By Barbara O'Brien & Catherine M. Grosso,

Race has long had a pernicious role in how juries are assembled in the United States. Racism—intentional, implicit, and structural—has produced disparities in how jury venires are selected, whom the court excuses for cause, and how lawyers exercise their peremptory strikes. We are, however, at a moment of reform in the United States. We see courts, legislatures, and citizens looking for opportunities to make our criminal legal system fairer.1 One aspect of the system receiving attention is jury selection, specifically race discrimination in the selection process.2 Efforts to counter discrimination range in scope from creating commissions to study the issue, to implementing rules to address Batson’s shortcomings, to outright abolishing the use of peremptory strikes.3 Much of the research on racial discrimination in jury selection has focused on lawyers, particularly their use of peremptory strikes. But the process that produces racial disparities involves multiple steps and players. Judges, in particular, play a vital role in ensuring that voir dire is conducted in a way that produces a diverse and competent jury. Fortunately, significant research on best practices in jury selection provides practical guidance to judges overseeing the jury selection process. To demonstrate how these best practices play out in the real world, this article examines two high-profile cases in light of what researchers have learned about maximizing the effectiveness of voir dire and, in particular, minimizing racial bias in jury selection. We take advantage of the live broadcasting of jury selection in two notorious cases during these times of crises and change to look closely at ways courts can mitigate racial bias in jury selection and, in the process, further the educational and information-gathering objectives of voir dire.5 In Part I, we review the research on practices that can enhance the effectiveness of voir dire and counter racial bias in jury selection, with a particular focus on the role of judges and on recent efforts to reform jury selection in several states. In doing so, we broaden the focus beyond how lawyers’ behavior in exercising peremptory strikes contributes to racial discrimination to the role of judges. In Part II, we present a brief overview of the main actors, as well as the legal and social context for our two cases: the prosecution of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis for killing George Floyd, and the prosecution of Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and William Bryan in Georgia for killing Ahmaud Arbery. In Part III, we draw on that research to examine the jury selection processes in the Chauvin and McMichael/Bryan cases. We compare the processes by which those juries were selected and the judges’ approaches to voir dire by identifying attributes or initiatives that render voir dire more or less effective.

98 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 111 (2024), 25p.

By The Council on Criminal Justice

As cities across the nation grapple with effective responses to increases in violent crime, a task force co-chaired by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy today released a report outlining a comprehensive approach for the use of lengthy prison sentences in the United States.

The report, How Long is Long Enough?, presents 14 recommendations to enhance judicial discretion in sentencing, promote individual and system accountability, reduce racial and ethnic disparities, better serve victims of crime, and increase public safety. Defining long sentences as prison terms of 10 years or longer, the panel’s proposals include:

Shifting savings from reductions in the use of long prison sentences to programs that prevent violence and address the trauma it causes individuals, families, and communities (Recommendation 1).

Allowing judges to consider all relevant facts and circumstances when imposing a long sentence, and requiring that sentencing enhancements based on criminal history are driven by individualized assessments of risk and other factors (Recommendations 6 and 8)

Providing selective “second look” sentence review opportunities and expanding access to sentence-reduction credits (Recommendations 11 and 12)

Focusing penalties in drug cases on a person’s role in a trafficking organization, rather than the amount of drug involved, (Recommendation 7)

Reducing recidivism by providing behavioral health services and other rehabilitative living conditions and opportunities in prison (Recommendations 3 and 13)

Strengthening services for all crime victims and survivors by enforcing victims’ rights, removing barriers to services, and creating restorative justice opportunities (Recommendations 2, 4, and 9)

“Some may wonder, why would we even discuss the nation’s use of long prison sentences now, amid a rise in homicide rates and legitimate public concern about public safety? Because this is exactly the time to examine what will actually make our communities safer and our system more just,” Yates and Gowdy said in a joint statement accompanying the report. “When crime rates increase, so do calls for stiffer sentencing, often without regard to the effectiveness or fairness of those sentences. Criminal justice policy should be based on facts and evidence, not rhetoric and emotion, and we should be laser-focused on strategies that make the most effective use of our limited resources.”

