Law Commons^™

Crashing The Misdemeanor System, Jenny M. Roberts

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

With “minor crimes” making up more than 75% of state criminal caseloads, the United States faces a misdemeanor crisis. Although mass incarceration continues to plague the nation, the current criminal justice system is faltering under the weight of misdemeanor processing.

Operating under the “broken windows theory,” which claims that public order law enforcement prevents more serious crime, the police send many petty offenses to criminal court. This is so even though the original authors of the theory noted that “[o]rdinarily, no judge or jury ever sees the persons caught up in a dispute over the appropriate level of neighborhood order” …

Telus: Asking The Right Questions About General Warrants, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The general warrant provisions in the Criminal Code have often been interpreted by lower courts in a way which threatens to make that power quite open-ended, and to make those warrants available as a way of making an "end run" around the requirements of other provisions. This note argues that the Supreme Court of Canada is correct, in Telus,to adopt a "substantive equivalence" approach to general warrants, thereby limiting the circumstances in which they can be used. Lower courts have sometimes taken the view that a general warrant is only unavailable if the proposed technique would fall squarely within some …