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…
Category: Criminal Justice Reform
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
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: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct | Qualified Immunity
THE PERILS OF A TRAFFIC STOP
The Stanford Open Policing Project (SOPR) reports that police conduct 50,000 traffic stops daily. These traffic stops result in more than 20 million American motorists interacting with the police each year.
At best, traffic…
2022
A little more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, a picture is emerging as to the effect the pandemic has had on the nation’s prison and jail systems.
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country…
2022
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct | Prosecutorial Misconduct
As of April 1, 2022, the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) reported 3,050 exonerations in the U.S. since 1989. These cases represent 26,700 lost years in prison because of wrongful convictions, many of which were obtained through intentional prosecutorial and…
2022
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
The death penalty is the ultimate punishment imposed in the American criminal justice system.
One hundred eight countries have completely abolished the death penalty, while another 55 have effectively abolished it by not executing anyone over the last ten years,…
2022
In March of 2021, Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam signed a Democratic-sponsored legislative bill into law that repealed the state’s death penalty—the 23rd such state to take such action.
State-Sponsored Racism
Many of the lawmakers who voted for the…
2022
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Police Misconduct
He was born Hubert Gerold Brown. He would become known as H. Rap Brown. He evolved into Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.
His name became legendary in the tumultuous civil rights era of the 1960s. The mere mention of “H.…