by Jo Ellen Nott
Travis County is in Central Texas, 150 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The city of Austin, the state capital and county seat, sits at the intersection of three major highways. Its population in 2021 was 1.305 million. The Travis County Jail shares a problem with jails nationwide: They have become first responders for individuals suffering from mental health crises, a task they are not equipped to handle and, like most jails, warehouse individuals who are in dire need of treatment, not punishment.
Danny Smith is the Travis County Jail’s director of mental health services. Over the last 10 years, Smith has seen the number of people with mental health issues held in the jail climb from 15 to 40%. Travis County Judge Andy Brown says the jail is the largest mental health facility in Travis County, and in this regard, the county is not unique. Its numbers are consistent with the rest of the country’s jails according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Looking at booking data from 2018-2022, most charges this population had against them were for nonviolent misdemeanors like criminal trespassing, and only 7% were for assault. The …
by Jo Ellen Nott
Your attachment to interacting with social media and browsing the internet on your cellphone allows the government and law enforcement wide-open access to a disturbing amount of information about you. Even if you are not a user of social media and just carry a device around to make and receive phone calls, you are still being caught up in an ever-widening surveillance dragnet. If you are unlucky, it could make you collateral damage in a criminal investigation. In the best of cases, your personal information could merely end up in a government database to possibly be used against you in the future.
The public would be well advised to know that recent reports about the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the FBI use of our personal data should make us all uneasy. In the words of J.D. Tucille, civil liberties, and government overreach pundit: “Our mobile devices constantly snitch on our whereabouts.”
Those federal agencies are aware of the rules regarding cellphone tracking and data collection but either work around them or purchase data from businesses that profit from selling our electronic whereabouts. The use of our data revealed in …
by Jo Ellen Nott
Twenty-seven states in the U.S. have the death penalty. Those states and the federal government carry out the sentence by injecting a lethal mix of one, two, or three drugs as their execution of choice. Death by lethal injection, however, is not always humane, and its opponents point to it as an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. Understandably, the specific protocols used in the different states are widely challenged prior to each execution as the public grapples with reports of botched executions causing prolonged agony and suffering.
These challenges fall heavily on the judiciary, as judges must now evaluate the credibility of medical experts and complex scientific testimony before admitting it as evidence. The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), established the standard for admitting scientific testimony in federal courts.
Under Daubert, judges are mandated to consider four factors before admitting expert testimony into evidence: (1) the theory can and has been tested, (2) the theory has been subject to peer review, (3) the error rate is known, (4) and the theory has gained acceptance in the scientific community. The …
by Jo Ellen Nott
In an open access article first publishedonline on April 20, 2023, in The International Journal of Evidence & Proof, researchers from England and New Zealand discuss the challenges defense attorneys face when accessing and reviewing evidence from phones and computers.
The largest challenges identified after surveying 70 criminal law attorneys were (1) gaining access to data complicated by limited or late access, (2) the time needed to access and identify the relevant information because of the large volume of material, (3) the ability to use the data in the format provided, and (4) the difficulties processing and understanding data. Defense attorneys are hampered by tight turnaround times when confronted by these challenges.
Attorneys responding to the survey mentioned that even 1GB of data provides “unmanageable amounts of evidence to review.” This places defense attorneys at a disadvantage when they cannot examine all the evidence presented by the prosecution and are forced to rely on summaries the prosecution has prepared.
Because of the volume of material and the usual time constraints defense counsel must contend with, they cannot perform independent checks. The inability to independently fact check can lead to omitting important …
by Jo Ellen Nott
The National Institute of Justice (“NIJ”) is the research, development, and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. Its motto, “strengthen science, advance justice,” informs all its activities. One crucial area of forensic science it has helped strengthen through grants is DNA research and development. Since the late 1980s, law enforcement demands for tools and technologies of DNA testing have continued to exceed what is available in their jurisdictions.
In 2018, the Forensic Technology Working Group at NIJ asked for studies that would “provide foundational knowledge and practical data” about the persistence of DNA left on surfaces versus DNA collected from individuals via bloodstains or visible fluids at crime scenes or found on victims. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory received an NIJ grant to quantify how long touch DNA would persist on different surfaces under varying conditions. Scientists at South Dakota State University then took the Lincoln Lab findings and created predictive models of how touch DNA degrades.
Issues that forensic scientists face when dealing with touch DNA are many: low quantity of useable DNA, high variability in the amount left by one person, high variability in the amount …
by Jo Ellen Nott
Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia signed into law Senate Bill 92 (“SB 92”) on May 5, 2023, creating the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission (“PAQC”). The new oversight group is tasked with discipling and removing “far-left prosecutors” who make Georgia communities “less safe,” according …
by Jo Ellen Nott
On March 28, 2023, a criminal indictment from the Department of Justice was unsealed accusing Joanne Marian Segovia, 64, of importing thousands of opioids and other pills from abroad to her home in San Jose, California, with an intent to distribute them elsewhere in …
by Jo Ellen Nott
A police K-9 involved in the execution of a search warrant for a 27-year-old drug trafficking suspect on March 15, 2023, in Cleveland, Ohio, was given NARCAN after an exposure to fentanyl. The unnamed K-9 was taken to Westpark Animal Hospital where he was …
by Jo Ellen Nott
Oregon law enforcement stopped Nicholas Chappelle on January 30, 2022, for expired tags. When the officer ran them, Chapelle appeared in DMV records as having a suspended license.
A previous suspension had expired in 2021, but the Oregon DMV database of driver’s licenses …
by Jo Ellen Nott
On March 3, 2023, Governor Tim Walz signed legislation that will give 50,000 Minnesotans previously convicted of a felony immediate voting access. The bill restores political franchise to those who served their time without having to complete probation or parole.
Advocates of restoring …
