The state of the death penalty
As the justices make their final preparations this week for the start of the 2025-26 term, they’ll also address the latest request for a stay of execution. Victor Tony […]
Every Step You Take: Police's Search for Armed Robber Makes New Law on Privacy of Geolocation Information - Jayce Born Amanda Claire Hoover Ronald D. Lee and Suneeta Hazra
"An armed robber walks into seven stores in Indiana and Michigan during a three-week crime spree in October 2017. Investigators get from the robber's phone carrier real-time cell site location information (CSLI) that show his phone's pings to nearby cell towers which help the investigators geolocate their suspect. The robber gets arrested and charged in federal court with five counts of robbery and several accompanying weapons charges. And the rest of the world gets an opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on one of the many questions that the Supreme Court left open when it decided its seminal privacy-related opinion Carpenter v. United States 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018)."
Court Will Consider Whether Prisoners Can Develop Certain Evidence in Federal Court to Challenge Their Convictions - Noam Biale
"In 1994 death penalty lawyer Stephen Bright published his seminal essay Counsel for the Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime but for the Worst Lawyer. His argument 'succinctly stated in the title' was that indigent defendants were disproportionately sentenced to death because their lawyers (who were often court-appointed) were under-resourced ill-prepared and failed at the most basic levels in their duty to represent their clients."
Divided Court Issues Bright-Line Ruling on Fourth Amendment Seizures - Jeffrey Bellin
"Against a backdrop of increasing national attention to police violence the Supreme Court on Thursday issued an opinion in a closely watched criminal-procedure case that clarifies the meaning of the term seizure."
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action programs in college admissions
This article was updated on June 29 at 4:09 p.m.In a historic decision, the Supreme Court severely limited, if not effectively ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday.
The Posthumous Pardon of Homer Plessy - Anna Price
"On January 5 2022 the governor of Louisiana posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy the defendant in the famous 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy is known for affirming the legal theory of 'separate but equal' that was used to justify Jim Crow laws in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was later overturned in part by Brown v. Board of Education."