Category Archives: Criminal Law

Judge Dismisses Government’s Attempt to Prosecute Man Handing Out Jury Nullification Pamphlets

Posted April 20th, 2012
Shon R. Hopwood
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood dismissed jury tampering charges against retired chemistry professor Julian P. Heicklen after he stood outside a courthouse and distributed pamphlets containing information about jury nullification. Reason and the New York Times have coverage. If there was ever a time to reprimand an Assistant U.S. Attorney for bringing frivolous [...]
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Racist Criminal Laws Examined At The Supreme Court

Posted April 18th, 2012
Shon R. Hopwood
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This week the Supreme Court considered, in Dorsey v. United States and Hill v. United States, whether the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 applies retroactively to those prisoners sentenced before the act took effect. A number of media outlets reported on the oral arguments, including  Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog; Adam Liptak at the New York Times; Mike [...]
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Just Another Reason Why We Need a Different Kind of Politician

Posted April 7th, 2012
Shon R. Hopwood
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The Seventh Circuit Rules that Pro Se Prisoner Missed His Chance at Resentencing

Posted March 7th, 2012
Shon R. Hopwood
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I wrote this past year about the obstacles that prisoners filing pro se face when challenging their convictions and sentences. The Seventh Circuit’s opinion today in United States v. Wyatt kind of typifies the problems inherent in a system that requires uneducated prisoners to fend for themselves and learn the law within a year in order to meet [...]
Also posted in Prisoners |( 1 Comment)

Michelle Alexander’s Book on Mass Incarceration

Posted February 1st, 2012
Shon R. Hopwood
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I’ve been reading lots of write-ups for Law Professor Michelle Alexander’s book on the American criminal justice system, entitled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. From what I’ve read, and heard from others in the legal community, it sounds like an amazing work. You can find the website for the [...]
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Attaching a GPS Device to a Car Is a Fourth Amendment Search

Posted January 23rd, 2012
Shon R. Hopwood
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In a big loss for the federal government, the Supreme Court held today that when the government attaches a GPS device to a vehicle to monitor the vehicle’s movement, the government conducts a Fourth Amendment search. Justice Scalia wrote the opinion for the Court in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, backed by the Chief Justice, [...]
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Three Hopeful Changes for the Criminal Justice System in 2012

Posted January 14th, 2012
Shon R. Hopwood
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I am a little late on New Year’s resolutions. But I thought I would shoot for three things I would like to see happen in the criminal justice system in 2012. At number three I would like to see the U.S. Supreme Court declare, loud and clear, that lawyers must be constitutionally effective at the [...]
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A Pro Se Prisoner Victory

Posted December 29th, 2011
Shon R. Hopwood
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As Professor Michael W. Martin and I pointed out in our new articles in the Fordham Law Review (here and here), although a huge swath of litigation occurring in federal courts is a result of filings from pro se prisoners, very few of those litigants actually obtain some modicum of success, let alone win a new [...]
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The Efficiency Over Rights Argument

Posted December 2nd, 2011
Shon R. Hopwood
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Stanford Law Professor Jeffrey L. Fisher had a particularly compelling argument yesterday in the New York Times against the assertion that if applying federal constitutional rights costs too much than the right should not apply. This efficiency versus rights argument is a commonly employed by prosecutors offices across the country. And it is incredibly false. Tax [...]
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More on Jones–the Supreme Court’s GPS Monitoring Case

Posted November 11th, 2011
Shon R. Hopwood
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SCOTUS news was dominated this week by the oral arguments United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259. In that case, the Court must decide whether law enforcement can conduct GPS monitoring sans warrant without violating the Fourth Amendment’s prescription of unreasonable searches and seizures. A lot was written about the oral arguments, but here are the [...]
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