Restoring the Criminal Jury Trial
Courtroom sketch courtesy of the Author
I. The Disappearance.
A. The Lesson of the Pandemic.
Covid-19 has impacted the criminal justice system tremendously. Operations have slowed to a crawl across the country as courts have adjusted to new and difficult conditions. The quintessential proceeding of the criminal justice system — the jury trial — has become almost impossible to conduct, and many jurisdictions have gone for many months without any trials. A jury trial requires bringing a large number of people, including lay members of the public, into close proximity for hour upon hour, and thus cannot be conducted with security or normality in the era of mask-wearing and social distancing.
But perhaps the most striking aspect of the criminal system during this pandemic is that it has not completely broken down. That is, while its operations have been impacted, and while criminal trials have been canceled by the thousands, there has not been a wholesale failure of the system. It has continued to limp along much as before. The total absence of trials has not been fatal to the system.
The oddity of this should not be ignored. A health care system could not function without patient evaluations; a university could not operate without lectures or seminars; a sports league could not operate without games. Yet somehow our criminal justice system has continued to operate for a year — sputteringly, ineffectively, to be sure — without trials.
B. A System of Pleas.
This points to one secret of criminal justice in the United States, understood by virtually all participants in the system but perhaps not grasped by those whose knowledge comes from countless novels, televisions series, and movies depicting courtroom drama. The pinnacle of our justice system — the adversarial jury trial — almost never occurs. Our justice system is the result of hundreds of years of evolution through the wisdom of the common law combined thousands of statutes and rules governing procedure produced by legislators and judges. We regard this system of adversarial litigation combined with a jury trial subject to rules of procedure and evidence as the best possible way of reaching the truth. Yet such trials are relative rarities. Approximately ninety-five percent of criminal convictions, if not more, are the result of guilty pleas (usually negotiated pleas) rather than jury trials. Almost no one goes to trial. As the Supreme Court has stated, “criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.” Lafler v. Cooper, 566 U.S. 156 (2012).
II. Reasons for the Disappearance.
I propose two straightforward solutions to return jury trials to the heart of our criminal justice system. But before setting those out, we must begin with an analysis of the potential causes of the decline and of whether this is indeed a problem in need of a solution. These suggestions will be more comprehensible with a proper understanding of the causes of the problem.
A. Expense.
One systemic answer to the dearth of jury trials is their expense. They are costly to the system itself. Attorneys must spend dozens of hours in preparation and then in the courtroom. That is time that cannot be used for other purposes. The same is true for judges: time spent in trial is time that cannot be used to handle other cases. In the aggregate, more trials means there must be more prosecutors, more defense attorneys, and more judges. The expense of trials extends further: jurors must be brought to court, taken away from their daily lives and ordinary activities, often for days or even weeks at a time. Although they are often paid very little, there is a non-negligible cost to their own lives and economic welfare.
From the perspectives of the individual attorneys, trial is also often deeply inconvenient or financially harmful. Prosecutors are overburdened with caseloads, and each trial means days or even weeks in which the prosecutor cannot make progress in all of his or her other cases: cannot file or respond to motions, cannot communicate with law enforcement, cannot coordinate with victims and witness, but is instead stuck largely incommunicado inside a courtroom for seven or eight hours a day.[i] The same is true of defense attorneys. Public defenders, who handle the largest percentage of cases throughout the country, are chronically overburdened with cases. Other appointed attorneys, paid by the state by the hour, are often subject to restrictive caps on the amount they can be paid for each case, a cap often exceeded even before a trial begins (and thus the trial may be done largely for free). Retained attorneys are often paid primarily by flat fees, paid in advance, and thus will not be paid any more (or paid only by smaller per diems) for the intensive work of trials. For almost all of the professional participants, trial is a disruption and expense. This gives them an incentive, conscious or not, to take steps to avoid a trial.
B. A Defendant’s Decision to Plead.
Yet these incentives are really only a small part of the story. Attorneys pride themselves, and take seriously, the obligation to provide vigorous representation regardless of any contrary financial incentives. And more importantly, the final decision of whether a trial occurs ultimately falls to an individual defendant. The explanation of the disappearance of jury trials must therefore consider the wide variety of reasons why a defendant would plead guilty rather than proceeding to trial.
