by Anthony Accurso
Disturbing images were coming out of Portland, Oregon, where protesters were being arrested by camouflaged federal agents in unmarked vans and taken to undisclosed locations for “processing.” Lawmakers rightfully called this behavior reprehensible for its utter lack of transparency and similarity to tactics used by authoritarian dictators. ...
by Anthony Accurso
Twitter-oriented startup Dataminr markets itself as offering an AI-enabled tool designed to identify “threats” in real-time by scanning Twitter posts. Reporting by The Intercept shows, however, that humans are scanning Twitter feeds and creating “alerts” based largely on racial stereotypes.
Dataminr’s early backers included Twitter and the ...
by Anthony Accurso
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (“EFF”) Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass has posted a 25-minute video titled “How To Observe Police Surveillance at Protests.” In it, Maass explains the visible and non-visible tools deployed against protesters.
First and foremost, anything with a camera can be used by police ...
by Anthony Accurso
The Supreme Court of Mississippi held that a district court erred when it ordered a mistrial on all three counts of an indictment after the jury had returned an acquittal on two of the counts.
Johnathan Nickson was tried in mid-2018 on two counts of first-degree murder ...
by Anthony Accurso
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a lower court order denying defendant’s evidence suppression motion on the grounds that a photo, which provided very little identifying information, was insufficient grounds to stop and investigate.
On September 2, 2017, Jaquan Walker and Javone Hopkins ...
by Anthony Accurso
The Supreme Court of Colorado, proceeding from original jurisdiction on appeal from a district court, held that the district court erred in denying a preliminary hearing to a defendant charged with a class 4 felony DUI simply because he was free on personal recognizance pending ...
by Anthony Accurso
In a decision filed on August 26, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit vacated the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky’s order denying a prisoner’s motion for sentence reduction under the First Step Act because the court failed to ...
by Anthony Accurso
Geofence warrants have become a common way for law enforcement to link a crime to a suspect using data gathered from smartphones. However, this process is legally dubious, and two federal judges from the district court in Chicago recently rejected issuing such warrants.
Such warrants are sometimes ...
by Anthony Accurso
The Supreme Court of the State of Montana held that a defendant’s rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and invasions of privacy were violated when his landlord’s probation officer searched his rented space.
Stephen Thomas was caring for his sick wife when they ...
by Anthony Accurso
In a decision issued August. 13, 2020, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court held that the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 1999 (“SORNA of 1999”) was unconstitutionally applied to a defendant in violation of the Maine and U.S. Constitutions’ ex post facto provisions.
Craig A. Porter ...
