Justice Scalia's Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence: An Unabashed Foe of Criminal Defendants

Sound Principles, Undesirable Outcomes: Justice Scalia's Paradoxical Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence

The Youth Discount: Old Enough to Do the Crime, Too Young to Do the Time

In a trilogy of cases, the Supreme Court applied the Eighth Amendment to the entire category of juvenile offenders, repudiated its “death is different” jurisprudence, and required states to consider youthfulness as a mitigating factor in sentencing. Roper v. Simmons prohibited states from executing offenders for murder they committed when younger than eighteen years of age. Roper reasoned that ...

Representing Defendants on Charges of Economic Crime : Unethical When Done for a Fee

As prosecutors have increasingly invoked asset forfeiture laws in their war against crime, scholars have harshly criticized the use of forfeiture laws to seize attorneys' fees. In cases in which attorneys' fees are seized, prosecutors claim that defendants are paying their lawyers with the proceeds of criminal activity. For example, drug dealers might use the profits from cocaine or heroin sale...

Delay in Process, Denial of Justice: The Jurisprudence and Empirics of Speedy Trials in Comparative Perspective

Criminal law scholars regularly maintain that American prisons are overcrowded and that defendants in custody wait long periods of time before having their cases brought to trial. A similar refrain is made of the penal process in India—the world’s largest democracy, an ally of the United States, and a country with a judiciary that draws upon American criminal procedure law. In fact, the situati...

A Comparison of Sentencing Outcomes for Defendants with Public Defenders Versus Retained Counsel in a Florida Circuit Court

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that a criminal defendant has the right to counsel for his defense, and the Fourteenth Amendment states that defendants must be provided due process and equal protection under law. Despite this, it is unclear whether indigent defendants in the United States-who are disproportionately ethnic minorities-are receiving such protections when it com...