"An armed robber walks into seven stores in Indiana and Michigan during a three-week crime spree in October 2017. Investigators get from the robber's phone carrier real-time cell site location information (CSLI) that show his phone's pings to nearby cell towers which help the investigators geolocate their suspect. The robber gets arrested and charged in federal court with five counts of robbery and several accompanying weapons charges. And the rest of the world gets an opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on one of the many questions that the Supreme Court left open when it decided its seminal privacy-related opinion Carpenter v. United States 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018)."

"To help reduce this massive prison population and to promote human dignity and growth over punishment and retribution WITNESS is supporting advocates lawyers and incarcerated individuals in using video for sentencing mitigation and to advocate for decarceration through clemency and parole."

"The New York State Bar Association is launching a task force focused on examining and addressing structural racism and other types of prejudice as part of its latest effort to resolve broader national social problems."

"Prompted by several recent high-visibility killings by police officers the U.S. civil rights enforcement regime is the subject of focused attention at the national state and local levels."

"In 1994 death penalty lawyer Stephen Bright published his seminal essay Counsel for the Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime but for the Worst Lawyer. His argument 'succinctly stated in the title' was that indigent defendants were disproportionately sentenced to death because their lawyers (who were often court-appointed) were under-resourced ill-prepared and failed at the most basic levels in their duty to represent their clients."

"Against a backdrop of increasing national attention to police violence the Supreme Court on Thursday issued an opinion in a closely watched criminal-procedure case that clarifies the meaning of the term seizure."

For much of its history, the death penalty in the United States has been framed as a tool of justice—a way to hold the most vicious criminals accountable for their heinous acts. Stories of grisly ...

"This blog is maintained by Pamela Oliver. I am a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. My specialties are collective action and social movements race and ethnicity and racial disparities in criminal justice."