By Christopher Zoukis On April 26, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed a package of seven new criminal reform measures into law; they were intended to, without lessening public safety, reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons (now running at 112% of capacity, not counting about 1,150 prison inmates diverted to county jails). Without the just-signed changes, […]
New laws taking effect Nov. 1 brought early release for about 1,900 inmates from local jails and state prisons in Louisiana, the state with the nation’s highest incarceration rate. The move is a direct result of the Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Act, a package of 10 measures enacted by the state legislature with support from both parties and […]
He’s probably not the first name you’d think of when hearing a celebrity is taking a stand against a New Jersey criminal law, bur cable-channel reality star Duane Chapman, better known as “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” was recently on the steps of the federal courthouse in Trenton, NJ, decrying what he sees as the evil […]
By Christopher Zoukis In a 5-3 decision March 28, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the methods that Texas has been using to gauge whether a defendant’s intellectual ability should spare them the death penalty. The appeal was for Bobby James Moore, convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1980 for fatally […]
By Christopher Zoukis Since 2009, seven state legislatures have acted to remove themselves from a 1991 federal law that since 1994 has threatened to reduce federal highway funds to states which did not provide at least a six-month driver’s license suspension for people convicted of drug crimes. Known at the time of enactment as a […]
By Christopher Zoukis With less than four days left in office, On Jan. 17 president Obama commuted nearly all of the 28 years remaining in the 35-year court-martial sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former army intelligence analyst who copied over 700,000 archived military and diplomatic files — some classified — and sent them to WikiLeaks. The […]
By Christopher Zoukis Founded in 1887, the Harvard Law Review is probably the nation’s best-known journal published by law students. The author of the lead article in this January’s issue, who first made history by being the first African-American student elected president of the publication in 1990-91, did so again by becoming the first U.S. […]