NACDL News for March/April 2025

Advanced prompt engineering strategies can increase the effectiveness of artificial intelligence. For example, a defense lawyer can employ prompts to create a bulleted list that serves as a reference tool when formulating an argument for presentation before a judge or jury.

On his first day in office, the president signed an Executive Order that directed the Bureau of Prisons to move transgender women housed in female facilities to men's prisons and cease funding any gender-affirming medical care for inmates. Within a week, litigation was underway.

Defense lawyers are the only advocates in the legal arena positioned to take a stand against the erosion of the last vestiges of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.

Defending DUI marijuana cases requires fighting the notion that a positive marijuana blood test, or the admission of recent marijuana use alone, is evidence of impairment. Because no valid test exists, toxicologists cannot testify that a specific amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in a suspect’s blood is associated with being impaired by marijuana and renders a driver unable to drive safely.

Allows Junk Science to Pervert Justice

Judges and lawyers do not understand the basic principles and methods of science, but they think they do. Is there a way to rectify their deficiencies?

Technology has a place in courtrooms. However, technology should be considered verbal support, not a verbal substitute.

Did the Ruan case drastically change how the government enforces the Controlled Substances Act? Jurors are no longer instructed to consider physicians’ subjective “good faith” in prescribing controlled substances that are then billed to health care benefit programs. Physicians must pivot and argue for other instructional safeguards to protect themselves against conviction.

In May 2024, the American Bar Association issued a formal opinion on the “Confidentiality Obligations of Lawyers Posting to Listservs.” The opinion does not break any new ground, but it applies long-standing principles about the duty of confidentiality in a way that might surprise defense lawyers.

This month Russell Stetler reviews V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère.

This month Susan Elizabeth Reese reviews Surrender: My Journey from Guerrilla to Grandmother by Katherine Ann Power.

What events are NACDL affiliates hosting this month? Find out here.

The New Age of Anticipatory Obstruction of Justice

Late one night last year, a defense attorney’s client decided to erase a document file folder and certain emails from his personal laptop computer. .....

Over the past 20 years, federal and state law enforcement officials have become zealous proponents of child pornography laws that punish such crimes with increasingly severe sanctions. As a result of the routine imposition of mandatory minimums as well as massive Guideline sentences, sex offenders now constitute — for the first time — the fourth largest group of offenders in the Bureau of Prisons, costing the public well over $307 million a year just to house.¹

Sentencing