1. Overwhelming proof of guilt.
The simplest reason that defendants plead guilty is that some defendants are both completely guilty and also will certainly be proven to be guilty. The defendant whose image was captured on the surveillance video carrying a TV out a broken store window, who was later found to be hiding that TV in his house, and who confessed that he had stolen the TV: for such a defendant, a trial would likely be a futile exercise with a preordained outcome.
2. Sentencing credit for acceptance of responsibility.
Most defendants plead guilty in order to avoid harsher sentences. The simplest form of this cost-benefit analysis is that defendants, anticipating a loss at trial, wish to receive a more lenient sentence by accepting responsibility and admitting fault. They may wish to avoid the expense (to themselves or even to the witnesses and victims) of going through a trial. Most sentencing regimes offer some relatively straightforward credit for a defendant who has accepted responsibility (under the federal sentencing guidelines, there is a numerical reduction; other jurisdictions require the sentencing judge to consider acceptance of responsibility) on the theory that (1) such a defendant has taken the first step toward becoming a reduced threat of future criminal activity and (2) such a defendant has saved the system a significant expense, and deserves reward for that.
3. Avoidance of risk.
Other defendants plead guilty because it is much less risky than going to trial. This is perhaps the prime driver for guilty pleas. A defendant trades a slight hope for success (complete acquittal or conviction only on minor charges) for the certainty of a sentence somewhere in the middle to avoid the worst-case scenario of complete conviction and punishment to the maximum extent of the law.
i. Hierarchical charges.
To analyze these cost-benefit or risk-weighing decisions, it is important to understand five quirks of our judicial system. Not all of these are present in every jurisdiction (there are more than 51 different legal systems in the country), but I am not aware of any system without any of them. First, many jurisdictions have a hierarchical structure of criminal offenses. The protypical example is homicide. For one basic type of offense - unlawful killing of another human being - there are a variety of potential offenses: aggravated or capital premeditated murder; premeditated or first-degree murder; felony murder (homicide during another dangerous crime); second-degree (knowing but not premeditated) murder; voluntary manslaughter; involuntary manslaughter; reckless homicide; negligent homicide; and so on. These represent increasingly less-serious forms of the same idea, unlawful killing of another person. They are also generally punished progressively less severely.
This basic idea of gradation is applied not just to murder but also to other crimes. Theft crimes are often graded based on the amount of money taken. Drug crimes are graded based on the quantity of drugs. Assault crimes are graded based on the implements or weapons used and the severity of any injuries suffered by the victim. Again, the graduated set of punishments becomes progressively less harsh with smaller amounts or smaller harms.
ii. Availability of multiple charges.
The second quirk is that any single criminal episode will likely involve more than one potential violation of law.[ii] The defendant who stole a TV from a store may have technically committed the offenses of theft, trespassing, assault (if a security guard was present), and reckless driving as he left the scene. While all these offenses arise from the same basic criminal conduct, it may be that they can all be charged separately and even all punished separately. A similar logic applies for certain crimes that have potential enhancing circumstances provided by law. For example, many drug crimes are subject to greater punishment when they occur within a certain range of a school or park. Other crimes are punished more harshly if the defendant possessed a weapon at the time of the offense, whether or not the weapon was used.
iii. Mandatory minimums.
The third quirk is provided by mandatory minimums — certain offenses for which the law does not allow sentences below a certain amount. This is often the case (in the federal system, for example) with certain drug quantities. A conviction for the sale of 28 grams of crack cocaine carries with it an automatic sentence of five years. Even the most kindly-disposed judge has no power to provide a lower sentence, if the defendant is actually convicted of a qualifying offense. These mandatory minimums, representative of decades of tough-on-crime legislation, are particularly prevalent in cases involving drugs and firearms.
iv. Prosecutorial discretion in charging and resolution.
