by Jo Ellen Nott
The U.S. Sentencing Commission is a government panel that formulates federal sentencing policy. On January 13, 2023, the commission made public proposed amendments to current federal sentencing guidelines and asked for comments. One amendment seeks to diminish judges’ controversial power to impose longer sentences based on ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
In December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit revisited the 2020 decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah in which the lower court ruled that Utah State Trooper Blaine Robbins was entitled to qualified immunity for conducting a bogus ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On December 30, 2022, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that hundreds of prisoners who were convicted by non-unanimous juries have a right to a new trial. The rulings handed down on the last Friday of 2022 ended years of legal challenges in Oregon, after the U.S. ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On December 30, 2023, police arrested Bryan Christopher Kohberger at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania for the savage stabbing and murder of four University of Idaho students in November. Law enforcement sources report that DNA evidence obtained from a public genealogy database linked the slayings to ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Edwin Davila’s first-degree murder conviction has been vacated after he was paroled in February of 2020. At the time of his release, Davila had spent 24 years wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of a teenager during a set-up gang retaliation shooting.
Following a shooting on West ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
The City of Vallejo, California, agreed to pay Adrian L. Burrell $300,000 to settle an excessive force lawsuit brought after Officer David McLaughlin tackled him and smacked his head against a porch post of his home in January of 2019.
McLaughlin had pulled over Burrell’s cousin ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On November 29, 2022, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen sent a letter to the CEOs of FedEx and UPS asking them to explain new policies the shipping giants have implemented to track and record firearms purchases. Knudsen and 17 fellow attorneys general want to understand if ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On November 12, 2022, the former police chief of Tampa, Florida, and her husband decided to ride out in their golf cart to pick up a take-out meal in their affluent suburb of Oldsmar, located on Tampa Bay. It was a decision Mary O’Connor would come ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On December 1, 2022, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons made decisions on the 2,600 applications it received under Democratic Governor Tom Wolf’s PA Marijuana Pardon Project available during September 2022. The program’s aim was a “one-time, large-scale pardoning project for people with select minor, non-violent marijuana ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On November 29, 2022, the city of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors approved the use of killer robots for law enforcement. The San Francisco Police Department had previously petitioned for permission to deploy robots to kill suspects that law enforcement considers posing “a sufficient threat to ...
