Massachusetts

James Carver spent 36 years in prison after he was convicted of setting one of the deadliest fires in Massachusetts history. But after reviewing new scientific evidence, a judge set him free.

When residents of Leyden, Massachusetts, started investigating their former police chief, they didn’t know it would end with criminal charges—and a successful push to reform the town’s government.

In Minnesota, Democrats used a newly won legislative trifecta to legalize marijuana, overhaul the pardons process, and limit no-knock warrants. But they also funneled hundreds of millions in new funding toward prisons and policing.

Justices in the state’s highest court are weighing whether it is unconstitutional to sentence people convicted of murder and aged 18 to 20 to life without parole.

A man is serving two life sentences for a crime that, according to his legal team, never occurred.

Over two nights last year, police in Boston and Worcester used excessive force—including pushing and tackling—while arbitrarily arresting protesters without apparent cause.

The case illustrates the importance of keeping lists of police officers with histories of misconduct or dishonesty, the defense lawyer in the case says.

This historical moment is crying out for a re-examination of our institutions, and law schools are no exception.

District Attorney Rachael Rollins sought to block the disclosure of records that could show Boston police used Snapchat to target people who are Black or Latinx.

During a Boston radio show where Rachael Rollins accused defenders of harming Black and Brown communities, the DA demonstrated that she misunderstands the role that prosecutors play in the criminal legal system: caging those very people.

The state’s law enforcement agencies failed to implement a 2018 data-sharing law. Now officials are struggling to identify high-risk people to release from county jails.

District attorneys in the state could decarcerate quickly by dropping unnecessary cases.

People held in Bristol County are ‘extremely agitated and panicking’ due to unsanitary conditions and overcrowding amid the coronavirus outbreak.

In Boston, it’s worse than business as usual at the police department as the pandemic spreads. On a recent day, officers arrested people for charges the district attorney has publicly declined to prosecute.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, who once offered prisoners at his jails as laborers to build the border wall, is one of many sheriffs who partners with the agency.

A culture of violence and resistance to reform in the corrections department set the stage for a recent lockdown

In his run for president, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has been forced to address his consulting past. Kennedy should do the same about his work.

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. Every American law student gets to know, and usually comes to dislike, a person called “the reasonable person.” The reasonable person is everywhere: negligence cases in torts […]

A severe shortage of assigned counsel due to low rates of compensation in Hampden County, Massachusetts jeopardizes the rights of defendants.

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. “As soon as Julie Eldred was granted probation for stealing jewelry to buy drugs, she got busy fulfilling the judge’s conditions,” Jan Hoffman reported for the New York Times […]

Advocates say that despite the election of several progressive prosecutors in the state, there’s a substantial increase in such detentions, which are stymieing gains made through policies to limit cash bail.

With Miriam Mack and Elizabeth Tuttle Newman of The Bronx Defenders

Even in states where use is decriminalized, child welfare systems continue to treat it as a sign of neglectful parenting, particularly among families of color.

Most coverage of police raids targeting homeless people and substance users parroted official—and fraught—talking points.

Recent legal victories have spurred counties and states to provide medication-assisted treatment to prisoners struggling with substance use.

Trooper testimony inconsistent with video and misconduct among state and local law enforcement in New Hampshire and Massachusetts have caused at least 15 drug cases to unravel.

Prosecutors denounce bail reform efforts when people miss court dates, but ‘failure to appear’ rates obscure the fact that many who miss court aren’t on the run.

Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins’s promise to decline to prosecute several offenses is a rejection of the punitive tradition of prosecutors and perhaps signals a new kind of reform that spurns criminal justice as a solution to public health problems.

“Jail is not a country club,” the Bristol County sheriff said. “That’s why once you’ve done time in the Bristol County House of Corrections, you won’t want to come back.”

In the Berkshire County DA race, the establishment is resorting to extreme measures to ensure it maintains power and avoids change.

It’s de rigueur these days in progressive circles to decry attempts by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “bring back the war on drugs.” A cursory internet search for the phrase “Sessions wants to bring back the war on drugs” returns nearly identical headlines containing a variation on the theme from the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Vice, […]

Last month, Massachusetts criminal defense lawyers filed suit seeking an extraordinary measure of relief: dismissal en masse of thousands of drug convictions, with prejudice — meaning that prosecutors would forever be barred from retrying the defendants. The circumstances giving rise to the request were, at first glance, equally extraordinary. First, there was the revelation in 2013 that Massachusetts state […]

Norfolk County (Massachusetts) prosecutors announced on Monday that they do not intend to retry Fred Weichel, a South Boston man who spent 36 years behind bars for a murder the existing evidence suggests he did not commit. Yet the district attorney’s office took pains to clarify that the decision not to re-prosecute falls far short […]

Recently, a Massachusetts judge took two former prosecutors to task for attempting to cover-up the extent of a massive lab scandal that called into question thousands of drug convictions in the state. Today, a lawyer from the Innocence Project and a Northeastern Law Professor took the rare step of filing bar complaints against those lawyers — Kris Foster and Anne Kaczmarek — previously […]

The scandals marring Massachusetts’ state drug labs — and its criminal justice system — have taken a new turn. Former state chemists Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan have both received their legal comeuppances for their misconduct. And at least one wrongfully convicted person, Leonardo Johnson, has been awarded $2 million as a result of being victimized by Dookhan’s lies. But last week, following months of […]