by David M. Reutter
It is often said that life imitates art. When it comes to electronic monitoring (“EM”), your friendly, neighborhood Spiderman was a major influence for the idea to use an electronic device to track the location of persons entangled within the criminal justice and immigration systems. The ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Cellebrite—the Israeli digital intelligence company that provides data extraction tools for law enforcement to collect, analyze, and manage digital data—is asking its customers to keep the technology a secret.
For years, Cellebrite has tried to keep the technology of its products secret and has urged law ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The Court of Appeal of California, Fourth Appellate District, overturned the denial of a defendant’s motion to suppress, holding that the officer impermissibly extended a traffic stop to conduct a drug dog sniff around the exterior of the defendant’s vehicle.
Officer Anthony McGlade of the Anaheim ...
by Matt Clarke
The Supreme Judicial Court of Maine reversed a defendant’s domestic violence conviction after finding her attorney was ineffective for opening the door to prejudicial evidence about her parenting and failing to object to the prosecutor’s improper introduction of evidence about having a child removed from her home. ...
by Douglas Ankney
In a case of first impression, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit announced that the categorical approach applies to the tier analysis of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (“SORNA”), 18 U.S.C. § 2250(a).
Michael Ryan Coulson was convicted by court martial of “forcible ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Following a congressional investigation, some lawmakers wrote a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) about how the eight largest pharmacy chains provide patient prescription information to police without requiring a warrant, and only one regularly notifies customers when it discloses this private ...
by Ken Armstrong, ProPublica
An unusual recent court decision offered harsh criticism of a behavior that has left dozens of men condemned to death since the 1970s, spotlighting cases where prosecutors offered claims that contradicted what they said elsewhere.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
When Baltimore police ...
by Douglas Ankney
The Court of Appeals of New York declined to adopt a per se rule that a handcuffed person is “in custody” for purposes of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966). Nevertheless, the Court held that the handcuffed and un-Mirandized defendant was in custody for purposes of ...
by Jo Ellen Knott
Rand, a nonprofit research organization, published a research brief on January 9, 2024, that proves hiring individuals with criminal records is not risky and has benefits for the employer, the individual seeking employment post-incarceration, and society.
The brief titled “Resetting the Record: The Facts on Hiring ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the admission of Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) Investigation Form G-166F (“G-166F”) at Nicole Elizabeth Foreman’s trial where the preparer of the G-166F did not testify violated the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the ...
by Jo Ellen Knott
On January 10, 2024, Forensic Mag delivered astonishing news: Research out of Columbia University and the University at Buffalo radically challenged the long-held belief that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person are always unique and unmatchable.
The research team, led by Columbia Engineering undergraduate ...
by Douglas Ankney
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and ...
by Douglas Ankney
In late 2023, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Clean Slate Act into law, permitting millions of criminal convictions to be sealed. “With the signing of this law, it adds to our momentum to get people back to work, give them those opportunities,” said Hochul.
Under ...
by David M. Reutter
In a case of first impression, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that “a defendant constructively is deprived of his or her constitutional right to counsel under art. 12 [of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights] where trial counsel sleeps for a significant portion of during an ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Rob Bonta, the Attorney General for the state of California, issued a memo to law enforcement agencies in the state, which interprets SB 34 and forbids them from sharing with out-of-state agencies data collected from automated license plate readers (“ALPRs”).
ALPRs are controversial. They record license ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
In a case of first impression, the Supreme Court of Utah held that production of a cellphone passcode is “testimonial” for purposes of the Fifth Amendment and that the State violated the defendant’s privilege against self-incrimination rights when it mentioned his refusal to disclose the passcode ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab investigated weaknesses in the manner with which cellphones and their locations are passed from tower to tower. What they found was that it was remarkably easy for a state agency, telephone company, and others to track cellphones using the archaic ...
by David M. Reutter
In a case of first impression, the Vermont Supreme Court held “that in determining whether the criminal court would have accepted a plea agreement,” the Post-Conviction Relief (“PCR”) “court can consider only evidence that was available to the criminal court at the time it would have ...
by Jo Ellen Knott
The First Step Act (“FSA”), a 2018 law designed to curb recidivism among formerly incarcerated individuals on the federal level, is showing modest but positive results in reducing the amount of time people serve in the federal Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”) system.
