Criminal Law

Sex offenders often live too close to schools; who is checking?

Posted on November 23, 2009
In Idaho, people convicted of sex crimes are required to register their address. But they can't live just anywhere. A law passed in 2006 established that convicted sex offenders cannot live within 500 feet of a school. But nowhere in the law does it say who is supposed to monitor those boundaries...

Ohio executions back on with 1-drug method

Posted on November 14, 2009
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio's death chamber is set to resume executions next month using a single drug that has been used in the U.S. to euthanize pets but never to put condemned prisoners to death. Barring legal challenges, condemned inmate Kenneth Biros is scheduled Dec...

The Myth of Closure via Execution

Posted on November 12, 2009
Of all the arguments in support of capital punishment, perhaps the most emotionally compelling is that it provides "closure" for the loved ones of murder victims. Prosecuting attorneys, politicians and journalists commonly refer to how executions allow family members to "move on" from their pain, providing a sense of relief at knowing that "justice" was finally served...

The Permanent Underclass

Posted on November 11, 2009
If you think it's tough getting a job during a recession, imagine what it's like for an ex-convict. Gregory Headley, 29, knows exactly what it's like. The Harlem resident was released from prison in July after serving two years and eight months for the criminal sale of a firearm...

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Needle Exchange Programs

Posted on November 10, 2009
PROGRAMS THAT allow drug addicts to swap their dirty needles for sterile syringes are effective in reducing the transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. A 2008 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that an 80 percent reduction in the incidence of HIV in intravenous drug users over the past 20 years can be attributed in part to such programs funded by private organizations and localities...

The Cost of Killing in Idaho

Posted on November 03, 2009
BOISE - Thomas Creech sits and waits on Idaho?s death row. Creech was already serving a life sentence for a double murder in 1981, when he was convicted of bludgeoning a fellow inmate to death using a sock filled with batteries. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Ada County...

No Constitutional Protection Against Being Framed

Posted on November 02, 2009
"THERE IS NO Freestanding Constitutional 'Right Not To Be Framed.' " So states a brief filed by Iowa prosecutors hoping to persuade the Supreme Court to dismiss a lawsuit against them for allegedly fabricating evidence that led to the 25-year incarceration of two innocent men...

Justices will scrutinize life sentences for youths

Posted on October 29, 2009
It did not take long for the judge to determine that the convicted rapist in front of him was irredeemable. "He is beyond help," Judge Nicholas Geeker said of Joe Harris Sullivan. "I'm going to try to send him away for as long as I can." And then Geeker sentenced Sullivan to life in prison without the possibility of parole...

Like Giving Car Keys to A Drunken Teenager

Posted on October 24, 2009
State officials will soon seek bids from private companies for 9 of the state?s 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 here on death row. It is the first effort by a state to put its entire prison system under private control...

The Death Penalty in Texas Looks Bad?

Posted on October 22, 2009
Questions about whether Gov. Rick Perry allowed the execution of a man some arson experts say may have been innocent, and then hindered an investigation into the evidence, continue to reverberate across Texas, where issues surrounding capital punishment have rarely stirred such controversy...

An Example of Prosecutorial Misconduct

Posted on October 19, 2009
After spending three years investigating the conviction of a Harvey man accused of killing a security guard with a shotgun blast in 1978, journalism students at Northwestern University say they have uncovered new evidence that proves his innocence.Their efforts helped win a new day in court for Anthony McKinney, who has spent 31 years in prison for the slaying...

Governor Perry Did What?

Posted on October 01, 2009
DALLAS, Texas (CNN) -- Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Wednesday shook up the ranks of a state commission that is probing whether a man executed in 2004 belonged on death row, forcing the commission to delay a scheduled hearing on the case.Read more... Dallas Morning NewsI have witnessed some pretty outrageous conduct by elected officials, but this action by Governor Perry is way over the top...

Decriminalizing Drugs in Mexico

Posted on August 23, 2009
Reporting from Tijuana and Mexico City - Mired in a bloody battle with major drug traffickers, Mexico is quietly eliminating jail time for possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs.Read more...This policy change is a great first step in shifting the issue of drug use away from the failed prohibition policies...

Priority Test: Health Care or Prisons?

Posted on August 22, 2009
At a time when we Americans may abandon health care reform because it supposedly is ?too expensive,? how is it that we can afford to imprison people like Curtis Wilkerson?Mr. Wilkerson is serving a life sentence in California ? for stealing a $2.50 pair of socks...

The Politics of Crime Control

Posted on August 21, 2009
After an impassioned debate over the cost and benefit of California's massive prison system, the state Senate on Thursday narrowly approved a controversial bill to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in spending on state lockups by reducing the time lower-level inmates would spend behind bars and on parole...

