I have no idea how anyone can argue that solitary confinement isn't a violation of the 8th Amendment. The death penalty is more humane.
criminal justice
The perfectionist strain in American culture tends to rebel against the idea that in a well-functioning criminal justice system lots of probably-guilty people should not be convicted.
Yesterday's big tabloid story actually has some things in common with our discussion about the DSK prosecution yesterday. Correct me if I'm wrong -- I don't claim to have followed.
I understand that you have to put the best face on things, but still...According to documents filed in Stamford Superior Court in 2007, he made an annual salary of $214,000, but that salary, along with assets and debts, came up in a dispute over the...
This is a long story, but it deserves to be read in its entirety. I met Tim Masters recently and was struck by two things: how comparatively normal he seemed.
I'm not sure what's more troublesome here: the fact that Alabama allows county sheriffs to profit from serving meals in their jails, or that it allocates a mere $1.75 per.
James Q. Whitman has an interesting new book about the development of the concept of reasonable doubt in the Anglo-American legal system. An odd feature of that system is its quite explicit refusal to produce anything like a formal definition of this supposedly crucial concept....
In the hubbub over Kennedy & Exxon today, little attention has been paid to Giles v. California, a case on which I worked (for the record, my SCOTUS record is.
The Times's City Section this week has a feature on a program called Puppies Behind Bars, which places puppies with incarcerated men and women in NY state prisons. The "puppy.
Via Plumer, Adam Liptak discusses the case of a 20-year-old in Florida serving life without parole for lending some friends his car. What's particularly useful in the article is that Liptak makes clear how unusual it is for the U.S. to have retained the concept...
A program in Brooklyn that provides substance abuse counseling, job training, and other supports to people re-entering society after incarceration seems to be working and reducing recidivism rates. No big.