Criminal Law

“For years, California courts ran an unconstitutional shadow detention system.” writes Chesa Boudin, executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at Berkeley Law. “The mechanics were straightforward: Set bail at an amount the defendant cannot pay and the result is the same as ordering detention outright.”

“In California, there are no laws that criminalize homelessness. But with policies such as the one Oakland has instituted, unhoused people are losing protections,” said Laura Riley, assistant dean of Clinical Education at Berkeley Law and a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Homelessness & Poverty.

“The Supreme Court recognized in Roper v. Simmons, juvenile cognition means they are not as deterrable or as responsible as adults. With crime historically low today, it makes no sense to run the experiment again,” UC Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Simon said.

Maiya Zwerling, clinical supervisor at Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic (PAC) joins KPFA’s Law & Disorder to discuss PAC’s report No Time To Wait: A Case for Releasing Elders from California’s Women’s Prisons.

“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.