In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Miller v. Alabama that seemed to hold life sentences without parole for juveniles unconstitutional. The court found that locking a juvenile away for life without the possibility of parole was cruel and unusual...
Criminal Appeals
Supreme Court: Shooting a suspect is a constitutional ‘seizure’
Roxanne Torres didn’t know what was happening when men in dark tactical vests began chasing her car. She thought she was being carjacked. She fled in her Toyota FJ Cruiser, but the men shot her twice in the back. She still managed to get away. She went to a hospital...
Wisconsin Supreme Court to decide on phone searches and seizures
Police in Wisconsin and in all 50 states are using mobile forensic tools to copy the entire contents of cellphones. While the law generally requires a search warrant before a cellphone can be searched, this technology allows the entire phone to be recorded and saved...
Coercive interrogation, false diagnosis point to wrongful plea
In 2005, an infant died in Amy Wilkerson’s care. She picked him up to feed him a bottle, and he made a terrible face, almost gasping for air, she says. Then he went limp. She called 911 and performed CPR. The baby was taken to a hospital, but he was taken off of life...
Curtis Flowers, tried 6 times for murder, finally set free
The state of Mississippi tried Curtis Flowers for murder six times. He was convicted in four trials, while another two ended in mistrials. Yet each of the convictions was overturned. In 2010, after his sixth trial, Flowers was given the death penalty. In June of 2019,...
If you have a revoked license, can you lend out your car?
Yes, as long as it is still registered and insured. However, you might want to warn anyone borrowing your car that they are likely to be pulled over.That's because the U.S. Supreme Court just issued a ruling in a case in which a man was pulled over solely because the...
Supreme Court: Can states just get rid of the insanity defense?
At stake is our basic understanding of the difference between right and wrong. If someone commits a wrongful act but, due to a mental illness or defect, wasn't able to recognize that what they were doing was wrong, we don't consider them to have committed a crime.The...
SCOTUS voids death sentence after finding racist jury selection
The Montgomery County, Mississippi, prosecutor seems to have made it his career mission to convict Curtis Flowers for four 1986 murders in a small-town furniture store. Over the past two decades, he has tried Flowers for the murders six times.For each trial, the...
Federal lawsuit seeks to halt Wisconsin’s lifetime GPS monitoring
Last September, the then-attorney general announced that people with two or more convictions for sex offenses would be required to wear GPS monitors for life. He ordered 180 people to get fitted for GPS bracelets within 5 days.Those required to enter the lifetime...
‘Making a Murderer’ defendant Steven Avery wins evidence appeal
If you remember the Emmy Award-winning documentary series "Making a Murderer," you know there is good reason to suppose that the defendants, Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, were wrongfully convicted of the murder of Teresa Halbach. As the documentary showed, Attorney...