Government of the Virgin Islands v. Charles Walker

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• declining to reach arguments raised before but not decided by the lower court, and instead remanding
• holding a defendant’s due process rights were violated where a court permitted only one of two defendants to plead and 9 imposed a harsher sentence on defendant who went to trial to punish him for exercising his trial rights
• focusing on appearance of impartiality when reassigning sentencing judge who appeared to have inappropriately considered defendant’s decision to plea bargain
• exercising the supervisory power to reassign a case because the “conduct and comments of the trial judge ... ma[d]e it exceedingly difficult to resurrect an appearance of impartiality”
• noting that, “[a]lthough it is the standard practice in the district courts and in this circuit that a case on remand is assigned to the judge who originally heard it, we can, in the exercise of our supervisory power, reassign this case to a different judge upon remand.”
• noting that, “[a]lthough it is the standard practice in the district courts and in this circuit that a case on remand is assigned to the judge who originally heard it, we can, in the exercise of our supervisory power, reassign this case to a different judge upon remand.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).