"Edward Snowden Criticizes 'Big Brother' Measure in Russia"

From The New York Times: “Mass surveillance doesn't work,” Mr. Snowden wrote. “This bill will take money and liberty without improving safety.” Rights activists have protested several elements of the bill, especially a provision making it a crime to fail...

Robbins on Citizen's Arrest

Ira P. Robbins (American University - Washington College of Law) has posted Vilifying the Vigilante: A Narrowed Scope of Citizen's Arrest (Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 25, No. 3, 2016) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The...

Opinion holding reckless assault sufficient to preclude legal gun possession

Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court in Voisine v. United States. Justice Thomas, joined in part by Justice Ginsburg, dissented.

Opinion holding reckless assault sufficient to preclude legal gun possession

Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court in Voisine v. United States. Justice Thomas, joined in part by Justice Ginsburg, dissented.

"White House announces series of measures for incarcerated individuals"

From Jurist: The White House [official website] announced [press release] on Friday a series of programs aimed at ensuring that former prisoners have better resources to transition back into the community. The administration said that improving education and job opportunities...

"Arkansas Supreme Court upholds lethal injection protocol and secrecy law"

From Jurist: The Arkansas Supreme Court [official website] upheld [opinion, PDF] a state law Thursday that allows for the type, manufacturers and sellers of drugs used for lethal injections to be kept confidential. This ruling would allow the execution of...

Agan & Starr on Employment and Criminal Records

Amanda Y. Agan and Sonja B. Starr (Princeton University - Department of Economics and University of Michigan Law School) have posted Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Statistical Discrimination: A Field Experiment on SSRN. Here is the abstract: “Ban-the-Box” (BTB)...

"Lawsuit accuses Louisiana judge of running debtors' prison"

From Jurist: A lawsuit [complaint, PDF] is accusing a Louisiana judge of running a modern-day debtors' prison. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center [advocacy website], alleges that Judge Robert Black is sending poor defendants to jail...

Walters & Tumath on Rape as Hate Crime

Mark Walters and Jessica Tumath (University of Sussex Law School and University of Sussex) have posted Gender 'Hostility', Rape, and the Hate Crime Paradigm (Modern Law Review, Vol. 77(4), pp. 563-596, 2014) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This article...

Levin on Crespo on Systemic Facts

Benjamin Levin has posted Values and Assumptions in Criminal Adjudication (Harvard Law Review Forum (2016)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This Response to Andrew Manuel Crespo's Systemic Facts: Toward Institutional Awareness in Criminal Courts proceeds in two Parts. In...

Bradford et al. on Public Acceptance of Police Violence

Ben Bradford , Jenna Milani and Jonathan Jackson (University of Oxford - Centre for Criminology , University of Oxford - Centre for Criminology and London School of Economics & Political Science - Department of Methodology) have posted Identity, Legitimacy and...

"Martin Winterkorn, Ex-C.E.O. of Volkswagen, Is Under Investigation"

From The New York Times: FRANKFURT - The investigation into Volkswagen's vast emissions scandalreached the top echelon of management for the first time after German prosecutors said on Monday that they were looking into the carmaker's former chief executive and...

"Virginia prosecutors join challenge to restoration of felon voting rights"

From Jurist: More than 40 prosecutors in Virginia filed an amicus brief [text, PDF] Friday in support of a challenge to the governor's executive action[JURIST report] to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 felons individuals in the state. The...

Ryan on Dignity and the Eighth Amendment

Meghan J. Ryan (Southern Methodist University - Dedman School of Law) has posted Taking Dignity Seriously: Excavating the Backdrop of the Eighth Amendment (University of Illinois Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The U.S. punishment system is...

Binder on Application of Criminal Law to Disasters

Denis Binder (Chapman University, The Dale E. Fowler School of Law) has posted The Application of Criminal Law to Disasters and Tragedies in Asia and the Pacific Islands on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The New Millennium has witnessed a...

"Making the case that Congress should, at the very least, make the Fair Sentencing Act fully retroactive"

Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy links to and excerpts this commentary from The Huffington Post. In part: For 4,900 people serving sentences Congress itself deemed unfair, members of the Senate and House need not wait a day longer....

Moore on The Antidemocratic Sixth Amendment

Janet Moore (University of Cincinnati College of Law) has posted The Antidemocratic Sixth Amendment (Washington Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Criminal procedure experts often claim that poor people have no Sixth Amendment right to choose their...

"Why our emotional reactions to terrorist attacks and other tragedies are a poor guide to policy"

Ilya Somin has this post at The Volokh Conspiracy. In part: First, much of the public is ignorant about public policy issues, and forms opinions without serious consideration of the evidence. Such ignorance is not necessarily a sign of stupidity...

Mungan on Salience and the Severity Versus the Certainty of Punishment

Murat C. Mungan (George Mason University School of Law) has posted Salience and the Severity Versus the Certainty of Punishment on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The certainty aversion presumption (CAP) in the economics of law enforcement literature asserts that...

"Virginia felon voting rights challenged"

From Jurist: Judicial Watch [advocacy website] filed alawsuit [complaint; press release] Tuesday challenging an executive order by VirginiaGovernor Terry McAuliffe [official website] restoring the voting rights of certain felons. McAuliffe signed an executive order in Aprilrestoring the voting rights [JURIST...

