By Joanna R. Lampe

Federal law generally prohibits the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for both medical
and recreational purposes. In April 2024, news outlets reported that the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) planned to change the status of marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) by moving
it from Schedule I to the less restrictive Schedule III. Such a move would relax some controls over
marijuana but would not immediately legalize medical or recreational use of marijuana under the CSA.
Notwithstanding the strict federal control of marijuana, in recent years, many states have repealed state
law criminal prohibitions on some marijuana-related activities, and medical and recreational cannabis
businesses now operate openly in some parts of the United States.
In response to the disparity between state and federal law, Congress has enacted appropriations legislation
prohibiting the Department of Justice (DOJ) from expending appropriated funds to prevent states from
implementing their own medical marijuana laws. Federal courts have interpreted the appropriations rider
to prohibit DOJ from bringing criminal drug prosecutions against certain persons and entities involved in
the state-legal medical marijuana industry, but they have differed as to the scope of conduct the rider
shields from prosecution.
This Legal Sidebar first outlines the legal status of marijuana under federal and state law. It then discusses
the medical marijuana appropriations rider and analyzes how federal courts have interpreted the
provision. The Sidebar closes with key considerations for Congress related to the appropriations rider and
the disparity between federal and state marijuana policy more generally.
Federal and State Marijuana Regulation
The plant Cannabis sativa L. and products derived from that plant have a number of uses and may be
subject to several overlapping legal regimes. In recent years, a significant divide has developed between
federal and state marijuana laws. On the federal side, the CSA imposes stringent regulations on the
cannabis plant and many of its derivatives. Activities involving controlled substances not authorized
under the CSA are federal crimes that may give rise to large fines and significant prison sentences.
Unless an exception applies, the CSA classifies cannabis and its derivatives as marijuana. Congress
classified marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance when it enacted the CSA, reflecting a legislative

Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2024. 5p.

Edited by Murdoch Watney

The chapters in this volume focus on the future of law and related disciplines: human rights and access to medical care, corruption and money laundering in state procurement, counterfeit medical products, IPR waiver on COVID-19 vaccines, emergency powers, freedom of expression, prison healthcare, the impact on labour law, access to courts and digital court processes, access to education and the impact on insurance law are but a few possible topics which are addressed.

Johannesburg, UJ Press, 2022. 288p.

By American Bar Association Working Group on Building Public Trust in the American Justice System

Released in June 2020, this Report provides a comprehensive overview of the role private companies play throughout the criminal justice system and how the use of these private companies impacts low-income individuals moving through the system. The Report summarizes research done by other entities, academics, journalists, and activists on specific aspects of privatization. The organization of the report tracks the sequence of a typical accused individual's experiences in the criminal justice system following arrest, demonstrating how costs compound as the individual moves through the system.

The Report acknowledges that courts and other government entities sometimes need to import expertise they lack, but it urges governments to recognize how low-income individuals too often can be relentlessly ensnared in the criminal justice system, not because they engage in ongoing criminal activity, but because they cannot pay the debts imposed by the system itself. Too often, by hiring private companies to handle what were previously governmental functions in the criminal justice system, government agencies exacerbate the cycle of mandatory fees, nonpayment, and consequent additional fees. Far too frequently, government authorities allow private companies to operate in the criminal justice system with little or no oversight and to charge fees untethered to actual costs.

The Report urges the ABA to adopt specific policy on the privatization of services in the criminal justice system, as well as to promote the policies, already in existence, calling for careful limitations on fines and fees.

Chicago: ABA, 2020. 36p.

