Additions to Grits' Reading Pile: On prosecutors, pretrial detention, plea bargaining, and more

Let's add a few items to Grits' reading pile, and perhaps to your own. First,

On pretrial detention

• Laura and John Arnold Foundation: "Investigating the Impact of Pretrial Detention on Sentencing Outcomes"
• From D Magazine: "Trapped in Lew Sterret: Dallas County is being sued over the constitutionality of its bail system. But what's it like to actually go to jail?"
• See an academic paper on "Pretrial Detention and the Decision to Impose Bail in Southern California"
• From the UK, here's a defense of supplementing human judgments with artificial intelligence in pretrial detention decisions.

On Prosecutors
David Alan Sklansky says the least understood "problem with prosecutors" is the ambiguity of their role. Here's a brief item on "Post-conviction Prosecutorial Duties."

On Forensics
Brandon Garrett and Chris Fabricant analyzed 229 Daubert rulings (admitting scientific or expert evidence) purporting to assess the "reliability" of forensic evidence and found that the "reliability test" is seldom applied and almost never used to exclude potentially unreliable testimony.

On Instructing Juries
See an interesting proposal for fixing known flaws in common jury instructions surrounding "beyond a reasonable doubt" by articulating for their jury their relative strength compared to lower burden-of-proof thresholds, like "preponderance" or "clear and convincing."

On the Fourth Amendment
The title evokes one of the most vexing legal questions of the digital age: "The Third Party Doctrine and the Future of the Cloud." Can't wait for Carpenter to come out!

On Plea Bargains
A coupla items here:

• In Australia, plea bargaining is governed by standardized rules overseen by judges, not by prosecutors. Here's an article titled, "Plea Bargaining: From Patent Unfairness to Transparent Justice," suggesting how that might work in the United States.
• Will have to read it, but from the abstract I'm not sure I agree with this one: "Eradicating Assembly Line Justice: An Opportunity Lost by the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Standards." Hard to ask one's client's to sit in jail longer on principle. After all, it's not like the lawyer has to sit in jail with them. Seems like there have to be better solutions.

On Competency Restoration
This was a long-time Grits hobby horse to which of late I haven't had the bandwidth to pay much attention. But I've long been a fan of at least testing outpatient models - mainly as an expression of my lack of confidence that the Texas Legislature will ever sufficiently fund forensic beds at state mental hospitals - and have regretted that Texas never doubled down on that strategy after testing it in pilot programs. So I'm interested to read this academic offering from Susan McMahon out of Georgetown Law titled, "Reforming Competence Restoration Statutes: An Outpatient Model." Texas' failed system for competency restoration at state mental hospitals has been underfunded to the point of crisis since at least the earliest days of this humble opuscule. Maybe she can point to a better path.