Practitioner & Policy Documents

We hope that the documents below will be useful. Please reach out if you have others for us to post or if you would like to collaborate with us in other ways!

Litigation Documents

• Amicus Brief to Washington Supreme Court in State v. Gates (2024)

• Amicus Brief to Oregon Supreme Court in State v. Aranda (2023)

• Appellate Brief to Washington Court of Appeals in State v. Gates (2022)

• Appellate Brief to Washington Court of Appeals in State v. Wiggins, 2025 WL 1153399 

• Amicus Brief to Colorado Supreme Court in People v. Simmons (2025) - available upon request.

Key Cases

• State v. Santiago, 53 Haw. 254 (1971)

• United States v. Walker, 2016 WL 4091250 (E.D.N.Y.) (Weinstein, J.)

Policy Documents

• NACDL Report, Prior Conviction Impeachment: The Need for Reform (2023)

• Letter to the Federal Advisory Committee on the Rules of Evidence (2024) - at pp. 359-361.

• Comment to Federal Advisory Committee on the Rules of Evidence (2026) - at pp. 430-436.

Articles (please also refer to the "Scholarship" page)

• Anna Roberts & Julia Simon-Kerr, Prior Conviction Impeachment: Working Toward Reform Within and Beyond the Classroom, The Champion (Mar/Apr 2024), 48-APR Champion 14. 

• Theodore Eisenberg & Valerie P. Hans, Taking a Stand on Taking the Stand: The Effect of a Prior Criminal Record on the Decision to Testify and on Trial Outcomes, 94 Corn. L. Rev. 1353 (2009).

• John H. Blume, The Dilemma of the Criminal Defendant With a Prior Record—Lessons from the Wrongfully Convicted, 5 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 477 (2008).