The report is the product of a year-long analysis by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) Task Force on Long Sentences, which includes 16 members representing a broad range of experience and perspectives, from crime victims and survivors to formerly incarcerated people, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement, courts, and corrections. The panel examined the effects of long sentences on the criminal justice system and the populations it serves, including victims as well as people in prison, their families, and correctional staff.

Drawing on sentencing data and research, including a series of reports prepared for the Task Force, the sweeping recommendations offer a comprehensive blueprint for action on a complex and polarizing topic. According to an updated analysis by CCJ, 63% of people in state prison in 2020 were serving a sentence of 10 or more years, up from 46% in 2005, a shift due largely to a decline in people serving shorter terms. During the same period, the gap between Black and White people receiving long terms widened, from half a percentage point to 4 percentage points. Though murder defendants were the most likely to receive a long sentence, drug offenses accounted for the largest share (20%) of those admitted to prison to serve 10 or more years.

“Our nation’s reliance on long sentences as a response to violence requires us to wrestle with highly challenging questions about the relationship between crime, punishment, and public safety,” Task Force Director John Maki said. “Through their painstaking deliberations, our members rose to the challenge and produced a set of recommendations that recognize our need to advance public safety while respecting the humanity of those most affected by long prison terms.”

Washington DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2023. 39p.

By The Center for Justice Innovation

In May 2024, the New York State Unified Court System, with the Center for Justice Innovation (the Center), and in partnership with the Office of the Governor of the State of New York, launched the Family Justice Initiative: Court and Community Collaboration (FJI or the Initiative). Building on the reports and analyses that have documented statewide challenges across all case types in Family Court to date, the Initiative seeks to forge a fair, equitable, and sustainable path forward for the Court and its system partners to better serve all New Yorkers. The Initiative is solutions-focused, prioritizes areas for improvement, identifies promising programs, and explores new ideas to strengthen families, reduce unnecessary system involvement, and break intergenerational cycles of trauma. The Center’s role is to support a strategic planning process to develop a broad vision for what makes an effective family-serving system, as well as a comprehensive plan to support that vision. The goal for the initial phase was to begin to develop a shared vision and objectives for the Initiative and identify concrete solutions ready for immediate implementation. This report lays out the values and goals articulated by Initiative partners to date, and the specific recommendations that emerged from extensive discussions facilitated across New York State in the first phase of the project. It also provides a preview of the next phase of work, which will include the development of working groups to pursue longer-term areas for improvement while continuing to identify concrete opportunities for investment along the way.   

New York: Center for Justice Innovation, 2025. 31p.

By Sarah Picard, Leah Nelson, Rae Walker, Ellie Wilson

Every year, courts across the United States impose millions of dollars in fines, fees, and restitution charges on people adjudicated guilty of traffic violations, misdemeanors, and felonies. In theory, these assessments are intended to punish and deter unlawful behavior and compensate victims for financial losses incurred as the result of a crime. Despite their near ubiquitous use in criminal legal systems throughout the country, there is surprisingly little evidence that these financial penalties and assessments, collectively known as legal financial obligations (LFOs), deter criminal conduct, enhance public safety, or result in victims being compensated for their losses. In fact, some analyses indicate excessive fines and fees can have detrimental effects, eroding community trust in law enforcement, exacerbating hardships faced by individuals and families, undermining public safety and court legitimacy, and saddling community members with debt many will never be able to pay.

The Jefferson County Equitable Fines and Fees (JEFF) Project—a research–practice partnership among MDRC, the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Tenth Judicial Circuit Court of Alabama—uses five years of longitudinal, case-level data and qualitative research to explore how Alabama’s fines and fees system plays out in Jefferson County, Alabama. This brief presents early results from analysis of the quantitative data collected. 

