The U.S. has embraced a ‘tough on crime’ narrative since the 1980s, and it’s reflected in the tripling of the nation’s jail population since that time. Most of the increase in jail population growth, however, is due to those detained pretrial. The courts explain this as a necessity to deterring failure to appear and new criminal activity by the individual. The data offers a different argument.
In 1987, the Supreme Court held that pretrial detention did not violate due process and is therefore constitutional. However, pretrial detention continues to raise humanitarian and justice concerns while also imposing serious and quantifiable costs on detained individuals, which, in turn, imposes economic and social costs on communities.
In the United States, federal regulations protect the autonomy of individuals participating in research. That protection often takes the form of insisting that a potential participant provides informed consent before they can be randomized to one or another treatment. Sometimes, however, it is possible to proceed without eliciting informed consent from study participants. This fourth “Ethics of RCTs in the Law” series blog posts discusses the complexities of the informed consent process and the ethical considerations associated with research in a legal setting.
Marriage in the U.S. typically requires a marriage license, payment of a nominal fee, and often a short waiting period from the license signing to marriage. Divorce, on the other hand, typically involves lawyers; courthouse visits; comparatively higher fees; and, in some cases, antiquated roadblocks just to implement this federal constitutional right. The result is that divorce can be an access-to-justice issue for low-income individuals who are faced with trying to pay for a lawyer they cannot afford or navigate unnecessarily complex divorce filing procedures on their own.
While specialized “problem-solving” courts have become common, there is still no equivalent civil mental health court in Massachusetts to handle complex issues like civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment. The gap exposes the potential for the Commonwealth to learn from other states leading reform of the civil judicial system in this area and to pilot such a court and evaluate its impact through a randomized controlled trial.
Rogers hearings, the Massachusetts ruling designed to protect patient autonomy in involuntary psychiatric treatment, often cause harmful delays in treatment. Two reforms that propose shifting responsibility to Administrative Law Judges and to mental health professionals respectively, however, could help bring timely treatment and better advocacy.
In Massachusetts, involuntarily committed psychiatric patients with schizophrenia often face systemic barriers to timely treatment from procedural inefficiencies that prioritize legal formalities over patient well-being. To address this access to justice challenge, the Commonwealth could implement reforms to streamline the legal process while preserving patient rights.
The Access to Justice Lab published a newly released study of Washington, D.C. mothers involved in Child Protective Services demonstrating that government-funded child welfare programs are effective in reducing child neglect cases by prioritizing economic support to overcome conditions caused by poverty.
An individual’s First Appearance before a court in a criminal case has significant impacts on the defendant’s freedom and the costs that a criminal trial can bear on the defendant’s life, before it even begins. However, many states still begin the trial process without an offer of counsel. But what happens if defendants DO have counsel at First Appearances?
Government websites, when effective, can make the process of filing for bankruptcy, divorce, restraining orders and other common legal requests easier. Unfortunately, the quality of these websites varies significantly with many state and federal sites’ lack of accessibility reflecting limited access to justice for their users. Fixing these websites is a relatively easy and inexpensive method to expand accessibility to court systems and services, provided the willpower is there.
