You Can Lose An Appeal Even When A Court Admits You Are Right

In  People v. Butcher , a restitution award of $113,605 was entered against a defendant for securities fraud against two at risk adults.  Th...

Bayesian Statistical Reasoning and Race In The Criminal Justice System

Bayesian Reasoning Is Discouraged In Guilt-Innocence Trials. The legal system, especially the criminal justice system, in the United States ...

A Judge's Demographic Characteristics Are Correlated With Sentencing Outcomes

A continuing education course/happy hour presentation of the Colorado Bar Association in a couple of weeks will present some new empirical f...

Federal Jury Trials Scarce In 2017

The 2017 annual statistical data from the federal courts of the United States has been released, and the long, slow path of the vanishing j...

Crime May Not Be Genetic But It Is Significantly Hereditary

The lede here is the striking insight of the story. We don't know with any certainty how strongly genetic influences are on a person...

Bad Prosecutors

The Colorado Supreme Court has unanimously  overturned a murder conviction after it was determined that prosecutors from the 18th District ...

The Federal Criminal Docket In The Fourth Quarter Of 2017

Conclusions * Sentences for child pornography (mostly possession not creation of it) are far too high. The average child pornography sentenc...

Another Quote Of The Day

Don’t talk.  —   Peter Hardy , a former federal prosecutor and white-collar defense partner at Ballard Spahr, offering advice for President ...

The Threshold For Disarming People Needs To Be Lower

[T]he gunman had no known criminal history, but he was well known to law enforcement. From the Denver Post . Five deputies were shot (one di...

Indigenous Peoples' Day

It is officially Indigenous Peoples' Day in Denver. (Accompanied by a snow storm and freezing temperatures following a 75 degree and sun...