The fourth quirk is that the three preceding quirks are all within the control of the prosecutor.[iii] That is, a prosecutor can choose to pursue charges of first-degree murder or second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter; can choose to charge a school zone enhancement or a firearms enhancement or to charge merely the basic offense; can choose to charge multiple crimes arising out a single episode or just a single crime. Such decisions are made through a combination of individual discretion and office policy. Even more importantly, perhaps, the prosecutor has the ability to agree to reduced or limited charges as part of a plea agreement. Having initially charged first-degree murder, a prosecutor can agree to resolve a case with a plea to second-degree murder. A prosecutor can agree to drop a school zone enhancement and guarantee of increased punishment as part of a negotiated settlement. A prosecutor can agree not to seek consecutive sentences for multiple criminal violations arising out of the same incident. Beyond office policy, there is little law limiting a prosecutor’s power in making these decisions between harshness and lenience. It is this enormous leverage that has most caused the jury trial to disappear: the prosecutor has a nearly-limitless arsenal of carrots and sticks with which to encourage a defendant to plead guilty prior to trial.
v. Absence of judicial discretion.
Fifth, and finally, the sentencing judge generally does not have the same level of discretion as to these issues, particularly after a guilty verdict. That is, if a defendant is convicted of first-degree murder, the sentencing judge must give a first-degree murder sentence even if he thinks otherwise a second-degree murder sentence might be more appropriate. This is true even if, prior to the trial, the prosecutor offered (and the defendant rejected) a plea to second-degree murder. Similarly, a prosecutor may offer to drop a school zone enhancement, for example, in exchange for a plea; but if a case goes to trial, and the defendant is convicted of a drug offense in the proximity of a school zone, the judge has no option to disregard that offense.
This point is worth emphasizing given that it may conflict with the public perception of the relative institutional powers of judges and prosecutors. Prosecutors have decision-making power, either in obtaining an initial charge or in determining whether to negotiate down to less serious charges, that can drastically reduce a defendant’s potential sentence. That power is essentially unreviewable by courts and can be exercised for any of a multitude of reasons. Prosecutors can say, and do say, “The defendant has technically committed a more serious crime but I conclude that justice is better served by punishing him only for a less serious crime.” A judge, by contrast, considering a defendant who has been found guilty after trial of that offense, has no such power. Other than in very unusual circumstances, if a judge concludes that a defendant has technically committed a crime, as found by the jury, the judge has no ability to impose a sentence instead for a lesser crime. In this sense, the prosecutor’s office is much more powerful than the judge in determining the severity of punishments.
vi. Conclusions.
Three conclusions should be drawn from these premises: (1) there is often a tremendous range of potential sentences available under law for any given criminal conduct; (2) the range of sentences can be manipulated through agreement of the parties; and (3) if a defendant goes to trial, and loses, then the sentencing judge does not have the same flexibility in imposing a sentence. This provides a tremendous incentive for a defendant to resolve a case by means of a negotiated plea agreement. Going to trial and losing can be catastrophic when compared to the outcomes achievable through negotiated resolution. Trials generally occur only in one of three circumstances: (1) a very serious crime where the prosecution will not agree to any sentence that will not incapacitate the defendant for a long time, and the defendant has no incentive to reach such an agreement; (2) a defendant who rejects a plea deal for some reason other than an evaluation of costs and benefits, such an innocent defendant who will never take any plea deal; and (3) when the two sides have dramatically different views of the likely outcome of a trial.
A few important clarifications. First, these considerations operate regardless of whether a defendant is actually “guilty” or not. For a small minority of defendants, the decision of whether to plead guilty or innocent depends solely on their factual guilt. Some defendants will never plead guilty to something they did not do; other defendants (though this is rare) will plead guilty out of remorse regardless of the precise charges or sentence on offer. For the vast majority of defendants, though, decisions are subject to a cost-benefit analysis. Consider a defendant facing a charge that can carry a sentence of ten years in prison. The defendant knows that (a) he did not actually commit the crime; (b) believes that a jury will likely conclude that he did not commit the crime; but (c) there is enough suspicious evidence connecting him to the crime that it is not impossible that a jury could find him guilty. Suppose that defendant were to be offered a plea agreement that would carry only four years of probation. Under a cost-benefit analysis, even an innocent defendant would be tempted to accept four years of probation, however inconvenient that might be, to avoid any chance (even if only a small chance) of the life-altering disaster of being taken away from job, family, friends, and incarcerated in a dangerous prison for ten years of his life. This cost-benefit analysis is exactly the same whether the defendant knows he is guilty or not. While this is a serious example, many defendants face a version of this decision.[iv]
Second, this analysis does not center on any accusation that prosecutors are making decisions unethically or improperly. This is merely the way the system operates under governing statutes and applicable rules. The system has given them immense power, and it is hardly surprising that they exercise that power to further their institutional objectives.
