Articles

Most will remember the popular, now infamous, news story from a few years back when a young woman was punched in the face by a police lieutenant at the Philadelphia Puerto Rican Day Parade. That incident was captured on video and audio by a local bystander and quickly went viral.  The past few years have […]

A three-member panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court has upended the required evidence for proving a prima facie case at a preliminary hearing, holding in Commonwealth v. Ricker, 2015 WL 43810955, that a prima facie case at this stage in a criminal proceeding can be established solely based on hearsay. Hearsay is an out-of-court statement […]

In a keynote address to the NAACP National Convention meeting yesterday in Philadelphia, President Obama strongly argued that mandatory criminal sentences for nonviolent drug offenders should be reduced or abolished all together, and that generally the system passing as “criminal justice” in the United States does not live up to that billing. During the speech, […]

In Ohio v. Clark, a 6-member majority of the United States Supreme Court agreed that introduction of incriminating statements made to a school teacher by a three-year-old boy indicating that a specific person was responsible for abusing him was admissible and not a violation of the Confrontation Clause.  Three other members concurred in the judgment, […]

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the weaknesses of Pennsylvania’s expungement law. As you’ll recall, expungement is the process by which someone convicted of certain crimes may be able to have governmental records of that event wiped clean from the system (For more on expungement generally, see this site’s primer here). Senate Bill 166, […]