By The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, Data Lab

The Conviction Integrity Unit (“CIU”) was established in 2018 by District Attorney Larry Krasner. The CIU’s predecessor, the Conviction Review Unit (“CRU”), which was established in 2014, had operated for a number of years with only a small staff and a narrow mandate. The CRU only reviewed claims of actual innocence, and rarely undertook investigations into whether new evidence existed that could prove those claims. Cases where the defendant had confessed were largely excluded from consideration, as if false confessions (which occur in a quarter of DNA exonerations nationally) were always reliable. Today, the CIU is an independent unit within the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, reporting directly to the District Attorney, and involved in one out of every ten homicide exonerations in the country. When District Attorney Krasner transformed the unit from the CRU to the CIU, he immediately tasked it with a broader mandate: not only to review past convictions for credible claims of actual innocence but also to review claims of wrongful conviction and secondarily to consider sentencing inequities. Early in his first term, District Attorney Krasner merged the CIU with the Office’s Special Investigations Unit (“SIU”). The two units share a common focus on investigating official misconduct, and their cases frequently overlap. However, as the CIU and SIU personnel have grown and expanded their caseloads, the units were separated in the summer of 2020 to better accommodate each unit’s mission

The CIU’s mission is to ensure that justice is served by prosecutors at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office and to remedy the Office’s wrongful convictions. Pennsylvania prosecutors have limited post-con viction discretion in general and they have no legal authority to set aside convictions in the interest of justice. Since CIU prosecutors cannot unilaterally dismiss an existing conviction or free anyone we believe to be wrongfully incarcerated, the CIU makes a recommendation to the court that the petitioner be granted a new trial whenever its independent investigation leads it to conclude that a conviction lacks integrity. If warranted, the CIU will move to withdraw the charges against the petitioner or reduce the charges so that an equitable sentence can be imposed. In cases that are ultimately withdrawn or dismissed, the CIU will investigate and prosecute the actual perpetrator where feasible. However, given the inherent difficulties involved in investigating decades-old crimes where the original investigation was either botched or inadequate, identifying the real perpetrator and bringing that person to justice may be impossible. To date, the Philadelphia Police Department has declined to re-open and re-investigate old cases following exonerations. For example, Walter Ogrod was exonerated of a 1988 murder in 2020. While investigating the case, the CIU identified two alternate suspects. As of almost a year after Ogrod’s exoneration, however, police had not even begun the process of re-opening the underlying murder case. Additionally, the CIU believes that conviction integrity is more than simply fixing past mistakes and exposing misconduct. It also requires policies and processes to prevent future injustices. With this aim, the CIU helps craft office-wide policies and trainings designed to reduce the number of future wrongful convictions.

This report encompasses exonerations, commutations, and sentencing adjustments from January 1, 2018 through June 15, 2021. This report includes data on cases submitted to the CIU, active investigations, cases declined or closed, and cases awaiting review that are accurate as of May 31, 2021. Experts who have opined on the issue of best practices for conviction integrity units agree that in order to increase public understanding of and trust in such units, offices should publish annual reports detailing the results of their conviction and case reviews and actions taken. This report is the first report issued by the CIU under District Attorney Krasner and is a first-term report, rather than an annual report. Although annual reports were contemplated, they were postponed as a result of multiple factors ,including lack of resources, internal technology deficits, case load, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, Data Lab. 2021. 47p.

By Kuc, Oktawian

Recent decades have brought international and municipal courts much closer together and induced meaningful cooperation. This holds true also for the International Court of Justice and domestic judicial institutions as they engage actively in an inter-judicial dialogue, particularly on the normative level. Due to the impact of globalisation and internationalisation, the World Court has expanded its jurisprudence to also accommodate references and analysis of external judicial organs and their pronouncements. Likewise, ICJ decisions are referred to and consulted by municipal courts as authoritative statements of international norms or assistance in fact determination. This monograph examines this inter-judicial dialogue in a comprehensive manner by identifying and analysing all its aspects as evidenced in respective jurisprudence. Surprisingly, the mutual conversation in judicial decisions between the World Court and national judicial institutions has drawn little attention from international legal scholarship, and the book is designed to fill this lacuna.

New York; London: Routledge, 2022.

