Law Commons^™

You Made Gideon A Promise, Eh?: Advocating For Mandated Publicly Appointed Counsel At Bail Hearings In The United States Through Domestic Comparisons With Canadian Practices And Legal Considerations, Lauren Elizabeth Lisauskas

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Federal Guilty Pleas: Inequities, Indigence And The Rule 11 Process, Julian A. Cook

Scholarly Works

In 2017 and 2018, the Supreme Court issued two little-noticed decisions—Lee v. United States and Class v. United States. While neither case captured the attention of the national media nor generated meaningful academic commentary, both cases are well deserving of critical examination for reasons independent of the issues presented to the Court. They deserve review because of a consequential shared fact; a fact representative of a commonplace, yet largely overlooked, federal court practice that routinely disadvantages the indigent (and disproportionately minority populations), and compromises the integrity of arguably the most consequential component of the federal criminal justice process. In each …

The Downstream Consequences Of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, Paul Heaton, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan Stevenson

Scholarly Works

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas—the thirdlargest county in the United States—to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly …

An Originalist Argument For A Sixth Amendment Right To Competent Counsel, Erica J. Hashimoto

Scholarly Works

The Treason Act of 1696 provided a right to counsel in treason cases in England and laid the framework for the right to counsel both in England and in the United States. Evidence suggests that the Treason Act may have influenced the Framers of the Constitution; thus, any historical understanding of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel should consider the quality of representation treason defendants received. If, as appears to be the case, treason defendants had competent, experienced lawyers representing them, then the Sixth Amendment right to counsel may well include that right to such representation. This Essay suggest that …

Apprendi And Federalism, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

Since the emergence of the Apprendi majority and its newly minted (and evolving) constitutional limits on criminal punishment, many commentators have begun to address its implications for the horizontal relations between the branches of government — between legislators and courts, between judges and juries, and between judges and prosecutors. Less widely addressed, though equally (if not more) important, has been the Apprendi doctrine’s implications for vertical relations, particularly federalism.

This essay seeks to begin to fill that lacuna in the literature. Part I explains how Apprendi undermines principles of federalism, a curious tension because several of Apprendi’s strongest defenders, particularly …