"In May of 1976, twenty-four-year-old Carol Menaker was impaneled with eleven others on a jury in the trial of Freddy Burton, a young Black prison inmate charged with the grisly murders of two white wardens inside Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison. After being sequestered for twenty-one days, the jury voted to convict Mr. Burton, who was then sentenced to life in prison without parole. For more than forty years, Menaker did what she could to put the intensely emotional experience of the sequestration and trial behind her, rarely speaking of it to others and avoiding jury service when at all possible. But the arrival of a jury summons at her home in Northern California in 2017 set her on a path to unravel the painful experience of sequestration and finally ask the question: What ever happened to Freddy Burton--and is it possible that my youth and white privilege were what led me to convict him of murder? The Worst Thing We've Ever Done is Menaker's inspirational account of journeying back in time to uncover the personal bias that may have led her to judge someone whose shoes she never could have walked in." --

"What if social transformation and liberation isn't about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle."--Page 4 of cover.

"Police power was built on women's bodies. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us - the first history of women and police in the modern United States - Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets. Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of 'broken windows' policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of 'urban vice' into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes"--

"This book explores the private weaponization of racial fear that drives modern-day enforcement of these Black and white spaces. More than any express hatred of African Americans or desire to return to formal segregation, private white actors today react to deeply ingrained, systemic, and often unconscious racial fear of Black people who appear "out of place" in their public environment. They weaponize this racial fear in a variety of ways, including by abusing 911 to enforce formal social control via armed government agents, by trafficking in racial fear to whitewash their own misdeeds through "racial hoaxes," and by exacting vigilante justice through extrajudicial killing under the guise of self-defense and standing one's ground. Each of these approaches perverts and exploits the weapon of choice - the criminal justice system - with violent repercussions for the Black targets of this subformal apartheid. More often than not, private actors employing these methods enjoy the express or implicit support of government officials at all levels, from local police departments to state legislatures to the United States Supreme Court"--

"Tens of thousands of innocent people are behind bars for offenses ranging from misdemeanors to capital crimes. But proving their innocence in the court of law is extraordinarily difficult. After conviction, the presumption of innocence vanishes, and a new presumption of guilt forms and ossifies over time. Our criminal justice system values finality over accuracy, even if it comes at the cost of an innocent person's wrongful conviction and even when there's good evidence they haven't committed the crime. In Barred, acclaimed legal scholar and pioneering innocence advocate Daniel Medwed argues that our justice system's stringent procedural rules are to blame for the ongoing punishment of the innocent. Every state gives criminal defendants just one opportunity to appeal their convictions to a higher court. Afterward, the wrongfully accused can pursue various post-conviction remedies, but all too often they fall short in leading to exoneration. Because of narrow guidelines and deferential attitudes toward lower courts, higher courts tend to uphold convictions, even when there is compelling evidence of a miscarriage of justice. And although the executive branch holds the power to release people who are in custody, it exercises this power sparingly and views with intense suspicion those who insist upon their innocence. The result is that a startling number of people are incarcerated for crimes they didn't commit; highly-publicized death-row exonerations are just the tip of the iceberg. The regime is stacked against the innocent, Medwed concludes, and the appellate and post-conviction process must be entirely overhauled. Through heart-wrenching real-life stories, alongside accessible descriptions of complex legal procedures, Barred exposes how our legal system perpetuates gross injustice and issues a powerful call for change"--

An Arizona organization working to investigate and litigate cases of wrongful conviction in Arizona will receive funding from the Department of Justice to continue that work.The University of Arizona Innocence Project started as a small clinic in 2014 and today it's one of two such initiatives in Arizona.

The city of Minneapolis has reached settlements totaling more than $8.8 million in two civil lawsuits that accuse former police officer Derek Chauvin of using excessive force in two incidents that happened nearly three years before he killed George Floyd during an arrest.

Daniel Perry, a US army sergeant stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, had been found guilty of murder in a 2020 shooting.

