Posts tagged Supreme Court
Bonus: How Will Coney Barrett Rule on Criminal Justice?

Presumptive Justice-to-be Amy Coney Barrett is conservative in both her political ideology and her judicial philosophy. But that doesn't mean she'll automatically side with police and prosecutors on the Supreme Court bench. Indeed, if her mentor Antonin Scalia is any guide, Coney Barrett may be less predictable on criminal justice than on other social issues.

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Bonus: To Investigate or Not?

As we record this, the question hanging over Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court is whether, and how, Senate Judiciary Committee will treat the accusations of criminal sexual assault made against Judge Kavanaugh by Professor Christine Blasy Ford. Whatever happens, the most important thing is to have a full, complete, and independent investigation of the charges before any hearing or vote.

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#18: Scandal and the Golden Rule in Criminal Defense for the Poor

The tattered system for supplying criminal defense services to the poor is a shambles. More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that persons charged with crimes must be provided with a defense lawyer if they are too poor to afford one, that promise has been broken. In countless places around the U.S., governments simply do not provide the resources for poor people charged with crimes to have a real defense. The result: defense lawyers with impossible caseloads struggling to meet the constitutional minimum standards for defense. It’s a national scandal, and yet year after year, state and local governments do too little – or nothing – to fix it.

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