GIST: Leading defense lawyers have been trying to wrap their heads around what they consider abnormal behavior by the U.S. Department of Justice over the past year.
They have launched a tool to track criminal cases that appear to involve irregular charging practices, including aggressive legal theories and possible political retribution against President Trump’s foes, NPR reports.
“We created the Case Tracker because you cannot defend against an enemy you cannot see,” said Steven Salky, a lawyer who oversees the project. “The Tracker is intended to spotlight for the next several years the unusual cases being prosecuted by the Department of Justice.”
The new database includes the federal cases against Sean Charles Dunn, who threw a sub sandwich at a federal immigration officer, and Jacob Samuel Winkler, a homeless man accused of directing a laser pointer toward the Marine One presidential helicopter. Juries in Washington, D.C., acquitted both men.
The tracker, sponsored by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), also monitors cases where government charges of resisting federal law enforcement have been undercut by videos and eyewitness accounts from protesters.
Judges and juries have been turning a skeptical eye toward the work of the Justice Department.
Federal jurists have questioned whether the executive branch is complying with court orders on immigration and other issues at the heart of Trump’s agenda — giving rise to concerns that federal prosecutors will no longer get the benefit of the doubt in court.
Grand juries across the U.S. have rejected efforts by prosecutors to bring indictments, once considered to be a cinch because of the low bar to charge defendants at that early stage in the criminal process.
The new tracker features a map that allows people to follow some of these trends across states, a way to search for specific statutes, and links to key court filings and judges’ decisions."
The entire story can be read at:
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;you cannot defend against an enemy you c
