According to the National Registry of Exonerations, between January 1, 2023, and January 31, 2024, there were 50 exonerations nationwide in fifteen states and one from the federal system. Illinois led the way with nine exonerations, while New York and…
Category: Criminal Justice Reform
2024
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
On January 25, 2024, Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first person to be executed by a state government in this country through a method known as nitrogen hypoxia. Officials at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama at…
2023
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | SCOTUS
Billionaires buy justice, just as they buy everything else. They live by the business creed that everything and everyone has a price—even presidents, legislators, and Supreme Court justices.
Many have argued that Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is such…
2023
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
What the State…
2023
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
Who to believe, DNA evidence or third party confession?
At 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 21, 2013, the State of Oklahoma executed Anthony Castillo Sanchez in its death house at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It marked the tenth…
2023
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Brutality | Police Misconduct | Uncategorized
“It is tragic to see a life cut short at 29, with so many milestones unmet, so many words unsaid, and so much potential unfulfilled,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, at…
2023
Category: Constitutional Law | Criminal Justice Reform
America is enduring dark times these days.
Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate and a state governor, calls for civil war and praises the jury-convicted insurrectionists with the racists paramilitary groups, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, as “good…
2023
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Federal Criminal Law | Police Misconduct
Islam is one of the three Abrahamic religions, just like Christianity and Judaism. None of these religions espouse violence to secure a religious or political objective. But we know that within all religions are fanatical elements that embrace violence and…
2023
Category: Criminal Justice Reform
The United States prison population peaked in 2009 with more than two million incarcerated people in state and federal prisons. The nation’s prison population began its world leader growth in 1972 with President Richard Nixon’s “war on crime.” It continued…
2023
The Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association (ABA) in 2019 formed The Plea Bargain Task Force (Task Force) “to address persistent criticisms of the plea bargain system in the United States. Plea bargaining has become the primary way…