Access to Justice

  • April 19, 2024

    Wrongful Detention Suit Illustrates Pitfalls Of ICE Lockups

    A Salvadoran woman's recent lawsuit alleging immigration authorities locked her up for months despite her protected status highlights how authorized immigrants, and sometimes even U.S. citizens, can wind up being wrongfully detained, and how, with no right to counsel in immigration proceedings, it can prove difficult to free them.

  • April 19, 2024

    Shook Hardy Mass Tort Pros Help Nix Pa. Murder Convictions

    Deep experience dealing with expert testimony on complex scientific evidence and local knowledge of the Philadelphia suburbs made Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP partners John Lyons and David Haase a perfect fit for the team that recently helped vacate the decades-old convictions of three men accused of murdering a 70-year-old woman.

  • April 19, 2024

    How Attys Are Helping DC Residents Keep Family Homes

    As homeownership rates among Black residents have fallen in the nation's capital, a new initiative aims to provide legal counsel to people living in homes that were passed down through the generations but don't have clear titles.

  • April 18, 2024

    NYC Bar Rips Hochul Plan To Divert Client Trust Interest Cash

    The New York City Bar Association urged Gov. Kathy Hochul Thursday to reconsider her "eleventh-hour" renewed plan to divert $55 million in interest earned on lawyer trust accounts that typically goes toward legal aid for low-income New Yorkers, saying the "deeply troubling" move undermines the independence of the legal profession.

  • April 18, 2024

    BYU Law Students Develop 2 Access-To-Justice Tools

    Brigham Young University Law School announced this week the development of two new legal technology solutions, one intended to make assigning community service more efficient and the other used to generate divorce documents.

  • April 17, 2024

    'It Has To End': Justices Mull Finality In 32-Year Murder Saga

    In its second review of drug-fueled, baseball bat killings during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday pondered steering an Arizona man's capital punishment challenge toward conclusion, perhaps by handling evidentiary tasks normally left to lower courts.

  • April 17, 2024

    Sentencing Commission Limits Acquitted Conduct Sentencing

    The U.S. Sentencing Commission on Wednesday voted to restrict the controversial practice of considering acquitted conduct in federal sentencing, and floated the possibility of applying the change retroactively.

  • April 17, 2024

    Justices Rule Criminal Forfeiture Deadline Isn't Absolute

    The U.S. Supreme Court held Wednesday that courts can issue forfeiture orders at sentencing in criminal cases even if prosecutors fail to submit a draft request prior to the court-ordered date, ruling noncompliance with the rule doesn't strip judges of the authority to direct defendants to hand over ill-gotten gains.

  • April 15, 2024

    Justices Wary Of Strict Limit On Malicious Prosecution Cases

    Several U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared open Monday to the idea that a charge made without probable cause can be grounds for a malicious prosecution civil suit even if another charge with valid probable cause accompanied it, but without a clear consensus on a precise boundary.

  • April 15, 2024

    Sotomayor, Jackson Dissent As Court Rejects Capital Cases

    In a pair of dissents, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor on Monday broke with a majority of their colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court who declined to hear two death penalty cases.

  • April 11, 2024

    Prison Racial Gap Narrowing, No Thanks To Reforms, Study Says

    A wide range of changes to criminal sentencing laws that most states have adopted in the last two decades did not play a major role in the reduction of Black-white disparity in imprisonment seen between 2000 and 2020, according to a study released Thursday by the Council on Criminal Justice.

  • April 10, 2024

    No Damages After Drug Lab Scandal Sinks Case, Court Says

    A Massachusetts man is not entitled to compensation from a fund for exonerees after his 2006 heroin distribution conviction was among thousands of drug cases vacated due to misconduct by a chemist at the state crime lab, an intermediate appeals court said Wednesday.

  • April 09, 2024

    Mo. Gets OK To Execute Man Repped By Flat-Fee Lawyers

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to halt the looming execution of a convicted murderer who claimed that his attorneys' flat-fee contracts incentivized them to push him to plead guilty before they secured promises from prosecutors not to pursue a death sentence.

  • April 08, 2024

    Calif. Legal Aid Group Leader On Fighting For Those With HIV

    Matt Foreman, the new executive director of San Francisco's AIDS Legal Referral Panel, talks with Law360 Pulse to discuss the ongoing challenges faced by people living with HIV and how the organization assists them.

