On the test case that provoked the courts to decide whether the federal government had jurisdiction to exercise American criminal law over Native peoples on Native lands.

The bill would make it illegal for a city to spend less on its police force than it did in the year prior. But no Arizona cities have reduced their police budgets since the 2008 recession.

This semester, 12 clinical law students, representing six law schools, participated in our Spring 2024 Movement Lawyering Clinical Cohort. Through the work in the cohort, their skills were used to advance the campaigns of four of our beloved movement partners. The cohort's reach extended from the Northeast to the Midwest and down to the South, showcasing the broad impact of our collective work. The students' work and research shared the common theme of "Ending Criminalization and Building Thriving Black Communities Our Way."

"Despite greater social awareness and intense media coverage of high-profile sexual assault cases, the vast majority of such crimes still go either unreported or unprosecuted. Why? The answer lies in the patchwork of laws governing such crimes and the often sexist and racist roots that underlie them. This book discusses the history of sexual violence laws, the social and media forces that drive the laws, and the progress American society has made in recognizing and punishing such behavior. The chapters cover a range of subjects including federal regulations such as Title IX and Title VII, sentencing, children and sexual violence, pornography, and evidence, as well as the evolution of legal concepts such as force and consent"--

"No comparable volume collects in one place the various rules, doctrines, policies, and ideological positions that prevent our criminal justice system from pursuing and achieving justice"--

For much of its history, the death penalty in the United States has been framed as a tool of justice—a way to hold the most vicious criminals accountable for their heinous acts. Stories of grisly ...

The University of Arizona Innocence Project has received a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Justice to enhance its efforts in investigating wrongful convictions, particularly through DNA evidence analysis.

The federal funding will support DNA evidence analysis, helping to overturn wrongful convictions and train future advocates in Arizona.

The passage of Prop 36 marks a return to harsher punishments for some drug and theft crimes. Advocates worry it will also lead to a surge in prison populations.

"A brutal killing, an all-out manhunt, and a riveting account of the first murder trial in U.S. history--set in the 1600s in colonial New England against the backdrop of the Pequot War (between the Pequot tribe and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay), an explosive trial whose outcome changed the course of history, ended a two-year war, and brought about a peace that allowed the colonies to become a full-blown nation. The year: 1638. The setting: Providence, Plymouth Colony. A young Nipmuc tribesman, returning home from trading beaver pelts, is fatally stabbed in a robbery in the woods near Plymouth Colony, by a white runaway servant and fellow rogues. The young tribesman, fighting for his life, is able, with his final breaths, to reveal the details of the attack to Providence's governor, Roger Williams. A frantic manhunt by the fledgling government of Plymouth ensues, followed by the convening of the first trial, with Plymouth's governor Thomas Prence presiding as judge. The jury: local settlers (white) whose allegiance seems more likely to be with the accused than with the murdered (a native) . . . Tobey Pearl, piecing together a fascinating narrative through original research and first-rate detective work, re-creates in detail the full and startling, pivotal moment in pre-revolutionary America, as she examines the evolution of our nascent civil liberties and the role of the jury as a safeguard against injustice"--

The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, the organization is now an independent nonprofit. Our work is guided by science and grounded in anti-racism.

"Throughout my career, I have defended clients in numerous matters where I needed to litigate issues related to every possible variety of prosecutorial misconduct - false statements in search warrant affidavits, improper conduct before the grand jury, improper closing argument, etc. While I continue to believe that the overwhelming majority of prosecutors are professional and ethical, our recent history demonstrates that there are far too many individuals serving prison sentences due to unchecked prosecutorial misconduct. This book aims to arm criminal defense attorneys with the tools needed to fight back against the minority of prosecutors who choose to use their immense power in the wrong way"--

In the spirit of truth and reconciliation, judges, lawyers, and law enforcement officers write about working with First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Peoples through their trials and tribulations with the criminal justice system. The stories are a mix of previously published essays from the True Cases anthologies with an equal number of new chapters by legal and law enforcement professionals including Justice Thomas Berger (posthumous), Justice Nancy Morrison, Justice John Reilly, Senator Kim Pate, lawyers Eleanore Sunchild, Brian Beresh, and John L. Hill, and parole and police officers Doug Heckbert, Ernie Louttit, Val Hoglund, and Sharon Bourque.

Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona (DPAA) is a non-profit educational organization working to inform the public about the injustices surrounding the death penalty and the criminal punishment system. DPAA consists of volunteers from around the State of Arizona organized into the Northern, Central, and Southern regions of the state.

Decades before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, pregnant people faced arrest and prosecution for supposed crimes against the fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses they gestated. The Pregnancy Police investigates the legal arguments undergirding these prosecutions and sheds much-needed light on the networks of health-care providers, social workers, and legal personnel participating in this ongoing surveillance and punishment of pregnant people. Drawing on detailed analyses of legislation, statements from prosecutors and law enforcement, and records from over a thousand arrest cases, Grace E. Howard traces the long history of state attempts to regulate and control people who have the capacity for pregnancy--from the early twentieth century's white supremacist eugenics to the end of Roe and the ever-increasing criminalization of abortion across the United States.

