It seems like the best way to point out the tragic absurdity of capital punishment is simply to look to Texas, which puts to death more people than any other state. A few months ago, the Lone Star State was the focus of national scrutiny after a New Yorker article on the case of Cameron Read More
[via.] This comment leapt out at my while reading the NYT’s scene story on Arizona’s SB 1070, the state’s draconian new immigration law. …Ron White, 52, said he felt a sense of relief that something was finally being done about “the illegals” — whom he blames for ills like congregating on the streets, breaking into Read More
A lot of people were disappointed by the NYT‘s anticlimactic story on David Paterson that followed lots of speculation about a bombshell the paper was working on. (Many said the story would force Paterson to resign.) The story that ran focused on the checkered past of a close aide, David Johnson, who was arrested on Read More
Cross-posted from TAPPED. On Tuesday, a judge in Kansas ruled for the second time that he wouldn’t bar Scott Roeder, the 51-year-old accused of killing the Kansas abortion provider George Tiller in May, from arguing that he believed he needed to kill Tiller to protect unborn children. The judge, Warren Wilbert, denied prosecutors requests to Read More
Adam Serwer writes that after decades of taking increasingly punitive steps against nonviolent felons, many of the folks who championed so many of those same tough-on-crime policies — which has left 1 percent of the U.S. population behind bars — are starting to change their tunes. Fueled by the damage mass incarceration has done to Read More
After spending 35 years in prison for a rape that he didn’t commit, James Bain was finally released Thursday morning. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Bain made five requests for DNA testing before a judge granted his motion. The testing eventually cleared him of the crime. Obviously, the state of Florida owes Bain Read More
If an alibi and the absence of a criminal record aren’t enough to keep you out of prison, then surely DNA evidence should be enough. Right? Thirty-five years ago, a 9-year-old boy was raped in a field near his Lake Wales home. Five months later, a 19-year-old man was convicted of the rape and sent Read More
David Martin, the trial attorney for the executed Cameron Todd Willingham, said Willingham was guilty on Anderson Cooper’s 360 and dismissed as biased the science debunking the “science” that determined the fire was arson. While plenty of experts have called the arson investigators’ work mysticism and folklore, the fire investigator who found evidence of arson Read More
It’s two weeks too late for Derrion Albert, but the New York Times reports that a former police officer named Ron Huberman has a new plan for trying to protect the most vulnerable students from violence. It sounds a bit like CompStat. . . . if Mr. Huberman’s hunch is right, about 10,000 high school Read More
