Courts cannot evaluate trial errors without imagining what should have happened instead. That is easy to overlook, but it is central to claims involving prosecutorial misconduct, suppressed evidence, ineffective assistance of counsel, and other trial defects. The Richard Glossip case shows why this matters. At Glossip’s second murder trial, the prosecution’s case depended heavily on…
Coerced confessions are dangerous evidence. They can appear powerful to jurors even when they are unreliable, and they can distort the jury’s understanding of the entire case. For that reason, courts must take coerced confession evidence seriously. But not every improperly admitted confession changes the outcome of a trial. The case of Texas v. Bobby…
Some trial errors are obviously harmful. Others are obviously harmless. The hardest cases fall in between. Arizona v. Fulminante is one of those cases. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the admission of Fulminante’s coerced confession was subject to harmless error analysis, but that the error was not harmless in his case. The decision became…
Jury instructions are not just formal language read at the end of trial. They tell jurors what legal standard governs the case. When the instructions change, the same facts may produce a different verdict. The Commonwealth v. Berkowitz trial provides a useful example. The case involved a rape prosecution in Pennsylvania where the victim did…
Jury instructions matter because they tell jurors what legal rule to apply. In most cases, the same evidence may look different depending on the legal standard the jury is asked to use. United States v. King provides a useful example. The case involved an insanity defense, and Professor Rita James Simon later used the case…
Some trial errors are devastating. Others are real errors but do not substantially affect the outcome. A valid method for measuring trial fairness must be able to tell the difference. David Leroy Washington’s case produced one of the most important criminal procedure decisions in American law: Strickland v. Washington. The case established the modern framework…
In capital sentencing, the jury’s task is not only to decide whether the defendant committed a terrible crime. It must decide whether that person should live or die. That decision requires the full story. George Porter was sentenced to death in Florida after his lawyer failed to present important mitigation evidence about his life. Porter’s…
Marion Wilson’s life began in instability and violence long before it ended in a Georgia execution chamber. His case is often remembered for the crime that brought him to death row, but its legal significance lies elsewhere—in what the courts concluded could not be shown about his life, and what that failure ultimately cost him….
On April 25, 2025, Fair Trial Analysis filed an Amicus Curiae Brief in Partial Support of Brenda Andrew’s Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (Case No. 15-6190). The Brief shares the results of a double-blind randomized experiment that had 1,128 jury-qualified adults, representative of Oklahoma…
On February 5, 2025, Fair Trial Analysis LLC filed an Amicus Curiae Brief in Support of Warren King’s Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus in the Superior Court of Butts County, Georgia (Case No. 2024-SU-HC-0010). The Brief shares the results of a double-blind randomized experiment that had 786 jury-qualified adults, representative of the county, vote…