As some readers may know, the blogging service Typepad is complete shutting down as of September 30, 2025. When I first started this blog back in May 2004(!), Typepad seemed
like a good-enough, user-friendly platform, and before long I had the assistance of then-Professor Paul Caron and his then-new Law Professor Blog Network to help [...]
The title of this post is the title of this notable essay authored by Shawn Bushway. I recommend the full piece, and here is how it gets started: The U.S. now incarcerates
25 percent fewer people than it did at its peak level of incarceration in 2009. Although this decline exceeds most projections from even 10 years ago, Stanford [...]
I just saw that yesterday the US Sentencing Commission released here its latest federal sentencing quarterly data report which is titled "3rd Quarter Release, Preliminary Fiscal
Year 2025 Data Through June 30, 2025." Because these data only capture a little more than five months of sentencing data since the Trump Administration took charge [...]
As reported in this AP piece, a "Florida man convicted of killing his estranged wife’s sister and parents and setting their house on fire was put to death Wednesday evening
in what was a record 12th execution in the state this year." Here is more: David Pittman, 63, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. [...]
I have been invited to speak in a few weeks on pardon and expungement topics at the "White Collar Conference 2025," which is presented by the White Collar Support Group run
by the indefatigable Jeff Grant. Here are links and a few details I received recently from Jeff about the conference to pique interests: White Collar Conference [...]
The title of this post is the title of this new article now on SSRN authored by Max Wolson, Benjamin Flick and Adeel Bashir. Here is its abstract: This article explains how
the U.S. Sentencing Commission's excessively punitive, weight-based drug trafficking guideline has played a key role in exploding prison populations, contributing [...]
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) today released this lengthy new report written by LawProf Cortney Lollar. Here is the report's executive summary:
Criminal restitution has become a regular part of sentencing in criminal cases. And yet it remains widely misunderstood — both in its implementation and its effects. [...]
The Marshall Project has this notable new piece exploring some reasons for the higher number of executions throughout the US in 2025. I recommend the piece in full, and here
are excerpts (with links from the original): Ten states have executed 30 people since January, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. [...]
This new Law360 article, headlined "Appeals Courts Rethink Harsh Youth Sentences, Search Rules," details some of the ways state courts have been extending the US Supreme Court's
Eighth Amendment jurisprudence precluding some extreme juvenile sentence. Here are excerpts from the article: Since the U.S. [...]
As reported in this New York Times article, "Nadine Menendez, the wife of New Jersey’s former senator, was sentenced on Thursday to four and a half years in prison for her
role in a scheme to trade her husband’s clout for cash, gold and a Mercedes-Benz." Here is more: In an emotional address before the judge imposed the sentence, [...]
