Gov. Rick Perry and his defense team have characterized his recent two felony abuse of power indictments by a Travis County Grand Jury as “banana Republic politics.” The governor, and his defense team, is giving “banana Republic politics” a bum…
Author: John Floyd
2014
Category: Federal Criminal Law
Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by the State of Texas on February 17, 2004. He was the seventh person put to death that year in the state, and the 320th person executed since 1982 when Texas resumed executions in the…
2014
Category: Uncategorized
On August 15, 2014, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was indicted on felony counts of coercion and official oppression. After the immediate hoopla settled, the serious inquiry began focusing on the motivation for the criminal charges.
Any proper analysis of whether…
2014
Category: Federal Criminal Law | Terrorism Criminology
The recent confrontations between the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department and the city’s African-American community have served at least one purpose: it has shown the entire nation that too many police departments have become militarized units committed to absolute control, rather…
2014
Category: Drug Crime | Federal Criminal Law
Kentucky is often a state of distinction for the wrong reasons. It ranks in the top ten of the two of the worst categories: corruption and meth labs. Both categories lend support to each other. The Kentucky States Police reported…
2014
According to a November 2013 report by the Urban Institute, the federal prison population has increased 790 percent since 1980. All prisons in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) are over capacity, some as much as 35 to 40 percent.…
2014
On July 21, 2014, Arizona convicted murderer John Rudolph Woods became the fourth condemned inmate this year to die in a “botched” lethal injection execution in this country. He spent 90 minutes gasping for air every 10 seconds or so,…
2014
Category: Federal Criminal Law
Courts generally consider the evidentiary power of confessions to be uniquely persuasive of guilt. In 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court Arizona v. Fulminante found that a confession is unlike any other evidence, saying “the defendant’s own confession is probably the…
2014
Category: Drug Crime | Federal Criminal Law
In January 2012 the Texas Department of Public Safety realized it had a major problem with one of its employees—a forensic scientist named Jonathan Salvador who had been employed with the agency for six years. He was assigned to the…
2014
Category: Drug Crime | Federal Criminal Law
It has been hailed by privacy rights activists and legal scholars as the most significant U.S. Supreme Court decision in the “digital age.” The decision was handed down on June 25 in the case David Leon Riley v. California. The…