Criminal Law and Procedure

Someone broke into a church in Centerville, Utah, last November and attacked the organist who was practicing there. In March, after a conventional investigation came up empty, a police detective turned to forensic consultants at Parabon NanoLabs. Using the publicly accessible website GEDmatch, the consultants found a likely distant genetic relative of the suspect, whose blood sample had been found near the church’s broken window.

Sometimes a marketing pivot serves a truth-telling function.

Most Wanted Poster

Trinity County, California, Courthouse, July 2018

Photos by Lisa R. Pruitt 

The headline is "Calling 911 in rural California?  Danger might be close, but the law can be hours away," and four Sacramento Bee journalists contributed to this major feature, which has been in the works since December, 2017.

As part of a symposium entitled "One Toke Too Far: The Horizontal-Federalism Implications of Marijuana Legalization Symposium," my article "Budding Conflicts: Marijuana's Impact on Unsettled Questions of Tribal-State Relations," will appear in the Boston College Law Review (forthcoming 2017). (There seems to be an unwritten rule that every piece of marijuana-related legal scholarship must contain a pun.) 

This morning, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Esquivel-Quintana v. Sessions, a case that arose from the U.S. government's effort to remove a lawful permanent resident for a "sex crime." Judging from today's argument, the justices appeared closely divided on the question of statutory interpretation before the court.

Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has decided a number of criminal-removal cases. Next week, the justices will hear oral argument in another one, Esquivel-Quintana v. Sessions, which stems from the government's effort to remove a lawful permanent resident for a "sex crime."

In recent years, the U.S government has aggressively used detention of immigrants as a tool for enforcing the immigration laws. Immigration detention became national news in 2014 when the Obama administration detained tens of thousands of Central American women and children fleeing violence in their native lands.

The Case Western Reserve Law Review published its symposium on the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Whren v. United States.

In a recent speech, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens discussed Professor Gabriel "Jack" Chin's paper Effective Assistance of Counsel and the Consequences of Guilty Pleas. 

On March 3, I will deliver a talk in the inaugural Crimmigration Law Lecture Series at the University of Denver.

From the event website: "The lecture series is dedicated to understanding how criminal and immigration norms affect one another and to creating a praxis that can potentially shape crimmigration’s development. As far as we know, this year-long crimmigration-focused project is unique."