by Matt Clarke
Across the country, retailers’ associations are lobbying legislatures to stiffen the punishment for retail theft, allegedly to prevent “organized retail crime,” a fuzzy term often used to describe repeated shoplifting. In Tennessee, Walmart and local prosecutors have taken advantage of a broadly worded burglary statute to felonize ...
by Matt Clarke
It is a perfect storm of temptation. Many sheriffs in America have little oversight, independent sources of revenue with little fiscal accountability, low salaries, and a lot of power. This leads some of them to pocket funds intended for other purposes.
Some Alabama sheriffs have become examples ...
by Matt Clarke
Recently published information shows that plainclothes officers, who make up about 6 percent of the New York Police Department (“NYPD”), are involved in 31 percent of New York City’s fatal police shootings. This has led critics to question the behavior of NYPD’s plainclothes officers, who often act ...
by Matt Clarke
A study by researchers from the University of Texas School of Law Capital Punishment Center published in the Houston Law Review found that in 96 percent of post-conviction proceedings in cases where the defendant received the death penalty, Harris County judges adopted the prosecutors’ proposed findings of ...
by Matt Clarke
On May 21, 2018, the Supreme Court of Hawaii held that a prosecutor’s improper closing argument stating that defense counsel tried to get the complaining witness to commit perjury required that a conviction be vacated.
A jury convicted Brian Underwood of second-degree unlawful imprisonment and abuse of ...
by Matt Clarke
According to techdirt.com, scientists at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom have developed a new forensic technique that, in as little as 30 seconds, analyzes sweat found along the ridges of fingerprints to determine whether a person has used cocaine within the previous 24 hours. ...
by Matt Clarke
On April 13, 2018, the Supreme Court of Kansas held that, absent a finding by a trial court that a defendant used a deadly weapon in a person felony, the trial court could not require the defendant to register as a violent offender pursuant to the Kansas ...
by Matt Clarke
March 2018 should have been the happiest month of his life. After over two decades of wrongful imprisonment, the Cook County State’s Attorney agreed to drop murder charges against Illinois state prisoner Ricardo Rodriguez. He should have walked out of prison a free and exonerated man. Instead, ...
by Matt Clarke
On April 25, 2018, the Supreme Court of New Jersey held that a trial court erred when, on the eve of trial, it permitted the State to amend the indictment to increase a charge from a third-degree to a second-degree felony.
Following surveillance on a suspected drug ...
by Matt Clarke
Around the nation, powerful lobbying groups composed of associations of prosecutors are influencing state legislatures to reject certain laws, regardless of how popular the proposed laws are with the electorate.
In his January 2018 State of the State address, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called for justice ...
