Criminal Law

Spying on Citizens

Posted on December 07, 2008
Maryland officials now concede that, based on information gathered by "Lucy" and others, state police wrongly listed at least 53 Americans as terrorists in a criminal intelligence database -- and shared some information about them with half a dozen state and federal agencies, including the National Security Agency...

Indigent Defense in Shambles

Posted on November 09, 2008
This article in the NY Times captures the current state of indigent defense as well as the desperation of those who fulfill the 6th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution's promise of the assistance of counsel. Our society is failing to live up to this standard, which should be an embarrassment to the legal system and to all of us...

No Reversal on Kennedy v. Louisiana

Posted on October 01, 2008
The Supreme Court on Tuesday voted, 7 to 2, not to reconsider its decision last June that the death penalty is unconstitutional punishment for the rape of a child.Read more....Clearly there is no national trend toward executing child rapists, and the original majority in Kennedy v...

Palin's town charged women for rape exams

Posted on September 22, 2008
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's hometown required women to pay for their own rape examinations while she was mayor, a practice her police chief fought to keep as late as 2000.Read more...At up to $1000 per kit, it is not difficult to imagine the impact that Wasilla's policy had on rape investigations...

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The Cost of Capital Punishment

Posted on September 21, 2008
It is not uncommon to hear claims that when it come to capital punishment, money should not matter. Today's op ed in the Star Press is typical.Read more...The editorial laments the fact that the prosecutor is not seeking a death sentence in a local case due, in part, to the prohibitive costs...

Harmless Error

Posted on September 09, 2008
In a rare move, the Supreme Court said it might reconsider its June decision that struck down the death penalty for crimes that fall short of murder, after a law blog revealed that the government left out a fact that would have bolstered its argument that executions for such offenses are constitutional...

Virginia's DNA Project

Posted on August 17, 2008
After Eva King Jones, 88, was raped and killed in her small-town Virginia home, a local man was accused and convicted. Now, 33 years later, police say newly discovered DNA evidence has led to the arrest of someone else.Read more....This state-wide effort to ensure the validity of convictions is a wonderful step toward restoring confidence in a system that punishes both the guilty and the innocent...

Prisoners' time spent on death row doubles

Posted on July 25, 2008
The time prisoners spend on death row has nearly doubled during the past two decades. Legal experts predict it will rise further as states review execution procedures and prisoners pursue lengthy appeals.Read more...Why is it taking longer to carry out executions? Wasn't the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act supposed to speed up the execution process? I cannot be sufficiently sarcastic to such a non-rhetorical question...

Will gas prices change policing practices?

Posted on July 20, 2008
As gasoline soars past the $4-a-gallon mark, police chiefs in towns and cities across the country are ordering their officers out of the car and onto their feet in a budgetary scramble.Read more...Carl Klockers once wrote that having police riding around looking for crime is about as effective as having fireman riding around looking for fires...

Anti-Death Penalty Groups Under Covert Police Surveillance

Posted on July 17, 2008
Maryland State Police officers conducted surveillance on local peace activists and groups opposed to the death penalty, including some in Takoma Park, for more than a year during the administration of former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), documents released this morning show...

Ailing Manson follower denied release from prison

Posted on July 16, 2008
Susan Atkins, a terminally ill former Charles Manson follower convicted in the murder of actress Sharon Tate, on Tuesday was denied a compassionate release from prison.Atkins, 60, has been diagnosed with brain cancer and has had a leg amputated, her attorney said...

Neighbor Cleared in Murder of Two Burglary Suspects

Posted on June 30, 2008
A Texas man who shot and killed two men he suspected of burglarizing his neighbor's home was cleared in the shootings Monday by a grand jury.Read more....First, let's remember that this is Texas, a state that permits killing someone in defense of property and that leads the nation in executions...

The Insidious Nature of Capital Punishment

Posted on May 29, 2008
Two recent news articles bring attention to the insidious nature of the death penalty. The first article reports that a Louisiana prosecutor wanted the jury in a capital case to know that the defendant had been caught masturbating in his jail cell and was thus unfit to receive a life sentence...

Our National Shame - One Out Of Many

Posted on May 04, 2008
"Alas, we don?t treat our own inmates in Guantánamo with even that much respect for law. On Thursday, America released Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera who had been held without charges for more than six years. Mr. Hajj has credibly alleged that he was beaten, and that he was punished for a hunger strike by having feeding tubes forcibly inserted in his nose and throat without lubricant, so as to rub tissue raw...

Exonerated Inmates Struggle to Live Normal Lives

Posted on April 28, 2008
Tabitha Pollock was asleep when her boyfriend killed her 3-year-old daughter. Charged with first-degree murder because prosecutors believed she should have known of the danger, Pollock spent more than six years in prison before the Illinois Supreme Court threw out the conviction...

