Defense counsel can put the heat on a law enforcement officer witness through a persistent and thorough examination. What will intimidate the officer most is being questioned about how he did his job. A careful examination of the officer’s conduct can soften the law enforcement witness into giving defense counsel details she never imagined she could get, or it can make the officer hostile and show him to be unprofessional and prejudiced against the client. Defense attorney Mary Stillinger includes examples from real cases to illustrate.

Defenders start from the proposition that something went wrong with the police case.

But how do things go wrong?

Defense attorneys often point to “one big screw-up” or “one twisted cop” in telling the story of a client’s innocence to a jury. In reality, the best explanation of how things go wrong is usually an “organizational accident” – a lot of small errors that alone would not be enough to cause something to go wrong, but when put together can cause catastrophe.

Presented by: Detective James Trainum (ret.), Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department; and Deja Vishny, Homicide Practice Group Coordinator and Deputy Training Director, Wisconsin State Public Defender

NACDL supports the videotaping of all law enforcement interrogations from beginning to end and calls upon Congress and state legislatures to pass legislation mandating this practice.

Known data projects by government, non-profit, and community organizations that publicly post data, preferably with making individual data points available. 

Join NACDL’s Full Disclosure Project to hear about our new resources for tracking law enforcement misconduct. We've compiled our best practices for beginning or improving your processes of tracking police misconduct data. We’ll cover hidden places to look for data, how to create a feasible collection plan, and effective systems for organizing your data. We’ll show approaches from the advanced and involved to the low-tech and simple - so you can apply these methods with whatever resources you have.

Racially biased policing takes many different forms, from elevated police presences in the neighborhoods of marginalized communities, to disproportionate street and vehicle stops and searches, to use of force, to outright expressions of racism within some police departments.

Information and reports related to recording of interrogations.

1-08-2073 (Ill. App.)

Citing wrongful convictions due to mistaken eyewitness identification and the urgent need to reform traditional police eyewitness identification procedures, NACDL, in conjunction with the MacArthur Justice Center of the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law, filed a civil lawsuit against the Illinois police departments who participated in a controversial study of eyewitnesses and police lineups.

The Full Disclosure Project aims to disrupt the culture of secrecy that systematically and pervasively shields law enforcement misconduct by changing police secrecy laws and empowering the defense community to track police misconduct.

The criminal defense community is uniquely positioned to lead the reform efforts around law enforcement accountability and misconduct. 

Coalition letter to members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees regarding proposed reforms to federal forfeiture law.

If police credibility is a critical issue at trial, the defense needs jurors to believe one of two possibilities – the police officers are not credible either because they are mistaken or because they are dishonest. Are the prospective jurors open to the idea that police officers will lie under oath? What hypotheticals can defense counsel use to educate the members of the venire while simultaneously searching for cause challenges?

2012

Predictive policing encompasses the surveillance technologies, tools, and methods employed to visualize crime, target “at-risk” individuals and groups, map physical locations, track digital communications, and collect data on individuals and communities.