III. Solutions to the Problem.
A. Abandonment of the Jury Trial; Reform of Plea Bargaining.
With this explanation of the causes of the avoidance of jury trials in mind, it is possible to consider solutions. Broadly speaking, there are two separate types of solutions. One is to formally recognize that the historic trial system has disappeared forever. On this view, we should instead recognize that we fundamentally have a negotiation / plea system, and seek instead to reform that system, which is now largely unregulated. That is, we have hundreds of specific and granular rules governing what can happen at a trial: what arguments can be made, what witnesses can be presented, what evidence is permissible, and so on. Vast bodies of law have developed about what information heard out of court can be repeated in court (the rule against hearsay). Another body of law governing the situations in which prior misdeeds by a defendant or witness can be brought into the courtroom is equally large. Jurors are given very precise instructions as to what exactly they can (or cannot) consider in reaching a decision. And decisions by trial courts on these issues are subject to close oversight by appellate courts by lawyers trained on the minutiae of these doctrines.
By contrast, the procedure and content of plea negotiations are largely unregulated and subject to little oversight. What information is relevant, how that information is evaluated, what considerations are appropriate, how those considerations are weighed against each other — all of those are decided in a largely ad hoc way, with wide variation from one attorney to another and one jurisdiction to another. There are few, if any, rules governing this informal process.
This idea is not that the rules of evidence and procedure developed for trial should simply be imported into the plea negotiation process. It is, rather, that new rules and procedures, developed outside of the pressures of litigation in individual cases, should be constructed, with goals of providing fair and equitable resolutions in a way that can be confirmed and reviewed.
B. Resurrection of the Jury Trial.
Yet this seems needlessly defeatist. The jury trial has been regarded for centuries as one of the bulwarks of liberty. Its techniques and procedures incorporate the accumulated wisdom of generations of thinkers on issues of accurate fact-finding. And its fundamental principle — that hugely consequential decisions are best left in the hands of citizens, drawn at random from the local population — is one that resonates with democratic principles. As a country we resist oppressive governmental authority and locate wisdom in the cumulative voice of citizens. As the Supreme Court once wrote:
The guarantees of jury trial in the Federal and State Constitutions reflect a profound judgment about the way in which law should be enforced and justice administered. A right to jury trial is granted to criminal defendants in order to prevent oppression by the Government. Those who wrote our constitutions knew from history and experience that it was necessary to protect against unfounded criminal charges brought to eliminate enemies and against judges too responsive to the voice of higher authority.... If the defendant preferred the common-sense judgment of a jury to the more tutored but perhaps less sympathetic reaction of the single judge, he was to have it. Beyond this, the jury trial provisions in the Federal and State Constitutions reflect a fundamental decision about the exercise of official power—a reluctance to entrust plenary powers over the life and liberty of the citizen to one judge or to a group of judges. Fear of unchecked power, so typical of our State and Federal Governments in other respects, found expression in the criminal law in this insistence upon community participation in the determination of guilt or innocence.
Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 155–56 (1968).
Commentators have developed dozens of fixes for the jury trial system. And while no single fix will cure the problems identified above, I offer here two suggestions that are eminently worthy of consideration and would have an immediate ameliorative impact on the process.
1. Fixed Trial Penalty.
First, the penalty for a defendant who goes to trial, instead of pleading guilty prior to trial, should be reduced and, most importantly, standardized. I would propose a system along the following lines: in every case, before a trial occurs, a prosecutor will make a best and final offer. That offer must be reduced to writing. If the defendant rejects that offer, proceeds to trial, and is convicted, the maximum sentence that can be imposed on that defendant is a multiple (perhaps 125%) of the final plea offer. A defendant who rejects a ten-year prison sentence, and is then convicted by a jury, will face a maximum of 12.5 years in prison.[v]
This proposal retains a measurable benefit for a defendant who knows he is guilty and will be convicted at trial. If he is almost sure he will be sentenced to 12.5 years in prison if he goes to trial, he will consider entering a plea that would shave 2.5 years off that sentence. This reduction will also reflect the value to the prosecutor’s office of not having to prepare for trial, the value to the victims (if any) of not having to suffer the unpleasantness of trial, the value to society of a defendant admitting guilt and accepting responsibility, and the value to the court system of reducing the cost of the trial.
