Ronald Sullivan

More than 20,000 drug cases tied to a disgraced former state chemist appear headed for dismissal, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and public defenders said Tuesday as they combed through legal filings from local prosecutors in Massachusetts...he scandal led drug labs around the country to re-examine their protocols, said Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, which has some clients who are affected by the scandal. Mr. Sullivan, who described the wave of dismissals as “wholly unprecedented,” said, “There will be literally tens of thousands of people whose lives will change.”

A jury on Friday cleared Aaron Hernandez of committing a double murder in 2012, handing the former New England Patriots star his first significant legal victory since his shocking arrest for a third slaying in 2013...When the verdict came down, Jenkins-Hernandez, his fiancee, cried, holding the hands of two friends and nodding furiously with her eyes shut. She later told reporters she was “very happy.” It was a sentiment echoed by Ronald Sullivan, one of Hernandez’s lawyers, who said the “actual perpetrator of this crime was given immunity by the Commonwealth. He [Hernandez] was charged with something that someone else did."

Jurors in the Aaron Hernandez double-murder trial began their second day of deliberations today, while behind the scenes the former New England Patriots player's lawyers and the judge were squabbling over perceptions of racism. Suffolk Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Locke, exhuming a fight thought buried Thursday, told Hernandez's defense team he found it "astounding" they would object to his selection of a white woman to serve as foreperson...But Hernandez attorney and Harvard Law professor Ronald Sullivan Jr. said what Locke did was make sure a white woman was put in charge and could not be removed as an alternate. "We find it offensive that with the jury predominantly filled with people of color, they cannot self-govern. We think it violates Mr. Hernandez's due process rights," Sullivan said.

The defense team for Aaron Hernandez said Monday they will present some evidence and call witnesses in the former New England Patriot’s double murder trial. “We do have evidence,’’ defense attorney Ronald Sullivan told Suffolk Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Locke. “We do have motions.” The announcement came after First Assistant District Attorney Patrick Haggan told Locke that the state has completed detailing the evidence prosecutors believe will prove that Hernandez committed the 2012 killings.

...Starting this week, Slate is partnering with Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project to create “Trials and Error.” Our collaboration will attempt to illustrate the reality of the justice system via thorough, fair, and accurate investigative journalism and policy analysis...Trials and Error will also feature academic voices, including Ron Sullivan...

The final two jurors were selected Monday in the double murder trial of former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez, paving the way for opening statements in the highly anticipated case on Wednesday...Ronald Sullivan, a lawyer for Hernandez, said outside court during the lunch break that his client is looking forward to the start of the trial. “He’s looking forward to vindication,” said Sullivan, a Harvard Law professor. “To demonstrate to this jury and to the public that he is not guilty of the charged crimes.”

When students move back into a renovated Winthrop House this fall, they’ll find transformed spaces and modern amenities as well as design touches that celebrate the residence’s rich history...In a statement, Winthrop Faculty Deans Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and Stephanie Robinson said: “We are thrilled beyond belief that all of Winthrop will be returning home in the fall of 2017. It will be a wonderful celebration to have our entire community together under one Winthrop, something that we’ve never experienced before. We are extraordinarily grateful for the generous support of Robert M. Beren for helping to make this possible. We further wish to thank all of the people — especially the renewal team and the construction workers who have worked tirelessly to finish Winthrop ahead of schedule.”

Harvard Law School professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. advocated for criminal justice reform and an end to mass incarceration in a TEDx talk entitled “Justice is a decision,” arguing that wrongful convictions are widespread and often overlooked. Sullivan, who is also a Winthrop House Faculty Dean and former adviser to President Barack Obama, began the talk with stories from his personal experiences exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals in Brooklyn, N.Y. In some cases, wrongfully convicted individuals spent years in prison or died before their release, Sullivan said. In an interview Tuesday, Sullivan noted that although he considers the United States’s criminal justice system “the greatest legal system in the world, there still are very many people who fall through the cracks.”

Harvard Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. talks about his work on criminal justice reform, and the last minute clemency requests to President Obama.

Sixteen Harvard Law School faculty members have joined thousands of other law professors across the country in signing a letter opposing Republican U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions’s nomination as United States Attorney General... Law School professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., who signed the letter, said Sessions’s record on voting rights, especially for minorities, is deeply troubling to him. “The aim of the letter is to raise the significant issues about voting, which is fundamental to our democratic experiment and, once these issues are raised, we hope that the committee and the citizenry in general would not support this nominee,” Sullivan said. “We certainly think that, party affiliation aside, no Attorney General should have taken such a radical view about voting rights laws.”

A surviving family member of Jack Johnson and a prominent Harvard Law School professor said that a series of reports on PIX11 News about the boxing legend inspired them to join our campaign to officially get the name of the boxing legend cleared...The reports of PIX11 News reporters Jay Dow, Mario Diaz and James Ford resulted in Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School and the director of the criminal justice institute there to join the campaign to win Johnson's posthumous pardon...It's a "very direct and personal appeal, saying, 'Mr. President, I'm a family member,'" said Sullivan in an interview with PIX11 News at Harvard earlier this week. "'Here are ways in which my family was impacted.'"

