Prosecutors across the country have begun declining low-level cases in an effort to reduce racial inequity and to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hours of video given exclusively to The Appeal show police officers bragging about attacking protesters and multiple instances of excessive force and the liberal use of pepper spray.
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.
His attorney says the Suffolk County DA’s office tried to send “an innocent man to his death.”
District attorneys in the state could decarcerate quickly by dropping unnecessary cases.
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.
District Attorney Rachael Rollins ran as a reformer who would work to increase transparency, but her office and the police department have been fighting the order.
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.
Law enforcement’s old guard claims that policing low-level crime protects communities. That’s not just wrong; it’s dangerous.
Nineteen academics published a letter to the newspaper over its coverage of the Suffolk County DA.
Boston’s top prosecutor says big changes are in the works; advocates plan to keep pushing.
The landmark decision could help other transgender people in jails and prisons who have been denied access to hormone treatment, a violation of their constitutional rights.
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.