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
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
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
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 ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
Public defenders and advocacy groups in New York City sent letters of concern to the city’s five district attorneys in 2021 about police testimony and investigations dating back several decades. The letters referenced cases in which the arresting officers’ criminal misconduct unknown at the time tainted ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On November 8, 2022, voters in Missouri passed a ballot initiative legalizing cannabis for recreational use after having approved marijuana for medical use four years earlier. Amendment 3, or Legal Missouri 2022, passed with 53% voter support. The medical marijuana initiative passed with 65% of the ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On August 18, 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) announced that his new election and security unit had arrested and was charging 20 people across the state with voting illegally in the 2020 election. Not surprisingly, the group was mostly comprised of Black man who had ...
