17-year-old high school student Trayvon Martin was murdered in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012. Seventeen months later, his killer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted. In response to this travesty of justice, three Black organizers created the social movement known as…
CRIMINAL JURISDICTION
Criminal Jurisdiction:
A Criminal Law Blog from a Defense Perspective
2022
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
The National Registry of Exonerations announced on March 15, 2022, that 33 of the 45 exonerations announced in February involved people falsely accused of crimes by former Chicago police Detective Ronald Watts and the team of officers he supervised. This…
2022
Category: Drug Trafficking | Federal Criminal Law | Guns | Uncategorized
This past February, Houston’s city officials allocated 44 million dollars to combat increasing violence in the state’s largest city. At a news conference announcing the allocation of the violence-fighting funds, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner stated:
“Violent crime is a public…
2022
Category: Federal Criminal Law
There is a mistaken belief sometimes that you are convicted of a crime and serve your sentence, then you will have paid your debt to society – and that’s the end of it. But that is far from the end.…
2022
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty | Prosecutorial Misconduct
After her November 2016 election as district attorney of Harris County, Kim Ogg said she would reduce the use of the death penalty with all its racial discrimination and unfairness.
Five and one-half years into the Ogg administration has taught…
2022
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Prosecutorial Misconduct
There has always been, and will always be, a legion of rogue criminal prosecutors who, with tunnel vision to win at all cost, kill innocent people through the power of the state.
That is not hyperbole. It is an indisputable,…
2022
Category: Appeals | Criminal Law | Federal Criminal Law | SCOTUS
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant the right to effective assistance of counsel at both the trial and appellate level. A defendant raising an ineffective assistance claim in a post-conviction proceeding must meet a two-prong…
2022
Category: Uncategorized
White hatred of people of color is a permanent fixture in American history. The violence done to people of color by White Americans cannot be undone, nor the historical recordings of that violence erased from the chronicles of history.
…
2022
The tragic shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2015 by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, triggered nationwide protests and the eventual trend to elect “reform-minded” district attorneys to deal with countless inequities in the country’s criminal justice…
2022
Category: Federal Criminal Law | Hate Crime
Terrorism is a serious charge in the United States. While some associate terrorism with planes flying into buildings or bombs exploding, acts of teror can take on many forms.
Today Americans must deal with domestic terrorism as part of…