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A first-cut criminal justice take on the SCOTUS Term that was

By Douglas A. Berman

Because the just-completed Supreme Court Term was rich with criminal justices cases that were themselves rich with dynamic issues of constitutional and statutory law, it may not be possible to provide a simple criminal justice take on the Justices' work this past Term.  Nevertheless, I wanted here to express my first-cut perspective about the OT 2009 in the hope that readers might confirm or dispute my initial view. Put most simply, I think the Term had a significant number of little wins for criminal defendants, but the vast majority of cases that could have potentially produced huge wins for defendants ended up being losses (or dismissed cases) or wins via relatively narrow opinions.  My view here may be skewed a bit by end-of-term cases like Barber and Comstock and Dillon and Dolan and HLP which were defendant losses that would have been huge if they came out the other way, and also by rulings like Carr and O'Brien and Skilling which were defense wins on possibly the most narrow of the reasonably available grounds...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on July 01, 2010 (boomark / email).