The preliminary findings highlight inequities in how LFOs are assessed and distributed and the inefficacy of LFOs as a revenue source. Analyses showed that indigent individuals across all charges were assessed higher financial penalties and paid less toward their debt than those who could afford private representation. In addition, across groups, most people did not satisfy their balances over the five-year period, and many incurred a “restitution recovery fee” due to missed payments. Furthermore, the research depicts a system in which restitution often goes unpaid because of the state’s priority disbursement schedule, which compensates law enforcement agencies that collect debt before funding victim restitution

New York: MDRC, 2024. 9p.

By Karin D. Martin

The core of the access-to-justice problem is widespread unmet civil legal needs coupled with general disuse of the civil legal system. This Essay posits that monetary sanctions are an important contributing factor to the problem of access to justice. First, monetary sanctions and the unpaid criminal legal debt they produce are engines of “legal hybridity” in people’s lives in a way that impedes access to justice by generating unmet legal needs. They conflate the criminal and civil legal systems in many people’s lives, thereby reducing access to recourse in either system. Second, by subverting the principles of proportionality, specificity, and finality, monetary sanctions structurally deprive people of just solutions and condition them to not expect justice from legal institutions

widespread disuse of the civil legal system to help solve civil legal problems lies at the core. Regardless of whether the crisis is conceptualized as people having insufficient legal assistance, legal information, or access to civil courts, a through line is the failure of people to make use of the benefits ostensibly available to them through the civil legal system. Here, “access to justice” is conceived of in terms of widespread unmet legal needs with an accompanying paucity of just solutions. Theories about the source of this deficit of just resolutions for people with civil legal problems include lack of legal knowledge and knowhow, underfunded courts, and too few lawyers.cal and structural aspects of monetary sanctions, explained in detail below, this Essay argues that it is time to include monetary sanctions as a contributing factor to the problem of access to justice.

Monetary sanctions are the fines, fees, surcharges, restitution, or any other financial liability imposed in the criminal legal system. Three factors make it easy to overlook the role of these sanctions in the access-to-justice problem: (1) Monetary sanctions originate in the criminal legal system; (2) Some people can pay them without difficulty; and (3) They are a less severe sanction than incarceration. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of monetary sanctions and the unpaid criminal legal debt they produce are engines of “legal hybridity” in people’s lives in a way that harms access to justice by giving rise to unmet legal needs. Specifically, this legal hybridity amplifies the potential for extraction in both the criminal and civil legal systems and hinders the potential for resolution in each. Further, monetary sanctions are structured in a way that violates key principles of justice, which inhibits the pursuit of just solutions. This Essay thus argues that failing to consider the role of monetary sanctions in the access-to-justice crisis will stymie efforts to solve it.

This Essay proceeds as follows. Part I explores how monetary sanctions conflate the criminal and civil legal systems in many people’s lives, thereby reducing access to recourse in either. The idea of legal hybridity is offered as a way to conceptualize this phenomenon. While both the criminal and civil legal systems ostensibly offer remedies for all manner of problems, legal hybridity highlights how they also both have the capacity to be extractive—of time, of money, of property, and of liberty. Monetary sanctions should be a point of focus because they often tilt the balance toward extraction, rather than toward recourse. Part II discusses how monetary sanctions undermine central tenets of justice: proportionality, finality, and specificity in punishment. By subverting these principles, monetary sanctions structurally deprive people of just solutions and condition them to not expect justice from legal institutions. Although these principles are typically of concern in the criminal legal setting, the aforementioned legal hybridity underscores the need to consider them more broadly, particularly in the domain of monetary sanctions.

Stanford Law Review Online , Vol. 75, June 2023, 15p.

