Andrew Manuel Crespo

The NBC Latino 20 honors achievers who are making our communities and our nation better...The first-ever Latino president of the Harvard Law Review, Andrew Manuel Crespo has clerked at the Supreme Court and represented children as a public defender. He has seen firsthand the chasm between our legal ideals and the reality on the ground. "We've told ourselves that whether you are imprisoned for years should not depend on whether you are rich or poor," says the Harvard Law professor, "but any lawyer who has set foot in a courtroom would probably agree that resources and money do make a tremendous difference."

An op-ed by Andrew Manuel Crespo. We talk a lot in the Trump era about novel constitutional problems, and a lot about special prosecutors. But in the wake of President Trump’s controversial pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, it’s important to talk about both at once, and to ask: Should the US District Court in Phoenix, which found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt, now appoint a special prosecutor to defend that conviction, in the face of a pardon that might well be unconstitutional?

An op-ed by Andrew Crespo. The New York Times recently unearthed a thorough legal memo, prepared twenty years ago for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, that advances the view that a sitting president can be indicted while still in office. For those keeping score, this new memo sharpens an internal divide within the Department of Justice on this important question. Two memos authored by the Office of Legal Counsel—one in 1973, in the midst of the Nixon impeachment saga, the other in 2000, on the heels of the Clinton impeachment saga—take the view that a sitting president is immune from indictment. By contrast, two different memos—authored by the Office of Special Counsel investigating Nixon, and the Office of Independent Counsel investigating Clinton—reach the opposite conclusion.

The debate over whether the president of the United States can be charged with a crime is as old as the country itself...The words of the Constitution aren't much help either. It talks about impeachment, removing a president from office. But the document is vague on the issue of whether a president can be indicted while he holds the office. "We tend to talk about it as one big on-off switch," explained Harvard Law School professor Andrew Crespo. "But, really, the question ought to be: Can he be investigated, can he be indicted, can he be made to stand trial, can he be sentenced? And the burdens imposed by each of those steps of the process are different."

The ongoing feud between the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and President Trump took a turn on Friday when Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough published an op-ed, “Donald Trump is not well,” in the Washington Post. In it, they wrote, “This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked.” The story — ”Joe & Mika: TV Couple’s Sleazy Cheating Scandal” — was published on June 2. Quickly, some of Trump’s toughest opponents on Twitter questioned whether laws had been broken...Harvard Law School professor Andrew Manuel Crespo, who teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, told BuzzFeed News that many questions would need to be answered to know whether it is even possible that the actions violated any coercion, blackmail, or extortion laws. First, he said, more context is needed regarding what the conversation actually was.

President Donald Trump won’t seek to invoke executive privilege to block former FBI director James Comey from testifying before Congress later this week...Any decision on whether to investigate the president or administration officials for possible obstruction likely will fall to Robert Mueller. The former FBI director was appointed by the Justice Department as a special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation after Mr. Comey’s dismissal. Legal experts differ on the extent of Mr. Mueller’s authority in the probe. “If Mueller’s investigation confirms what has been publicly reported, then he would be well within the zone of prosecutorial discretion to seek a criminal indictment for obstruction of justice,” said Andrew Crespo, a Harvard Law School criminal-law professor.

The Constitution does not answer every question. It includes detailed instructions, for instance, about how Congress may remove a president who has committed serious offenses. But it does not say whether the president may be criminally prosecuted in the meantime...But would the Constitution allow Mr. Mueller to indict Mr. Trump if he finds evidence of criminal conduct?...Andrew Manuel Crespo, a law professor at Harvard, has questioned whether the special-counsel regulations should be read that broadly. The regulations, he wrote on Take Care, a law blog, “focus more on administrative protocols and procedures than on legal analyses, arguments or judgments.”

An op-ed by Andrew Manuel Crespo. Robert Mueller, the recently appointed special counsel overseeing the criminal investigation into whether Donald Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia, has a sterling reputation as a prosecutor’s prosecutor — someone who follows the facts without fear or favor, wherever they may lead. Based on what we know so far, those facts will lead him to the most consequential decision any American prosecutor has ever faced: Whether to pursue charges against the president of the United States for the federal crime of obstruction of justice.

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office in January, the legal community has begun to ponder and prepare for the changes the incoming administration may make...Adrian Vermeule ’90, J.D. ’93, the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, sees two possible prospects for administrative law under Trump. One involves what he called “bipartisan retrenchment.”...Four major signposts during the first 100 days will show whether the Trump administration will transform executive authority or not, said Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. First, how does the Trump administration handle ostensibly independent regulatory commissions such as the Security and Exchange Commission or the Federal Reserve?...With the executive branch’s role leading the trends in America’s criminal justice system and criminal justice reform, the effect that Trump’s presidency will have in this realm, given that his positions on a number of issues are either unformed or shifting, is still unknown, said criminal law professor Andrew Crespo.

