by Derek Gilna
The effects of the January 2016 United States Supreme Court decision in Hurst v. Florida, 136 S. Ct. 6161 (2016), which overturned Florida’s prior law permitting non-unanimous jury verdicts in death penalty cases, continues to reverberate through the Broward County, Florida, criminal justice system. The previous statute ...
by Derek Gilna
Catherine Bernard, a former public defender in Laurens County, Georgia, who now practices criminal defense, won yet another “not-guilty” jury verdict in a marijuana possession trial on July 12, 2018, by utilizing a modified “jury nullification” approach. The term “jury nullification” refers to a refusal by juries ...
by Derek Gilna
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that as of September 1, 2018, the New York Police Department will no longer arrest individuals for the public smoking of marijuana in some circumstances and instead will issue tickets. However, those with arrest records, convictions, or open warrants ...
by Derek Gilna
Mark Bennett, a 22-year criminal trial lawyer, argues that responsible citizens have a duty to serve on a criminal jury as a reasoned observer of the trial process — and not as a pawn of a system meant to over-awe them into an emotionally driven conviction.
He ...
by Derek Gilna
Concerns are being raised about a 70 percent increase in the New York City Police Department (“NYPD”) gang database revealed in a recent public records request by CUNY School of Law professor Babe Howell. Since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, the NYPD has added ...
Methuen, Massachusetts, a modest town of 50,000 people near Boston, has backpedaled on a contract formula that would have paid police captains over $432,000, making them the highest-paid police officers in the states, and more than twice as pricey as Governor Charlie Baker’s paycheck, who makes a relatively modest ...
by Derek Gilna
Civil forfeiture, under fire at the state and federal levels the past two years, has faced the spotlight in the city of Denver, Colorado, where a particularly burdensome civil ordinance has resulted in millions of dollars of revenue flowing to the city from largely underserved people.
Based ...
by Derek Gilna
The federal Drug Enforcement Agency (“DEA”) has contributed to the opioid crisis by more than tripling the number of individuals and organizations licensed to distribute controlled substances in the past 12 years, according an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Daily Caller website. In 2006, the ...
by Derek Gilna
A man who was wrongfully accused, convicted, and imprisoned because of the alleged misconduct of four San Francisco police officers who fabricated and withheld evidence to frame him for a 2007 murder, has been awarded $10 million by a federal jury.
Jamal Trulove had been accused of ...
by Derek Gilna
The launch of the Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database in September of 2017 puts at the public’s disposal, through a simple web search, all crimes committed by non-federal sworn police officers. The database contains information on the 8,006 criminal arrests of 6,596 officers from 2005 to ...
