by Steve Horn
The ivory tower of academia. It’s seemingly quite a long distance from the real-world implications of the U.S. criminal justice system’s often brutal iron fist.
It’s a place in which professors and their assistants have the world at their fingertips for research. A collegial atmosphere for ...
by Steve Horn
The Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Justice has unfurled a new study on state and federal law enforcement agencies’ reporting of deaths of individuals who were under the custodial watch of federal law enforcement agents. The results are disturbing.
“Review ...
by Steve Horn
After a years-long federal court dispute, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”) won a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) lawsuit, which forced the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) to fork over hundreds of pages of records revealing the machinations of the “Hemisphere” ...
by Steve Horn
A study that called into question the reliability of DNA as a piece of smoking-gun evidence due to its propensity to be easily transferred and detected by modern DNA-detection technology was big news. However, a U.S. government lab sat on the laboratory-based and peer-reviewed study results for ...
by Steve Horn
In the aftermath of her testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was hailed by legal scholars, legal practitioners, and laypeople alike as a “credible witness.”
Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, testified at a hearing September 27, 2018, set ...
by Steve Horn
A cardinal rule of defense lawyering – or any lawyering, for that matter – is to zealously advocate on behalf of your client. Yet in many states, incentive systems exist for criminal defense attorneys to do the opposite and collaborate directly with prosecutors.
These dynamics are spelled ...
by Steve Horn
More than 100 civil rights organizations have signed a statement to denounce the use of pretrial bail risk assessment algorithm tools meant to determine conditions of bail and, in many cases, jail.
The 10-page document titled, “The Use of Pretrial ‘Risk Assessment’ Instruments: A Shared Statement of ...
by Steve Horn
A draft copy of an academic article set to be published in 2019 in the Vanderbilt Law Review calls for a novel approach to chipping away at the nagging issue of Brady violations that occur during criminal cases.
That paper, titled “Disclosing Prosecutorial Misconduct” by University of ...
by Steve Horn
Conviction integrity units, known as CIUs and sometimes referred to as conviction review units or CRUs, have in recent years become increasingly widespread in county prosecutors’ offices throughout the U.S. They sit alongside actual innocence commissions, which exist in several states and review claims of innocence among ...
