The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/crime-and-justice-news/)
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The “Beatrice Six” were coaxed into false-memory confessions for a 1985 rape and murder. They served up to 19 years in prison before DNA testing showed that the victim had been attacked by a teenager who lived in her building.
Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote in an opinion published this week that sex offenders “are much more likely than any other type of offender to be rearrested for a new rape or sexual assault.” The data says he is wrong.
David Cole of the ACLU and Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project say there is little reason to believe that Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ 1980s-style response to the narcotics menace will do anything to solve the problem.
The amount was concealed when the settlement was announced this week. The city attorney was obliged to disclose the figure in response to an open records request by journalists.
University of Alabama student Megan Rondini, 20, complained that she was treated as a criminal after reporting that a prominent local man had raped her. After months of anxiety, she killed herself.
The 2016 Mississippi law, the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act, is considered the most aggressive of several state-level conservative responses to the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015. The law likely will remain blocked for the time being during the appeals process.
Rob Krentz, a prominent Arizona rancher, was found shot to death 30 miles from the Mexican border in 2010, and the case was used to justify the state’s harsh immigration laws. But seven years later, it is far from certain that his killer was in the U.S. illegally.
Watchtowers at some prisons are no longer staffed as the facilities increasingly rely on rings of wire as the primary defense against dash-and-climb escape attempts. A breach at a federal facility in California has prompted a new examination of the reliance on fencing technology.
Officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown shot Sylville Smith last Aug. 13. After the verdict, the dead man’s kin called for racial unity, and the prosecutor noted the difficulty of self-defense cases.
Juries in recent days have acquitted two more cops involved in controversial fatal shootings of black men. One criminologist says jurors are reluctant to convict: “They just don’t want to second-guess officers in those life-or-death decisions.”