By Beth Karp

Several widely used criminal risk assessment instruments factor a defendant’s abstract beliefs, peer associations, and family relationships into their risk scores. The inclusion of those factors is empirically unsound and raises profound ethical and constitutional questions. This Article is the first instance of legal scholarship on criminal risk assessment to (a) conduct an in-depth review of risk assessment questionnaires, scoresheets, and reports, and (b) analyze the First and Fourteenth Amendment implications of attitude and associational factors. Additionally, this Article challenges existing scholarship by critiquing widely accepted but dubious empirical justifications for the inclusion of attitude and associational items. The items are only weakly correlated with recidivism, have not been shown to be causal, and have in fact been shown to decrease the predictive validity of risk assessment instruments. Quantification of attitudes and associations should cease unless and until it is done in a way that is empirically sound, more useful than narrative reports, and consistent with the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Stanford Law Review, Vol. 75, 2023, 99p.

By Erin Jacobs Valentine, Sarah Picard

Jurisdictions across the United States are implementing reforms to their pretrial systems to reduce the number of people who are held in pretrial detention—that is, who remain incarcerated in jail while they await the adjudication of their cases. As part of this effort, many jurisdictions are moving away from money bail as a primary means to encourage people to return for future court dates, and are instead implementing pretrial supervision, which requires clients to meet regularly with supervision staff members. Jurisdictions often attempt to match the intensity or frequency of supervision with a client’s assessed risk of failing to appear in court or being rearrested, for example by requiring more intensive supervision for clients who are assessed as being at a high risk. However, while different levels of pretrial supervision impose different burdens and costs on both jurisdictions and people awaiting the resolutions of their cases, there has been little systematic research into how they differ in their effectiveness in improving court appearance and arrest outcomes.

This report contributes new evidence in this area using retrospective data from cases initiated between January 2017 and June 2019 in two jurisdictions: one populous, urban metropolitan area in the western United States and a sparsely populated, rural county from the same region. The research team employed a regression discontinuity design, comparing the outcomes of people whose risk scores were just below and just above the cutoff for a level of supervision. They did so for four supervision levels: (1) no supervision, (2) low-intensity supervision that involved only check-ins with supervision staff members after court hearings, (3) medium-intensity supervision that also required one in-person meeting a month with a supervision staff member, and (4) high-intensity supervision that required three in-person meetings per month. The analysis uses a noninferiority approach, which tests whether the less intensive form of supervision is at least as effective as (that is, no worse than) the more intensive form.

The analysis found that:

Overall, lower-intensity supervision was as effective as higher-intensity supervision in helping clients to appear in court and avoid new arrests. When comparing each level of supervision with the next level in intensity, assignment to less intensive supervision led to similar outcomes as assignment to more intensive supervision.

Risk scores were strongly correlated with rearrest rates and modestly correlated with court appearance rates. Unsurprisingly, people with higher risk scores were more likely to be rearrested, and somewhat less likely to make scheduled court appearances. However, higher-intensity supervision did not mitigate this effect.

Overall, the analysis found no evidence that requiring people to meet more intensive pretrial supervision requirements improves outcomes. These findings suggest that policymakers should consider other strategies to encourage people to appear in court and avoid arrest, especially since supervision has costs, including monetary costs to jurisdictions and time and travel costs to clients. It is possible, for example, that strategies that involve service connections rather than supervision could be more effective. At the same time, the results indicate that more research on the use of pretrial supervision is needed. Because the regression discontinuity design of this study focuses on cases at particular risk levels—those near the cutoff risk scores that determine supervision intensity—it is possible that the results would differ for cases with other risk levels. For example, high-intensity supervision could have effects among very high-risk cases, a question that this analysis was not designed to address. Given that prior research suggests that both service and supervision resources are most effective when reserved for higher-risk and -need cases, studies focusing solely on outcomes among this group could be of great benefit to the field.

New York: MDRC, 2023. 77p.

