The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/)
A Supreme Court ruling in June overruled the conviction of a sex offender for violating his probation after posting on Facebook. But that opens up a new legal minefield over limitations on internet access for anyone convicted of a crime, warns a Washington, DC attorney.
Children are more deeply affected by crime, both directly and indirectly, than previously realized, according to a sobering new research paper from University of Pennsylvania Law School. Bureaucracy and incompetence stand in the way of help.
Campuses are becoming battlegrounds for society’s violent fringes. Two universities are denying requests to speak from white nationalist Richard Spencer, a lead speaker in Charlottesville.
Militias have made public statements of neutrality but they are growing increasingly close to a segment of the right. Va. Gov. Terry McAuliffe complains that “they had better equipment than the State Police.
The GEO Group has signed $774 million worth of federal contracts so far this year. Last year, its livelihood was threatened by an Obama Justice Department order to phase out federal contracts with private lockups.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions charges that, “Chicago’s leaders need to recommit to policies that punish criminals instead of protecting them.” Mayor Rahm Emanuel responds that the Trump administration is “wrong morally, wrong factually and wrong legally.”
People who use heroin and related drugs are sometimes so eager to get high, or so sick from withdrawal, that they’ll shoot up in the car as soon as they get their hands on more.
As part of the new national “Face to Face” program, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock talks to women in a “Recovery and Re-Entry program. “These people lift you up,” says one participant.
Some witnesses and commenters on Facebook saw police harassment of citizens in the video. Others saw citizen harassment of police. “It shows you how quickly a scene can turn chaotic,” said T.J. Smith, police spokesman. “They simply try to arrest those who are dealing drugs, and they have to deal with a hostile environment as a result.”
Sheriff Mike Andrews of Durham, N.C., filed felony riot charges against activists who toppled a Confederate memorial this week. A City Councilman and a law professor questioned the severity of the felony charge.
The American Civil Liberties Union charges that Nebraska’s prisons are illegally overcrowded and suffer from a shortage of corrections officers and mental health workers.
Three states have acted this year, and three others have abolished civil forfeiture entirely, says the libertarian Institute for Justice.
The jump in fatalities was driven by heroin and synthetic opioid use and by an increasing number of deaths among teenage girls, the National Center for Health Statistics reported.
Once a minor player in the drug crisis, the man-made narcotic — about 50 times stronger than heroin — is directly linked to thousands of overdoses and a shocking rise in fatalities nationwide.
Twenty-five applications have been filed to grow marijuana for research, but the main Justice Department refuses to let the Drug Enforcement Adminstration act on them.