Newly elected Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx detailed her plans Monday for reshaping the second-largest prosecutor's office in the country, including creating a unit to target firearms trafficking and revamping the team that reviews potentially wrongful convictions....Foxx has turned to Harvard Law professor Ronald Sullivan Jr. to reorganize the office's conviction integrity unit, created by Alvarez in 2012. The conviction review unit Sullivan created and ran for the Brooklyn, N.Y., district attorney's office has an independent advisory panel staffed by outside attorneys that issues nonbinding recommendations on whether convictions should be dismissed. Sullivan could not be reached for comment Monday, but Foxx said he "will design a unit that fits for Chicago."

In one of the biggest death penalty decisions in years, Florida's Supreme Court ruled on Friday that only a unanimous jury may sentence a defendant to the death penalty. According to the Orlando Sentinel, the court's decisions mean that the state "effectively has no death penalty."...“Our latest research has shown that non-unanimous jury verdicts can lead to the conviction of persons with intellectual disabilities, mental illnesses, and even those who are innocent," said Harvard Law Professor Ron Sullivan, co-founder of the Fair Punishment Project. "The Florida Supreme Court’s decision validates our concern about the constitutionality of these verdicts.”

The imposing architecture of New York City’s courts give the impression that the law is immutable. The long-serving district attorneys who marshal that law are similarly so permanent as to be like statues, their names unshakably on the ballot. But Ken Thompson’s brief tenure as Brooklyn district attorney threatened to change that, by bringing the zeal of a reformer to the borough’s courts. He quickly drew national attention for halting prosecutions for most low-level marijuana possession in 2014, for example...Harvard Law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. had been the chief public defender in the DC court system. An adversarial judicial system traditionally puts defense attorneys on the other side of a deep divide from prosecutors. Sullivan had done academic work on exoneration and the potential for errors in certain types of convictions. “The first time he called, I had to make sure that he had the right guy,” Sullivan says...For Sullivan, one of the crucial changes embedded in the CRU was prosecutors being encouraged to think of themselves as “ministers of justice.”

At the Conference on Race and Justice in the Age of Obama, academics, activists, and government officials engaged in a heated debate about whether President Barack Obama effectively addressed race-related issues during his administration...Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, argued that despite Obama’s limited executive powers, his administration’s Justice Department is working resolutely to advance civil liberties. “A president can’t wave a magic wand and say, ‘Civil rights, repair!’ That doesn’t happen. The executive is constrained in very real ways,” he said.

Not long after he was elected district attorney for Brooklyn, New York, in 2013, Kenneth Thompson cold-called a Harvard law professor and former public defender to ask for help digging through old cases for people who had been wrongly convicted. At first, the professor thought Thompson had made a mistake: Why would a prosecutor want to hire someone who made a living exposing the justice system's flaws? But Professor Ronald Sullivan quickly realized that Thompson was not a typical DA. He wanted his Conviction Review Unit to find true justice, even if it meant unraveling old guilty verdicts, or exposing wrongdoing. That meant having an outsider run it. "It's the right thing to do, and I'm committed to doing it the right way," Sullivan recalled Thompson telling him before he took the job.Sullivan recalled that conversation Monday as a sort of requiem. The night before, Thompson had died of cancer, five days after announcing he was ill.

As voters around the country decided the fates of Sens. Marco Rubio and John McCain and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz, at least a few observers focused on the primary for Jacksonville’s elected prosecutor. Ten-time Grammy Awards winner John Legend celebrated State Attorney Angela Corey’s loss. So did “Orange Is The New Black” author Piper Kerman and former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean...Harvard Law School professor Ronald Sullivan said, “Overzealous prosecutors, like Angela Corey, who have resorted to pursuing draconian sentences regardless of the circumstances will soon see themselves being replaced with leaders who have rejected these failed policies of the 1980s and ’90s, and are truly committed to reforming the justice system with proven, evidence-based, equitable solutions that increase public safety.”...David Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard Law School, said the election results show that “voters have spoken in no uncertain terms about the kind of change they want to see and it speaks well beyond any single prosecutor to changes across the justice system.”

More than a year after Usaamah Rahim was shot to death by an FBI agent and a Boston police officer in a Roslindale parking lot, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley has announced that his office will not be pursuing criminal charges against the agent and officer who shot him. ... Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan, who is representing Rahim’s family, said that while they still have to review the report, which is more than 700 pages, the possibility of pressing civil charges against the FBI and Boston police remains open.

An op-ed by Ronald Sullivan. Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby is the subject of intense yet wholly unfounded criticism for her office's decision to prosecute six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray. Significantly, a George Washington University law professor, John Banzhaf, has gone so far as to file an ethics complaint against Ms. Mosby. These critiques of Ms. Mosby bespeak a troubling double standard. It appears that some would rather treat police officers with a special legal status, while treating average citizens with the rules reflected in our Constitution. Significantly, enshrined on the main portico of the Supreme Court building is the phrase "equal justice under law." It is a symbolic representation of a core constitutional principle that no person is above the law. Ms. Mosby has exercised her prosecutorial discretion equally with respect to all citizens. Yet many condemn her nonetheless.