The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is quietly rolling out a pair of new policies that could restrict access to books and communications for the system’s nearly 200,000 prisoners. The first of the new policies bans all books from being sent into federal facilities from outside sources including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. These retailers are […]
We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system. What this brilliant short film called “Prosecutorial Accountability” breaks down is the fact that no single individual has more power and more influence in the criminal justice system than […]
On April 11, President Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), legislation that would make it possible to hold the operators of websites criminally and civilly liable if third parties were found to have posted advertisements for prostitution. Days before the legislation was enacted, however, federal authorities seized Backpage.com, essentially locking sex […]
Just a few months ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo seemed sure that criminal justice reform was imminent. During his annual State of the State address in January, he called for a legislative package that would limit civil asset forfeiture, reform discovery, reduce trial delays, and most notably, significantly reduce the use of cash bail. […]
On April 9, a Florida public defender persuaded a judge to drop a first-degree murder case against his client related to a fentanyl overdose last fall. The case involves Christopher Toro, 30, who is accused of selling illicit fentanyl that resulted in the overdose death of 32-year-old Alfonso Pagan in September 2017. Seminole County prosecutors […]
In 1963, the Supreme Court handed down Gideon v. Wainwright, which held that the government had to provide a lawyer to any poor defendant facing prison time. While often trumpeted as one of the Court’s greatest modern decisions, it has also been embroiled in controversy from the beginning. Like all Supreme Court opinions that impose new […]
“Police brutality in the United States is not worse. Phones and social media just make it feel that way.” I see and hear some version of that thought pretty much every single day. It’s a lie. It sounds good. I wish that was what we were dealing with right now. But it’s not. See, some […]
On April 30, 2015, William Aubin Jr. was at home with his wife in Livingston Parish, Louisiana when a patrol car from the sheriff’s office pulled onto his street. The deputy, William Durkin, was there to investigate a reckless driving complaint. Aubin wasn’t involved in the incident but he knew about it and went outside […]
On Jan. 23, 2007, a pair of officers from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Narcotics Field Unit (NFU) received information from a “reliable source” that drug sales were being conducted in the vicinity of 22nd and Jackson Streets, on the city’s south side. “Numerous B/Ms” — NFU officers Reginald Graham and Sylvia Jones would later write in a […]
Marius Mason is a transgender man incarcerated at FMC Carswell, a federal women’s prison located in Fort Worth, Texas. Since at least 2014, Mason has wanted to change his legal name to his chosen name, an important step in the transition process for many transgender people. Section 45.103 of the Texas Family Code, however, prevents anyone […]
Dear Jay-Z, We need to talk. I want to understand how funding your new app, “Promise,” is going to dismantle what you’ve called the “exploitative bail industry.” The Black Youth Project, among others, has rightly criticized the profiteering possibility of Promise. I’m down with liberty and justice for all. And I know you are too. So let […]
In 2012, Gilbert Narvaez was convicted on drug-dealing charges and sent to a Pennsylvania prison for a three- to eight-year sentence. Narvaez maintained his innocence and argued that he was the victim of a bad cop named Christopher Hulmes, who claimed that in 2011 he had seen Narvaez in Philadelphia’s Fairhill neighborhood peddling narcotics. “He was just […]
At the beginning of the year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo laid out a plan that would eliminate cash bail for those charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. Last week, however, his plan stalled out during budget negotiations with state legislative leaders. For bail reform advocates, including public defenders and advocates for incarcerated people, the plan’s failure serves as […]
A few miles from Miami International Airport, outside of Hialeah, sits a tent camp of about 280 homeless people. There’s no electricity or running water and no bathrooms. News reports describe the stench of human waste and garbage, tents that flood when it rains, and flies, mosquitoes, and rats infesting the area. “Animals live better than this,” one resident […]
In February 2017, Mweze Kyungu was pulled over by Houston police officers in Harris County, Texas for a defective brake light and then arrested. “You kill people like me,” Kyungu told the arresting officers, “all you do is kill black people.” Thus began a nearly year-long ordeal for Kyungu in Harris County’s criminal justice system, […]
“It’s illegal to stand still, it’s illegal to sit down, it’s illegal to lay down, it’s illegal to eat,” said Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project. “You’re breaking the law as soon as you stop walking.”
When Steven Shockey was arrested at a San Diego port of entry in December 2011, he knew his luck had run out. The 52-year-old was trying to re-enter the United States after jumping bail and fleeing to Mexico because of an arrest in Williamson County, Texas, for the aggravated assault of his ex-wife. Because of […]
On Sept. 6, 2017, then-Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett penned a letter describing, in excruciating detail, how Las Vegas police officers physically assaulted him while investigating shots fired in the area of the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight.
