By Lonnae O’Neal Parker via the Washington Post
As director of the criminal justice unit at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Swarns, 43, is one of the most prominent capital-defense lawyers in the country — the rare black woman in a community whose public face is most often white and male.

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 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 Stacey Patton
In 1985 Alan Newton, a Bronx man, was convicted for rape, robbery and assault and imprisoned for 22 of a 40-year sentence before being cleared by DNA evidence and released in 2006.

By Lee A. Daniels
More and more, it’s become apparent that America has a double-sided criminal justice system

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Inmates in prisons and jails, even minor offenders, are finding they not only have to do the time, but they have to pay—for booking, rent, routine medical care and even electronic monitoring once they are released

By Erica Ferrari
The city will pay out more than $170,000 to settle with nine people who claimed they were illegally stopped and frisked by police at city housing projects.

By Vern E. Smith
Wharlest Jackson Jr. is a big man, well over six feet tall and 200 pounds. But to listen to him speak of his namesake, Wharlest Jackson Sr., is to witness the strapping adult reduced to the weeping eight-year-old boy who rode his bicycle to the scene of a powerful car bomb in the spring of 1967 in Natchez, Miss. and discovered that the victim was his own father.

By TaRessa Stovall
Like an embattled boxer returning to the ring, the question of whether the nation’s first black biracial president will pardon the first black heavyweight champion for the crime of interracial dating is back for another round.

On January 28, 2011, Mumia Abu-Jamal retained the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) to represent him in the ongoing appeal of his capital murder conviction and death sentence.