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COVID-19 placed unprecedented strains on criminal court systems, necessitating moves to digital platforms with little preparation. To study the influence of virtual courtrooms on defendant rights (e.g. effective assistance of counsel, speedy and public trials, among others), we qualitatively analyzed the journals of 44 student court watchers, documenting their observations of online court proceedings in a single state in the Northeastern United States. We find that virtual courtrooms are highly disorganized and fraught with technical malfunctions, compromising defendants’ appearances online, and impeding their ability to confer with counsel and address the court. Defendants with less access to digital platforms and incarcerated individuals are disproportionately impacted. Further, court actors tend to treat virtual court in a casual manner and are often unprepared to litigate cases, resulting in undue delays, and extended periods of pre-trial detention. Policy recommendations to improve technologies and administrative procedures are discussed.

Suppression motions are the means by which defendants challenge the constitutionality of stops, searches, and seizures, and move the court to exclude illegally recovered evidence. However, defendants face insurmountable obstacles in challenging police credibility in these motions. Using 31 motions with factual disputes from a northeastern state, we dissect the types of defense challenges related to stops, searches, seizures, and arrests, as well as the prevalence and types of corroborating evidence presented by the defense. We find that most defense challenges to police credibility are not corroborated, and evidence of prior police misconduct is not presented. Furthermore, judges typically rule in favor of the police when adjudicating uncorroborated factual disputes between police officers and defendants. As a result, suppression motions generally fail to serve as an accountability structure for police conduct and rarely provide defendants with a viable remedy to address rights violations.

The type and quantity of evidence in a case is a critical factor for deciding guilt but should have little or no influence on the sentencing determinations of judges post conviction; this is because case evidence goes to guilt decisions by triers of fact, whereas sentences are imposed upon those already convicted. This study examines the effects of evidentiary type and the total quantity of physical evidence in a case on length of custodial sentence. The results demonstrate that violent felony cases with forensic evidence and those cases with more varied pieces of physical evidence result in longer custodial sentences for convicted defendants. Thus, the findings indicate that inculpatory evidence in criminal trials has enduring effects post conviction and, more broadly, suggest that judicial discretion at sentencing is, at least in part, influenced by the judge's confidence in the defendant's guilt.

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