Bill Would Let Judges Bypass Mandatory Minimums In Certain Cases
Sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums have not done what was promised—they haven’t reduced crime and they haven’t eliminated racial disparities. What they have done is serve as fuel to the...
View ArticleExamples of Our Growing Police State?
When you call the United States a “police state”, people either look at you like you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist or they nod their head in agreement. While the thought of the “land of the free”...
View ArticleWhat You Should Know About Recording Police
Many of us no longer feel like the police are here to protect us. As a collective, citizens are growing more and more suspicious and even afraid of police officers. When we see cases of police...
View ArticleSupreme Court Rules on DUI Blood Draws
Score a victory for civil liberties and protections. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that police generally must seek a warrant before drawing blood in a suspected drunk driving case. In a...
View ArticleHow Being Poor Could Land You In Jail
Being poor isn’t a crime. Or is it? Americans living in poverty are more likely to be involved in the justice system than those from other economic groups. It’s partly because they have little to no...
View ArticleCongress Creates Over-Criminalization Task Force
There is a lot to complain about in the U.S. criminal justice system. And many of those complaints (mass incarceration, mandatory minimums, etc.) have a whole lot to do with over-criminalization in...
View ArticlePolygraph Evidence: If Courts Don’t Allow Them, Why do Police Use Them?
The use of so-called “lie detectors” to solve crimes and gain convictions has been largely overstated by the media and the big screen. As a matter of fact, many states don’t allow the results of a...
View ArticleTaking DNA Samples When Arrested is Allowed by Supreme Court
The Supreme Court ruled last week that police can swab arrestees for a DNA sample as a booking procedure. This means, you don’t have to be guilty of a crime in order for your genetic material to be...
View ArticleNew Criminal Statutes & Mandatory Minimums
Historically, law enforcement and crime and punishment was left to the states. The states wrote the majority of criminal laws and enforced them as well. But, over the past several decades, the federal...
View ArticleSign of the Times: Sesame Street Film for Children of Incarcerated Parents
The Sesame Street show that so many of us grew up with has changed considerably over the years. Old characters have moved on and news ones have shown up. But, perhaps the most significant thing the...
View ArticleLocal Police Amassing Own DNA Databases
A Supreme Court ruling recently determined that DNA collections at the time of arrest constitute a Constitutional search. In other words, even if you aren’t convicted of an offense, the government can...
View ArticleMost U.S. Police Have No Eyewitness Policies in Place
There is nothing quite as convincing to a jury as an eyewitness identification. Seeing the victim identify their assailant, for example, can have a profound effect on the people sitting in the...
View ArticleThe Problem(s) With Crime Labs
In what’s known as the “CSI effect” most people who lack true insight into the justice system get their information from television dramas. And when it comes to crime labs, this information is often...
View ArticleCan The Surveillance State Be Stopped?
As Law Enforcement Pushes APLRs and Surveillance, People Push Back With advances in technology and under the guise of keeping everyone safe, comes an ever increasing infringement by the government on...
View ArticleJustice Isn’t Just – WHO You Are Matters in US Criminal Courts
In the U.S., we have this idea that the Constitution and the legal system are crafted so that we are all treated equally under the law. It’s even written into that founding document in the Equal...
View ArticleHow To Avoid Breaking The Law
Most of us manage to go about our daily lives managing not to get into too much trouble with the law. Most of us have never had a court hearing, have never been fined and have never been arrested. That...
View ArticleDrug-Sniffing Dogs: Accurate Crime-Fighters or Tool of Deceptive Police?
Police K-9’s: we’re led to believe they have been trained in the best dog academies to use their superior sniffers to identify illicit drugs. They are essentially used to find drugs when cops...
View ArticleObama Hints at “Thousands” of Potential Drug Case Clemencies
Obama has the worst record on presidential clemencies of any modern Head of State. So when he recently announced he would be accepting and potentially approving stacks of clemency petitions, it came as...
View ArticleA Victory for Justice: Federal Law Enforcement to Record Interrogations
What happens in police interrogation rooms used to stay in police interrogation rooms. And though recording these potentially high-stress conversations has become more standard in local and state...
View ArticleMothers arrested for questionable crimes: Where is police discretion?
Breaking a criminal law puts you at risk for arrest. But we all know police use their discretion in determining who gets cuffed and who gets a stern “talking to”. In several recent cases to cross...
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