Lithwick does a good job of summarizing the issues surrounding upcoming oral arguments about whether the 8th Amendment proscribes life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, but one set of facts under consideration raises another set of questions:Terrance Jamar Graham tried to rob a restaurant with two accomplices....
civil liberties
You may remember, in one of the worst slippery slope arguments ever, school district lawyers objecting to the Supreme Court's salutary decision in Safford School District v. Redding because it.
"With Me As Your Law...Talkin' Guy, Your Railroad to the Death Chamber is Ready!"It's bad enough that various state officials conspired to murder Cameron Todd Willingham based on worthless junk.
A couple news items on Texas's murder of Cameron Todd Willingham. First, Chris Orr points us to this video of Willingham's prosecutor, John Jackson, reiterating his theory that although we no longer have any idea if a crime was committed we can be sure that...
MurdererNot surprisingly, in response to a Forensic Science Commission that had the temerity to hear evidence about the execution of an innocent man he allowed to proceed after a less-than-cursory.
MurdererHopefully you've all read David Grann's remarkable New Yorker story about Cameron Todd Willingham, an almost certainly innocent man who was executed for arson based on worthless junk science roughly.
It's always difficult to figure out what's going on from news reports regarding a criminal investigation, but this story raises a lot of questions.First, why isn't Zazi being charged under one of several very broadly-worded federal anti-terrorism statutes? If, as the FBI asserts, Zazi admitted...
For less encouraging news about state judiciaries, we can turn to the state of Texas, where a man was sentenced to death in a trial in which the prosecutor and.
Balko, on Bob Dylan being detained for questioning by policemen in New Jersey:But now everyone’s having a good laugh about how two local police officers had no idea who Dylan.
I wrote a little while ago about the exclusionary rule in Canada. As Mckingford recently noted in comments, with respect to the case that was the centerpiece of the Liptak article, the Supreme Court of Canada voted 6-1 to overrule the lower courts and exclude...
It's because of arguments of this quality that they found a civil liberties claim that Sam Alito (albeit superfluously) can support:Matthew Wright, lawyer for the Safford school district, predicted the.
I'm very, very happy to be wrong about this one. In a very pleasant surprise, today 8 justices found that the appalling arbitrary strip search of Savana Redding violated the.