By Chloe Anderson Golub, Erin Jacobs Valentine, Daron Holman

As more jurisdictions across the country are seeking to reduce their jail populations, many view electronic monitoring (EM, the use of an electronic device to monitor a person’s movement and location) and sobriety monitoring (regular drug and alcohol testing) as potential alternatives to pretrial detention. In theory, the added layer of supervision that these special conditions provide should encourage people to appear for court dates and avoid activities that could lead to new arrests. Yet most studies of the effectiveness of special conditions have faced methodological limitations and have yielded mixed findings. Furthermore, special conditions such as electronic monitoring and sobriety monitoring carry significant costs—both personal and monetary—for those being monitored and for jurisdictions.

This report contributes cross-jurisdiction evidence on the effects of these special conditions of release using retrospective data from cases initiated between January 2017 and June 2019 in four diverse jurisdictions across the United States: one small and rural, one medium-sized, and two large and urban jurisdictions. The MDRC research team employed a propensity score matching design to test the effectiveness of EM and sobriety monitoring in maintaining clients’ court appearance rates and helping them avoid arrest. This method allowed the team to compare court appearance and pretrial rearrest outcomes for individuals released with special conditions with those of statistically comparable individuals who were released without special conditions. The analysis uses a noninferiority approach, which tests whether release without special conditions is at least as effective as (that is, no worse than) release with a special condition.

The analysis found that:

Being released on EM or sobriety monitoring did not significantly improve court appearance rates. The analyses found that the special conditions and non–special conditions groups had similar pretrial court appearance rates. These results were consistent across jurisdictions.

Being released on electronic monitoring did not significantly increase the percentage of people who avoided a new arrest during the pretrial period. In fact, the analysis found that the EM group had a higher pretrial rearrest rate than the non-EM group, a result that was consistent across the two jurisdictions in that analysis. While the factors causing the results are not definitively known, the difference may be a supervision effect: people may be more likely to be arrested if their actions are more closely monitored, compared with others who are less closely monitored. Alternatively, the result may reflect unmeasured differences between the EM and non-EM groups that could not be controlled for in the analysis.

Being released on sobriety monitoring did not significantly improve the percentage of people who avoided a new arrest, but there was variation in this effect among jurisdictions. In two of the four jurisdictions studied, people who were assigned to sobriety monitoring were more likely to avoid new arrests, while in the other two, the result was the opposite.

These findings warrant cautious reflection among policymakers and practitioners on the extent of current electronic and sobriety monitoring use, particularly considering their high personal and financial costs to those directly affected and to jurisdictions. The exploratory findings also highlight a need for additional cross-site studies—in particular, those that employ more rigorous experimental methods—on the effectiveness of special conditions at the pretrial stage. Given the site variation in findings, particularly for sobriety monitoring, more research is also needed to delineate the populations that would benefit from special conditions from those who would not benefit and to illuminate the policies and practices that are associated with the greatest success.

New York: MDRC, 2023. 51p.

Edited by Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox and Callum McGregor

Data Justice and the Right to the City engages with theories of social justice and data-driven urbanism. It explores the intersecting concerns of data justice - both the harms and civic possibilities of the datafied society – and the right to the city - a call to redress the uneven distribution of resources and rights in urban contexts. These concerns are addressed through a variety of topics: digital social services, as cities use data and algorithms to administer to citizens; education, as data-driven practices transform learning and higher education; labour, as platforms create new precarities and risks for workers; and activists who seek to make creative and political interventions into these developments. This edited collection proposes frameworks for understanding the effects of data-driven technologies at the municipal scale and offers strategies for intervention by both scholars and citizens.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 386p.

By David Grant

Political systems across much of the West are now subject to populist disruption, which often takes an anti-Constitutional form. This interdisciplinary book argues that the current analysis of anti-Constitutional populism, while often astute, is focused far too narrowly. It is held here that due to an obscured complex of dynamics that has shaped the history of the West since its inception and which remains active today, we do not understand the present. This complex not only explains the current disruptions across the fields of contemporary religion, politics, economics and emerging artificial intelligence but also how these disruptions derive each from originary sources. This work thereby explains not only the manner in which this complex has functioned across historical time but also why it is that its inherent, unresolvable flaws have triggered the shifts between these key fields as well as the intractability of these present disruptions. It is this flawed complex of factors that has led to current conflicts about abortion reform, political populism, the failure of neoliberalism and the imminent quantum shift in generative artificial intelligence. It is argued that in this, law is heavily implicated, especially at the constitutional level. Presenting a forensic examination of the root causes of all these disruptions, the study provides a toolbox of ideas with which to confront these challenges.

