A study published earlier this year in the peer-reviewed journal Comprehensive Psychiatry took a careful look at a question that often goes muddled in the courtroom: does using cannabis make you cognitively impaired in some lasting, measurable way or does that depend entirely on how a person uses it? The answer the researchers reached, simplified: […]
Category Archives: Hot Takes
By Deandra Grant | Deandra Grant Law | Dallas, Texas On May 28, 2026, the United States Supreme Court reversed the conviction and death sentence of Terry Pitchford, a Black man on Mississippi’s death row, ruling 5-4 that the state trial court never properly evaluated his claim that prosecutors had unconstitutionally struck black jurors at […]
On May 21, 2026, U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel sentenced Aimee Bock, the founder and executive director of the Minnesota nonprofit Feeding Our Future, to 500 months in federal prison (just over 41 years) for her lead role in a $250 million scheme to defraud a federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic. […]
This month Cybergenetics (the company behind the TrueAllele probabilistic genotyping system) announced the launch of the TrueAllele Investigative Database (TA-ID), a tool built to re-examine DNA evidence that crime labs previously set aside as “inconclusive”: the low-level, partial, degraded, and mixed samples that traditional analysis could not search. The pitch is that thousands of stalled […]
On May 13, 2026, the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously vacated Alex Murdaugh’s 2023 double-murder conviction and ordered a new trial. The 5-0 opinion did not reach the merits of the murder case. It reached the conduct of Mary Rebecca “Becky” Hill, the Colleton County Clerk of Court who served during the six-week trial. The […]
On April 24, 2026, the en banc Fifth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction that had kept Senate Bill 4 (the 2023 statute creating new state criminal offenses for unlawful entry into Texas) on ice for nearly three years. The 10–7 ruling did not decide whether SB 4 is constitutional. It held that the plaintiffs (Las […]
On May 1, 2026, the Texas Supreme Court lifted the injunction that had blocked the Department of State Health Services from enforcing its classification of Delta-8 THC as a Schedule I controlled substance. Headlines declared Delta-8 effectively banned. The hemp industry reacted immediately. So did the confusion. The ruling is significant. But what it actually […]
This week, Notre Dame Law School is hosting its second annual Death Penalty Abolition Week. Among the speakers are two men who, between them, spent nearly 60 years on death row for crimes they did not commit. Elwood Jones was convicted of aggravated murder in Ohio in 1996 and sentenced to death. He spent 27 […]
In early March 2026, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Mike Lee (R-UT) reintroduced two pieces of bipartisan criminal justice legislation: the Smarter Sentencing Act and its companion, the Smarter Pretrial Detention for Drug Charges Act. The fact that a Democratic Senate whip and one of the Senate’s most conservative members keep reintroducing this bill together […]
On December 29, 2024, Brianna Longoria (a California woman in Phoenix for her wedding) was pulled over, arrested for DUI, and booked into jail. Her breathalyzer result: triple zeros. Her blood test: zero alcohol, zero drugs. The red light violation that justified the stop: later voided by the arresting officer herself after reviewing body camera […]