Timothy P. O'Neill

Welcome!

For the past 15 years I have written a monthly column on criminal law and procedure for the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. Over the years I have periodically sent out an Index of columns to judges and lawyers involved in criminal law in Illinois.

This website will eliminate the need to send out an Index. Instead, each new column will now immediately be placed on the website under "Recent Columns", before it is eventually filed as part of the permanent Index.

I will regularly update this page both to tell you briefly about the topics of the last few columns and to keep you posted on new cases and developments in criminal law. I also have included a complete index of my law review articles. Bookmark it at www.jmls.edu/oneill.

The new January column discusses why it is more important than ever for defense attorneys to file cert petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court asking them to review unfavorable state court judgments on direct review. The December column deals with an important new "vehicle/dog sniff" case that will be decided by the Illinois Supreme Court. The November column discusses the problems arising from careless use of the term "high crime area" during hearings on suppression motions. The October column features important new work by Professor William Stuntz of Harvard. The September column discusses two important 4th Amendment cases that will soon be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. The August column deals with a pair of recent cases that show how careful trial judges must be in guaranteeing that non-indigent criminal defendants are represented by their retained counsel of choice. The July column looks at a recent U.S. Supreme Court case that should cause the Illinois Supreme Court to reconsider its 2005 decision in People v Willis on suppression of confessions. The June column looks at a recent Second District case that finds that a Class X defendant was guilty despite the absence of mens rea; the column explains why the court may have been wrong. The May column compares racial profiling in traffic cases to the use of "vagrancy laws" that were used to control newly-freed slaves in the post-Civil War South. April column discusses various aspects of the "anticipatory search warrant." The March column talks about a major new U.S. Supreme Court case that reminds us of the powers of state courts in our federal system. The February column discusses some of the problems that arise in determining exactly what constitutes "effective assistance" of criminal defense counsel.        

I also invite you to take a look at a law review article of mine that was recently published in Constitutional Commentary, the faculty-edited journal of the University of Minnesota Law School. It is entitled Scalia's Poker: Puzzles and Mysteries in Constitutional Interpretation. It can be downloaded free at the Social Science Research Network website, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1004613.

I have also written "The Stepford Justices: The Need for Experiential Diversity on the Roberts Court." The citation is 60 Oklahoma Law Review 701 (2007). It is available for free downloading at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1021598.

All of my work on SSRN may be accessed at http://ssrn.com/author=375173.

Your feedback is always welcome! You can reach me at 7oneill@jmls.edu.

Tim O’Neill