Death Penalty is Cruel & Unusual

Posted on April 24, 2008
THE Supreme Court concluded last week, in a 7-2 ruling, that Kentucky?s three-drug method of execution by lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment?s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts cited a Supreme Court principle from a ruling in 1890 that defines cruelty as limited to punishments that ?involve torture or a lingering death...

Former Bexar County DA lost faith in capital punishment system

Posted on April 20, 2008
SAN ANTONIO ? Sam Millsap is embarrassed to admit he doesn't remember how many people his office sent to death row when he was district attorney here in the 1980s.Read more...Interesting how many people who actually had a hand in sentencing someone to death or in the actual execution process no longer support capital punishment...

Problems for Lethal Injection Remain

Posted on April 17, 2008
New York Times - Executions in Texas, Alabama and other Southern states with large death rows are likely to resume shortly in the wake of the Supreme Court?s decision Wednesday upholding Kentucky?s method of putting condemned prisoners to death.But the fractured decision may actually slow executions elsewhere, legal experts said, as lawyers for death row inmates undertake fresh challenges based on its newly announced legal standards...

U.S. Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injections

Posted on April 16, 2008
The Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's use of lethal injection executions Wednesday, likely clearing the way to resume executions that have been on hold for nearly 8 months.The justices, by a 7-2 vote, turned back a constitutional challenge to the procedures in place in Kentucky, which uses three drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates...

Limits of the Death Penalty

Posted on April 16, 2008
In recent decades, the Supreme Court has looked for ways to limit the death penalty, but it hears arguments today in a case that could reverse that trend ? and extend capital punishment to additional crimes. The court should stand by its past rulings that murder is the only crime committed by one person against another that can be punished by death...

Orange County Sheriff's Duputies Lied Under Oath

Posted on April 13, 2008
They lied, they changed their stories and they compared notes even after being ordered not to by a special Orange County grand jury investigating a deadly beating at Theo Lacy Jail, the testimony shows.During 45 days of grand jury prodding, members of the Sheriff's Department repeatedly hindered the probe, according to thousands of pages of transcripts made public last week...

Maryland Fires Correctional Officers for Brutality

Posted on April 10, 2008
The state prison agency fired eight more correctional officers on Tuesday, bringing the number to 17 in an investigation into accusations of brutality against inmates at two western Maryland institutions.Read more...More evidence of a national trend?

Rampant Abuse in Orange County Jail

Posted on April 08, 2008
A grand jury transcript released Monday describes an Orange County jail in disarray, with deputies watching television, playing video games and taking naps while inmates were allowed to use brutality and intimidation to keep order in the cellblocks.Read more...

Evidence the Pa. death penalty is punishment existing in name only

Posted on April 06, 2008
Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of murdering a police officer 26 years ago, has had his sentenced stayed by an appellate court. The reason was due to juror confusion over comprehension of sentencing instructions.Read more...The author laments that no evidence was presented to substantiate the claim that the original jury was confused, but the appellate court looked at the record and the forms and concluded that a substantial risk of confusion existed...

California prisons rocked by problems

Posted on April 05, 2008
A stabbing attack this week on four guards at one overcrowded state prison and a racially sparked brawl at another mark the type of violence that guards, inmates' attorneys and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been worried about for years.Read more...Let's place blame for the situation in today's prisons and jails where it belongs - on us...

Sex abuse, violence alleged at teen jails across U.S.

Posted on April 04, 2008
Girls as young as 13 say they were shackled for weeks at a time in Mississippi. Erica was 16 when she was forced to wear leg shackles at a Mississippi detention center, she said var CNN_ArticleChanger = new CNN_imageChanger('cnnImgChngr','/2008/CRIME/04/04/juvenile...

U.S. opens probe into Miami-Dade jails

Posted on April 04, 2008
The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a civil rights investigation into Miami-Dade County's beleaguered jail system, eying alleged excessive force against inmates and a pattern of suicides at the county's two main facilities over the past few years...

Do the time, lower the crime

Posted on March 30, 2008
Too many people behind bars? The statistics suggest otherwise.read more | digg story

Virginia's prison gravy train

Posted on March 29, 2008
The stupendous growth in the U.S. prison population is driven not by crime (which has been declining since the mid-1990s), but by ideology and profit. read more | digg story

The Juveniles Are Gone, Yet the Jails Remain

Posted on March 26, 2008
Three state facilities for teenagers are becoming high-priced ghost jails as teenagers in trouble are sent to programs closer to home, usually in the New York City area.read more | digg storyWhat are the elected and appointed officials of the State of New York thinking? How can they reduce the prison-industrial complex? Not only is the state closing adult prisons, but now it appears that juvenile facilities are also being emptied...

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