I have some follow-up thoughts to the GPS surveillance decision handed down by the Supreme Court earlier this week. The first major takeaway from the case is that Sonia Sotomayor was one of the best decisions Obama has made so far: The split on the...
civil liberties
The Supreme Court has unanimously held that GPS tracking of an individual by the state constitutes a "search" in terms of the Fourth Amendment. However, the Court declined to answer.
Shorter Scalia and Thomas: By stopping Cory Maples's execution, the majority has violated Alabama's rights. Look, sure, he didn't really have a "lawyer" in the sense of someone responsible for.
Clarence Thomas's 2011 opinion for a bare majority of the Court shielding the New Orleans DA from liability for its systematic violation of civil liberties (which in some cases led to innocent people serving substantial jail terms) stands out as one of the very worst...
I blogged a couple weeks ago about the case of Juan Rivera, who Illinois prosecutors kept sending back to jail based although his confession was coerced and the forensic evidence.
The bad news is that the pardoned man is dead. Dead despite the fact that the guilty man tried repeatedly to confess: Perry made those remarks during an extraordinary ceremony.
Clearly, anyone who is more concerned with arbitrary executive authority than Ben Wittes must be lying.
I have a piece up at the Prospect about the 6th Amendment case that was argued yesterday. Since Scalia and Thomas have taken pretty consistent civil libertarian positions on the.
Balko is terrific on the militarization of local police forces.
As Charlie Savage and Adam Serwer point out, the Senate yesterday decided to punt on the question of whether the executive can arbitrarily and indefinitely detain American citizens simply by declaring them terrorists. While dismaying, this is part of an ongoing pattern many political scientists...
Although it's sort of touching that they think governors and prosecutors will take scientific findings showing evidence to be unreliable into account if appellate courts can't. The other salient fact.
Andrew Martin has a fascinating article about how things work in a winger-dominated DA's office in Illinois. First, people are convicted based almost entirely on not-very-plausible confessions extracted from.