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Legal Aid Society

Needed In Jails In A Heat Emergency: Air Conditioning And Oversight

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Over the weekend, much of the United States experienced a heat wave. In The Atlantic last week, Robinson Meyer described what was coming as “a vast blanket of […]

As Reform Stalls in New York, Defendants Plead Out Because They Can’t Afford Cash Bail

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 National Campaign to Crack Down on Massage Businesses May Harm the Women it Wants to Help

Polaris, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization best known for operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline, says it has located a new front in the fight against human trafficking: what it describes as “illicit massage businesses,” or IMBs. The nonprofit, which brought in $10 million in 2016 (of which $2.1 million is government funding, according to IRS […]

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Family, Former Attorney of Queens Woman Who Fell to Her Death in Vice Sting Say She Was Sexually Assaulted, Pressured to Become an Informant

Yang Song fell four stories onto a sidewalk in Flushing, Queens on the night of November 25th. An officer with the New York City Police Department accompanied her, unconscious, to New York Presbyterian Hospital where doctors placed her on a respirator. They worked for hours: the 35 units of blood they transfused did not take, given the severity of her injuries from the thirty foot fall.

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