When Pigs Fly

Posted on August 19, 2009
The Supreme Court on Monday took the rare step of ordering a federal judge to consider the innocence claims of condemned Georgia prisoner Troy Anthony Davis, who has mounted a global campaign to declare he was wrongfully convicted of murder and barred by federal law from presenting the evidence that would prove it...

Getting Smart on Crime?

Posted on August 15, 2009
After decades of supercharged incarceration rates, our bloated prison system is straining under its own weight, and policy makers are finally being forced to deal with the need to shrink it.Read more...Asking elected officials to get smart on crime is asking a lot...

Death Qualification

Posted on August 14, 2009
NASHVILLE (WATE) -- Death penalty questions in Nashville Thursday brought out tears and hedging from the jury pool for the first trial of suspects accused of killing Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Attorneys for both sides continue questioning potential jurors in Davidson County for the trial of Letalvis Cobbins...

Needle Exchange Programs

Posted on August 12, 2009
The House voted to end a 21-year-old ban and allow federal funding of needle exchange programs. It also voted to allow the District to use its own money for such a program. There's one catch: the programs cannot be located "within 1,000 feet of a public or private day care center, elementary school, vocational school, secondary school, college, junior college, or university, or any public swimming pool, park, playground, video arcade, or youth center, or an event sponsored by any such entity...

Collateral Damage in Wrongful Convictions

Posted on July 29, 2009
Instead of the killer being caught, prosecuted and punished, quickly and efficiently, and the Nicarico family receiving whatever solace it could, the case has shapeshifted into something it should have never been. With three innocent men being prosecuted for the crime, it's become a case about law enforcement's mistakes and misconduct...

What Happend at the Gates Residence?

Posted on July 24, 2009
By now most people are aware of the events that took place at the Cambridge home of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. A person in the neighborhood (not a neighbor) saw two black men trying to force open a door and called police. Gates was returning home from an overseas trip and could not open the door to his home...

Use of Life Sentences Continues to Increase

Posted on July 23, 2009
More prisoners today are serving life terms than ever before ? 140,610 out of 2.3 million inmates being held in jails and prisons across the country ? under tough mandatory minimum-sentencing laws and the declining use of parole for eligible convicts, according to a report released Wednesday by the Sentencing Project, a group that calls for the elimination of life sentences without parole...

Race and the Criminal Justice System

Posted on July 22, 2009
Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has spent much of his life studying the complex history of race and culture in America, but until last week he had never had the experience that has left so many black men questioning the criminal justice system.Read more...

Older Prisoners Denied Social Security

Posted on July 22, 2009
Mother Jones - Not long ago I described the plight of the growing numbers of older prisoners filling up the country?s prisons and jails. They receive poor health care and are subject to any number of cruel and inhuman punishments?people with bad arthritis are required to climb into upper bunks to sleep; it's next to impossible for inmates in wheelchairs to access parts of prisons available to younger people, like baths...

Giving Life, Wearing Shackles and Chains

Posted on July 12, 2009
One day last November, the first shudders of childbirth woke Venita Pinckney before dawn. She was well into her ninth month of pregnancy. She was also incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a state prison. Before she left for the hospital, Ms...

No to More Prisons

Posted on July 09, 2009
Wednesday morning began with 100,552 inmates locked up in Florida prisons. The state also has or will soon have 11 thousand more beds under construction at a cost of almost a billion dollars. Florida?s major business groups are saying enough is enough...

Mental Health and the Death Penalty

Posted on July 09, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO, July 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- For the first time, families of murder victims have joined with families of persons with mental illness who have been executed to speak out against the death penalty. Double Tragedies, a report being released today at a special session on the first day of the annual convention of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), calls the death penalty "inappropriate and unwarranted" for people with severe mental disorders and "a distraction from problems within the mental health system that contributed or even directly led to tragic violence...

Financial Costs of Capital Punishment

Posted on July 01, 2009
Nearly 3 1/2 years into a court-ordered suspension of executions, opponents have embraced a new argument: that Californians can't afford to carry out the death penalty in a constitutional manner.They contend that by commuting all 682 death row inmates' sentences to life without the possibility of parole, the state could save up to $1 billion over the next five years -- a view expected to be offered, and challenged, during a public hearing today in Sacramento on proposed changes to the lethal injection procedures...

Mexico Gets It

Posted on June 21, 2009
The Mexican legislature voted to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs.Read more...President Calderon proposed this legislation. His reasoning: It makes sense to distinguish between small-time users and big-time dealers, while re-targeting major crime-fighting resources away from the consumers and toward the dealers and their drug lord bosses...

DHS Report Warned Against Anti-Semitic Violence

Posted on June 10, 2009
A heavily criticized Department of Homeland Security Report on right-wing extremism that was released in April warned precisely of the type of violent anti-Semitic activity that occurred at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. on Wednesday...

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