the crime report

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A reporter looks at day-to-day practices in American courtrooms, and finds them wanting.

Last year in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., two juvenile judges were indicted on charges of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks in exchange for sending children to a private prison. But this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who had studied the daily procedures in their courtrooms.

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An Omaha case in which a down-on-his-luck attorney agreed to wear a wire for the U.S. attorney’s office to get incriminating statements during a jail meeting with a local inmate raises “one huge legal ethics question,” Ashby Jones writes in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog.  Defense attorneys are moving to suppress evidence collected by the lawyer, Terry Haddock. The inmate, Shannon Williams, is the alleged ringleader of a big marijuana conspiracy. (more…)

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Below are copies of three chapters on covering criminal justice,  a special report by Criminal Justice Journalists and the John Jay Center on Media, Crime and Justice:

Part One: Covering Prisons and Jails

Part Two: Covering Sentencing

Part Three: Covering Community Corrections, Probation and Beyond

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As of July 1 

dtuerkhe@depaul.edu

Office Phone: (207) 780-4409

tuerkheimer@usm.maine.edu

Professor Tuerkheimer focuses her scholarship on the intersection of criminal law and the lives of women and children. As an ADA, she prosecuted child abuse, sex crimes, and internet crimes and conducted trainings for prosecutors, law enforcement officers, medical personnel and child protective workers.

Mistaken diagnoses of Shaken Baby Syndrome may have sent thousands of innocent people to prison, according to a new study

Read the research here

Exclusive to The Crime Report

In October, 1995, when police charged Audrey Edmunds, a Waunakee, Wis. day care provider, with the murder of a seven-month-old girl who had been left in her care, prosecutors said she had shaken the baby to death.

A medical expert testified at trial that the child had suffered critical injuries that were the hallmarks of Shaken Baby Syndrome. A jury convicted Edmunds and she was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

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Across Georgia, poor people accused of crimes are being abandoned by their lawyers because there is no money to pay their legal fees, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. There are 10 death-penalty cases proceeding to trial with $1.1 million in expected billings. But there is no money to pay for those cases, either. (more…)