This obviously represents a significant difference from current practice, where defendants often decide between a plea offer and a potential sentence after trial that differ by a factor of two, three, or even more (or a plea of probation compared with a certainty of incarceration after trial). I have represented defendants who were offered a sentence via plea of less than a year of probation, where if they went to trial and lost they would have received mandatory six- or even twelve-year sentences to be served in prison. Yet there is no good reason that the incentive for pleading guilty should be so large.
This proposal addresses a contradiction in the current system. A prosecutor, in making a plea offer, bases his or her offer on an evaluation of what severity of sentence is in the interest of the public. Prosecutors should not (and presumably are not) offering plea deals that depart significantly from what is in the interest of justice. If a prosecutor offers a ten-year sentence, then that reflects a judgment by the prosecutor that a sentence greatly in excess of that would be unnecessarily punitive (and that a sentence below that would be unnecessarily lenient). With that decision having been made, it is counter-intuitive that a defendant could then receive a twenty- or thirty-year sentence — a sentence that thus exceeds by an order of magnitude what was already determined to be in the public interest by the prosecutor. Such a sentence would seem, in light of the prosecutor’s earlier assessment, to be excessive. (To look at it another way, a defendant’s refusal to plead guilty and instead to proceed to trial can hardly be judged to have rendered his or her crime deserving of twice as much punishment.)[vi]
2. Juror empowerment.
The second proposal addresses the fact that many sentences depend on the exact statute found to have been violated in a hierarchical system of offenses. As noted above, the prosecutor has no obligation to charge the most serious offense that can be technically proven. The prosecutor can decide whether justice, rather than a technical reading of the statutory language, supports a less-serious charge. Yet in almost every jurisdiction, a jury does not have the same power. Juries are generally informed that they must return a guilty verdict on the most serious offense for which the evidence is sufficient beyond a reasonable doubt. This proposal is to inform juries that they are not required to convict on the most serious offense actually proven, but can instead convict on a lesser offense if that is more consistent with their evaluation of the justice of the case.[vii] Similarly, they will be given the independent power to reject any conclusions that would trigger a mandatory minimum, even if those triggering facts were proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Consider a defendant charged with a drug crime that took place within 1,000 feet of a school. Under current law, in many jurisdictions on sufficient proof a jury would be required to find the defendant not only guilty of the underlying drug crime but also a school zone enhancement. Yet, while the jury might conclude that the allegation that the offense occurred within 1,000 feet of a school had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the jury under this proposal would be explicitly told that it had the power to decline to convict on that allegation: perhaps because the offense happened on a summer weekend when no child had been at the school for days or because the jury believed that it unfair to impose additional penalties on crimes occurring in urban areas versus suburban ones.[viii] In other words, the same discretionary decisions that a prosecutor is empowered to make — to reduce the seriousness of the offense charged due to considerations of fairness and equality and not just mechanical application of the law — would now be also given to the jury.[ix]
C. Conclusion.
These proposals would not be without significant cost. They would change the nature of plea negotiations. They would result in many more trials, requiring more jurors, more courtrooms, and even more judges. Yet there is a growing consensus on all sides that our uniquely incarcerative system is both counterproductive and hugely expensive (it costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to incarcerate an individual), and reductions caused by these reforms might well pay for themselves. And even if that were not so, given that an individual’s liberty is supposedly of the highest value in our country, this is no place to be cutting corners for economic reasons.[x] In my view, unless we are simply to admit failure, every effort should be made to ensure that our justice system, which is historically and philosophically predicated on the fact-finding and democratic institution of the jury trial, is one in which jury trials are not just an anomaly, but an everyday and essential part of the administration of justice.
[i] On the other hand, many attorneys enjoy trials and regard them as valuable experiences, thus somewhat counteracting these incentives.
[ii] This problem is less severe in systems, like the federal system, that sentence based on “real conduct” rather than the number of offenses charged, although even then there is a significant amount of fact bargaining, which serves much of the same purpose.
[iii] Technically, initial charging decisions often are the province of a grand jury, but grand juries almost always follow the guidance of the prosecutors.