By Carrie Leonetti

This article presents a systematic and critical assessment of the reliability of forensic science in New Zealand. It documents the types of forensic-science being offered in criminal cases, the party presenting the evidence, the experts’ affiliations, how often there are challenges to the admissibility of the expert evidence and their timing in the proceedings, how often experts rely upon the uniqueness assumption, and how often experts testify to an individualised identification or ‘match’ of a source of forensic evidence. It finds that several of the common forensic disciplines in the criminal justice system in New Zealand have been the subject of critique and criticism internationally, the most common source of expert evidence was presented by the prosecution and provided by institutional police laboratories, and in most cases the forensic expert testified either to the uniqueness assumption or to an individualised match determination. It concludes that the New Zealand Parliament should amend the Evidence Act 2006 to require a demonstration of foundational validity and as-applied reliability as a precondition to the admissibility of any purported scientific evidence.

Common Law World Review, Online First, March 2024, 26pg

By Sandra Susan Smith and Cierra Robson    

In the year following Humphrey, a judicial decision mandating that judges consider both defendants’ ability to pay cash bail and non-monetary release options, San Francisco Sheriff’s Office (SFSO) reported a 308% increase in the number of people court-ordered for pretrial electronic monitoring (EM) – from 178 to 725. Although proponents of pretrial EM have described it as an effective alternative to pretrial incarceration – one that ensures public safety and court appearances – critics contend that it is simply an alternative form of incarceration, with many of jail’s attendant harms. With this debate in mind, we explore people’s recent experiences on pretrial EM in San Francisco – the extent and nature of difficulties program participants face while attempting to meet program obligations, the extent to which and how these difficulties put them at risk for noncompliance, and how threats of noncompliance interact with other major issues that system-involved people face to affect program outcomes. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a convenience sample of 66 people court ordered to participate in pretrial EM between 2018 and 2020, we find that prior struggles, especially with housing insecurity and co-occurring disorders, made it much more difficult to meet program obligations, amplifying risks of noncompliance. Further, conditions of pretrial EM release also created hardships for many, making it even more difficult to find safe, affordable, and stable housing; to protect health and well-being; to secure employment and keep jobs; and to maintain physical, emotional, and psychological connections to loved ones. Indeed, pretrial EM often placed program participants in the untenable position of constantly having to choose between two or more equally awful options, such as program compliance or maintaining employment. These findings have major implications for debates about pretrial EM’s net-widening effects but also the inherent stickiness of the criminal legal system.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Kennedy School. 2022, 53pg

By Oceana R. Gilliam, Brett Taylor, Lindsey Price Jackson, and Jarred Williams

In partnership with the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office, this study looks at the potential for offering meaningful alternatives to traditional prosecution for people accused of felony offenses in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, laying out key aspects of planning a successful diversion program.

New York: Center for Justice Innovation. 2023, 40pg

By Sam J. Merchant

Many observers claim that judges are imposing disproportionately lenient sentences on January 6, 2021, “Capitol Breach” offenders. Some have even suggested a racial or political motivation for lighter sentences. Comparative data on these sentences and offenders, presented here for the first time, refute this narrative. Individuals convicted of felonies related to the Capitol Breach appear to actually receive longer sentences than individuals convicted of the same crimes outside of the Capitol Breach context.

But sentences in Capitol Breach cases may indeed be “lenient” for a deeper, more structural reason—the current Federal Sentencing Guidelines do not adequately account for the severity of the conduct that occurred on January 6, 2021. There is a qualitative difference between federal offenses and the same offenses committed in the context of the “treason spectrum.” English and American legal traditions have historically viewed treason, rebellion, and subversive activities as “the worst crimes of all” because they are crimes against all citizens and threaten the constitutional order. Yet no sentencing enhancement addresses the increased severity of conduct involving offenses that are on the treason spectrum.

Recognizing the increased seriousness of other conduct, Congress and the Sentencing Commission have enacted an array of enhancements to punish, incapacitate, and deter offenders whose conduct involves a dangerous weapon, body armor, or even use of a fake website during an offense. This Article proposes a new sentencing enhancement in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines that properly accounts for the relative severity of conduct involving offenses on the treason spectrum. To reaffirm a commitment to democratic values, to deter future subversive conduct, and ensure that the legal system is equipped to respond to the severity of subversive conduct, policymakers and judges should send clear signal that subversive activities are indeed among “the worst crimes of all.”

Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law Research Paper Series. 2024, 41pg

By Randolph Atkins, Trisann Jodon, Jennifer Davidson Conlon, and Amy Schick

This report was prepared in accordance with Section 25025 (Drug-Impaired Driving Data Collection) of the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act (IIJA), Pub. L. 117-58. The report summarizes what is known about the collection of drug-impaired driving data and its reporting to the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). The report describes the FARS data collection process and its toxicology reporting framework, the Recommendations for Toxicological Investigations of Drug-Impaired Driving and Motor Vehicle Fatalities – 2021 Update, identifies barriers that States encounter in submitting alcohol and drug toxicology results to FARS, provides recommendations on how to address those barriers, and describes the actions that the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are taking to assist States in improving toxicology testing in cases of motor vehicle crashes, and the reporting of alcohol and drug toxicology results in cases of motor vehicle crashes.

Washington, DC: United States. Department of Transportation. 2024, 34pg

By Samuel W. Buell

Fifteen years after the largest financial scandal and economic crisis in a century, discussion of the problem of corporate crime too often borders on cliché. Endless calls from Congress, the media, the public, many scholars, and even the Justice Department itself, to recommit, over and over, to locking up more managers and executives to deter corporate wrongdoing portray the problem as relatively straightforward and blame legislative and executive failure of will. Through examination of the litigation record from over 100 prosecutions spanning the period from the 2008 financial crisis to the present, this Article presents evidence that relying on individual prosecutions to deter the most significant corporate crimes, especially those involving fraud in the financial sector, is less promising than believed. Structural features of crimes in the largest corporate organizations have made securing individual convictions and imprisonment, especially at senior levels, a chancy project for prosecutors. The Article further argues that its evidence relating both to failure rates and causes of those failures should point policymakers and enforcers beyond hackneyed calls for perp walks and prison and towards deeper thinking about a full suite of preventive tools, especially regulatory design.

Wake Forest Law Review, Vol. 59. 2024, 78pg

By Allison P. Harris

How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality? Discussions about diversity usually focus on how individuals’ identities shape their behavior, but diversity is a group-level characteristic. Scholars must, therefore, consider the relationship between group composition and the individual decisions that shape institutional outcomes. Using felony data from a large U.S. court system, I explore the relationship between racial diversity among the judges comprising a court and individual judges’ decisions. I find that as the percent of Black judges in a courthouse increases white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants. Increases in racial diversity decrease the Black–white gap in the probability of incarceration by up to 7 percentage points. However, I find no relationship between judge’s racial identities and disparities in their decisions. This study highlights the importance of conceptualizing diversity as a group characteristic and the relationship between institutional context and outcomes.

American Political Science Review, 2023, 16 pages

By R. Michael Cassidy

Disciplining individual prosecutors will never be enough to overcome the multifarious incentives prosecutors have to cut corners to secure convictions. Although bar discipline against prosecutors is increasing in frequency, professional regulators tend to focus on individual actors rather than paying attention to systemic failures.

No single instance of prosecutorial misconduct—revealed perhaps by the reversal of a criminal case or the exoneration of an innocent defendant—can ever be fully explained by the deeds of a lone actor without looking at who establishes enforcement priorities, who sets office policies, and who does the training. Leaders in the office are usually involved, either by omission (failing to catch an error) or commission (creating an office culture where ethical lapses are tolerated or even encouraged).

The predominance of collective action and shared responsibility in business organizations often makes it difficult to pinpoint criminal liability. That challenge is addressed through the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine in criminal law, which holds executive-level individuals accountable for the wrongdoing to which they contributed, whether through commission or omission. Prosecutor’s offices are organizations with structures and incentives not dissimilar to that of a corporation. Because existing frameworks for addressing prosecutorial misconduct in the criminal justice system are ineffective, bar regulators should borrow from the responsible corporate officer doctrine by more aggressively enforcing Rule 5.1 of the Rules of Professional Conduct.

