The Fourth of July, a Supreme Court victory (with a small “v”) on plea waivers, and new conversations about survival and second chances.
Independence and N.J. Detention Tours
In the wake of this weekend’s Independence celebration, I’d like to highlight some terrific pieces reflecting on the meaning of the holiday: Anne Lamott’s “The Fourth Is With Us”; Ezra Klein’s interview with Bryan Stevenson, “The America That’s Still Possible”; and from last year, the Marshall Project’s “What, to the American Incarcerated Person, Is Your Fourth of July?”.
In the meantime, June brought fireworks all its own. After weeks of protests over conditions at Delaney Hall, the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey Assembly Republicans went on their own tour of New Jersey State Prison. The point seemed to be: why focus on the terrible conditions at Delaney Hall when conditions at NJSP are also awful? I think they got it half right. Both facilities are deeply troubling, with crumbling infrastructure, unsafe conditions, and people confined inside them who are needlessly suffering. But if their “tour” was supposed to change the subject, it backfired — they just gave us another facility to be upset about. Contact New Jersey representatives and let them know how you feel about it!
Supreme Court ruling
The Supreme Court ended its final term in a blaze of decisions, from affirming birthright citizenship, clarifying gun rights, and its ruling on campaign financing. And let’s not forget those not-so-compassionate compassionate release decisions that I talked about in last month’s newsletter.
I wanted to highlight another case from this term that may not have been on your radar: Hunter v. United States (2026).
If you’ve been with me for a while, you know I write a lot about plea bargains and how coercive their terms can be. Prosecutors overcharge people to get them to waive their trial rights and instead plead guilty to something carrying lesser penalties. Sometimes even innocent people plead guilty to avoid the risk of an outrageous punishment after trial. To add insult to injury, prosecutors often require people to waive their right to appeal as part of the plea deal, insulating convictions and sentences from appellate review even when serious legal questions remain, including questions about police or prosecutorial misconduct.
In a good-news/bad-news decision, the Supreme Court pushed back on appeal waiver. Sort of.
In Hunter, Justice Kagan, writing for the majority in a 8-1 decision, held that an appeal waiver cannot be enforced when doing so would result in a “miscarriage of justice.” In other words, review of an appeal waiver would be appropriate where, for instance, a sentencing judge “let an orangutan pick a sentence out of a hat.” (Yes, that was actually one of their examples).
Justice Gorsuch, in a concurrence joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, wrote that jury trials have given way to “a conveyor belt of plea bargains.” He argued that the Court too often has condoned or ignored “coercive prosecutorial tactics designed to induce defendants to take plea deals.” Today, he wrote, the “Court begins to correct course.”
But despite the promising language of the concurrence, Hunter is not an overwhelming win. For Hunter himself, his challenge to a sentencing condition that required him to take prescribed psychiatric medication was sent back to the lower court for further consideration.
More importantly, the Court made clear that defendants must meet an exceptionally high bar before they can successfully challenge an appeal waiver. Ordinary sentencing errors, including significant mistakes in applying the federal sentencing guidelines, will not be enough to get out from under plea bargains that required defendants to waiver their appellate rights.
So, I’m putting Hunter in the “victory for justice” column. But it gets a small “v.” I fear that the Hunter standard is so high that, as a practical matter, it will help very few defendants get off the “conveyor belt” at all.
Just Justice News
I have had some particularly meaningful conversations recently, each in its own way about what it takes to survive, transform and build something different.
On a recent episode of Just Justice, I spoke with journalist Justine van der Leun about Unreasonable Women, her devastating new book about women whose experiences of violence and survival brought them into the criminal legal system. We talked about the impossible choices too many women have to make, and the ways the law can sometimes criminalize survival in the context of abuse.
I also had the pleasure of sitting down in person with Nikki Mammano at the Westhampton Free Library to talk about her memoir, Breaking Good. There is something especially moving about being in conversation in a room full of people, and diving deep into ideas of accountability, transformation, and what second chances really look like. (Plus, I love a library! Who doesn’t love a library?)
And in my most recent episode, I spoke with Courtney Teasley, a lawyer, educator, and legal disruptor, about legal, financial and civic literacy, and why justice education should begin well before a person ever enters a courtroom. I hope you’ll give it a listen.
Taken together, these stories remind me that the we must continue the work of independence and justice, through challenges in our courts, to our prisons and detention centers, and through the conversations we choose to have and hear. I’m grateful to be on this journey with all of you. Thank you for all that you do.
Take care,
Jessica