[iv] And the most extreme version of this interacts with our system’s continued reliance on bail and pre-trial detention. Many defendants, either because of the nature of their charges or more often their lack of financial resources, are held in custody prior to trial. Even a $100 or $1000 bond is beyond the means for some defendants. Yet the ultimate plea offer from the prosecutor may be to a non-incarcerative sentence. That is, a defendant may end up choosing between waiting in jail for trial (something that can take many months or even years because of pre-trial litigation and scheduling difficulties) and pleading guilty to a probationary sentence and being released immediately. To anyone who does not interact with the system regularly, the idea — pleading guilty to get _out_ of custody — seems self-evidently wrongheaded. Yet it happens on a daily basis in courtrooms across the country. Again, many completely-innocent defendants, aware that the only option that would allow them to immediately return to their family, jobs, and community is to enter a guilty plea, will do so.
[v] I am not certain that 125% is the correct multiplier. Perhaps 150% would be more appropriate. The system in England and Wales provides a maximum reduction of one-third for a guilty plea, which would equate to a trial penalty of 150%.
[vi] It is possible that this proposal would have the effect of increasing the severity of plea offers, as prosecutors know that their offers would also limit the punishment available after trial. While that might be a problem, it is at least a very different one, and would not result in innocent defendants accepting plea offers out of sheer risk-aversion.
Further elaboration would be required in systems, such as the federal system, where plea offers often are not to specific terms of sentence, but rather are for agreement as to certain facts and the applicability of certain sentencing guideline provisions. There is no reason, however, that the fixed-percentage trial penalty principle could not be adapted to this context by requiring the plea offers to include more specific and complete guideline calculations, which could be used as the starting point for the trial penalty.
[vii] In many jurisdictions, juries already have some version of this power through the doctrine of jury nullification. However, almost no jurisdiction actually tells them of this power, instead indicating to them that they are required to find the most serious offense proven.
[viii] Due to this focus on distance from schools, a much larger portion of urban areas falls within drug-free school zones than suburban areas. This means that a defendant living in a city is more likely to be subject to higher penalties, for the same basic conduct, than a defendant living in a suburb or rural area. Given the demographics of the country, that differential has a predictable consequence for people of color and less-affluent people, who are statistically more likely to live in dense areas of a city.
[ix] There would be the further question of whether the jury should be told of the practical consequences (i.e., the effect on the likely punishment) of these different outcomes. I am not certain about that issue.
[x] In other words, I anticipate that allowing for greater rationality and discretion throughout the system would serve to reduce over-incarceration. But that is merely a prediction. The goal of these proposals is not solely, or even primarily, to reduce incarceration; rather, it is to ensure that punishment follows after reliable fact-finding consistent with our legal traditions and democratic commitments, rather than defendants making decisions primarily on the basis of an oppressive cost-benefit analysis.
For further reading:
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers & Foundation for Criminal Justice, The Trial Penalty: The Sixth Amendment Right to Trial on the Verge of Extinction and How to Save it (2018), available at https://www.nacdl.org/trialpenaltyreport/
Jed S. Rakoff, Why Innocent People Plead Guilty, N.Y. Rev. Books, Nov. 20, 2014, available at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/
Clark Neily, Jury Empowerment as an Antidote to Coercive Plea Bargaining, 31 Fed.Sent.R. 284, 2019 WL 2453395 (2019)
Russell D. Covey, Fixed Justice: Reforming Plea Bargaining with Plea-Based Ceilings, 82 Tul. L. Rev. 1237 (2008)
Brian D. Johnson, Trials and Tribulations: The Trial Tax and the Process of Punishment, 48 Crime & Just. 313, 344 (2019)
John F. Pfaff, Locked In (2017)
Emily Bazelon, Charged (2019)
Prison Policy Initiative, “Fighting against excessive and ineffective geography-based penalties,” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/zones.html
Rachel Elise Barkow, Prisoners of Politics (2020)
Vikrant P. Reddy, R. Jordan Richardson, Why the Founders Cherished the Jury, 31 Fed.Sent.R. 316, 2019 WL 2453399 (2019)
Laura I. Appleman, The Plea Jury, 85 Ind. L.J. 731, 750 (2010)
Jonathan Harwell is a graduate of Williams College, Oxford University, and Harvard Law School. He has practiced as a criminal defense lawyer for fifteen years in Massachusetts and Tennessee. He is currently an assistant public defender.
(c) 2021 Jonathan Harwell