Criminal

Email Updates Blogs
Nebraska Senior District Judge Richard Kopf took Adam Cohen to task for his review of a book about the enigmatic Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts. What purported to be a book review devolved into a polemic: Given the court’s current composition, anyone who does not want the law to lurch to the right in civil rights, gay rights, abortion and other areas has to hope Roberts will hold it close to its…
6a00d83451574769e20240a496138a200b-320wi
The Prison Policy Initiative has today posted the latest, greatest version of its remarkable incarceration “pie” graphic and associated report on the particulars of who and how people are incarcerated in the United States.  The extraordinary pies produced by PPI impart more information in one image than just about any single resource I can think of.  Here is part of the report’s introductory text and the concluding discussion on my favorite law-nerd version of pie…
Via this great new post at the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, I see that Sonja Starr and J.J. Prescott have this great new article titled “Expungement of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study.”  Here is the article’s abstract: Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge of legislative activity.  This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence…
The title of this post is the title of this notable new empirical article authored by Nancy King and Michael Heise. Here is its abstract: Misdemeanor cases affect far more people than felony cases, outnumbering felony cases by more than three to one.  Yet very little empirical information exists on many aspects of misdemeanor prosecutions.  This Article provides the first quantitative look at appellate review in misdemeanor cases, nationwide.  It uses data drawn from a…
The title of this post is the title of this notable new empirical article authored by Nancy King and Michael Heise. Here is its abstract: Misdemeanor cases affect far more people than felony cases, outnumbering felony cases by more than three to one.  Yet very little empirical information exists on many aspects of misdemeanor prosecutions.  This Article provides the first quantitative look at appellate review in misdemeanor cases, nationwide.  It uses data drawn from a…
I learned last night of a remarkable new four-page order entered in US v. Marks, No. 03-CR-6033 (WDNY March 14, 2019) (available for download below).  Chad Marks’ case has been followed for years by clemency advocates like Amy Povah, and this CAN-DO profile page has lots of background materials about his case, his requests for clemency, and all the positive work he has done since being sentenced many years ago to 40 mandatory prison years…
clip_image002.jpg
Who spends their time carping about a book review, particularly about a book that the complainant has not and will not read? That would be me. It seems that Joan Biskupic has written a book about Chief Justice John Roberts, entitled The Chief—The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts. Adam Cohen, a former editorial page editor of the New York Times, with legal credentials to match[i] his writing chops, published…
When the results of Stuyvesant High School’s entrance exams broke, the numbers were staggering. Not merely bad as a stand-alone number, but worse than last year, despite the “push” to improve the number of black students offered admission. And before some fool says it, the school is not too white, as Asians, unsurprisingly, make up the majority of students. The end result: only seven black kids, out of 895 freshman slots, were offered admission to …
The Hamilton Project has assembled some notable new materials under the heading “The Economics of Bail, Fines, and Fees in the U.S. Criminal Justice System.”  An event last week on this topic with multiple notable discussants is recorded here, and this one-pager reports on three papers with this introduction to the set: Monetary sanctions have played a role in the U.S. criminal justice system since its founding, but the way these sanctions — bail,…
The title of this post is the title of this notable new Law360 commentary authored by By Addy Schmitt and Ian Herbert.  I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts (with footnotes omitted): Much attention has been paid to the provisions in the law designed to address systemic issues for defendants in drug cases…. The First Step Act also includes numerous changes to address quality-of-life issues for current inmates and to help individuals…