High school students visit Georgetown Law on February 13.
In the spring of 2018, Professor Shon Hopwood was driving through Tennessee to visit a client when the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) — a nonprofit working towards criminal justice reform — asked him to reach out to a man named Matthew Charles.
Almost half of all African American men have been arrested by age 23. One in three have a felony conviction. More than 500,000 are currently incarcerated. Professor Paul Butler knows this, because as a former federal prosecutor, it was his job to lock up black men. But Butler, a black man, is well aware that his own resume (which also includes Georgetown Law professor and a J.D. from Harvard) hasn’t insulated him from police bias.
Tiauna Mathieu (L’19) was inspired to become a lawyer, she says, in a sixth grade law and government class where half of the class served as the prosecution and half served as the defense.
When Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein first became a prosecutor nearly 30 years ago, a criminal investigation of a business might have entailed executing a search warrant, going into a building, and carting out boxes of documents to review as potential evidence. Today, such records are stored in digital formats, possibly in foreign countries, generated by employees (and potential perpetrators) who might not even be on site.
When James Forman Jr., a former Georgetown Law and current Yale Law faculty member, was working as a public defender in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, he represented a 15-year-old client named Brandon who had pled guilty to gun and marijuana possession. Forman was requesting probation; the prosecutor wanted Brandon sent to Oak Hill, D.C.’s now-notorious juvenile facility. The judge chose Oak Hill — to Forman’s fury. The same racial injustice that motivated him to become a public defender, he realized, was being used to lock his client away.
The jury is still out (so to speak) on whether justice was served Wednesday night at Georgetown Law’s Hart Auditorium. But those who witnessed — and participated in — the Theater of Law production of a scene from Aeschylus’ Eumenides could all agree that the night was a moving and thought-provoking success.
Students and graduate fellows at Georgetown Law's Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, directed by Professor Brian Wolfman, have secured a victory for a Memphis man who spent 17 years in prison — more than seven years greater than the maximum statutory sentence — for unlawful possession of ammunition.
“This is an area in urgent need of congressional action,” says Georgetown Law Professor Laura Donohue, who recently testified before Congress on the topic of warrantless searches of electronic devices at U.S. borders.
Ten days after the Supreme Court decided Carpenter v. United States — holding that the government’s acquisition of a criminal defendant’s historical cell phone records was a Fourth Amendment search — a group of experts gathered at Georgetown Law…
The story of Professor Shon Hopwood’s astounding life journey from federal prisoner to Georgetown Law professor has been told many times. Today, Hopwood — who joined the Georgetown Law faculty last year — works for criminal justice reform and prison…
