Showing posts with label prosecute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prosecute. Show all posts

Ilya Somin: Rethinking Jury Nullification

The jury's equivalent power to prosecutorial discretion. Jury nullification occurs when jurors choose not to convict a defendant they believe to be guilty of the offense charged, usually because they conclude that the law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive. When I first thought about jury nullification as a young law student,    ... MORE

Felony Murder Case Linked To Marijuana Deal Illustrates The Need For Jurors To Know About Jury Nullification

Because justice is a result, not just a process.    A murder case that prompted a Wichita woman’s run for governor last year is in the hands of a Sedgwick County jury. Kyler Carriker, the son of former gubernatorial candidate Jennifer Winn, faces a life sentence without parole eligibility for 20 years if he is convicted of first-degree felony murder in the  ... MORE

Steve Chapman: Cops As Criminals

Those who enforce the law but do not obey it.   Late one night, during high school, I was driving home when several police cars zoomed by. Curious about what was going on, I followed them down a residential street, where they pulled up to a house. I drove by and saw some officers walking up the sidewalk, but couldn't tell what they might be    ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Paying The Price

Imposing kinder, gentler policing.    Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters. Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double  ... MORE

Daniel Rivero: The FBI Convicted This Man Using Hair Analysis. Now We Know The Truth. It Was A Dog’s Hair.

What if the government wanted you convicted?    For a while now, thanks in part to the reporting of the Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu, it’s been known that something was not quite right with the FBI’s hair forensics unit in the past. But only but only recently has the FBI admitted that failings within the unit led to hundreds, maybe thousands    ... MORE

Ron Paul: IRS, Congress Hold Our Liberty In Contempt

Unaccountable government marches on.       This week the Justice Department announced it would not charge former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner with contempt of Congress. Some members of Congress requested that Lerner be charged with contempt after she refused to testify at a congressional hearing        ... MORE

Tom Knapp: J-U-R-Y does not spell 'rubber stamp'

It's getting harder to prosecute victimless crimes. Break out the world’s smallest violin for prosecutors in Alachua County, Fla. They’re having problems finding citizens who will jail other citizens for marijuana possession. In one recent case it took hours to weed out (pun intended) prospective jurors who didn’t think marijuana should be illegal.  ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: Darren Wilson's Friendly Trial

The need for independent prosecutors in police shootings. A Justice Department report released last week makes a strong case that Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, last August. The report suggests that Robert McCulloch, the much-maligned   ... MORE

Radley Balko: Prosecutors Looking Out For Number One

Government lying becoming accepted practice.  Tennessee law professor and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds takes on prosecutor misconduct in a column for USA Today.   He begins with a case from California in which Kern County prosecutor Robert Murray appended a confession to a suspect’s statement without the suspect’s knowledge.    ... MORE

Radley Balko: Video Saves Man From Lying Cops And Prosecutors, But No Consequences For The Culprits

An all too familiar pattern of no gov't accountability.    The latest example of cellphone video vindicating someone from false charges is a doozy. It comes from Washington Parish, La., and WWL TV. One of the worst days of Douglas Dendinger’s life began with him handing an envelope to a police officer. In order to help out his family and earn a   ... MORE

Police State America: TSA To Arrest Any Citizen Charged With Any Crime Trying To Come Or Leave The Country

Including taxes.     The border is closing rapidly. First it was FATCA hunting Americans with any assets overseas whatsoever. Now just two days after taking charge of the committee chairing the House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, U.S. Rep. John Katko introduced two bills. He is looking to effectively close the borders using terrorism as   ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: Jurors Can't Know Pot Growers Are Patients

Federal prosecutors determined to hide the truth.     Imagine you are a juror in the federal trial of five people charged with growing and distributing marijuana in northeastern Washington. The prosecution cannot present any direct evidence that the defendants sold marijuana to anyone, and the defendants say they were growing all 74 plants ... MORE

Rapper Faces Long Prison Stretch Over Unpopular Speech

by Emma Lacey-Bordeaux.      If only there was a First Amendment. Song lyrics that glorify violence are hardly uncommon. But a prosecutor in California says one rapper's violent lyrics go beyond creative license to conspiracy. San Diego-based rapper Tiny Doo has already spent eight months in prison, and faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted ... MORE

Matt Kaiser: Overpunishment And Rationality

Injustice by prosecutorial discretion.     Judge Jed S. Rakoff  has launched a firestorm of conversation about his criticism of the federal criminal justice system in the New York Review of Books and his proposal for how to fix it. First, a bit of backstory for those who do not turn to the New York Review of Books for commentary on the federal      ... MORE

Radley Balko: Horrifying Civil Liberties Predictions - 2015

Sound familiar? Sometimes, real life can be stranger than parody. This can be particularly true when it comes to the beat we cover here at The Watch, civil liberties. With that in mind, I’ve gone out on a limb to make some predictions about what might happen on the civil liberties front in 2015. I realize that some of these prognostications may seem a   ... MORE

Lee Stranahan: Authority’s Threat To Citizen Journalism

The government's persecution of James O'Keefe.        It’s a scenario that smacks of a movie set in a foreign country. A journalist is arrested and put into shackles. Not just handcuffs, mind you; shackles. He’s taunted by the police and thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. The politically connected prosecutors don’t just work to put him    ... MORE

Andrew Napolitano: Ferguson

Failure in Ferguson is across the board.   The city of Ferguson, Mo., is now burned into our consciousness in a way that few other places are. In my youth, the race riots in Newark, Detroit and Los Angeles marked turning points in my own and in the public's awareness of the problems of a black underclass that perceives itself as being so   ... MORE