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 Jennifer A. Tallon

To effectively address the problem of mass incarceration, prosecutors must adopt ways to respond to cases involving violence that don’t rely on jails and prisons. The "Prosecutors and Responses to Crimes of Violence: Notes from the Field" document offers in-depth case study findings and is intended as a tool for jurisdictions looking to expand alternative approaches to crimes of violence.

New York: Center for Justice Innovation. 2024, 18pg

By Kayla Tawa

As mental health concerns and awareness around mental health challenges have increased, policymakers have prioritized mental health policy. Within these conversations, there is a broad recognition that far too often people experiencing mental health challenges encounter the criminal legal system rather than accessing mental health supports. In response, many policymakers have championed policies that aim to divert people experiencing mental health challenges away from prisons and jails and into mental health treatment. However, some of these policies, particularly those involving forced treatment, rely on carceral tactics and replicate incarceration.

Washington, DC:  Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). 2024, 14pg

By Charles Fain Lehman

Crime, particularly violent crime, is a pressing concern for the American people. The surge in homicide and associated violence in the past three years has made voters skittish and prompted aggressive partisan finger-pointing. This increase has not, however, prompted significant investment in our criminal justice system. Ironically, as this report argues, this increase in violent crime is itself a product of fiscal neglect of that same system over the past decade.

Across a variety of measures, in fact, the American criminal justice system needs an upgrade. Police staffing rates have been dropping since the Great Recession; prisons and jails are increasingly violent; court backlogs keep growing; essential crime data are not collected; and essential criminology research is not conducted. These shortcomings contribute not only to the recent increase in violence but to America’s long-term violence and crime problems, problems that cost us tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

For too long, policymakers at all levels have failed to attend to this problem. Instead, both the political left and right have subsumed criminal justice issues into the larger culture war, fighting over the worst excesses of the police or the horrors of criminal victimization. Rather, they should look to past examples of federal policymaking in which lawmakers have used the power of the purse to dramatically improve the criminal justice system’s capacity to control crime. Doing so again could ameliorate many of the major concerns voiced by both sides in the criminal justice debate.

As such, this report proposes an ambitious, $12-billion, five-year plan to bring the criminal justice system up to date. 

New York: Manhattan Institute. 2023, 33pg

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