by Michael Dean Thompson
While it is true that Americans tend to carry their cellphones as grafted appendages, it may be that their cars know even more about them than their cellphones. Consider the following scenario: Jane sees that her car is iced over, so she uses her remote key ...
by Douglas Ankney
The people of Maine have made a bold step in corralling the “unaccountable power of fusion centers” with the passage of HP 947, An Act to Increase the Transparency and Accountability of the Main Information and Analysis Center. The Main Information and Analysis Center (“MIAC”) is ...
By John & Nisha Whitehead
September 19, 2023
“There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Supreme Court of Montana held that retroactive application of Montana’s Sexual or Violent Offender Registration Act (“SVORA”), as amended beginning in 2007, violates the ex post facto clause in Article II, Section 31, of the Montana Constitution.
Richard D. Hinman was convicted in 1994 of ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
A new report from PrisonPolicy.org was released with the purpose of informing prison policymakers and the public about the true costs of the criminal justice system, which includes both prisons and various forms of community supervision – probation, parole, supervised release, and involuntary civil commitment. The ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
Although advocates say there is still work to do to ensure New Jersey public defenders don’t come with a price tag attached, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (D) took the first giant step earlier this summer when he signed a bill removing burdensome fees that clients ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37 (1971), is inapplicable where a petitioner moved for a stay of his 28 U.S.C. § 2254 petition for writ of habeas corpus and that the petitioner ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In the July 2023 issue of the Forensic Chemistry journal, new research from West Virginia University (“WVU”) forensic scientists reveals that gunshot residue (“GSR”) behaves differently on skin, hair, and fabric depending on whether it contains organic or inorganic compounds. The WVU scientists are working ...
by Richard Resch
The Supreme Court of Colorado held that under Colorado Rule of Evidence (“CRE”) 106 if the prosecution creates a misleading impression by excluding statements made by the defendant that should be considered together with the proffered evidence out of fairness, the rule of completeness requires the ...
by David M. Reutter
The Supreme Court of Michigan held that a guilty plea cannot be understandingly or knowingly entered into when it was, in significant part, induced on the basis of an inaccurate understanding of the minimum and maximum possible prison sentence. It was error, therefore, to deny ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In a stabbing case in The Hague, Netherlands, a suspect facing charges in the deadly incident denied his involvement. Wanting to prove his presence at the crime scene, the Dutch police turned to digital evidence and, more specifically, data from the suspect’s cellphone.
The police ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Supreme Court of California reversed a judgment of the Court of Appeal (“COA”) and remanded because the COA incorrectly applied the harmless-error analysis of People v. Aledamat, 447 P.3d 277 (Cal. 2019), where the jury was instructed with both a legally valid theory and a ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit explained the “cause and prejudice” framework of Martinez v. Ryan, 566 U.S. 1 (2012), in the context of a federal habeas proceeding where a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel at trial (“Trial IAC”) in a state ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit vacated a defendant’s sentence where the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado improperly applied a Guidelines enhancement under U.S.S.G. § 2K2.1(b)(6)(B) based on a mistaken application of Colorado law.
Lougary Eddington was involved in a ...
by Douglas Ankney
A recent study by researchers from Arizona State University (“ASU”) “found that 85% of cartridge cases that were judged inconclusive by forensic firearm examiners were actually fired by two different guns. In an actual crime scene investigation, that would mean that the cartridge cases did not match ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Two faculty members at Georgia State University in Atlanta in the Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology wrote in the May 18, 2023, edition of Scientific American Technology Section that artificial-intelligence-powered facial recognition will lead to increased racial profiling. In their research, Thaddeus Johnson and ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
It seems every month, a new story emerges about how ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) egregiously abuses its power. Just a few weeks ago, Wired published an article about how ICE was improperly demanding data from elementary schools, news organizations, and abortion clinics. A few ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held a district court erred in denying a defendant’s suppression motion regarding an unreasonable seizure and search, finding he was not required to prove he was unarmed.
