By Lee A. Daniels
The New York Times reported yesterday that Mark Melvin, a prison inmate in Alabama, is suing the state department of corrections because they won’t let him have a book his attorney sent him. His lawsuit charges that prison officials characterized the book as “a security threat,” as “too incendiary” and “too provocative.”

By The Editors The U.S. Supreme Court late Thursday stayed the scheduled execution by the state of  Texas of Duane Buck in order to review the appeal of Buck’s attorneys that his sentencing was tainted by racial bias. Buck, 48, who is African American, was convicted of the 1995 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Debra Gardner, [...]

By The Editors
A Washington state men, with an extensive links to a neo-Nazi website and white-supremacist organizations, has pleaded guilty to attempting to bomb the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Parade last January 17.

By The Editors
The New Jersey Supreme Court this week ordered sweeping changes in the way eyewitness identification is used and evaluated in the state’s criminal courts.

By Marlon Peterson
My brother was definitely not my keeper… He was never the big brother that would give his little brother the tough love most big brothers took pride in. Hell, there was no love.

By Lee A. Daniels
America’s policy of mass incarceration – under which the number of black state and federal inmates especially has exploded over the past three decades – has had a starkly negative impact on the lives of millions of black children, and is contributing to “an intergenerational transfer of racial inequality” on a massive scale, two scholars assert in the current issue of an academic journal.

By The Editors
A federal jury in New Orleans Friday convicted five current and former New Orleans polices officers of charges stemming from their unprovoked shooting of two groups of unarmed civilians on a city bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

By The Editors
A study released last month by the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative shows that Alabama is unique even among the other 33 states which have capital punishment laws. It is the only state whose statute enables judges to easily overrule jury decisions in capital cases imposing a sentence of death or life without the possibility of parole. As a result, Alabama judges have overwhelmingly chosen to discard jurors’ sentences of life and impose a death sentence.

By The Editors
Federal prosecutors are expected to call their final witness Monday in the explosive trial in New Orleans whose purpose is to apply a measure of justice to one of the most notorious incidents that wracked the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: the Danizger Bridge police shooting.

Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News Service
Public housing residents can proceed with a class action lawsuit claiming that New York City and the New York City Housing Authority allowed the police to set up “checkpoints” that routinely violated tenants’ rights in front of their homes, a federal judge ruled.