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Adam Liptak's article in The New York Times described America's extraordinary incarceration rate, a rate clearly outstripping that of any industrialized country. But Liptak overstates the case when he talks about the relationship between incarceration and the crime rate. He notes that, there is ''little question'' that the high incarceration rate ...

On April 18, the L.A. Times reported the United States Attorney was facing criticism from line prosecutors who said that they were being pressured to file ''relatively insignificant criminal cases'' for the purpose of driving up statistics that would lead to increased federal funding. The United States Attorney denied the accusation. Whatever the ...

[Nancy Gertner] Kenji Yoshino asks whether it is better to eliminate peremptory challenges altogether rather than risk their use in a discriminatory fashion. I understand the problem; Snyder, the Supreme Court's recent peremptory challenge case, dramatized it. Still, because of what I know of the real world of criminal trials, I would not throw ...

I am an unlikely blogger. I am a United States District Court judge for the District of Massachusetts. I have been a judge since 1994, and have taught Sentencing at the Yale Law School for the past nine years. (Emily Bazelon, in fact, was in my class!)  I have taught discrimination law, and evidence law at Harvard, BU and a number of ...