On March 14, Herman Bell learned that after 45 years behind bars, he would soon be released from prison. The 70-year-old former Black Panther was convicted in the 1971 shooting deaths of two New York police officers. Since 2004, he appeared before the state’s parole board seven times; each time, he was denied parole because of the nature of […]
In August 2017, 29-year-old Richard Gaworecki of Union, New York trembled as a Johnson City Village Court judge read charges that included selling heroin that led to the death of Nicholas McKiernan, 26, that July. About one month later, Broome County District Attorney Steve Cornwell, assisted by his first ever “overdose investigator,” upgraded Gaworecki’s charges […]
In May 1988 on the south side of Chicago, a video store caught fire in the middle of the night. The fire spread quickly, eventually burning down seven other nearby businesses and killing two people. The police determined it was arson, and quickly identified the owner of the video store as the mastermind of a four-person plot. […]
I love New York. It’s my favorite city in the world. I live and work here by choice. We get a lot of things right. Every day I walk down the street or hop on the subway, I am reminded that I am a citizen of a very big, incredibly diverse world. But our progressive […]
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently unveiled a legislative proposal packaged as part of a budget amendment to expand already onerous residency and presence restrictions for some sex offenders in New York. The proposal expands blanket presence and residency restrictions for sex offenders who are on parole or post-release supervision by vastly increasing the number of places they cannot be […]
A Texas man tried and convicted in late February of murdering his girlfriend’s daughter is the state’s first death sentence in 2018 — but it also may be its latest example of prosecutorial misconduct in a capital case. On February 28, a jury in Hardin County, a small East Texas county near the Louisiana border, handed down a […]
In 2016, Louisiana Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards made good on a campaign promise to fix his state’s wildly underfunded public defender system by pushing the state legislature to increase funding to public defender offices working on regular felony and misdemeanor cases. But there was a catch: the majority of the increased funding didn’t come from new taxes or […]
On March 13, roughly two dozen community activists and supporters gathered outside a courtroom in Franklin County Municipal Court to support four young activists accused of disrupting last June’s pride parade in Columbus, Ohio. The Black Pride 4 — Wriply Bennet, Ashton Braxton, Deandre Miles-Hercules, and Kendall Denton — and six other activists blocked the […]
This week, the Senate is expected to vote on a bill that could shutter websites that host sex-for-sale ads. The bill, known as SESTA — the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act — has been described by its supporters as a way to provide justice to victims of human trafficking by making it easier for them to file civil suits against the sites. However, a growing coalition of survivors of trafficking, sex workers, and women’s and LGBT rights groups oppose SESTA, saying it will endanger those it is meant to help.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro may be eyeing a run at the governor’s office in 2022, yet his law-and-order voting record on the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons suggests that he is playing to Democratic primary voters of a bygone tough-on-crime era.
Voters in Florida may soon get to decide whether to give victims of crime a bigger say in the criminal justice system.
On the evening of January 29, 2018, Caryn Santa knew she only had a few hours to save her son, Robert Collazo. Collazo, 21, had been held on Rikers Island for almost three years, charged with the murder of Jose Velasquez.
As part of a growing push to end the use of cash bail, a national movement is calling attention to the plight of defendants held in jail simply because they can’t afford to pay their way out.
On Friday, in what her office called, “the first [release] of its kind in the country,” Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx made public six years of felony criminal case data.
By the time Steven Odiase learned of the evidence that would set him free, he’d already spent six years in prison for murder.
Across the country, police departments have chronically failed to investigate rape cases, leaving rape kits — the physical evidence collected from a rape victim’s body — untested. Unfortunately, a false narrative has taken hold around the concept of a rape kit backlog.
He’s a death-penalty championing, Islam-bashing vaccine skeptic who believes the U.S. is “rooted in Christian principles.” And he’s currently campaigning for re-election in Texas as the district attorney of Bexar County, a populous county of nearly two million residents, close to 60 percent of whom are Hispanic — as a Democrat.
In California, as elsewhere in the nation, there’s a growing consensus that cash bail unfairly penalizes poor defendants, forcing them to sit in jail for months or even years pre-trial, while wealthier defendants walk free. Last year, California nearly ended cash bail after a bill, SB 10, passed the State Senate and then stalled out in […]
In September 2017, newspapers across the country ran headlines of a similar theme: According to data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, the agency’s official report on criminal behavior nationwide, crime — or at least violent crime — had risen for the second year in a row. That’s not entirely true.
As the conversation about criminal justice reform increasingly focuses on the nation’s broken bail system, prosecutors across the country have announced new policies that purportedly aim to keep low-income people from being denied their freedom simply because they can’t afford to pay bail. In New York City, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and Manhattan District Attorney […]
Local activists are set to gather at New York’s City Hall today, urging Mayor Bill de Blasio to end his silence on the idea of the city opening a supervised injection facility, a medical setting for safely injecting drugs. Organized by VOCAL-NY, a nonprofit grassroots organization, the coalition of activists and drug users are calling out […]
Her former partner assaulted her in her home. When the police arrived, she was arrested and he walked free.