Milwaukee Criminal Defense Law Blog

Recently, criminal justice reform advocates have pointed out a fundamental unfairness in our system. People who can afford bail are allowed to continue their lives while under criminal charges. People who cannot are held in pretrial detention, often until their criminal charges are resolved. They typically lose their jobs and housing and may even lose their kids -- all before they've been found guilty of anything.

Being stuck in pre-trial detention is one major reason why people plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit. Prosecutors often offer seemingly good deals to people willing to plead guilty. Often, those deals allow the person to get out of jail right away and sometimes serve no additional time.

If you take a genealogy test, you could be exposing your family, from your kids to your distant relatives, to the possibility of having their genetics exposed to third parties, including law enforcement.

This is because companies like GEDmatch have created massive databases of results from consumer genealogy companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com. If your genetic profile is uploaded to GEDmatch or a similar database, everyone you're related to can be extrapolated from your DNA.

According to the government, the full-body scanners that are standard at airports cost about $150,000 each. In the last decade or so, the Transportation Security Administration has invested over $100 million on the scanners, which are called "millimeter wave machines."

Unfortunately, these machines have a major flaw. They can detect non-metallic objects, but they can't tell what they are. And that includes hair -- especially African-American women's hair. The machines create a false alarm when people have Afros or wear dreadlocks, braids or twists. They also set false alarms on turbans, wigs and hair extensions.

The Confrontation Clause in the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that, "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to be confronted with the witnesses against him." The courts have read this to mean that criminal defendants have the right to fully confront any evidence brought against them.

When the evidence is technological in nature, the Confrontation Clause gives the accused the right to fully examine how that technology works. The defense needs this in order to challenge whether the technology works as described, whether it worked properly in a particular case, and whether its use violated the suspect's other constitutional rights.