At Fort Drum in upstate New York, thirty miles from the Canadian border, a group of U.S. Army infantry soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division raise their right hands before Magistrate Judge George Lowe (N.D. NY), ready to become the newest citizens of the United States. They are thousands of miles from the countries of their births—India, the Philippines, Poland, Guyana, Mexico, Haiti, and Ethiopia. Today, they’ll become U.S. citizens. Tomorrow or next week, they will be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Their division holds the distinction of being the most deployed division in the Army.

Federal district courts generally are coping well with the sudden increase in their workloads that occurred March 3, when a retroactive reduction in penalties for crack cocaine offenders took effect and more than 21,000 inmates became eligible for shorter prison sentences.

Receiving a letter from this Judicial Conference committee has been known to “make stomachs churn” acknowledges its chair. For more about the Committee and its work, read the full interview here.

Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica (3rd Cir.) has been named chair of the Executive Committee of the Judicial Conference by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.. He succeeds Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan (D. D.C.), who has chaired the Executive Committee since October 2005.

The Eighth Circuit became the first court of appeals to go live with the case management component of the Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system in December 2006, and as of March 2008, eight of the 12 regional courts of appeals have followed suit for a total of nine.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) has formed a standing advisory group to provide it with “insight and advice on the operation of the federal sentencing guidelines from the perspective of victims of federal crime.”

Proposed revisions to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges drew relatively few public comments that, nevertheless, included a wide range of suggestions now being reviewed and analyzed by a Judicial Conference committee.

Federal judges now have help in solving the special case-management challenges associated with terrorism-related cases.