An analysis performed by ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
About a year after the New Orleans Police Department (“NOPD”) performed its first facial recognition scan under a new policy that reauthorized its use, they have little to show for it. That is according to NOPD’s own data, which was analyzed by Politico. The new policy ...
by Michael Dean Thompson
One hundred petabytes is a difficult quantity to comprehend. In plain English, that is about 113 quadrillion or 113 followed by 15 zeroes. According to ProPublica, that is the rough data equivalent of 25 million copies of the movie Barbie. One hundred petabytes is also approximately ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
The FBI has amassed over 20 million DNA profiles in its database and has requested Congress double its budget for handling DNA samples “to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected.”
The Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, is the FBI’s centrally searchable repository ...
by Dale Chappell
In the name of finality, federal courts are reluctant to undo criminal judgments of the state courts—especially repeated attempts by petitioners to do so under federal habeas corpus. When the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”) came along in 1996, codifying longstanding rules prohibiting multiple attempts ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Vince Schiraldi talks private probation and parole in his new book Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom. When Schiraldi was selected to run the troubled New York Department of Corrections (“DOC”) during the COVID pandemic crisis, the New York Times called ...
by David M. Reutter
The Court of Appeals of New York held a trial court erred in admitting evidence of prior bad acts evidence. It further concluded the error was not harmless and reversed, ordering a new trial.
Sebastian Telfair was arrested in June 2017 after a traffic stop, during ...
Michael Dean Thompson
Modern medical science has delivered some remarkable lifesaving technologies. Included in the list of modern marvels are pacemakers equipped with telemetry systems that permit remote monitoring but also remote modification of their operating parameters. With such a pacemaker, a technician can monitor how the patient’s heart responds ...
by Carlos Difundo
In September of 2021, then-Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Jill Sanborn told the Senate that the FBI did not monitor publicly available social media conversations. “It’s not within our authorities,” she told them, adding that the First Amendment barred them from doing so. It turns out that statement ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
F.D. Zigan, a veteran crime scene investigator who specializes in fingerprint analysis for the Roswell Police Department in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, writes about the disconnect between evidence collection and scene reconstruction in Forensic Magazine, November 2023.
Zigan points out that in a world of specialization, a ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Until recently, police departments in New Jersey were covering expenses for their officers to attend training sessions conducted by Street Cop Training (“SCT”), an organization that encourages “a hypervigilant warrior mentality” and trains officers to consider an arbitrary and contradictory list of behaviors as reasons to ...
Loaded on
April 15, 2024
published in Criminal Legal News
April, 2024, page 49
The Massachusetts State Police (“MSP”) is the defendant in a potential class action lawsuit alleging that troopers secretly recorded nearly 200 individuals during criminal investigations, many of them drug cases. These recordings made by a phone app called Callyo violate federal and state laws and potentially jeopardize criminal cases across ...
Loaded on
April 15, 2024
published in Criminal Legal News
April, 2024, page 50
News in Brief
Colorado: On February 28, 2024, Chiara Wuensch, a DNA Analyst for the Weld County Sheriff’s Office at the Northern Regional Forensic Lab for more than 10 years was fired. The termination was the result of a roughly one-month internal investigation, which concluded that Wuensch’s case work had ...
by Douglas Ankney
Perry Lott was exonerated in Ada, Oklahoma, of a 1987 rape and burglary conviction after 35 years—30 of which Lott spent in prison—in spite of former District Attorney Paul Smith’s attempts to perpetuate such a gross miscarriage of justice.
In November 1987, a white woman was raped ...
