Law Commons^™

Algorithms & Instruments: The Effective Elimination Of New Jersey’S Cash Bail System And Its Replacement, David Reimel Iii

Penn State Law Review

Until 2017, every state conditioned pretrial release on cash bail. Judges across the United States predicted the risk individuals posed of failing to appear and the danger to the community. As a result, indigent individuals waited in jails merely because they could not afford their bail. In 2017, New Jersey spearheaded the movement to change how the bail system operates by passing the Criminal Justice Reform Act (“CJRA”), which created an objective decision-making tool called the Public Safety Assessment.

Today, New Jersey judges are no longer required to speculate about the future decisions of individual defendants. Instead, the Public Safety …

The Quantum Of Suspicion Needed For An Exigent Circumstances Search, Kit Kinports

Journal Articles

For decades, the United States Supreme Court opinions articulating the standard of exigency necessary to trigger the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement have been maddeningly opaque and confusing. Some cases require probable cause, others call for reasonable suspicion, and still others use undefined and unhelpful terms such as "reasonable to believe" in describing how exigent the situation must be to permit the police to proceed without a warrant. Nor surprisingly, the conflicting signals coming from the Supreme Court have led to disagreement in the lower courts.

To resolve this conflict and provide guidance to law enforcement …