Suppression motions are the means by which defendants challenge constitutionality of stops, searches, and seizures, move court to exclude illegally recovered evidence. However, face insurmountable obstacles in challenging police credibility these motions. Using 31 with factual disputes from a northeastern state, we dissect types defense challenges related arrests, as well prevalence corroborati...

Since the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) that intellectually disabled defendants cannot be executed, approximately 7% of death row inmates have filed habeas petitions claiming to have an intellectual disability (Blume, Johnson, & Seeds, 2009). Countless other defendants have been evaluated pre-trial to determine the appropriateness of an Atkins exclusion of the death penalty. ...

The postconviction prison disciplinary records of capital defendants (n = 73) who had been the subject of defense-sponsored violence risk assessments or risk-related testimony (1995-2007) that asserted an improbability of future serious prison violence were analyzed. During postconviction prison tenures averaging 4.4 years, none of the capital defendants was cited for accomplished serious assau...

t he American Bar Association (ABA) does not publish reviews of sociologic and criminologic research projects, but it does have firm policy egarding the transfer of juveniles into the adult justice ystem. The ABA believes that underage defendants generlly should not be placed in the adult system. Thus, the rowing trend by courts to try minors as adults has tirred deep concern within the associa...

Archival data of inpatient defendants referred for competency restoration were used to make comparisons between those who were restored to competency (CST; n = 43) and those who remained incompetent (IST; n = 15). The groups did not differ on demographic variables, intellectual capacity, type of offense (violent versus nonviolent), clinical diagnoses, substance abuse, or psychotic symptomatolog...