Nacdl Foundation for Criminal Justice

4th amendment - fourth amendment center the Nacdl fourth amendment center was established to safeguard the fundamental values embodied in the fourth amendment to protect individuals from unreasonable government surveillance, searches, and seizures in the digital age. New technologies, such as gps tracking devices, automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, including facial recognition technology, and a wide range of technologies that foster the collection of bulk data threaten to undermine basic privacy rights. The fourth amendment center builds on Nacdl's steadfast commitment to limit unreasonably intrusive government conduct through the unique capacity of the nation's defense bar to challenge the limits of government conduct in the context of Criminal investigations and prosecutions. The center maintains an infrastructure to provide the following core resources to Criminal defense lawyers and their clients: (1) advanced education on emerging issues at the intersection of technology, privacy, and constitutional rights; (2) a dynamic toolkit of resources to help lawyers identify opportunities to challenge government surveillance; and (3) a tactical litigation support network to assist in cases that present an opportunity to challenge the use of new technologies that infringe on the fourth amendment rights of citizens.

Federal trial penalty clemency project - recruits and supports volunteer attorneys to seek federal commutations for prisonera whose sentences were vastly increased because they asserted their sixth amendment right to trial.

Full disclosure project - this project seeks to disrupt the culture of secrecy that systematically and pervasively shields law enforcement misconduct by changing police secrecy laws and empowering the defense community to track police misconduct. The project will provide defense entities with direct support, training, and technical assistance in implementing a database application to track, aggregate, and analyze bad acts by individual officers and units. The database can host data from a wide range of both public and legally privileged sources, including judicial decisions, lawsuits, community complaints and body cam videos. Through a web application, defense attorneys can immediately and easily search the database, ensuring that police conduct in every case is scrutinized from the first appearance. The project will also provide litigation support for obtaining the misconduct information and skills training for trial-level Criminal defense attorneys so they can maximize the value of the information.

General support; clemency project; dc compassionate release; return to freedom; first step implementation; forensic college; state Criminal Justice advocacy; criminalization of pregnancy & reproductive health