"Dr. Baden chronicles his six decades on the front lines of the fight for accountability within the legal system-including the long history of medical examiners of using a controversial syndrome called excited delirium (a term that shows up in the pathology report for George Floyd) to explain away the deaths of BIPOC restrained by police"--

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday signed a bill that would make child rapists eligible for the death penalty in the state.  “In Florida, we believe it’s only appropriate that the worst o…

The family of Tyre Nichols, who died in January after being severely beaten by five Memphis police officers, has filed a $550 million federal lawsuit against the city of Memphis over his death. The five officers charged with second-degree murder have pleaded not guilty. Geoff Bennett discussed the latest with Nichols' mother RowVaughn Wells and attorney Ben Crump.

The juvenile system forces many children and teens into long confinement in unsafe institutions.

The city of Minneapolis on Thursday agreed to pay roughly $8.9 million to settle two lawsuits involving former police officer Derek Chauvin, who was charged with killing George Floyd in 2020. In th…

“Digidog is out of the pound,” Mayor Eric Adams said at a press conference showing off three new NYPD technologies, including a robotic dog.

UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz talks about the legal protections — including qualified immunity and no-knock warrants — that have protected officers from the repercussions of abuse. Her book is Shielded.Also, David Bianculli reviews Mel Brooks' History of the World Part II on Hulu.

Here’s a list of 13 organizations across the country that are leading the fight to end the police brutality epidemic plaguing the Black community and the country.

Five Memphis police officers are facing murder charges over Nichols’s death.

The Department of Justice will help conduct a review of the Memphis Police Department following the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, city officials said.

This Article offers a detailed portrait of the potentially negative systemic effects of the growth of autonomous vehicles on racial and economic justice in traf

Issued by Excelencia in Education, the national certification recognizes the university's programs, policies, leadership and institutional culture for supporting Latino student success.

Philadelphia has apologized for experiments conducted on mostly Black men incarcerated in the city's now-inactive Holmesburg Prison, which exposed subjects to herpes, skin blistering chemicals, radioactive isotopes, and poisonous chemicals used during the Vietnam war.

A nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.

The Marshall Project explains its decision to offer free news to incarcerated people on tablets that otherwise charge users.

A day after prosecutors charged five former Memphis police officers with murder over the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, we speak with his parents, RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, about their drive to seek justice for their son. “He had a beautiful soul, and he touched everyone,” RowVaughn Wells says of her son. Nichols was a 29-year-old Black father, amateur photographer and longtime skateboarder who died January 10 from kidney failure and cardiac arrest, three days after he was brutally beaten by the five officers during a traffic stop. The officers were fired earlier this month and indicted on Thursday with second-degree murder, kidnapping and other charges for their role in Nichols’s death. We also speak with civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family.

We speak with Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors about her new book, “An Abolitionist’s Handbook,” which lays out her journey toward abolition and 12 principles activists can follow to practice abolition, which she describes as the elimination of police, prisons, jails, surveillance and the current court system. “We have to imagine what we would do with these dollars, with these budgets, and they have to really be an imagination that’s grounded in care,” says Cullors. She also speaks about her community organizing in Los Angeles, which fought $3.5 billion worth of jail expansion, and her multi-year contract with Warner Bros. Television Group to create original storytelling content around abolition.

We look at calls for police accountability in Los Angeles, where officers killed three men of color within 48 hours earlier this month, including 31-year-old Black school teacher Keenan Anderson, who died hours after he was repeatedly tasered. We speak with Anderson’s cousin Patrisse Cullors, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, who has joined in protests over the police killings. “The last two weeks have been a nightmare,” says Cullors. “No human being deserves to die in fear, to die publicly humiliated and without their dignity.”

Today, the Biden Administration is announcing additional actions to reduce gun crime and make communities safer. This plan builds on the steps the President has taken since the beginning of his Administration to stop the flow of guns being used in crimes, bolster federal, state, and local law enforcement, invest in community-based programs that…

Access to justice and research innovation were important topics at the recent World Justice Forum 2022 and the Annual Summit of Canada’s Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters. In this article, as part of a growing body of access to justice opportunities and initiatives, we discuss some exciting new developments […]