Writing in the November 4, 2018 edition of Law 360, Michael Macagnone pointed out that the current lame duck Republican-controlled Congress has slightly more than two months to come to terms with a number of sentencing and prison reform issues…
Category: Criminal Justice Reform
2018
Category: Corruption | Criminal Justice Reform
President Donald J. Trump will have a unique place in American presidential history: the most corrupt president to ever occupy the White House, surpassing the other five most corrupt presidents—Richard Nixon (1969-74), James Buchanan (1857-61), Andrew Jackson (1829-37), Warren G.…
2018
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
On August 28, 2018, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion in a police excessive force case that will not please the law enforcement community.
Given today’s divisive political climate, the political makeup of the three-judge panel…
2018
Category: Criminal Justice Reform
In a November 2016 post, we made this observation about the vanishing trial in the federal court system:
“ … it’s behind closed doors where U.S. Attorneys lean hard on criminal defense attorneys to advise their clients that a…
2018
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
Those words were written by Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Don R. Willett in an August 31, 2018 decision—Zadeh v. Robinson.
In the Zadeh decision, Judge Willett expressed the strong view that the “doctrine of qualified immunity ……
2018
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
The August 9, 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an African American, in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer named Darren Wilson during a street stop unleashed local civil disobedience and a violent, militarized police response. This tragic shooting…
2018
Category: Appeals | Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
There are several indisputable core facts about the case of Susan Mellen.
First, the burned body of Rick Daly was found near a dumpster in San Pedro, California on July 21, 1997. Anonymous tips to the Los Angeles…
2018
Category: Constitutional Law | Criminal Justice Reform | Criminal Law
Earlier this year we posted an article about a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that upheld much of a federal district court ruling that dismantled the antiquated Harris County bail system. We made this observation in that post:
…
2018
Category: Criminal Justice Reform
The first family detention center in the United States was opened in Berks County, Pennsylvania in 2001 when a nursing home was converted into a detention facility.
In May 2006, the State of Texas opened the second family detention…
2018
President Donald J. Trump and U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions want to increase this nation’s mass incarceration—Trump through his commitment to the private prison industry and Sessions through policy rollbacks deliberately designed to undo the reform progress made in the criminal…