"Medicine, Power, and the Law demonstrates that criminal and civil justice interact with medicine and public health more than is presently understood. The book focuses on the role of healthcare practitioners and an array of other professionals across industries in identifying wrongdoers, reporting behavior, and testifying on behalf of the state or government agencies. It also covers circumstances in which law enforcement relies on medicine for evidence or support in ways that compromise medical ethics. By reporting or testifying as experts, a range of people, from specialist pediatricians to flight attendants, can have a life-changing impact on individuals in the name of public health or medicine. People who work in hospitals, social work settings, and even airlines, often contribute to wrongful and aggressive criminal and civil actions against society's most vulnerable people, including parents, older adults, and people living with poverty. The book explores a number of examples, including police use of medicine as a restraint or the collection of blood as evidence and the risks of opting out of certain scientific discoveries, such as pharmaceuticals. It describes the harms that may come to those who engage in suboptimal but generally heretofore legal child-raising behaviors, and people opting to live independently as older adults. These can lead to civil and criminal charges when noticed by those in a position of power. Medicine, Power, and the Law is an important contribution for researchers and practitioners in medicine, the law, and the expanding field of bioethics."

"Drawing on a wide range of case studies, this book provides an examination of the role of United States federal law in shaping the invocation game of police interrogation. It is essential reading for researchers and students in the fields of forensic linguistics, law and society, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis"--

"An examination of the historical and present racial inequities of the prosecutorial system and a blueprint for transforming the system to one of fairness and justice"--;A deeply revealing expos of the American prosecutorial system and its historic and present racial inequities -- and how we can transform the system to one of fairness and justice. In Get Off My Neck, Debbie Hines draws on her unique perspective as a trial lawyer, former Baltimore prosecutor, and assistant attorney general for the State of Maryland to argue that US prosecutors, as the most powerful players in the criminal justice system, systematically target and criminalize Black people. Hines describes her disillusionment as a young Black woman who initially entered the profession with the goal of helping victims of crimes, only to discover herself aiding and abetting a system that prizes plea bargaining, speedy conviction, and excessive punishment above all else. In this book, she offers concrete, specific, and hopeful solutions for just how we can come together in a common purpose for criminal justice and racial justice reform. Get Off My Neck explains that the racial inequities in the prosecutorial system are built into our country's DNA. What's more, they are the direct result of a history that has conditioned Americans to perceive the Black body as insignificant at best and dangerous at worst. Unlike other books that discuss the prosecutor's office and change from inside the office, Hines offers a proactive approach to fixing our broken prosecutorial system through a broad-based alliance of reform-minded prosecutors, activists, allies, communities, and racial justice organizations -- all working together to end the racist treatment of Black people. Told intimately through personal, family, and client narratives, Get Off My Neck is not only a deeply sobering account of our criminal justice system and its devastating impact on Black children, youth, and adults but also a practical and inspiring roadmap for how we can start doing better right now. -- Provided by publisher.

"In Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference, Chloe Deambrogio explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped American courts' assessments of defendants' mental health and criminal responsibility over the course of the 20th century. During this period, new psychiatric notions of the mind and its readability, legal doctrines of insanity and diminished culpability, and cultural stereotypes about race and gender shaped the ways in which legal professionals, mental health experts, and lay witnesses approached mental disability evidence, especially in cases carrying the death penalty. Using Texas as a case-study, Deambrogio examines how these medical, legal, and cultural trends shaped psycho-legal debates in state criminal courts, while shedding light on the ways in which experts and lay actors' interpretations of 'pathological' mental states influenced trial verdicts in capital cases. She shows that despite mounting pressures from advocates of the 'rehabilitative penology', Texas courts maintained a punitive approach towards defendants allegedly affected by severe mental disabilities, while allowing for moralized views about personalities, habits, and lifestyle to influence psycho-legal assessments, in potentially prejudicial ways"--

Toxic intent : environmental harm, corporate crime, and the criminal enforcement of federal environmental laws in the United States-book

"A demonstration of how wrongful convictions have transformed American criminal justice, and how political ideology divides and shapes the innocence movement's fight for reform"--

"An original argument that the answer to mass incarceration lies not with experts and pundits, but with ordinary people taking extraordinary actions together-written by a leading authority on bail reform and social movements"--

The history of the U.S. criminal justice system is marked by racial inequality and sustained by present day policy. Large racial and ethnic disparities exist across the several stages of criminal legal processing, including in arrests, pre-trial detention, and sentencing and incarceration, among others, with Black, Latino, and Native Americans experiencing worse outcomes. The historical legacy of racial exclusion and structural inequalities form the social context for racial inequalities in crime and criminal justice. Racial inequality can drive disparities in crime, victimization, and system involvement.Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy synthesizes the evidence on community-based solutions, noncriminal policy interventions, and criminal justice reforms, charting a path toward the reduction of racial inequalities by minimizing harm in ways that also improve community safety. Reversing the effects of structural racism and severing the close connections between racial inequality, criminal harms such as violence, and criminal justice involvement will involve fostering local innovation and evaluation, and coordinating local initiatives with state and federal leadership.This report also highlights the challenge of creating an accurate, national picture of racial inequality in crime and justice: there is a lack of consistent, reliable data, as well as data transparency and accountability. While the available data points toward trends that Black, Latino, and Native American individuals are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and given more severe punishments compared to White individuals, opportunities for improving research should be explored to better inform decision-making.