London; New York: Routledge, 2025. 274p.

Edited by Henrique Sousa Antunes • Pedro Miguel Freitas • Arlindo L. Oliveira • Clara Martins Pereira • Elsa Vaz de Sequeira • Luís Barreto Xavier

This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2024. 456p.

By Ashley N. Muchow, Agustina Laurito

In 2012, Chicago closed half of its public mental health clinics, which provide services to those in need regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay. Critics of the closures argued that they would result in service shortages and divert untreated patients to the criminal justice system. We explore this claim by examining whether and to what extent the closures increased criminal justice contact. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we compare arrests and mental health transports in block groups located within a half mile of clinics that closed to those equi-distant from clinics that remained open. While we find evidence that police-initiated mental health transports increased following the closures, we do not observe similar changes in arrests.

Policy implications

Chicago's mental health clinic closures remain a contentious issue to this day. Our results suggest that the shuttered clinics were meeting a need that, when left unmet, created conditions for mental health emergencies. While the closures do not appear to have routed untreated patients to the county jail, they increased police contact and, subsequently, transportation to less specialized emergency care facilities. Our findings demonstrate the need to strengthen health care access, crisis prevention, and the mental health safety net to preclude police from acting as mental health responders of last resort.

Criminology & Public Policy Volume 24, Issue 1 Feb 2025

By Gemma Buckland

In recent decades, policymakers have become increasingly aware that our legal definition, which treats all people aged 18 years or older as adults, does not reflect the neurological process of maturation. Policymakers across all parts of the criminal justice system have recognised this although changes in practice are variable at best. There is now a considerable body of evidence on the maturation process and best practice in working with young adults (typically defined as those aged between 18 and 25 years old) in contact with the criminal justice system. This review looks at: What we understand about the development of the brain in young adulthood The implications for young adults involved in criminal behaviour The impact of trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences on the maturation process The “age-crime curve” and the evidence about growing out of crime Implications for best practice working with young adults

London: CLINKS, 2025. 16p.

By Tyson Singh Kelsall and Jasmine Veark and Molly Beatrice a d

This commentary explores a recent shift in British Columbia's drug policy under a novel drug “decriminalization” framework. We focus on the province's move toward "recriminalization" under this framework. In short, recriminalization was a shift in BC's drug decriminalization framework to only apply in private residences, and be removed from essentially all outdoor spaces. This policy change was completed through an agreement with the federal government amid a public health emergency. Since 2016, BC has faced a severe crisis of drug-related overdoses and poisonings, driven by a toxic and unregulated drug supply compounded by prohibitionist policies. Expert recommendations for increasing access to a regulated drug supply have repeatedly dismissed as solutions by the governing BC New Democratic Party, opting instead for measures that do not undercut the toxic drug supply. We examine the sociolegal context of the BC government decision to recriminalize drug use in 2024, including attempts to criminalize recent drug use and police suspicion of substance use. These drug law reforms, understood here as forms of biopolitical violence, reflect a broader trend of using drug policies as tools for social and spatial regulation. By analyzing the sociolegal implications of these policies, the commentary situates the BC government's actions within a framework of sanctioned biopolitical massacre, highlighting the tension between purported decriminalization efforts and the actual enforcement strategies that perpetuate harm and exclusion. This examination underscores the complex interplay between drug policy, public health crises, and state power in the context of systemic colonial and racialized control that may be adaptable to other regions considering drug law reform.

