Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Setser v. United States. The cases addresses whether a federal court has authority to order a federal sentence to run consecutively with a yet-to-be-imposed state sentence. In 2007, petitioner Monroe Setser was sentenced in federal court for possession of methamphetamine [...]
You know oral argument isn’t going well when a justice of the Court asks you to defend your decision not to throw in the towel already. Yet that is precisely what happened to Donna Andrieu, an assistant district attorney from New Orleans, charged with defending her office’s decision to withhold [...]
Members of the Supreme Court seemed skeptical last Wednesday when asked to establish a new constitutional rule prohibiting the use of unreliable eyewitness testimony at criminal trials. Under existing law, unreliable eyewitness testimony is excludable only when the source of unreliability stems from police misconduct. In Perry v. New Hampshire, Public [...]
Eyewitness identification is widely considered to be one of the most powerful pieces of evidence a prosecutor can offer at a criminal trial. But psychologists continue to debate whether witnesses to a crime can accurately relay what they saw. The Supreme Court has debated the due process implications of such [...]
Fueled by the lingering (and largely erroneous) perception of a liberal judiciary, Republican presidential candidates are calling for new legislation to curb the power of federal judges. As the Washington Post reports, a majority of the Republican field is calling for some sort of judicial reform, including the abolition of [...]
At the conclusion of oral arguments on Wednesday, pundits were left guessing whether the Supreme Court would declare that Americans’ constitutional right to privacy bars prison officials from strip searching them if and when they are jailed for minor, nonviolent offenses. The case, Florence v. Bd. of Freeholders, explores both [...]
When 96-year-old Dorothy Cooper was born, women were legally barred from voting. With the passage of Tennessee’s new voter identification law, women’s access to the polls is once again in jeopardy. As of last year, Tennessee law requires voters to present a valid, government-issued ID before casting a vote in [...]
Anthony Cooper is far from the most sympathetic litigant before the Supreme Court this term. In 2003, Cooper shot a woman four times as she ran away from him. Though Cooper’s behavior was by all accounts egregious, his attorney’s conduct was pretty bad as well. When a criminal defendant turns down a plea deal based on his attorney’s ignorance of the law and subsequently receives a harsher sentence after trial, can he seek to overturn his sentence, alleging ineffective assistance of counsel?
Jaycee Dugard has filed suit against the U.S. government, alleging that the failure of law enforcement officers to adequately monitor her captor – a federal parolee – contributed to her nearly twenty-year confinement in a California backyard, during which time she endured multiple rapes. In doing so, Dugard challenges decades-old [...]
Last week, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that a California school district did not violate a teacher’s free speech rights by ordering him to remove posters bearing the national motto, among other phrases. In late 2006, Bradley Johnson, a San Diego County math [...]
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