Holding a defendant in jail simply because they can’t afford a fixed bail amount is unconstitutional, the Justice Department said in a brief it filed Thursday in a Georgia lawsuit. "Bail practices that incarcerate indigent individuals before trial solely because of their inability to pay for their release violate the Fourteenth Amendment," the department said in an amicus brief, referring to the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. ... Questions about the fairness of the criminal justice system even extend to the Supreme Court. A recent study published by Harvard Law Prof. Andrew Manuel Crespo found that in two-thirds of Supreme Court cases, criminal defense lawyers had argued fewer than two cases before the Court.

It’s no secret that there’s a crisis in the lower rungs of America’s criminal defense system. Public defenders, overloaded with cases, struggle to offer even bare-bones defense for defendants who can’t afford their own lawyers. But for the first time, research now shows that the scales of justice are tilted against poor defendants all the way to the Supreme Court, with as many as two-thirds of them represented by lawyers relatively inexperienced in the ways of the nation’s highest court...A recent study was able to quantify the advocacy gap between criminal defense lawyers and the rest of the Supreme Court bar, which many regular court watchers have long suspected. The study – published by Harvard Law Prof. Andrew Manuel Crespo – examined 10 years of Supreme Court arguments ending in June 2015. In two-thirds of the cases, they had argued fewer than two cases before the high court.

The quality of advocacy at the Supreme Court these days is quite high. “We have an extraordinary group of lawyers who appear very regularly before us,” Justice Elena Kagan said in 2014 at a Justice Department event. But there was, she said, one exception. “Case in and case out,” she said, “the category of litigant who is not getting great representation at the Supreme Court are criminal defendants.” That impression, widely shared by people who frequently attend Supreme Court arguments, has now been confirmed by a comprehensive look at a decade of data. “Criminal defendants are almost never represented by expert counsel in arguments before the Supreme Court,” Andrew Manuel Crespo, a law professor at Harvard, wrote in the new study, which was published in The Minnesota Law Review. In the 10 years ending in June 2015, he found, as many as two-thirds of the arguments on behalf of criminal defendants were presented by lawyers making their first Supreme Court appearances.

An op-ed by Andrew Manuel Crespo. First he called Latinos “rapists.” After that, Donald Trump forcibly ejected the country’s leading Latino journalist from a press conference, swiped at Jeb Bush for being married to a Latina, praised supporters who assaulted a Latino man, and sharply criticized the country’s only Latina governor — a fellow Republican. In terms of denigrating Latinos, that’s a hard list to top. But Trump’s most recent attack, this time against federal judge Gonzalo Curiel, is among his very worst. Unanimously confirmed by the Senate, Judge Curiel is presiding over a lawsuit that accuses Trump of swindling students at the unaccredited Trump “University,” which Trump’s own employees have described as a fraud. At a recent rally, Trump said that Judge Curiel should step off the case, and then told the crowd, who had previously chanted “build that wall,” that Judge Curiel, born in Indiana, “happens to be Mexican.” That comment was widely criticized as coded racism. A week later, however, Trump doubled down, telling a reporter that Judge Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” disqualifies him from the case because, in Trump’s words, “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” Being Latino, that is. Only numbness to Trump’s streaming insults could spare this latest slur from becoming a campaign ender.

As a public defender, Andrew Manuel Crespo ’05, J.D. ’08, met his first client on Christmas Eve 2011. Handcuffed and shackled, the client had just celebrated, in juvenile lockup, his eighth birthday. Seated, his feet didn’t touch the floor. “I remember walking in and just being stunned,” recalls the newly appointed assistant law professor. “Like, this is my job now: I represent eight-year-olds who are in handcuffs.” A two-time Supreme Court clerk and the first Latino president of the Harvard Law Review, Crespo aims to interrogate the gap between the criminal-justice system’s ideals and its reality.

Laws regarding rape should be taught in criminal law classes at Harvard Law School despite its potential to trigger psychological trauma, two Law professors argued at a discussion on the topic Wednesday afternoon. Law professor Jeannie C. Suk, who has taught criminal law and procedure at the Law School, and Andrew M. Crespo ’05, who served as Harvard Law Review’s first Latino president and will teach criminal law for the first time next fall, both stressed the pedagogical value of including rape law in a curriculum. Suk spoke out on the issue when she penned a New Yorker article called “The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law" in December.