Digital Commons Network^™

Whom Do Prosecutors Protect?, Vida Johnson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Prosecutors regard themselves as public servants who fight crime and increase community safety on behalf of their constituents. But prosecutors do not only seek to protect those they are supposed to serve. Instead, prosecutors often trade community safety, privacy, and even the constitutional rights of the general public to enlarge police power. Prosecutors routinely advocate for weaker public rights, shield police from public accountability, and fail to prosecute police when they break the law.

This Article will show how prosecutors often protect police at the expense of the public. This Article suggests a novel theory of evaluating the conduct of …

Envisioning Abolition Democracy, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For decades, police in Chicago chained people in their custody to the wall in dark, windowless rooms and subjected their captives to beatings, electric shocks, anal rape, and racial abuse. In July 2016, members of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, created in the aftermath of numerous police killings in Chicago and elsewhere, occupied vacant lots adjacent to the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility — one of the locations where such abuse occurred. The Collective sought justice, not through recourse to the criminal courts or civil litigation, but instead by reconceptualizing justice in connection with efforts to end reliance on imprisonment and …

Reforming Competence Restoration Statutes: An Outpatient Model, Susan A. Mcmahon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Defendants who suffer from mental illness and are found incompetent to stand trial are often ordered committed to an inpatient mental health facility to restore their competence, even if outpatient care may be the better treatment option. Inpatient facilities are overcrowded and place the defendants on long waiting lists. Some defendants then spend weeks, months, or even years in their jail cell, waiting for a transfer to a hospital bed.

Outpatient competence restoration programs promise to relieve this pressure. But even if every state suddenly opened a robust outpatient competence restoration program, an obstacle looms: the statutes governing competence restoration, …

Some Themes In The Proposed Federal Rules Of Evidence, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although the Federal Rules of Evidence are under consideration by Congress, it is unlikely that many of their major themes will be reversed. The present article examines some of these themes as they appear in the Supreme Court-approved draft. The aim is merely to make more explicit the effects of the Rules and suggest some questions for study.