By Jin Hee Lee, Vincent Southerland and Christina Swarns
Dissenting opinions — offered not by liberal advocates but by moderate, if not conservative, law-and-order judges — stand as a strong rebuke to the presumed effectiveness of the death penalty system. And they also confirm longstanding concerns about how abuses of power, under-resourced defense counsel, and racial bias undermine both the accuracy and judiciousness of death penalty convictions.

By Matt Kelley
An exhaustive report published this week in the New Yorker shows that Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004, was innocent.

By TaRessa Stovall
This independent national litigation and public policy organization was established at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City, to free the wrongfully convicted and reform the criminal justice system.

By Olympia Duhart
At the age of 48, Alan J. Crotzer has spent more than half of his life behind bars: 24 years, six months, 13 days and four hours, to be precise.

And he was innocent of every single charge leveled against him.

By The Editors
Efforts to equalize federal sentencing guidelines for offenses involving crack and powder cocaine gained significant momentum in Washington last week.

By John Payton
On Thursday, July 16, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, was arrested outside of his Cambridge home for “disorderly conduct,” after several police officers confronted him for trying to open a door to his home. A neighbor had called the police when she saw Gates trying to open his front door, which was jammed shut. Gates was held for four hours then released. Here John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) shares his expert opinion.–The Editors

By Stacey Patton
On June 18, the United States Supreme Court ruled that convicts cannot access DNA evidence to try to prove their innocence. Stacey Patton, Senior Editor ofTheDefendersOnline, talked with Peter Neufeld, Co-Director of The Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent further injustice.

By Stacey Patton
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which denies prisoners the constitutional right to post-conviction DNA testing that could prove their innocence, says something bigger about the quality of justice in America.

By The Editors
The current federal law mandates far more severe sentences for low-level offenses involving crack cocaine than powder cocaine, even though the former is no more addictive or dangerous than the latter.

By TaRessa Stovall
The Supreme Court has denied an appeal from Mumia Abu-Jamal, the journalist and former member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, who was convicted in a 1981 death penalty trial for killing a white police officer after a trial by a predominantly white jury. On Monday, April 6, the court rejected without comment Abu-Jamal’s bid to have the conviction overturned.