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Jennifer Laurin

Law professor and criminal justice junkie at the University of Texas School of Law

The Massachusetts Lab Scandals: Confronting the New Normal of Mass Error in Criminal Justice

Last month, Massachusetts criminal defense lawyers filed suit seeking an extraordinary measure of relief: dismissal en masse of thousands of drug convictions, with prejudice — meaning that prosecutors would forever be barred from retrying the defendants. The circumstances giving rise to the request were, at first glance, equally extraordinary. First, there was the revelation in 2013 that Massachusetts state […]

Deceptively Tragic: Qualified Immunity in Police Suits

It is all too commonplace to read of police-civilian encounters ending in what is reported as “tragedy.” In May of this year, 15-year-old Jordan Edwards was shot and killed when a Balch Springs, Texas police officer fired a rifle into the window of the car in which Edwards was a passenger, as the car tried […]