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“The Police Don’t Always Tell The Truth”: The Killing Of Walter Scott Sheds...
Yesterday The New York Times published a video showing a police officer, Michael T. Slager, fatally shooting a black man, Walter L. Scott, as he ran away from the officer. The video is disturbing...
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“Our Current Investments In Justice System Are Unwise”: Criminal Justice...
When policymakers think of the people who comprise the victims’ rights movement, young people of color from low-income communities may not be the first group that leaps to mind. But the facts suggest...
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“Every Candidate Should Have A Plan”: Structural Racism Needs To Be A...
This year, as with every other year, nearly every presidential candidate is white, with the only exceptions being long shots in the mushrooming Republican field. Most candidates are making at least...
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“Why All Americans Should Support Obama On Prison Reform”: Our Prison System...
Last week, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit federal prison. It’s a shame it took so long, because so many Americans are prisoners, and because so many former presidents...
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“There But For The Grace Of God”: America Needs A Justice System Worthy Of...
The United States does not have a justice system. If we define a justice system as a system designed for the production of justice, then it seems obvious that term cannot reasonably be applied to a...
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“Challenging The Tough On Crime Craze”: Obama Administration Works On Both...
Recently I wrote about Evan McMorris-Santoro’s profile of Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. In the course of describing her work on mandatory minimum sentences, he explains something interesting...
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“It’s Not Just Bad Cops; Prosecutors Run Wild”: The Ones Who Lie And Cheat To...
One year ago, Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer. Since then, the nation has debated the justice system more feverishly than any other period in recent memory. Most of the scrutiny has...
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“How Prosecutors Get Away With Cutting Black Jurors”: ‘Articulating Juror...
A curious thing happened at the trial of Timothy Tyrone Foster, a young black man accused of killing an elderly white woman: Every black prospective juror was dismissed. Foster was convicted, and...
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“Ceding To The Language Of Reform”: The Senate’s Bipartisan Criminal Justice...
Determination to “do something” about the issue of mass incarceration has, at last, moved from the academic and activist worlds into the halls of Congress: At the beginning of October, a bipartisan...
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“Deferred Prosecution Agreements”: Criminals Should Get Same Leniency As...
For years, when corporations paid big fines to escape prosecution for their misdeeds, critics fumed. Why, they asked, shouldn’t big companies be treated like common criminals? A federal judge turned...
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“How America Tolerates Racism In Jury Selection”: Discrimination In Jury...
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Foster v. Chatman, a case that challenges the all-too-common practice by which prosecutors deliberately exclude African-Americans from criminal...
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“Ben Carson, And The Failure Of Black Conservatives”: The Belief That...
I was a 17-year-old teenager growing up on the west side of Detroit when I first read Ben Carson’s biography Gifted Hands. The first thing that caught my attention were the similarities in our...
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“Shaping The National Conversation”: President Obama Sends A Signal To...
Last Friday I noted that President Obama had commuted the sentences of 95 federal prisoners – mostly non-violent drug offenders. It turns out that “mostly” was accurate because two of them didn’t fit...
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“Ethical Canons? So Much For Promises”: Tamir Rice Decision Shows; You Can...
You can get away with murder. You can shoot a child in an open park. You can lie about the incident. You can refuse to cooperate with investigators. You can, if a Cuyahoga County prosecutor and grand...
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“McGinty Never Intended To Prosecute The Officers”: Tamir Rice Prosecutor...
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty’s announcement that a grand jury, at his office’s recommendation, declined to file charges against the two officers who killed 12-year-old Tamir...
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“Addicts Deserve Alternatives To Prison”: Misguided War On Drugs Has Left...
Earlier this month, five Republican presidential contenders addressed a New Hampshire forum concerned with a crisis swamping certain regions of the country, including New England: heroin addiction. The...
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“A Pledge He Can’t Keep”: Bernie’s Prison Promise Is Too Good To Be True
Democrats’ embarrassment of riches was on display last night in Milwaukee. Watching the two candidates, the choice between Hillary Clinton’s pragmatism and Bernie Sander’s idealism feels less like a...
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“A New American Ethos”: In America These Days, You Can Never Be Punished Enough
We will call her Jane Doe. We really have no choice, given that that’s the only identification found in the court document. Jane is 57, a Jamaica-born permanent U.S. resident living in New York City....
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“A Law Embedded Then Civil War-Era”: Restoring Voting Rights To Felons Is The...
Of all the consequences of the nation’s decades-long infatuation with building more and more prisons and locking up more and more citizens, perhaps the most curious is this: More than 4 million...
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“Juries And Racial Bias”: The Supreme Court Cracks Down On Racist Prosecutors
The Supreme Court tends to expend more energy detangling questions of law than it does sorting through questions of fact. But on May 23rd, in a decision that could spare the life of a death-row inmate...
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