weekly
This week’s edition is now available:
As one might expect this time of year, since the last edition there have been few notable opinions. Most notable is the Third Circuit’s opinion in Zachary Wilson v. Beard that upholds the district court’s grant of relief under Brady. In Wilson trial counsel for the Commonwealth failed to turn over large amounts of impeachment evidence. The suppressed materials later surfaced and dramatically undermined both the Commonwealth’s case and its chief witnesses against Wilson.
As happens semi-regularly, a few opinions were missed last edition because they had not yet been uploaded to Lexis & Westlaw. Two cases from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals fall areespecially notable. The CCA in David Dwayne Riley v. State ordered a new trial as “the trial court should have given the jury a limiting instruction regarding the proper use of evidence about Riley’s prior convictions.” The other decision, Kim Vanpelt v. State, is not noted or the holdings in the case, but rather the creative lawyering of the Appellant’s counsel which may provide some readers with ideas for their own appellate litigation endeavors. Unfortunately, Alabama , unlike every other appellate jurisdiction in the nation, does not provide links to its opinions; Lexisone.com has all the opinions at no costs.
In the news DPIC reports that “twenty-seven people were exonerated and released from prison this year, including some who had been on death row, according to a new report from The Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people.” Likewise DPIC notes that “county estimates in Texas indicate that the death penalty system is much more expensive than sentencing inmates to life imprisonment.”
As always, thanks for reading. – k