  • April 05, 2024

    Do New Laws Seek To Regulate Charitable Bail, Or End It?

    New legislation aimed at curtailing — some say criminalizing — the use of charitable bail is being considered in multiple states, where the bills' advocates say they're necessary to address crime, but bail reform activists insist they perpetuate an inequitable bail system that makes freedom dependent on wealth.

  • April 05, 2024

    Flat-Fee Representation Fuels Man's Bid To Avoid Execution

    As his execution date approaches on April 9, Brian Joseph Dorsey, who was sentenced to death for first-degree murder in Missouri, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to find that his trial attorneys' flat-flee contracts resulted in inadequate legal representation that has left him doomed to die.

  • April 05, 2024

    Study Shines Light On Excessive NY Prison Sentences

    A recent report shining a light on excessive felony prison sentences handed down by more than 140 trial judges in New York over a 16-year period has experts and advocacy groups calling for increased transparency to help ensure that courts are imposing fair penalties on criminal defendants in the Empire State.

  • April 04, 2024

    New Leader Discusses The Next Era For NY Federal Defenders

    The Federal Defenders of New York has chosen its new leader, elevating its director of strategic litigation to become the first Black woman serving as the federal public defense organization's executive director.

  • April 01, 2024

    BOP Drops Accreditation Org After IG, Sens. Raise Concerns

    The Federal Bureau of Prisons has let its $2.75 million contract with its accreditation organization expire, after a group of Democratic lawmakers and the bureau's watchdog raised concerns that the group wasn't effective or objective.

  • March 27, 2024

    Associates Help Ga. Prisoner Beat The Odds In Court

    When a team of mostly associates at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Bondurant Mixson & Elmore LLP took on the civil case of a Georgia prisoner who had developed stage 4 hepatitis C as he waited five years for prescribed treatment, they expected they'd have their work cut out for them.

  • March 26, 2024

    'Landmark' Trans Women Prison Housing Deal Gets Final OK

    A Colorado state judge on Tuesday approved a consent decree between the state and a class of transgender women who sued over dangerous housing conditions in state prisons and now hope the plan to accommodate their needs will spread to other states.

  • March 25, 2024

    Justices Nix Lenient Drug Sentence After 'Safety Valve' Ruling

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday vacated a 100-month sentence given to a woman who pled guilty to drug offenses and remanded the case to the Fourth Circuit after the justices recently clarified which defendants qualify for "safety valve" relief under a 2018 federal law.

  • March 22, 2024

    MoFo Helps Secure $2B For Calif.'s Forgotten Students

    Morrison & Foerster recently helped nab a historic $2 billion settlement to help roughly a million California students — disproportionately from Black, Latino and lower-income families — who say the state failed to provide them meaningful instruction once the COVID-19 pandemic began.

  • March 22, 2024

    Living With Death: How Judges Experience Capital Cases

    When presiding over death penalty cases, judges are called to set aside their political and moral beliefs, and shut out their emotions. It’s easier said than done.

  • March 22, 2024

    Milbank Pro Bono Counsel On Leading By Example

    Milbank LLP attorneys logged more than 54,000 hours of pro bono work across the firm's 12 offices worldwide in 2023, with 96% of its lawyers in the U.S. volunteering their time. According to Anthony Perez Cassino, the firm's pro bono counsel, it's a commitment to public service work that starts at the top.

Expert Analysis

  • The Most-Read Access To Justice Law360 Guest Articles Of 2022

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    Law360 guest experts weighed in on a broad slate of emerging access to justice issues last year, ranging from evidence of ineffective counsel to opportunities for nonlawyers to provide legal help and the presumption of innocence.

  • Understanding Illinois' First-Of-Its-Kind Law Nixing Cash Bail

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    A new law taking effect Jan. 1 that makes Illinois the first state to eliminate cash bail has been amended to correct some of the many concerns of those who opposed the original, flawed piece of legislation that was rushed through, and will make sweeping changes to how criminal justice operates in Illinois, say Joe Tabor and Perry Zhao at the Illinois Policy Institute.

