The Supreme Court upholds Kansas's law barring the insanity defense in criminal proceedings. Dave breaks down the decision in Kahler v Kansas.
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David follows up on this week's Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.
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The U.S. Supreme Court delivered rulings last week on two cases involving race and jury proceedings. We break down the decisions and get analysis on their implications.
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An update on the NAACP's Christina Swarns, of Episode 34, who just won a key victory with this week's U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Davis.
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The NAACP used the legal system to overcome separate but equal, desegregate schools and public facilities, and bring some measure of equal justice to African Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the U.S. What role does this legendary organization have now in the era of Black Lives Matter, and how would Thurgood Marshall interpret it all?
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Do the legal rules for using deadly force, set by the Supreme Court in the 1980s, still make sense? Do they protect the officer and the public, or is it time to change how police make the decision to take a life?
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Analysis of recent SCOTUS cases that grapple with the role of race in criminal justice.
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The tattered system for supplying criminal defense services to the poor is a shambles. More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that persons charged with crimes must be provided with a defense lawyer if they are too poor to afford one, that promise has been broken. In countless places around the U.S., governments simply do not provide the resources for poor people charged with crimes to have a real defense. The result: defense lawyers with impossible caseloads struggling to meet the constitutional minimum standards for defense. It’s a national scandal, and yet year after year, state and local governments do too little – or nothing – to fix it.
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