International Journal of Drug Policy

Volume 136, February 2025, 104688

By BRANDON L. GARRETT, ERIC TUCKER & NICHOLAS SCURICH

Firearms violence results in hundreds of thousands of criminal investigations each year. To try to identify a culprit, firearms examiners seek to link fired shell casings or bullets from crime scene evidence to a particular firearm. The underlying assumption is that firearms impart unique marks on bullets and cartridge cases, and that trained examiners can identify these marks to determine which were fired by the same gun. For over a hundred years, firearms examiners have testified that they can conclusively identify the source of a bullet or cartridge case. In recent years, however, research scientists have called into question the validity and reliability of such testimony. Judges largely did not view such testimony with increased skepticism after the Supreme Court set out standards for screening expert evidence in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Instead, the surge in judicial rulings came more than a decade later, particularly after reports by scientists shed light on limitations of the evidence. In this Article, we detail over a century of case law and examine how judges have engaged with the changing practice and scientific understanding of firearms comparison evidence. We first describe how judges initially viewed firearms comparison evidence skeptically and hought jurors capable of making firearms comparisons themselves— without an expert. Next, judges embraced the testimony of experts who offered more specific and aggressive claims, and the work spread nationally. Finally, we explore the modern era of firearms case law and research. Judges increasingly express skepticism and adopt a range of approaches to limit in-court testimony by firearms examiners. In December 2023, Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence was amended, for the first time in over twenty years, specifically due to the Rules Committee’s concern with the quality of federal rulings regarding forensic evidence, as well as the failure to engage with the ways that forensic experts express conclusions in court. There is perhaps no area in which judges, especially federal judges, have been more active than in the area of firearms evidence. Thus, the judging of firearms evidence has central significance for the direction that scientific evidence gatekeeping may take under the revised Rule 702 in federal, and then state courts. We conclude by examining lessons regarding the gradual judicial shift toward a more scientific approach. The more-than-a-century-long arc of judicial review of firearms evidence in the United States suggests that, over time, scientific research can displace tradition and precedent to improve the quality of justice.

97 S. Cal. L. Rev. 101, 2024.

By Roland Neil, and Michael Zanger-Tishler

There is great concern about algorithmic racial bias in the risk assessment instruments (RAIs) used in the criminal legal system. When testing for algorithmic bias, most research effectively uses arrest data as an unbiased measure of criminal offending, which collides with longstanding concerns that arrest is a biased proxy of offending. Given the centrality of arrest data in RAIs, racial differences in how arrest proxies offending may be a key pathway through which RAIs become biased. In this review, we evaluate the extensive body of research on racial differences in arrest as a measure of crime. Furthermore, we detail several ways that racial bias in arrest records could create algorithmic bias, although little research has attempted to measure the degree of algorithmic bias generated by using racially biased arrest records. We provide a roadmap to assist future research in understanding the impact of biased arrest records on RAIs.

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 8:97-119 January 2025)

By Christine Reynolds, et al.

On July 1, 2014, changes proposed to Indiana’s Criminal Code were officially implemented, affecting the criminal justice system. The Indiana Criminal Justice Institute (ICJI) is statutorily obligated to monitor and evaluate the impact of the criminal code reform, reporting results to state legislators on an annual basis. Findings from the Evaluation of Indiana’s Criminal Code Reform reports1 suggest that local criminal justice professionals are concerned with the lessened severity of sentences associated with drug crimes. They suggest that this reduction in severity may have increased recidivism, perpetuating the revolving door of the justice system, and is negatively impacting an offender’s ability to recover from substance use disorder—a commonly identified association with a drug offense. In an effort to operationalize changes in severity of sentencing, this report compares drug conviction data from nine Indiana counties from a period in time before the reform to a like period after the changes set in. Results indicate that dealing and possession convictions increased, where dealing of marijuana and possession of methamphetamine had the starkest increases. Findings also displayed that felons and misdemeanants alike are being convicted differently than offenders under the legacy code. There was a 50% decrease in both dealing and possession offenses’ advisory sentence. In addition, while jail is the most common sentence placement across both time periods, alternative sentencing is utilized far more often than pre-reform, indicating that penalties for drug crimes have generally decreased. This work adds to literature concerning the effects of the criminal code reform in Indiana, and may lay the groundwork for further analysis, such as the reform’s impacts on recidivism and offender rehabilitation.

