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Mon - January 15, 2007Federal Death Penalty Prosecutions IncreasingEven as states
back
away from the death
penalty, federal capital prosecutions have increased. The US Attorneys who favor
capital punishment find support in the Bush administration's Justice
Department.
Posted at 03:15 PM Read More Fri - January 12, 2007Officer Lied to Obtain Warrant in Fatal ShootingThe facts were bad enough when it
seemed that Kathryn Johnston's death was the result of unnecessarily aggressive
tactics in executing a search warrant. Now we learn that the warrant was based
on lies. Will the officers involved be held accountable?
Posted at 03:08 PM Read More Tue - December 26, 2006Why We Need Criminal Justice Reform in 2007Via the New York City
Independent Media
Center and the
DMI
blog:
These are some statistics from the
Department of Justice reflecting data through 2005.
What they tell us: America continues
to be a prison nation. The drug war doesn't work. Over-incarceration doesn't
work. Our elected officials in Congress need to spend time addressing these
issues in 2007.
Posted at 02:02 PM Read More Thu - December 14, 2006Florida Execution Lasts 34 MinutesAngel Nieves Diaz, 55, was
pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m., despite his protests of innocence and requests for
clemency made by the governor of his native Puerto Rico. He appeared to move for
24 minutes after the first injection. His eyes were open, his mouth opened and
closed and his chest rose and fell. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes after his
last movement.
Posted at 05:48 PM Read More Thu - December 7, 20067,000 a Year Die in U.S. PrisonsSometimes we focus more on prison abuses
abroad than we do at home. The first is not more important than the second as
Ira
Robbins points out in the Baltimore Sun.
Posted at 06:55 PM Read More Mon - December 4, 2006Student Killed by Police Over Video GameLast Night in Little Rock wrote here and
here
about the unnecessary use of aggressive tactics to execute search warrants or
make arrests -- tactics that needlessly kill innocent people. In a similar vein,
deputies who raided an apartment in Wilmington, N.C., intending to arrest 18
year old Peyton Strickland for allegedly stealing two Playstation 3 video games,
instead shot
him to death. While the details are unclear, here's one
account:
Posted at 07:06 PM Read More Sat - October 28, 2006Twenty Years of Unfair SentencingYesterday, NPR's "Morning Edition"
took a non-celebratory look at the twentieth anniversary of the Anti-Drug Abuse
Act of 1986 -- the law that responded to mindless fear about crack cocaine by
creating harsh mandatory minimum sentences for crack, and by irrationally
designating crack as 100 times more evil than powder cocaine (i.e., a gram of
crack gets the same sentence as 100 grams of powder).
The
story (about four minutes
of listening time) quotes Eric Sterling, who helped write the law for the House
Judiciary Committee, and who now speaks
out (pdf) against the
unfair sentences that the law compels.
Posted at 11:05 PM Read More Fri - October 20, 2006State of AZ Is Stealing Your Wire TransfersArizona is stealing money from innocent
people, then challenging them to prove their entitlement to its return. And
this, the state's Attorney General says, is a "model of due process." It's more
a model of
thievery.
Posted at 12:47 PM Read More Wed - October 11, 2006U.S. Uses Dogs to Scare Domestic Prison InmatesIf you thought the U.S. used dogs only to
scare detainees in foreign prisons, think again. Five
states allow the use of dogs not only to scare, but to bite
inmates.
Posted at 02:21 PM Read More Tue - September 26, 2006Young lives lostFor every 100,000 Black juveniles living
in the United States, more than 750 are in custody in a juvenile
facility.
Posted at 10:59 AM Read More Thu - August 24, 2006Police property: It’s finders keepers in NHThe state Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the
government can keep and destroy more than 500 CDs taken from Michael Cohen,
owner of Pitchfork Records in Concord, in 2003 even though the state failed to
prove that a single disk was illegal.
Posted at 01:02 AM Read More Sat - August 19, 2006Federal Appeals Court: Driving With Money is a CrimeA federal appeals court ruled yesterday
that if a motorist is carrying large sums of money, it is automatically subject
to confiscation. In the case entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in
U.S. Currency," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that
amount of cash away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a "lack of
significant criminal history" neither accused nor convicted of any
crime.
Posted at 01:48 AM Read More Thu - August 3, 2006North Carolina establishes Innocence CommissionNorth Carolina has a new way to help keep
innocent people out of prison. Gov. Mike Easley signed a bill Thursday that
creates an Innocence Inquiry Commission, the first of its kind in the
country.
Posted at 08:07 PM Read More Sun - July 30, 2006Good Samaritan Migrant Aid Workers ArrestedIn a case that is shocking immigrant rights groups
nationwide, prosecutors in Arizona have charged two volunteers who say they
tried to save the lives of three sick migrants stranded in the desert with
felony charges of transporting illegal immigrants.
Posted at 08:15 PM Read More Wed - July 26, 2006Administration's New Plan For Detainee Trials: More of the SameIntent on circumventing the Supreme Court's
pronouncement that detainees are entitled to meaningful trials, the
Bush administration is drafting
legislation that would rig the trials in the government's favor.
Hearsay would be acceptable proof and defendants could be excluded from their
own trials. Coerced confessions would be admissible unless the judge thought
they were "unreliable."
Posted at 10:41 PM Read More |
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