The following published opinions were released by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on May 1, 2008:

• U.S. v. Rosas-Pulido (Higginbotham, Smith, Owen, JJ.; opinion by Owen, J.). Defendant was sentenced to 57 months’ imprisonment for being unlawfully present in the country following deportation; in sentencing the defendant, the district court applied a sixteen-level enhancement upon finding that the defendant’s prior Minnesota state conviction for unlawful sexual contact was a “crime of violence.” The Fifth Circuit vacated the defendant’s sentence and remanded for re-sentencing, holding that the crime of which the defendant was convicted did not contain as a necessary element the use of “force” to achieve sexual contact, finding that unwanted sexual contact does not inherently involve “force.”
• Asbestos Claimants v. Babcock & Wilcox Co. (Higginbotham, Benavides, Dennis, JJ.; per curiam). Holding that the district court did not abuse its discretion in awarding attorneys’ fees at half the hourly rate for time spent traveling and not working. The asbestos claimants’ national counsel filed a fee application for $5,642,218.75 in attorneys’ fees; as to fees for travel time, counsel represented that the accepted practice among other New York firms was to charge full hourly rate for travel time. The bankruptcy court awarded only half the hourly rate for travel time not spent working; the amount disallowed for travel-only time was $135,685.80. The district court affirmed the disallowance, finding that the applicant had failed to uphold its burden of proving that customary compensation for non-productive travel time in the New York and Washington, D.C., markets was full hourly rate. Finding that the applicant only provided testimony of general knowledge of other firms’ billing practices and did not provide evidence of specific examples, the Fifth Circuit applied the standards in § 330 and in the lodestar method and held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in affirming the disallowance of half the hourly rate for nonproductive travel time. The Fifth Circuit observed that there is no consensus among courts as to whether nonproductive travel time should inherently be charged at a lower rate, but since the abuse of discretion standard was applicable, and there was support for assessing a lower rate, it upheld the fee award.