"From the co-creators and co-hosts of the Peabody- and Pulitzer-nominated podcast comes this illuminating view of prison life, as told by presently and formerly incarcerated people. The United States locks up more people per capita than any other nation in the world--600,000 each year and 2.3 million in total. The acclaimed podcast Ear Hustle, named after the prison term for eavesdropping, gives voice to that ever-growing prison population. Co-created for the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX by visual artist Nigel Poor and inmate Earlonne Woods, who was serving thirty-one years to life before his sentence was commuted in 2018, Ear Hustle was launched in the basement media lab of California's San Quentin State Prison. As the first podcast created and produced entirely within prison, it has since been globally lauded for the rare access and perspective it contributes to the conversation about incarceration. Now, in their first book, Poor and Woods present unheard stories that delve deeper into the experiences of incarceration and share their personal paths to San Quentin as well as how they came to be co-creators. This unprecedented narrative, enhanced by forty original black-and-white illustrations, reveals the spectrum of humanity of those in prison and navigating post-incarceration. Bringing to the page the same insight, balance, and charismatic rapport that has distinguished their podcast, Poor and Woods illuminate the full--and often surprising--realities of prison life. With characteristic candor and humor, their portrayals include unexpected moments of self-discovery, unlikely alliances, and many ingenious work-arounds. One personal narrative at a time, framed by Poor's and Wood's distinct perspectives, This Is Ear Hustle tells the real lived experience of the criminal justice system"--

"A bold new assessment of the multipronged attack on American rights, and how to push back, from experts at the Fletcher School at Tufts and the Carr Center at Harvard. In fifteen accessible chapters dealing with voting rights, freedom of speech, criminal justice, gun rights, LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights, religious freedom, privacy, immigration, and more, three renowned thought-leaders, including a former assistant secretary of state, John Shattuck, Sushma Raman, and Mathias Risse present a comprehensive account of the current state of rights in America-along with concrete recommendations to policy makers and citizens for reimagining them"--

"The Evidence of Things Not Seen, award-winning author James Baldwin's searing 1985 indictment of the nation's racial stagnation, is contextualized anew by an introduction from New York Times bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams. In this essential work, James Baldwin examines the Atlanta child murders that took place over twenty-two months in 1979 and 1980. Examining this incident with a reporter's skill and an essayist's insight, he notes the significance of Atlanta as the site of these brutal killings-a city that claimed to be "too busy to hate"-and the permeation of race throughout the case: the Black administration in Atlanta; the murdered Black children; and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes. In Baldwin's hands, this specific set of events has transcended its era and remains as relevant today as ever. Rummaging through the ruins of American race relations, Baldwin addresses all the hard-to-face issues that have brought us to a moment in history when we are forced to reckon with some of the country's most ingrained, foundational issues and when, too often, public officials fail to ask real questions about "justice for all." In this, his last book, Baldwin also reveals his optimistic faith in America's ability to move toward repair: "This is the only nation in the world that can hope to liberate-to begin to liberate-mankind from the strangling idea of the national identity and the tyranny of the territorial dispute. I know this sounds remote, now, and that I will not live to see anything resembling this hope come to pass. Yet, I know that I have seen it-in fire and blood and anguish, true, but I have seen it. I speak with the authority of the issue of the slave born in the country once believed to be: the last best hope of earth.""--

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson' is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn't commit, and the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. The book also tells the story of Homer Chase, a former World War II paratrooper and New England radical who was sent to the South by the Communist Party to recruit African Americans to the cause while offering them a chance at increased freedom. And it's the story of Thurgood Marshall's NAACP and their battle against not only entrenched racism but a Communist Party -- despite facing nearly as much prejudice as those they were trying to help -- intent on winning the hearts and minds of Black voters. The bitter battle between the two groups played out as the sides sparred over who would take the lead on Henderson's defense, a period in which he spent years in prison away from a daughter he had never seen. Through it all, The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson is a portrait of a community, and a country, at a crossroads, trying to choose between the path it knows is right and the path of least resistance. The case pitted powerful forces -- often those steering legal and journalistic institutions -- attempting to use racism and Red-Scare tactics against a populace that by and large believed the case against Henderson was suspect at best. But ultimately, it's a hopeful story about how even when things look dark, some small measure of justice can be achieved against all the odds, and actual progress is possible. It's the rare book that is a timely read, yet still manages to shed an informative light on America's past and future, as well as its present.

"A groundbreaking expose about the alarming use of rap lyrics as criminal evidence to convict and incarcerate young men of color"--

The condemnation of blackness : race, crime, and the making of modern urban America ; with a new preface-book