Criminal Law

“Federal grand jurors are showing that they will use their power wisely,” write Criminal Law and Justice Center Executive Director Chesa Boudin and UC Davis Professor Eric S. Fish. “We should embrace this trend and give them the procedural protections they need to serve as true checks on government power.”

Those prosecutors would “have a strong obligation to act,” given interest by their constituents here in the Bay Area, said Jonathan Simon, a law professor at UC Berkeley. Yet any such local effort would likely run headlong into a growing reality that “Trump and his underlings in the homeland security sector are just kind of openly suggesting the law doesn’t apply to them.”

“We’ve has this notion that California is not as blatantly racist as ‘them folks’ in the South,” said Elisabeth A. Semel, the co-director of the Death Penalty Clinic at Berkeley Law. “Because there it was not a secret, it was the very structure of Jim Crow. But that is a superficial difference. Here we have more covert practices–but with the same consequences that cause fatal harm.”

“There is a long-term strategy that many big entities, government and private, subscribe to, which is, if we settle every case, then people will keep suing us with increasingly frivolous cases,” Boudin said. “Sometimes it is worth paying lawyers more than it would cost us to settle a case to fight and deter future copycat litigation.”

UC Berkeley Law makes National Jurist’s list of top law schools from criminal law.

“We need safeguards to ensure that this powerful technology is used in a way that advance legitimate law enforcement interests, but that stave off possibilities of abuse,” said Professor Catherine Crump.

Chesa Boudin, executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at the UC Berkeley Law and Kenneth E. Hartman, a formerly incarcerated lifer weigh in on Trump’s Department of Justice’s decision to terminate all funds for an effort to stop prison rape by defunding the national Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center.

Professor Colleen Chien discusses racial bias in the criminal justice system, and the database she built to compare sentencing outcomes by race in the California justice system.

Professor Elisabeth Semel, founding director of the UC Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic, said no matter what someone thinks of the death penalty, there remains no evidence that executions advance public safety.

“Hopefully, the pushback in the form of lawsuits like this will show that there are legal boundaries that should not be crossed,” said Laura Riley, director of the Clinical Program at Berkeley Law. “What exactly those are; we have to wait to see what the courts do. But I do think it shows that municipalities can’t criminalize homelessness in a way that’s unchecked.”