Indianapolis: Indiana Criminal Justice Institute, 2020. 26p.

By  Elise Ferguson,  Daniel Goldberg,  Paul Guerin

This study examines the validity of the judicial designee assessment (JDA), an assessment tool used in Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court for select misdemeanor cases. We review specifically the ability to predict the likelihood of an individual committing a new crime, committing new violent crime, and failing to appear at a future court hearing during their pretrial period. Validity is reviewed for race and gender. Additional research is included that provides a preliminary look at the use of the JDA for charges that would typically not have qualified for assessment.

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, Institute for Social Research, 2023. 25p.

By Paul Guerin

This study reviews felony court cases in the Second Judicial District Court with a Public Safety Assessment (PSA) and a pretrial detention (PTD) motion filed between July 2017 and June 2023. The dataset of 6,698 cases includes court data and jail data that is used to study the cases from the filing of the case to the court disposition. It is important to note this review includes the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic likely had some impact on case filings, time to case dispositions, and jails admissions and lengths of stay. This review found that a slightly higher percent of court cases on which a preventive detention motion was filed was granted compared to denied motions. The study confirms other research that cases with higher FTA and NCA scores are more likely to have granted motions and that motions were most likely to be filed on cases with violent charges. We found 55% of closed cases had a conviction and were sentenced and that 43.5% were dismissed or nolled and so did not result in a conviction. Cases with denied preventive detention motions spent few days in the MDC regardless of their disposition. Cases with a granted motion that were eventually dismissed or nolled spent slightly more than 120 days in the MDC and a similar number of days in the court system. Dismissals and nolles occur at the case level for a variety of reasons including uncooperative witnesses, lack of probable cause, and because some cases might be refiled in the Federal court system. Various criminal justice system level reasons may also exist. This includes the volume of crime and arrests with resulting court case filings, the complexity of cases, and staffing among the various agencies. This preliminary review of preventive detention motion cases in the Second Judicial District Court is the first of its kind to report on the disposition of cases with a preventive detention motion. In the future more sophisticated and detailed analyses and reporting could occur that further detail the relationship between PSA scores, preventive detention motions and results, and court case dispositions.

Albuquerque: Center for Applied Research and Analysis, Institute for Social Research, University of New Mexico , 2024. 13p.

By Alex Severson,  Elise Ferguson,  Cris Moore, Paul Guerin, 

This study analyzes the costs and benefits of pretrial detention in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, examining 16,500 felony cases filed between January 2017 and March 2022. The analysis evaluates the relationship between pretrial detention length and failure outcomes, including failure to appear (FTA), new criminal activity (NCA), and new violent criminal activity (NVCA), both during the pretrial period and post-disposition. The study found that longer detention periods (8-30 days) were associated with significantly higher odds of pretrial failure compared to shorter stays, particularly for failure to appear, though this relationship varied by demographic groups. For post-disposition outcomes, moderate detention lengths (4-30 days) were associated with increased odds of general recidivism but decreased odds of violent recidivism. Using marginal cost estimates rather than average daily jail costs, we estimate that reducing detention length to two days for eligible low-risk defendants who did not fail pretrial could yield cost savings of approximately $259,722 annually. The study contributes to ongoing debates about pretrial detention policies by demonstrating that extended detention periods may increase certain failure rates while generating substantial system costs. However, the analysis notes important limitations, including inability to fully control for post-disposition sentencing outcomes and the challenge of establishing causal relationships between detention length and failure rates. 

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, Institute for Social Research, 2024.40p.