Anthony Eugene Peters and Gary Garrison were walking in ...
by Douglas Ankney
A rose by another name may still be a rose, but electrocution by a cop’s taser is deemed death from excited delirium. At least, that was the determination until recently. In March 2023, the National Association of Medical Examiners (“NAME”) said “excited delirium” should not be cited ...
by Matt Clarke
In a case of first impression, the Supreme Court of New Jersey held that there is a presumption in favor of in-person interpreting services, rather than video remote interpreting (“VRI”), for criminal trials and promulgated guidelines for determining whether a criminal defendant should be provided in-person ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
To understand the true gap between the role of the police as understood by the public (to protect and serve) and as understood by the police themselves, one need look no further than a protest or public demonstration. Here, especially when provoked, police quickly assume their ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In a victory for the First Amendment, the Arizona Attorney General agreed to settle a lawsuit brought in August 2022 challenging a state law that banned recording police officers within eight feet. The law, HB2319, passed in the Arizona Senate on June 23, 2022, was ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated the denial of a motion seeking a sentence reduction under § 404(b) of the First Step Act of 2018 (“FSA”) because the record was unclear as to whether the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found plain error where the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee required Nickless Whitson to admit guilt in order to fully consider Whitson’s evidence of rehabilitation.
Whitson was initially convicted of eight felonies, including ...
by Douglas Ankney
On March 10, 2023, Governor Jared Polis signed House Bill 1034 (“HB 1034”) into law, opening the door to a greater number of people convicted of felonies to be eligible for DNA testing. Colorado’s previous law allowed only people who are actively incarcerated to receive DNA ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
SoundThinking is a California-based tech company formerly known as ShotSpotter that sells systems to detect gunshot sounds and relay that information to law enforcement for follow-up. MarketBeat reports that the company has annual revenue of $81 million. Dayton, Ohio, will not be part of that ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma erred in applying United States Sentencing Guideline (“U.S.S.G.”) § 2A2.1(a)(2) without a specific finding of an intent to kill.
A jury convicted Jimmy Lee Brooks of ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
Over 50 years ago, fear of crime was even then associated in the minds of the governing bodies with Black and brown communities. An effort to combat crime based on that fear spurred the creation of software that has since grown to become the predictive ...
by Douglas Ankney
After conducting a two-year investigation in the wake of the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor by police, the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) concluded that the Louisville Metro Police Department (“LMPD”) engages in patterns of unconstitutional practices. The DOJ interviewed hundreds of officers and community members, ...
by Jordan Arizmendi
ICE stands for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The ICE website proclaims that its “primary focus” is “securing our nation’s borders and safeguarding the integrity of our immigration system.” While such a proclamation is ...
by Matt Clarke
A recent report on a study of the consistency among pairs of child witnesses published in the U.K. journal Legal and Criminological Psychology showed the surprising result that neither the age of the paired children nor the consistency of the details the pairs of child witnesses report ...
by Douglas Ankney
In a case of first impression in the Circuit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that a federal prisoner appealing a District Court’s choice of remedy in a 28 U.S.C. § 2255 proceeding must obtain a certificate of appealability (“COA”).
In 1990, a ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia held that, where a trial court has not set a deadline for submitting a stipulation to a prior conviction, the court must permit a defendant to so stipulate when (1) that prior conviction is an essential element of ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The breaching of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, shocked many Americans. Government filings uncovered since then suggest that even as the unrest raged, law enforcement had begun filing geofence warrants. We now understand that 1,535 names associated with phones using Google’s Location History technology ...
by Eike Blohm M.D.
A study funded by the National Institute of Justice recently found that the vast majority of forensic laboratories had difficulty correctly interpreting DNA samples derived from three donors.
Over 99.9% of our DNA is identical with that of random strangers. Forensic DNA analysis focuses on the ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Supreme Court of New Mexico allowed a defendant to withdraw his plea deal after the district court corrected his sentence to include a lengthier term of parole, because he could not “knowingly and voluntarily” take the deal without being aware of the mandatory parole ...
Loaded on
Nov. 1, 2023
published in Criminal Legal News
November, 2023, page 50
Alabama: According to The New York Times, the most notable sack and fumble of the Jefferson County high school football game on September 14, 2023, came after the game ended and the police were in the process of clearing the stadium. In the tradition of historically Black colleges, both bands ...
