Though it is not technically mid-summer, I am on a mid-summer trip that will leave me relatively little time for blogging for the rest of this week. (In addition, when I
have some spare time this week, there is a mid-summer classic and my favorite summer Open that will be drawing me to a screen other than my laptop.) So, before [...]
Not only are pardons an important lever of mercy in our current, woefully non-role-reversible systems of criminal justice, but, given the human tendency to anger, they might
be a critical mercy lever even in a truly robust system. [...]
Recent decades has brought considerable concerns about so-called "school-to-prison" pipelines, a term meant to lament certain educational policies and practices that serve
to enhance the prosepcts of some students being caught up in criminal justice systems. [...]
The New York Times has two notable new articles covering the controversies surrounding former Prez Biden's late-term clemencies and compentencies. Here are the pieces:
"Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions That Were Recorded With Autopen" "Excerpts From The Times’s Interview With Biden on Clemency Decisions" The first of [...]
The title of this post is the title of this article authored by Cassia Spohn in the June 2025 issue of the Criminal Law Forum. (As noted in this prior post, this journal
issue is devoted to celebrating the work of sentencing guru Michael Tonry, and I will be flagging various individual articles from the issue in the weeks ahead). [...]
This New York Times opinion piece, titled "Governors, Use Your Clemency Powers" and authored by Steve Zeidman, focuses on the need for states' chief executives to step up their
clemency work. The piece is worth a full read (though it focuses mostly on commutations and not pardons), and here are excerpts: Clemency, specifically the power [...]
The title of this post is the title of this new article now available via SSRN and authored by Charles Hintz. Here is its abstract: Federal habeas is a mess. The reason
is the current doctrine’s myopic proceduralism: its obsession with limiting relief through stringent and Byzantine procedural rules. This has transformed our [...]
In the latest chapter of a long running saga, a panel of the DC Circuit today upheld the authority of then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to withdraw from plea agreements
with three of the 9/11 defendants. The start of the majority opinion in In Re: United States of America , No. [...]
The title of this post is the title of this new article now available via SSRN authored by Talia Roitberg Harmon, Michael L. Perlin, Maren Geiger, Lea Roitberg and Stacy Bielic.
Here is its abstract: The United States Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. [...]
