A. Spoliation is the destruction or alteration of evidence or failure to preserve property for another’s use in litigation. 1 In the aftermath of Enron and the Arthur Andersen document destruction scandal, many judges view spoliation akin to contempt and will punish offenders accordingly. For example, Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm recently imposed damages and costs of over $1 million on the de...

Kat Albrecht and Kaitlyn Filip on data disadvantaging defendants.

Researchers previously have investigated the role of race in capital sentencing, and in particular, whether the race of the defendant or victim influences the likelihood of a death sentence. In the present study, we examined whether the likelihood of being sentenced to death is influenced by the degree to which a Black defendant is perceived to have a stereotypically Black appearance. Controlli...

WHOLE FOODS MARKET, INC.) PUBLIC VERSION 550 Bowie Street) Austin, Texas 78703)) and)) WILD OATS MARKETS, INC.) 1821 30th Street) Boulder, Colorado 80301)) Defendants.)

Implicit but significant assumptions made in the criminal justice system include beliefs that criminals do not commit crimes to be tried and convicted and that, once arrested, defendants' primary motives are to avoid or minimize the legal consequences of the charges they face. When those assumptions are not correct, clinicians and legal decision makers are faced with difficult tasks. The author...

The defense of involuntary intoxication has long been an exception to the general notion that intoxication is not a defense to criminal liability. The consumption of medications prescribed by a physician can form the basis of an involuntary-intoxication defense. In this article, I review cases where defendants relied on the use of prescribed medications for an involuntary-intoxication defense. ...

The current study is a partial replication of previous studies designed to estimate the level of risk posed by capital murder defendants. The study draws on data describing the behavior of nearly 2,000 incarcerated capital murderers to forecast violence propensity among defendants sentenced to life imprisonment. Logistic regression is used to model various violence outcomes, relying on the foll...

Bail Information Schemes gather and provide information on a defendant’s community ties to the court. Past evaluations have concluded that schemes are effective because more defendants are granted bail. However, the evaluations include possible confounds and other limitations, thus threatening the validity of their findings. They are also incompatible with research showing that magistrates do n...