by Matt Clarke
March 2018 should have been the happiest month of his life. After over two decades of wrongful imprisonment, the Cook County State’s Attorney agreed to drop murder charges against Illinois state prisoner Ricardo Rodriguez. He should have walked out of prison a free and exonerated man. Instead, ...
by Matt Clarke
On April 25, 2018, the Supreme Court of New Jersey held that a trial court erred when, on the eve of trial, it permitted the State to amend the indictment to increase a charge from a third-degree to a second-degree felony.
Following surveillance on a suspected drug ...
by Matt Clarke
Around the nation, powerful lobbying groups composed of associations of prosecutors are influencing state legislatures to reject certain laws, regardless of how popular the proposed laws are with the electorate.
In his January 2018 State of the State address, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called for justice ...
by Matt Clarke
On March 2, 2018, the Supreme Court of Idaho vacated a prisoner’s conviction and sentence for possession of a controlled substance and ordered an acquittal because the substance she possessed had not been adequately identified as a controlled substance beyond a reasonable doubt.
Gracie Jean Tryon, an ...
by Matt Clarke
It has been years since the National Academy of Sciences and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology published studies casting serious doubt on courtroom claims of practitioners of “pattern matching” forensics, a broad field that includes comparative analyses of such items as hairs, fibers, ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 14, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed the portion of the sentence that restricted a former Realtor who had pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud from working in real estate for five years following his release from prison. ...
by Matt Clarke
On March 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of Ohio held that the State must provide a prisoner the DNA profile created after his application for post-conviction DNA testing of crime-scene evidence was granted.
Tyrone Noling received the death penalty for the 1990 murder of an Ohio couple. ...
by Matt Clarke
The transcript of a panel discussion titled “Life After the Death Penalty: Implications for Retentionist States,” presented by the Committees on Capital Punishment of the American Bar Association Section of Civil Rights & Social Justice and the New York City Bar Association, which was posted on the ...
by Matt Clarke
On October 5, 2017, the Supreme Court of New Mexico held that an impaired driver generally could not be subject to criminal penalties for refusing to submit to a blood test for the presence of alcohol or drugs.
On April 23, 2011, Laressa Vargas encountered a DWI ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 27, 2017, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas held that a guilty plea for obtaining a controlled substance “through the use of a fraudulent prescription form” was invalid because it was given as a result of deficient legal advice from defendant’s attorney who failed ...
