Both black and white judges in Pennsylvania and Florida treat African American defendants unfairly according to a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Researchers from Harvard Law School and Princeton University studied cases involving 93,914...
Month: July 2018
Could you have had ineffective counsel?
When you are appealing a criminal conviction, one potential avenue to explore could be ineffective assistance of counsel. If the performance of your attorney at trial was deficient and it changed the outcome of your trial or sentencing, then you could have a...
Identifications made during police lineups are often unreliable
Lawmakers in Pennsylvania have not yet taken steps to revise the way police departments conduct lineups, although such changes have been implemented in many states. The reliability of eyewitness identifications has been a controversial issue for decades, but...
Supreme Court makes landmark Fourth Amendment ruling
The Fourth Amendment protects Pennsylvania residents against unreasonable search and seizure, but the courts have long held that this protection does not apply to information that is willingly shared with third parties such as banks or telephone companies. The digital...
How the FBI deals with hate crimes
In Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the U.S., hate crimes are a punishable offense. Hate crimes are defined as traditional offenses that range from arson and vandalism to murder, with the exception that there is an additional element of bias. For example, if a person...