Do criminal courts meaningfully accommodate psychiatric disability? A review of competency proceedings across the United States suggests not. In competency to stand trial (CST) proceedings, criminal courts offer a narrow vision of psychiatric disability that excludes many defendants. Ultimately, the institutional context of criminal court under-mines even the meager accommodations that the competency framework provides.
CST proceedings...
The right to have your day in court is foundational to the U.S. criminal legal system. Yet, many noncitizens in immigration detention facing criminal charges are denied this right when ICE routinely fails to produce immigration detainees to criminal court to resolve charges. In immigration proceedings, immigration judges regularly use those unresolved charges to detain and deport. This Article is the first to examine this obstruction of court access...
Since 1898, Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States, meaning that Congress wields plenary power over the Island. Although scholars have highlighted the history and some modern manifestations of this power, conversations about how plenary power affects the territories have largely ignored constitutional criminal procedure.
This Article is the first to center the territory’s criminal legal system within the broader debate over...
On January 1, 2022, the Arizona Supreme Court announced the most radical change to the American jury in nearly thirty-five years: the elimination of peremptory strikes. Arizona’s move is part of a broader trend of states experimenting with new ways to counter racial exclusion in the selection of juries after decades of federal inaction. Perhaps as noteworthy as the reforms themselves is the way in which many have come about: Rather than announcing...
Coercive policing is conducted mostly by means of commands, and officers usually cannot use force unless they have first issued an order. Yet, despite widespread concern about force and coercion in policing, commands are both underregulated and misunderstood. Officers have no clear legal authority to give many common commands, almost no departmental guidance about how or when to issue them, and almost no legal scrutiny for many commands they give....
This Comment examines the collateral order doctrine, a narrow exception to the otherwise general rule that appeals from interlocutory orders are generally disallowed in the federal court system. It does so in the context of fugitive disentitlement orders. This Comment focuses on a recent Second Circuit decision, United States v. Bescond, analyzing its consequences for interlocutory challenges by foreign defendants who live and conducted...
The Double Jeopardy Clause guarantees no individual will be put in jeopardy twice for the same offense. But, pursuant to the dual-sovereignty doctrine, multiple prosecutions for offenses stemming from the same conduct do not violate the Clause if the offenses charged arise under the laws of separate sovereigns, even if the laws are otherwise identical. The doctrine applies to tribal prosecutions, but its impact in Indian country is rarely studied....
Introduction When a Louisiana state court set Ronald Egana’s bail at $26,000, Egana’s mother and close friend did what hundreds of thousands of arrestees do each year: They sought the services of a commercial bail bondsman. Blair’s Bail Bonds agreed to post Egana’s bail in exchange for a twelve-percent nonrefundable premium, the state-approved rate in […]
Plea bargaining dominates the modern criminal justice system. Constitutional safeguards, however, have only slowly followed this fundamental shift in criminal adjudication. In Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, the Supreme Court extended the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel to situations in which deficient counsel leads a defendant to forgo a beneficial plea agreement. The Court’s test left state court...
Federal courts are vitally important fora in which to remedy constitutional violations that occur during state criminal proceedings. But critics have long lamented the difficulty of obtaining federal review of these violations. The Supreme Court rarely grants certiorari to review state criminal convictions, including allegations of constitutional defects, on direct appeal. Likewise, the Court has historically declined to grant certiorari to review...