"Omar Mateen's Wife Under Scrutiny by F.B.I., Official Says"

From The New York Times: The wife, Noor Zahi Salman, told the F.B.I. that she had driven him to the Pulse nightclub at some point before the attack and that she had also been with him when he purchased ammunition,...

"Michigan Senate passes bill compensating the exonerated for wrongful imprisonment"

From Jurist: The Michigan Senate [official website] on Thursday passed a bill (SB 291) [text, PDF] that would compensate people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes once they are exonerated[Daily Tribune report]. SB 291, also known as the Wrongful Imprisonment...

Documents in Stanford sexual assault case

An article in The New York Times includes links to the probation department's recommendation and a sentencing memo filed by the district attorney.

"Michael Hubbard, Alabama House Speaker, Is Convicted on 12 Felony Ethics Charges"

From The New York Times. In part: Michael G. Hubbard, the speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, whose sharp-elbowed approach to politics propelled the Republican Party to dominance in his state, was convicted Friday on 12 felony ethics charges,...

"It's not a Fourth Amendment search if a cop swipes your credit card, court finds"

From arstechnica, courtesy of NACDL news scan. In part: A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that law enforcement can legally scan or swipe a seized credit card-in fact, it is not a Fourth Amendment search at all, so it doesn't...

Jackson & Kovalev on Lay Adjudication in Europe

John D. Jackson and Nikolai Kovalev (University of Nottingham - School of Law and Wilfrid Laurier University, Department of Criminology) have posted Lay Adjudication in Europe: The Rise and Fall of the Traditional Jury (Oñati Socio-Legal Series, Vol. 6, No....

"Stern on liberals, sexual violence, and the justice system"

Howard Wasserman at PrawfsBlawg describes a post by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: He ties the recall petition to a host of issues in which progressive commitment to due process, basic defendant rights, and judicial independence have run aground in...

Hough et al. on Policing, Procedural Justice, and Prevention

Mike Hough , Jonathan Jackson and Ben Bradford (University of London - Institute for Criminal Policy Research , London School of Economics & Political Science - Department of Methodology and University of Oxford - Centre for Criminology) have posted Policing,...

"Stakes Rise for Prosecutors Trying Officer in Freddie Gray Case for Murder"

From The New York Times: “These are the most serious charges,” said Warren S. Alperstein, a defense lawyer here who has represented police officers and has been closely following the cases but is not directly involved in them. “This is,...

Goodman-Delahunty et al. on Reducing Jury Bias in Child Sexual Abuse Cases

Jane Goodman-Delahunty , Natalie Martschuk and Annie Cossins (Charles Sturt University - Australian Graduate School of Policing , Charles Sturt University and University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law) have posted Programmatic Pretest-Posttest Research to Reduce Jury...

"Violation of knock-and-announce on a 6 am arrest warrant execution leads to suppression despite Hudson"

FourthAmendment.com excerpts United States v. Vasquez, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 71856 (D.Conn. June 2, 2016), notable "because seldom can a court get around Hudson." From the opinion: Further, I emphasize that the determinative circumstances in this case were not the...

"Looking into the Wisconsin case looking into the use of risk-assessment tools at sentencing"

Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy links to and excerpts this article from The Wall Street Journal. In part: Algorithms used by authorities to predict the likelihood of criminal conduct are facing a major legal test in Wisconsin. The...

Curtis on The School-to-Prison Pipeline

Aaron J. Curtis has posted Tracing the School-to-Prison Pipeline from Zero-Tolerance Policies to Juvenile Justice Dispositions (Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 102, No. 4, 2014) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In recent years, schools have attempted to combat school violence...

"Why the muted response to seeking the death penalty for Dylann Roof?"

This opinion piece appears in The Washington Post. In part: [T]he Obama administration, perhaps the least favorable to capital punishment in recent memory, might not have sought the death penalty against Dylann Roof, the young white supremacist charged in the...

"Conservatives should celebrate Obama's commutations"

Sentencing Law and Policy links to and excerpts this commentary. In part: Consider the case of Weldon Angelos, who at age 24 was arrested in Utah for selling marijuana and possessing a firearm. Because of stacked charges with mandatory minimums,...

Gallini on The Public-Safety Exception to Miranda

Brian Gallini (University of Arkansas - School of Law) has posted The Unlikely Meeting between Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Benjamin Quarles (Case Western Reserve Law Review, Vol. 66, No. 2, 2015) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Everyone reads New York...

"Feds say no civil rights prosecution in Jamar Clark's death"

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Federal authorities said Wednesday that they would not pursue civil rights charges against two Minneapolis police officers in the shooting death of Jamar Clark, a decision met with both outrage and resignation by activists who for...

Wrongful Convictions of Sexual Assault

A press release from the Center for Prosecutor Integrity announces a new program to curb such convictions: [T]he Center for Prosecutor Integrity is launching a new initiative designed to address the over-criminalization of sexual conduct and to end wrongful convictions...

Newton on Federal Probation

Brent Evan Newton has posted The Story of Federal Probation (American Criminal Law Review, Vol. 53, 2016) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Critics of the modern federal sentencing system regularly assert that the sentencing guidelines promulgated by the United...

Lai on Proxy Criminalization

Annie Lai (University of California, Irvine School of Law) has posted Confronting Proxy Criminalization (Denver University Law Review, Vol. 92, No. 4, 2015) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Though state laws that directly criminalize unlawful presence have been struck...