Defendants are regularly condemned to years, decades, or life in prison for minor infractions because of minimum sentencing statutes. If judges had more discretion in sentencing, then sentences could be more proportional to the crime, more specific to the individual defendant, and minimize the negative impact of minimum sentencing laws without inherently needing those laws repealed.
“Ironically, righting the isolated wrongful conviction only reinforces public faith in the system as a whole; it works to prevent meaningful reconsideration of the many flaws that bedevil the criminal justice system. It is this attitude that defense lawyers and reformers struggle to upend.“
Boston Review
October 4, 2018
Read More“If the very idea that someone could suffer consequences due only to the testimony of a single victim is in fact an outrage, certainly the consequence of ending up incarcerated is far more damaging than the consequence of not getting a job.“
Splinter News
September 27, 2018
Read More"Forensic science is a fundamental tool of the criminal justice system. However, a growing number of scandals have illustrated that not everyone in this field is qualified or immune to systemic bias. And as research continues to develop, some forms of forensic science have been proven to be, well, unreliable."
American Conservative
August 28, 2018
Read More"Despite two hefty federal reports casting doubt on the validity of traditional forensic evidence such as bitemark and hair strand analysis, such questionable science is still used in the courtroom to determine guilt or innocence."
The Crime Report
August 1, 2018
Read More"One conclusion reached by the NACDL was that "There is ample evidence that federal criminal defendants are being coerced to plead guilty because the penalty for exercising their constitutional rights is simply too high to risk.""
Forbes
July 31, 2018
Read More