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.

Edited by Gavin E. Oxburgh, Trond Myklebust, Mark Fallon and Maria Hartwig

Data-driven decision-making and science-based policies are critical to ensuring that the most effective tools and methods are being used to address real-world issues, such as the challenge of how to effectively elicit information from people during an interview. Academics and practitioners alike have been calling for investigators to transition away from customary, experience-based approaches to interviewing and detecting deception, and toward adoption of science-based approaches in their stead. Increasingly, there are hopeful signs this transition is welcomed by many members of the practitioner community, and a growing number of organizations are seeking out science-based interview and interrogation training.2A fundamental premise of this volume is that science-based methods of interviewing–skills and techniques that have been validated through an objective process of systematic empiricism–are the most effective means of eliciting reliable information from interviewees, and the current volume provides the practitioner community with a comprehensive summary of the state of the science of interviewing (with the irony being that, at some point after this volume is published, the science will have advanced). Each chapter in this volume is written by leading scholars in the field or practitioners who have become versed in the science of interviewing and have key insights to share about their use of science-based approaches in the field. The findings and conclusions are based on hundreds, if not thousands, of studies using a wide variety of complex re-search methodologies and statistical analyses, none of which is particularly easy to understand for people without advanced scientific training. Just as it is fool-hardy for academics to assume they understand the challenges and realities of interviewing in the ‘real world’ without critical insights from and partnerships with experienced practitioners, it is not realistic to expect practitioners to be-come scientists in their own right, able to consume and put the science into practice without assistance. That said, it is imperative that practitioners are armed with enough knowledge of scientific methods to become critical consumers of purported scientific information

By Kelly Roskam, Chiara Cooper, Philip Stallworth, and April M. Zeoli

For more than a decade after the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to possess a handgun i  the home for  self-defense in District of Columbia v. Heller, 1 courts relied on the well documented connection between domestic abusers and firearm violence to uphold the laws prohibiting persons subject to domestic violence protective orders (DVPOs) from purchasing or possessing firearms. Research finds that these laws are associated with reductions in intimate partner homicide, making them a valuable tool for protecting victimized partners.2 However, the constitutionality of those evidence-based laws is now in question due to the sea change in Second Amendment jurisprudence represented by New York State Rifle and Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen. 3 Bruen repudiated the use of tiers of scrutiny and requires that the government bear the burden of showing that a modern law is relevantly similar to historical firearms laws to be constitutional.4 The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in United States v. Rahimi5 to decide whether the 30-year-old federal law prohibiting the purchase and possession of firearms by persons subject to DVPOs, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), is consistent with the Second Amendment. Before Bruen, public health research played a straightforward role in Second Amendment analyses of § 922(g)(8). Lower courts had no trouble using such research in their tiers-of-scrutiny analyses to determine that reducing firearm-involved domestic violence was an important    governmental interest and that there was a reasonable fit between § 922(g)(8) and that interest. After Bruen, public health and social science research plays a more nuanced role in Second Amendment analyses. Such research must be connected to an underlying historical argument that implicates either the original plain text of the Second Amendment or the relevance of an historical analogue. 6 In this Article, we illustrate how this connection can be made in the context of § 922(g)(8). We first introduce § 922(g)(8) and discuss how state analogs do or do not implement its proscription of firearm possession by those subject to DVPOs. We then lay out the relevant legal background, including Heller, post-Heller Second Amendment case-law concerning § 922(g)(8), and Bruen, before turning to the meat of our argument. We next discuss Rahimi and other post-Bruen cases addressing § 922(g)(8), arguing that the law satisfies Bruen’s requirement that statutes regulating firearm access must be sufficiently similar to historical firearm laws. We argue that firearm-involved domestic violence is an “unprecedented societal concern” that requires a more nuanced approach to analogy.7 A myopic search for founding-era bars on firearm possession by domestic abusers ignores both important differences in social norms surrounding women, marriage, and domestic violence and the significantly increased role of firearms in domestic violence today. Instead, § 922(g)(8) is more aptly analogized to historical laws evidencing the longstanding tradition of prohibiting “dangerous people from possessing guns,”8 such as so-called “going armed laws,” surety laws, and racist and discriminatory laws that prohibited firearm possession by enslaved persons, Native Americans, Catholics, and those who refused to swear loyalty oaths.

United States, 51 Fordham Urb. L.J. 2023, 39pg