Renewed War on Drugs, harsher charging policies, stepped-up criminalization of immigrants — in the current climate, joining the NACDL is more important than ever. Members of NACDL help to support the only national organization working at all levels of government to ensure that the voice of the defense bar is heard.
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NACDL is committed to enhancing the capacity of the criminal defense bar to safeguard fundamental constitutional rights.
NACDL harnesses the unique perspectives of NACDL members to advocate for policy and practice improvements in the criminal legal system.
NACDL envisions a society where all individuals receive fair, rational, and humane treatment within the criminal legal system.
NACDL’s mission is to serve as a leader, alongside diverse coalitions, in identifying and reforming flaws and inequities in the criminal legal system, and redressing systemic racism, and ensuring that its members and others in the criminal defense bar are fully equipped to serve all accused persons at the highest level.
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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.
Below are NACDL's comments on Executive Order 14074 on Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety. The policing technologies at issue in the Executive Order create serious harms for individual criminal defendants, their lawyers, and the criminal legal system more broadly. In this comment, NACDL aims to highlight the serious dangers that these technologies pose and propose recommendations for mitigating those dangers.
The impact of fatigue on defendants and their statements can be consequential. The most well-known examples come from false confession cases, where suspects (subsequently exonerated) were convicted based on fabricated statements provided under extreme fatigue and duress. Zlatan Križan and Richard A. Leo discuss sleep deprivation and its effects, and they analyze how sleep deprivation and fatigue can undermine the voluntariness and reliability of statements and confessions.
22nd Annual State Criminal Justice Network Conference August 16-17, 2023 | Held Virtually
Explore the mechanisms that incentivize police to engage in pretextual traffic stops and examine state and local efforts to stop law enforcement from enforcing minor traffic infractions.
We write to ask that you rescind your support, as members of the Virginia Municipal League, for racial profiling practices by Virginia law enforcement—euphemistically known as “pretextual policing”—and to invite you to an informal presentation on this important criminal justice issue.
For decades, law enforcement misconduct has been shrouded in secrecy, hidden behind a “blue wall of silence.” Until independent projects cropped up in 2012, even simple statistics were unknown. From 2020-2023, NACDL’s Full Disclosure Project helped defenders build databases tracking misconduct on over 150,000 law enforcement officers. This report examines how defense lawyers have pioneered the movement to track police misconduct, the impact of their work, and recommendations for other defenders looking to join the movement. [Released September 2023]
This month Julian Hope Wallace reviews The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham.
Chilling insider view of police misconduct: Rampart plea-bargain testimony of Rafael Perez available on-line - Washington, DC (November 30, 2000) -- Talking a man into blowing his own brains out was a good thing to laugh and joke about, according to Rafael Perez, at least if you were a member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division anti-gang unit at the same time Perez was.
The public’s idolization of the law enforcement industry serves as an impediment to reform. It blinds us from addressing the misdeeds of individual bad actors.
This month Lisa J. Steele reviews Duped: Why Innocent People Confess – and Why We Believe Their Confessions by Saul Kassin.
From 2020-2023, NACDL’s Full Disclosure Project disrupted the culture of secrecy that shields law enforcement misconduct by building technology to track law enforcement misconduct, empowering defenders with tools and training, and advocating for greater police transparency and accountability.
NACDL’s Full Disclosure Project co-hosted a 4-day online convening in collaboration with the Invisible Institute and WITNESS in November 2021 to bring together practitioners to discuss the potential benefits and harms of collecting and disseminating policing data and connect data collections efforts with organizing aimed at effecting change. The report aims to share the key principles, tensions and practices that we discussed; help guide ongoing conversations and development of best practices; and inform future project planning and funding decisions. [Released March 2023]
The following articles provide guidance on how to get started for anyone interested in tracking police misconduct. They cover hidden places to look for data, how to create a feasible collection plan, and effective systems for organizing your data. The approaches range from the advanced and involved to the low-tech and simple – so you can apply these methods with whatever resources you have. Whether you're a defender, NGO, or community activist, use these to better track police misconduct in your community.
Before choosing a tool for organizing misconduct data, establish your project scope with a data collection plan. This will identify your priority agencies, data sources, and collaborators. Once you have a data collection plan, consider how you want to store that data.
We simplified the FDP Application's data model and put it into the online spreadsheet called Airtable. Here are instructions on how to use FDP's simplified data model on the free online platform Airtable to track police misconduct data.