  • Defense Attorneys Can Help Limit Electronic Monitor Overuse

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    Though electronic monitoring is increasingly promoted as an alternative to incarceration for people awaiting trial, on probation or parole, or undergoing immigration proceedings, its effectiveness is unsupported by evidence and it results in clear harms, so defense attorneys should consider several strategies to challenge its overuse, say experts at the ACLU.

  • DOJ Can't Justify Its Failure To Get Data On Deaths In Custody

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    The U.S. Department of Justice incorrectly claims that a law requiring it to collect meaningful data on how many people die in government custody has somehow limited its ability to do just that — and every failure to study these deaths is a missed opportunity to prevent others, says David Janovsky at the Project On Government Oversight.

  • How Civilian Attorneys Can Help Veterans

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    With legal aid topping the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' annual list of unmet needs of veterans facing housing insecurity, nonmilitary volunteer attorneys can provide some of the most effective legal services to military and veteran clients, say Anna Richardson at Veterans Legal Services and Nicholas Hasenfus at Holland & Knight.

  • Prison Abuse Victims May Get Justice In NY Look-Back Term

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    As New York opens a one-year window for survivors of adulthood sexual abuse to bring otherwise time-barred claims, incarcerated individuals who were abused by prison staff have an opportunity to seek redress, and can rely on a recent federal court decision to assess potential remedies, says Jaehyun Oh at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Firm.

  • As 4th Circ. Reminds, Carrying Cash Is Not A Crime

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    The Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in U.S. v. McClellan makes clear that unwillingness or inability to use a bank account does not necessarily make someone a criminal, and that the government needs evidence of wrongdoing before seizing and keeping assets, say Robert Johnson and Caroline Grace Brothers at Institute for Justice.

  • Algorithms Have Potential To Reduce Sentencing Disparities

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    Criminal legal system algorithms have mostly been used to assess the risk posed by defendants in settings like pretrial release, bail determinations, sentencing and parole supervision, but predictable modeling can also be used to reduce sentencing disparities and overly punitive outcomes, say ACLU researchers and collaborators.

  • 2 Legislative Reforms Would Address Many Immigration Woes

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    Congress should pass currently pending legislation to create an Article I immigration court and update the registry process — reforms that would shield immigration courts from political pressure, enable many longtime residents to cure their immigration status, and alleviate case backlogs, says retired immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks.

  • Mich. Ruling Widens Sentencing Protections For Young Adults

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    The Michigan Supreme Court’s recent decision in People v. Parks, holding that a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for an 18-year-old violated the state’s constitution, builds on a nascent trend, based in neuroscience, that expands protections for young people over 17 who are charged with serious offenses, says Kimberly Thomas at the University of Michigan Law School.

  • Bodega Worker Case Exposes Key Flaw In NY Legal System

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    The controversial murder case involving bodega worker Jose Alba reveals New York prosecutors’ common practice of charging first and investigating later — a systemic failure that has devastating consequences for individuals and undermines the presumption of innocence, says Michael Bloch at Bloch & White.

  • Justices' Resentencing Ruling Boosts Judicial Discretion

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    The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Concepcion v. U.S., holding that federal judges can consider new laws and a defendant’s rehabilitation in resentencing, will enable correction of overlong crack cocaine-related sentences — but this wider judicial discretion may also entrench existing disparities, says Mark Osler at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

  • Justices Leave Many With No Court To Hear Innocence Claims

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    While bad lawyering is an all too common cause of wrongful convictions, the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Shinn v. Ramirez closes the federal courthouse doors to evidence of ineffective counsel, leaving many without a meaningful opportunity to prove their innocence, says Christina Swarns at the Innocence Project.

  • Nonprofit Ruling Is An Important Step For Nonlawyer Practice

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    A New York federal judge’s recent ruling that will allow nonprofit Upsolve to give legal advice to low-income debtors without a license is a positive development for nonlawyer practice, but presents questions about how to ensure similar programs can exist without fighting dodgy constitutional battles, says Ronald Minkoff at Frankfurt Kurnit.

  • DOJ's Cautious Return To Supplemental Enviro Projects

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    While the U.S. Department of Justice has ended the Trump-era ban on negotiating supplemental environment projects as part of civil and criminal environmental settlements, the process and delay around this change suggest that SEPs may be more limited under the Biden administration than in the past, say attorneys at Sidley.

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