The notion that supervisory attorneys must be more actively involved in their colleagues’ ethical decisions and conduct has been recognized by the bar since the adoption of ABA Model Rule 5.1 in 1983, but the rule remains undertheorized by scholars and underutilized by disciplinary authorities. This article draws on important parallels between the responsible corporate officer doctrine and Rule 5.1 to explain why enforcement of professional discipline against leaders in a prosecutor’s office is necessary to incentivize more rigorous supervision and training. The author scrutinizes two recent cases in Colorado and Massachusetts where bar regulators have successfully utilized Rule 5.1 to discipline leaders in a prosecutor’s office for failing adequately to supervise the conduct of junior associates. The author then advocates for an even more expansive use of Rule 5.1 to force head prosecutors to adopt written, transparent, and publicly available policies and procedures. Finally, the author discusses three recurring and highly intractable problems of prosecutorial discretion that could benefit from comprehensive office policy manuals: grand jury practice, disclosure of exculpatory evidence; and use of cooperating witnesses.

Oregon Law Review, Vol. 102, 2024, Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 614, 37 p

By  Jana Hrdinova, Dexter Ridgway, Douglas A. Berman and Peter Leasure

Ohio Senate Bill 288 (134th G.A.) created Ohio Revised Code Section (2953.39) to allow prosecutors to initiate sealing or expungement actions on behalf of defendants previously convicted of low-level controlled substance offenses. After passage of this new law, the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at The Ohio State University surveyed all elected or appointed prosecutors in Ohio to gauge their office's interest and willingness to initiate record sealing or expungement applications on behalf of people who have been previously convicted of a low-level controlled substance offense. Overall, about 12% of respondents stated that they were willing to pursue prosecutor-initiated sealing for low-level controlled substance offenses. For those who reported that they were unlikely to pursue prosecutor-initiated sealing, common explanations for not doing so included the lack of staffing resources, the lack of financial resources, the lack of data, the belief it is not the responsibility of prosecutors, and the sufficiency of the defendant-initiated system

Drug Enforcement and Policy Center. August 2023, 19pg

By Elisabeth Semel, Dagen Downard, Emma Tolman, Anne Weis, Danielle Craig, and Chelsea Hanlock

Racial discrimination is an ever-present feature of jury selection in California. This report investigates the history, legacy, and continuing practice of excluding people of color, especially African Americans, from California juries through the exercise of peremptory challenges. Unlike challenges for cause, each party in a trial has the right to excuse a specific number of jurors without stating a reason and without the court’s approval. In California, peremptory challenges are defined by statute. Historically, the main vice of peremptory challenges was that prosecutors wielded them with impunity to remove African Americans from jury service. These strikes were part and parcel of the systematic exclusion of Blacks from civil society. We found that prosecutors continue to exercise peremptory challenges to remove African Americans and Latinx people from California juries for reasons that are explicitly or implicitly related to racial stereotypes. In 1978, in People v. Wheeler, our state supreme court was the first court in the nation to adopt a three-step procedure intended to reduce prosecutors’ discriminatory use of peremptory challenges. Almost a decade later, in Batson v. Kentucky, the United States Supreme Court approved a similar approach with the goal of ending race-based strikes against African-American prospective jurors. An essential feature of the “Batson/Wheeler procedure” is that it only provides a remedy for intentional discrimination. Thus, at step one, the objecting party must establish a sufficient showing—known as a “prima facie case”—of purposeful discrimination. At step two, if the trial court agrees that the objecting party has made such a showing, the burden of producing evidence shifts to the striking party to give a “race-neutral” reason. At step three, the trial court decides whether the objecting party has established purposeful discrimination. If the court finds that the striking party’s reason was credible, it denies the Batson objection. In his concurring opinion in Batson, Justice Thurgood Marshall warned that Batson’s three-step procedure would fail to end racially discriminatory peremptory strikes. He anticipated that prosecutors would easily be able to produce “race-neutral” reasons at Batson’s second step, and that judges would be ill-equipped to second-guess those reasons. Further, Justice Marshall doubted Batson’s efficacy because the procedure did nothing to curb strikes motivated by unconscious racism—known more often today as implicit bias. Justice Marshall was prescient: 34 years after Batson was decided, prosecutors in California still disproportionately exercise peremptory challenges to exclude African Americans and Latinx people from juries. The Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic explored the shortcomings of the Batson procedure. Our report investigates how the California Supreme Court went from a judiciary that championed the eradication of race-based strikes to a court that resists the United States Supreme Court’s limited efforts to enforce Batson. We conclude that Batson is a woefully inadequate tool to end racial discrimination in jury selection.

Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley, School of Law, 2020. 166p.

By Elisabeth Semel , Willy Ramirez, Yara Slaton, Casey Jang and Lauren Havey

In a new report, the Death Penalty Clinic expands on “Whitewashing the Jury Box: How California Perpetuates the Exclusion of Black and Latinx Jurors,” a 2020 report which investigated the history, legacy, and ongoing practice of excluding people of color — especially African Americans — from state juries through prosecutors’ peremptory challenges.

“Guess Who’s Coming to Jury Duty?: How the Failure to Collect Juror Demographic Data Contributes to Whitewashing the Jury Box” continues the clinic’s racial justice research and advocacy by cataloging the states that gather prospective jurors’ self-identified race and ethnicity and those that do not. It examines what courts do with the information, including whether it is provided to the court and counsel for use during jury selection, and the consequences of these choices in furthering or obstructing jury representativeness and diversity. In particular, the report shows why the collection of prospective jurors’ self-identified race and ethnicity is vital to meeting state and federal fair cross-section guarantees and eliminating the discriminatory exercise of peremptory challenges.

Racial/ethnic representation and diversity matter to jury decision-making and hence justice cannot be achieved unless courts take a race-conscious approach to jury composition and selection.

Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley, School of Law, 2024. 89p.

By: The United States Sentencing Commission

This is the twenty-eighth edition of the United States Sentencing Commission’s Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics. This Sourcebook contains descriptive statistics on the application of the federal sentencing guidelines and provides selected district, circuit, and national sentencing data. The volume covers fiscal year 2023 (October 1, 2022, through September 30, 2023, hereinafter “2023”). This Sourcebook, together with the 2023 Annual Report, constitutes the annual report referenced in 28 U.S.C. § 997, as well as the analysis, recommendations, and accounting to Congress referenced in 28 U.S.C. § 994(w)(3). The Commission received documentation on 64,124 federal felony and Class A misdemeanor cases involving individuals sentenced in fiscal year 2023.[1] The Commission coded and edited information from the sentencing documents in these cases into its comprehensive, computerized data collection system.

The Commission first released sentencing data in its 1988 Annual Report and reported this data annually until 1996. That year, the Commission compiled sentencing data into a new publication, the Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics. In 2019, the Sourcebook edition reporting fiscal year 2018 data was substantially revised and expanded. Existing tables were revised to reflect current sentencing practices. Many figures were updated to make them easier to understand and were presented in color while others were removed and the data on them presented in new ways. Additional analyses regarding drug and immigration crimes were added, and new sections on firearms and economic offenses were included. Trend analyses were added to each of the major sections to show how sentencing patterns had changed over the last ten years. The section on Sentenced Organizations was also expanded. Finally, Appendix B, which provides sentencing data for each judicial district, was completely redesigned to reflect current sentencing practices.

Beginning with that 2018 Sourcebook, important methodological changes were made in the way the data was presented. Principal among them was the way cases were assigned to a “type of crime” (previously called offense type). Beginning with fiscal year 2018 data, the guideline (or guidelines) that the court applied in determining the sentence determines the crime type category to which a case is assigned. Also, the names of some of the crime type categories were revised and some outdated categories were removed from the tables and figures. Another important methodological change was that sentences were capped at 470 months for all analyses. Additionally, cases involving the production of child pornography were reassigned to the sexual abuse crime type. Previously, these cases were assigned to the child pornography offense type in the Sourcebook.

