By The Editors
The investigation into incidents of murderous violence by the New Orleans police department in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina received another jolt late last week when a federal grand jury there indicted five city current and former officers in connection with the gruesome death of Henry Glover.

According to a new publication issued this week by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the increased concern about the mass incarceration of African Americans in the nation’s state and federal prisons has exposed a concomitant insidious practice: prison-based gerrymandering.

The United States Supreme Court declared that children convicted of non-homicide offenses cannot be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Court concluded that because adolescents are, by nature, less culpable than adults and because life without parole is an extreme sentence which is rarely imposed on teenagers, it is cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a child who has not killed to life without possibility of parole

By The Editors
A ruling this week by New York’s highest court has opened the way for a legal challenge to the state’s widely-criticized public-defender system on the grounds that it has failed to provide adequate assistance to poor people charged with crimes.

By Seth Freed Wessler
Washington’s game of immigration-reform dodgeball got particularly intense this week after Arizona passed its racial police state bill.

By Lee A. Daniels
Friday Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed legislation passed by the Grand Canyon State’s legislature declaring every Latino resident there a second-class citizen who can be stopped by any law officer for no reason other than that they “look” Latino and made to produce proof of their American citizenship or be arrested for “trespass.”

By The Editors
This week, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) released Free the Vote: Unlocking Democracy in the Cells and on the Streets, a report detailing the impact felon disfranchisement laws have on communities of color nationwide.

By John Payton
Last night the Senate passed S. 1789, The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, concerning the, racially discriminatory disparity in the treatment of the crack and powder forms of cocaine. Although the Senate passed legislation concerning the crack/powder sentencing disparity, it refused to completely eliminate that unjustified disparity.

By The Editors
In the past six months two separate bodies investigating New York State’s juvenile prisons – one a federal agency; the other, a state-appointed commission — have produced scathing reports of a system beset by longstanding calamitous problems.

By Maggie Taylor
Freddie Peacock was arrested in July 1976 and later convicted of attacking and raping a woman. Twenty-eight years after his parole in 1982, Peacock became the 250th person nationwide to be exonerated by DNA evidence.