by Jo Ellen Nott
Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) launched Operation Lone Star in March 2021 after declaring a state of emergency in response to a rise in border crossings and fentanyl trafficking in southern Texas. As part of the $4.5 billion Texas spent in two years, the Texas Department ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
The Mississippi Supreme Court mandated on April 13, 2023, that poor criminal defendants must have an attorney throughout the entire criminal process. In re Miss. Rules of Crim. Procedure, 2023 Miss. LEXIS 103 (2023). The state high court made this decision to eliminate the “dead zone” ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In the July 2023 issue of the Forensic Chemistry journal, new research from West Virginia University (“WVU”) forensic scientists reveals that gunshot residue (“GSR”) behaves differently on skin, hair, and fabric depending on whether it contains organic or inorganic compounds. The WVU scientists are working ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In a stabbing case in The Hague, Netherlands, a suspect facing charges in the deadly incident denied his involvement. Wanting to prove his presence at the crime scene, the Dutch police turned to digital evidence and, more specifically, data from the suspect’s cellphone.
The police ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Two faculty members at Georgia State University in Atlanta in the Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology wrote in the May 18, 2023, edition of Scientific American Technology Section that artificial-intelligence-powered facial recognition will lead to increased racial profiling. In their research, Thaddeus Johnson and ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In a victory for the First Amendment, the Arizona Attorney General agreed to settle a lawsuit brought in August 2022 challenging a state law that banned recording police officers within eight feet. The law, HB2319, passed in the Arizona Senate on June 23, 2022, was ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
SoundThinking is a California-based tech company formerly known as ShotSpotter that sells systems to detect gunshot sounds and relay that information to law enforcement for follow-up. MarketBeat reports that the company has annual revenue of $81 million. Dayton, Ohio, will not be part of that ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On April 25, 2023, the Virginia Supreme Court issued an order refusing to hear the case of Michael L. Ledford, a man who was convicted of arson and first-degree murder in September 2000 when he was just 23 years old and the father of a baby boy.
Ledford was sentenced in 2001 to a total of 50 years based on a coerced confession obtained after five hours of high-pressure interrogation. After years of pro se petitions, hearings, and appeals, the high court of Virginia shut the door on a possible exoneration for Ledford. The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project with the pro bono help of law firm Baker Botts has represented Ledford since 2016.
The dry legal facts are merely the tip of the iceberg in the Ledford murder-arson conviction. Below the surface of that iceberg that shattered Ledford’s life at 23 lie a mountain of police and prosecutorial missteps that put an innocent man in prison for half a century. First and foremost, Ledford is autistic. He was diagnosed by a University of Virginia clinical and forensic psychologist as being “in the autistic spectrum or [having] a severe nonverbal learning disorder.”
On the night of October 10, ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Travis County is in Central Texas, 150 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The city of Austin, the state capital and county seat, sits at the intersection of three major highways. Its population in 2021 was 1.305 million. The Travis County Jail shares a problem with jails nationwide: They have become first responders for individuals suffering from mental health crises, a task they are not equipped to handle and, like most jails, warehouse individuals who are in dire need of treatment, not punishment.
Danny Smith is the Travis County Jail’s director of mental health services. Over the last 10 years, Smith has seen the number of people with mental health issues held in the jail climb from 15 to 40%. Travis County Judge Andy Brown says the jail is the largest mental health facility in Travis County, and in this regard, the county is not unique. Its numbers are consistent with the rest of the country’s jails according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Looking at booking data from 2018-2022, most charges this population had against them were for nonviolent misdemeanors like criminal trespassing, and only 7% were for assault. The key component to keeping these ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Your attachment to interacting with social media and browsing the internet on your cellphone allows the government and law enforcement wide-open access to a disturbing amount of information about you. Even if you are not a user of social media and just carry a device around to make and receive phone calls, you are still being caught up in an ever-widening surveillance dragnet. If you are unlucky, it could make you collateral damage in a criminal investigation. In the best of cases, your personal information could merely end up in a government database to possibly be used against you in the future.
The public would be well advised to know that recent reports about the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the FBI use of our personal data should make us all uneasy. In the words of J.D. Tucille, civil liberties, and government overreach pundit: “Our mobile devices constantly snitch on our whereabouts.”
Those federal agencies are aware of the rules regarding cellphone tracking and data collection but either work around them or purchase data from businesses that profit from selling our electronic whereabouts. The use of our data revealed in the recent reports proves ...
