More than 20 women accused Harry Morel, a longtime district attorney in Louisiana, of sexual misconduct. But Morel pleaded guilty to just a single obstruction of justice count while Mike Zummer, the FBI agent who investigated him, was fired. Now, Zummer is speaking about what he says is a grave injustice—at the hands of the Justice Department.
U.S Attorney William McSwain denies he’s targeted the social justice leader, but experts say prosecutors’ use of the man’s clothing and social media to argue that he should be detained pretrial is unusual.
Rachel Barkow, a respected legal scholar, expert on executive clemency, and former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia would be an ideal choice to start and lead a powerful new program inside the Biden White House.
In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Keva Landrum violated the Constitution when, as a judge, she permitted nearly a dozen Black people to be struck from serving on a jury in a high-profile murder case.
Voters decided to keep Adel in charge of the third-largest prosecuting agency in the country. She is recovering from emergency surgery for bleeding in her brain.
Los Angeles County, with the country’s largest jail system and largest local prosecutor office, is considered a crown jewel in a nationwide push for criminal justice reform.
The DA’s office has been home to bribery, corruption, and more since it was formed 170 years ago. What could a progressive prosecutor do to change that?
Incumbent Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel is backed by police unions and has declined to charge officers in high-profile killings. Challenger Julie Gunnigle says she wants to create an independent unit to review police use-of-force cases.
One candidate for Maricopa County attorney says she’ll make clearing past marijuana convictions ‘universal and automatic’ if elected. The other has not said she would do anything to support expunging criminal records.
The state’s pre-Roe abortion ban includes mandatory prison time for people who provide or obtain abortions. Candidates for top prosecutor in Maricopa County differ on whether they would prosecute such cases.
DA Jackie Lacey and challenger George Gascón outlined diverging visions for the top prosecutor’s office in the nation’s most populous county.
Allister Adel paints herself as a reformer, but her record shows otherwise.
While a debate over defunding the police rages in Austin, a new lawsuit reminds its residents that assault cases in the city are routinely ignored.
Late-stage donations to the Los Angeles DA race increase concerns about the influence of law enforcement money on politics.
Documents obtained by The Appeal raise questions about a Pittsburgh-area mass shooting case that fell apart due to prosecutorial misconduct.
B.S., a 61-year-old with chronic respiratory problems, has struggled with substance use for decades. Police and prosecutors sought the harshest sentence possible after he failed to return the car.
After testing positive for COVID-19, Tommy Zeigler, whose case inspired legislation and multiple investigative reports, is missing in a Florida prison; advocates for women inside Oklahoma’s Eddie Warrior Correctional Center want to hear from Gov. Kevin Stitt; and men quarantined in a previously shuttered prison say they’re being forced to pee in cups.
Its decades-long commitment to upholding convictions—even those marred by police or prosecutorial misconduct—has left Missourians languishing in prison for years.
Women at California’s Folsom prison fear that men with COVID-19 will be transferred into their building, a new report looks at the shockingly high rate of COVID-19 deaths among incarcerated people, and we update our ongoing case tracker map.
Prosecutors in states ranging from New York to Utah are using decades-old gang laws to target participants in the largest uprising against police brutality in U.S. history.
Removing police union influence from the prosecutor’s office is a critical first step towards building a system that is safe, just, and fair for all.
A state investigation found that Detroit police officers fabricated evidence that helped convict a 14-year-old boy. A judge threw out his conviction after he spent nine years in prison, but the officers are still on the job and haven’t been flagged as unreliable to testify in court.
A deadly pandemic should not be used as a bargaining chip against poor, detained people charged with crimes.
Julie Gunnigle, who is running in Maricopa County, says she supports alternatives to incarceration. But a decade ago in Illinois, she prosecuted a woman for recording phone calls and helped put her in jail for 18 months.
Lawyers and activists are calling on prosecutor Kym Worthy to dismiss charges against those who have been arrested. As of July 29, 451 Detroiters had been arrested for violating Michigan’s concealed carry law, an increase of 190 percent compared to July 2019.
Though domestic violence is often cited as a reason to maintain the carceral status quo, advocates say there are more humane—and effective—alternatives.
Excessive force against people being arrested, falsification of evidence against suspects, and brutality by guards against prisoners — these are all just different forms of the same problem.
Through this mechanism, communities can accept accountability for the racism they allow to flourish by failing to disrupt it.
How governors respond to this pandemic will define their legacy. They all face a choice: save lives in prisons now, or hand down potential death sentences with their inaction and watch harm ripple through communities and exacerbate inequities into future generations.
Democrats in Congress must still their impulse to legislate restrictions on clemency. Not only would such a law be unconstitutional, but it may deter future presidents from using clemency the way that the framers intended.
A late-night Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee, despite his claims of innocence and his attorneys’ belief that DNA testing could show he was wrongly convicted.
An Appeal analysis shows that the percentage of people held without bond remains steady, at roughly 33%, although arrests are down during the pandemic.
As a ‘heat dome’ descends on much of the country and local governments scramble to provide safe refuges, concern grows over the effect of a disease that has ‘totally demolished the homeless people.’
Attorney General Bill Barr has scheduled executions for four people on federal death row in July and August. That’s more federal executions in one month than in the entire modern history of the federal death penalty.
You can’t incarcerate a public health problem. It doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t repair harm.
From grocery store workers to nurses, from home care workers to janitors, from teachers to delivery workers to domestic workers — there is an invisible, undervalued army of people who make our lives possible. Their work is essential, and it always has been.
Prosecutors wanted to make an example of Justin Dixon, who has been in an Arizona prison for 14 years, with 37 ahead of him. Now, as COVID-19 spreads in the facility where he’s being held, his family is desperate for him to be released.
This historical moment is crying out for a re-examination of our institutions, and law schools are no exception.
Federal prosecutors argue that damaging a police vehicle is a violation of federal statutes in part because the police department receives federal funding. Former prosecutors and law professors say it’s an absurd rationale driven by politics of the Justice Department.
Lamar Burks has maintained his innocence for nearly 25 years in a murder case that has been marked by conflicting eyewitness accounts and the conviction of a DEA agent on corruption charges.