Finally, beginning with the 2018 Sourcebook, the methodology used to analyze the sentence imposed relative to the sentencing range for the case as determined under the Commission’s Guidelines Manual was substantially revised. Sentences now are grouped into two broad categories: Sentences Under the Guidelines Manual and Variances. The former category comprises all cases in which the sentence imposed was within the applicable guideline range or, if outside the range, where the court cited one or more of the departure reasons in the Guidelines Manual as a basis for the sentence. Variance cases are those in which the sentence was outside the guideline range (either above or below) and where the court did not cite any guideline reason for the sentence. Data for important subgroups within these two categories are also reported.

Because of these methodological changes, direct comparisons between data for Sourcebooks from fiscal year 2018 and later years cannot always be made to data reported in the Sourcebook for years before fiscal year 2018.

Washington, DC: USSC, 2024.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

BY W. J. WILLIAMS

MORIARTY'S POLICE LAW, now in its 19th edition, continues to serve as a comprehensive guide for police officers navigating the complex legal landscape of their profession. With a meticulous arrangement of laws and regulations, this authoritative volume provides officers with the knowledge and insights they need to uphold law and order effectively. From the basics of criminal procedure to the latest updates in policing standards, this essential resource remains a trusted companion for law enforcement professionals seeking clarity and guidance in their daily duties.

LONDON. BUTTERWORTHS. 1968. 728p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

BY ARYE RATTNER AND GIDEON FISHMAN

"Justice for All? Jews and Arabs in the Israeli Criminal Justice System" provides a comprehensive examination of the complex dynamics that shape the experiences of Jews and Arabs within Israel's legal framework. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, this book delves into the intricacies of how the Israeli criminal justice system navigates issues of identity, power, and discrimination in cases involving Jewish and Arab individuals.

By shedding light on the unique challenges and disparities faced by these two communities, "Justice for All?" prompts readers to critically reflect on the notions of equality and fairness within the legal landscape of Israel. With a nuanced approach, the authors navigate through a range of perspectives, offering a compelling exploration of the multifaceted interactions between ethnicity, religion, and the pursuit of justice.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of the Israeli criminal justice system and its implications for the diverse communities it serves. "Justice for All?" serves as a thought-provoking contribution to the ongoing dialogue surrounding issues of representation, equity, and human rights in the context of Israel's legal institutions.

Westport, Connecticut London. Praeger. 1998. 142p.

Author(s) Mark A. Motivans

This report presents data from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) describing the federal criminal justice response to opioids. It focuses on heroin, fentanyl, and other opioids, including how they are classified under the Controlled Substances Act, the number of deaths due to overdose, and the number of persons arrested and sentenced for federal offenses involving these substances. The report uses data from BJS’s Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP). The FJSP includes data received from the DEA, the USSC, and other federal criminal justice agencies.

Highlights:

• From fiscal year (FY) 2020 to FY 2021, the number of drug arrests the DEA made for fentanyl increased by 36% from 2,305 to 3,138.

• In FY 2021, for the first time, the number of drug arrests the DEA made for fentanyl (3,138) surpassed the number of arrests for heroin (2,591).

• Of the 28,224 total drug arrests by the DEA in FY 2021, 3,138 (11%) were for fentanyl, 2,591 (9%) were for heroin, and 676 (2%) were for other opioids.

• DEA arrests for heroin, fentanyl, and other opioids increased from 4,830 in FY 2001 to a peak of 8,258 in 2015 and declined to 6,405 in FY 2021.

• In FY 2021,

  • 97% of persons sentenced for a drug offense involving opioids were sentenced for drug trafficking.

  • most persons sentenced for drug offenses involving heroin (89%) or fentanyl (87%) had a prior criminal history at sentencing

  • persons sentenced for drug offenses involving heroin or fentanyl received a median prison term of 46 months, persons sentenced for oxycodone received a median prison term of 26 months, and persons sentenced for hydrocodone received a median prison term of 24 months.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2024. 25p.