Criminal Justice News And Events

The event, “Reform for Redemption: Cyntoia Brown Long and Gov. Bill Haslam on Criminal Justice Reform and the Power of Mercy,” will be held in Langford Auditorium and livestreamed at 6 p.m. March 15. Now an author and advocate, Brown was a trafficking victim when she was convicted of murder at 16. She was later granted clemency by Gov. Haslam. Professor Slogobin will moderate a discussion about criminal justice reform. The public is invited to attend in person or virtually. Read More

Newton's work with Iraqi judges is funded by a grant from the U.S. State Department. The goal is to help Iraqi courts prosecute ISIS and process counterrorism cases in accordance with international human rights norms. The article quotes Practice Lab students Emily Webb '22 and Cait Martins '22, who worked to develop a 300-page manual to support the casework of attorneys in international criminal tribunals. Read More

"How this Vanderbilt law professor and his student are helping Iraqis handle thousands of ISIS cases," an article by Mariah Timms, appeared in the Dec. 13, 2021, edition of The Tennessean. Timms' article profiles Newton's work helping Iraqi judges rebuild their nation's court system and prosecute a backlog of ISIS cases, some involving genocide charges. Read More

Mayeux's book is one of three books addressing public defenders and how public defense has evolved since its inception in the Progressive Era. Seo writes that Mayeux's book "leaves readers with a provocative thought: If we moved beyond adversarialism, what kind of legal representation could defendants receive?" Free Justice, published by the University of North Carolina Press, received the 2020 David J. Langum Prize in American Legal History. Read More

In "Just Algorithms: Using Science to Reduce Incarceration and Inform a Jurisprudence of Risk," released by Cambridge University Press, Slobogin supports his thesis that using risk-prediction algorithms to make sentencing decisions could help reduce unnecessary pre-trial detention, mitigate excessively punitive bail and prison sentences, and divert more eligible candidates to appropriate rehabilitative programs. Read More

Meyers found that more than half of Black men had been arrested by the time they were young adults but that Black men were much less likely to be convicted than white men. Her dissertation, The Criminal Justice System and Social Mobility in the United States, documents the negative impacts of over-arrest on the employment and educational opportunities of Black men. Read More