An unprecedented 95 percent of Americans favor criminal justice reforms that include police reforms. The National Opinion Research Center (“NORC”) at the University of Chicago found in its report released on June 23, 2020, that Americans support having specific standards…
Category: Criminal Justice Reform
2020
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
For over a decade, we have written about the “epidemic” of police misconduct and the devastating impact of systemic racism inside the criminal justice system. It was just another voice in the proverbial wilderness. Today, however, things are different. In…
2020
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Criminal Law | Police Misconduct | Prosecutorial Misconduct
Top officials of the Trump administration, including U.S. Attorney General William Barr, claim there is no “systemic racism” in law enforcement in this country. Yet the conservative Republican group, the Lincoln Project, recently called Trump the “second president” of the…
2020
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
The murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota has brought demands for racial justice to a pitched boil after generations of racial profiling, police violence, and failed promises for reform in the criminal justice system. Mr. Floyd’s murder is…
2020
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
In July 2017, President Donald J. Trump, as the nation’s “chief law enforcement officer” as he likes to call himself, implored police across the country not to be “too nice” when making an arrest. The President was speaking to a…
2020
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
Two white men, 64-year-old Gregory McMichael and his 34-year-old son, Travis, are under arrest for the February 23, 2020 shooting death of an unarmed African-American named Ahmaud Arbery, as he jogged through the predominantly white neighborhood in which the Travis’…
2020
Category: Corruption | Criminal Justice Reform
In 2017, the Equal Justice Initiative issued a report, “Lynching in America: Confronting The Legacy of Racial Terror,” that shows the state of Georgia had 589 lynchings from 1877 to 1950—second only to Mississippi’s 654 lynchings during the same period.…
2020
Category: bail reform | Criminal Justice Reform
Gradually, inevitably, the COVID 19 virus is working its way through the Texas jail and prison systems. There are roughly 7,500 to 10,000 inmates in the Harris County Jail.
Throughout Texas’ county jails, nearly 70 percent of people detained in…
2020
Category: Criminal Justice Reform
Each year worldwide, some 30 million people spend time in a prison or some other form of detention. Eleven million people are incarcerated around the world on any given day. The World Health Organization estimates that one in five of…
2020
Category: Corruption | Criminal Justice Reform
In response to the growing threat of COVID-19, some responsible public officials, activists, and experts in Harris County have demanded that non-dangerous “accused” people in the local jail be released. These are mostly individuals who have been charged but not…