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After years of groundbreaking reporting and analysis, The Appeal will sunset in its current form on June 30. Staff are working to relaunch in the near future.

Last week, a former clerk of Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt told a congressional committee that the judge sexually harassed her, a reminder of how little law schools and the federal court system do to protect law students.

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. “Today, the sham impeachment attempt concocted by Democrats ended in the full vindication and exoneration of President Donald J. Trump,” said Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary. […]

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. It was no secret that President Trump was planning to run an ad during the Super Bowl this year; the question was only what the particular message […]

“When New York State created a network of 12 Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, criminal justice professionals hailed it as an innovation,” writes Christina Goldbaum for the New York Times. “The courts send people into counseling sessions to help them leave the multibillion-dollar sex trade while dismissing their charges and sealing their records.” New York’s court isn’t alone. Courts […]

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. When John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2005, he assured the nation that his decisions would be guided by something loftier than his own […]

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. McKinsey & Company is a prestigious management consulting firm known more for being excellent than for being good. Which is to say, only the most die-hard free […]

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. Two days ago, the Union-Recorder in Georgia published a bizarre editorial. The editorial board noted that the state’s sex offender registry system drives people into homelessness and deprived […]

A rule restricting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits will have profound consequences for people with criminal legal system involvement.

After an 11-day strike, the Chicago Teachers Union won guarantees of nurses and social workers in every school and a “path” towards hiring librarians, counselors, and restorative justice coordinators.

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 […]

School districts are responding to fears around school shootings with policies that risk targeting Black and Latinx, and disabled, students, who are already disproportionately targeted by school discipline measures

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. At last night’s debate, the most sustained conversation about the courts was about the possibility of court-packing. Which is a fine thing to discuss, considering how effectively […]

Republicans seem to discover the urgent need for due process and procedural safeguards each time an ally of theirs becomes vulnerable. This time, it’s about hearsay. I am confident that I am not the only attorney fielding questions about whether the whistleblower complaint—which began an impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s dealings with the Ukranian president—is hearsay. This is because after the complaint was released, Trump allies such […]

Harsh disciplinary measures and school-based arrests continue to disproportationately affect students of color, including preschoolers in Texas.

California Supreme Court rules that the government cannot subject a young person on probation, as a condition of release, to random searches of his electronic devices and social media accounts.

Just about every year while they were on the bench, the Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia would take each other on. “These contests reflect the temperaments of the two men—Stevens’s cautious balancings against Scalia’s caustic certainties,” wrote Jeffrey Toobin for the New Yorker in 2010. Two years prior, in Baze v. Rees, the justices […]

In Justice Today invited leading thinkers in criminal justice reform to answer the question, “2018 is the year….” This is what they said.

“The district court found this constitutionally permissible. It is not.”

This November, Ohio voters will consider a ballot measure that, if approved, will add new crime victim protections to the state constitution. The proposed constitutional amendment is called the Ohio Crime Victims Bill of Rights or Marsy’s Law. It is based on a similar victims rights bill enacted in California in 2008, named for Marsalee “Marsy” Nicholas, a University […]

In New York City, many demographics are eligible for subsidized MetroCards, which allow them to access the increasingly expensive and dysfunctionalsubway system at a lower cost. Transit benefits are available to the elderly, disabled, and schoolchildren, and many companies offer their employees pre-tax MetroCards as part of their benefits package. But one group of New Yorkers is conspicuously left out […]

Note: This first appeared in our daily In Justice Today newsletter. To get stories like these in your inbox every day, you can sign up here. In today’s news roundup, we bring you stories about questions surrounding the use of DNA evidence, misuse of labor by ICE detainees, the lawsuit challenging drivers license suspensions for failure to pay […]

Each week, the Fair Punishment Project monitors the news in New York, talks to local journalists and advocates, and share the most important stories with you through our weekly New York newsletter. In this week’s New York newsletter, we brought you stories about ICE raids, the future of Rikers Island, a program that is cutting […]

It’s been almost 50 years since President Richard Nixon played the law-and-order card to help him win the presidency. Decades later Donald Trump has adopted the same playbook, telling his own version of the forgotten American who is at the mercy of a crime wave. It didn’t matter that facts didn’t support candidate Trump’s arguments. […]

North of the New Mexico border sits Alamosa Municipal Court. An unassuming brick building with a terra cotta roof, the local court looks like a sleepy place you might duck into to pay a traffic ticket. Yet the mostly poor Alamosa residents who appear before Judge Daniel Powell are routinely denied counsel, face jail because […]

The California Bar doesn’t want disgraced Contra Costa District Attorney Mark Peterson to ever practice law again. The Bar has recommended Peterson be disbarred for his behavior while he was district attorney. The final decision on what happens will be made by the California Supreme Court. As In Justice Today previously reported, Peterson resigned and pleaded no […]

At a town hall in Oakland, California, organized by the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the two candidates for Alameda County District Attorney challenged each other on their progressive approaches to criminal justice. Civil rights attorney Pamela Price took incumbent Nancy O’Malley to task for what she said were racial disparities in the […]