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Posts Tagged ‘ Criminal Justice ’

Justice, At Last, For an Ordinary Man?

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By The Editors
Jimmie Lee Jackson died at 26 on February 18, 1965 in the melee that erupted when Alabama state police brutally set upon nonviolent protest marchers who had just come from a mass meeting on voting rights in a Marion church.



Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Shame of America’s Criminal Justice System

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By Lee A. Daniels
Michael Anthony Green was released from the custody of the state of Texas last Friday – 27 years after being wrongly convicted for the rape of a woman that brought him a sentence of 75 years in prison.



LDF Applauds Supreme Court Decision Declaring Life Without Parole Sentences for Children in Non-Homicide Cases Unconstitutional

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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



LDF Statement Regarding Senate Passage of Legislation Concerning Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity.

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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.



A Crack In The Danziger Bridge Cover-Up

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By Lee A. Daniels
Lieutenant Michael Lohmann, who supervised the police investigation of the so-called Danziger Bridge shooting, pleaded guilty in federal district court in New Orleans to one count of conspiring to obstruct justice.



Juvenile Detention Facilities in New York State: The Ghetto Dynamic at Work

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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.



Census Bureau Gives States New Option on Counting Inmates

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By The Editors
This month the U.S. Census Bureau issued new guidelines that could significantly alter how inmates in state prisons are counted for the census. That, in turn, could affect whether voting districts across the country gain or lose population in advance of the 2011 Congressional and state legislative redistricting.



Freddie Peacock’s Long Journey to Exoneration

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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.



New York City Sued Over Discriminatory Policing Policy in Public Housing

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By The Editors
The lawsuit claims that the city’s policing practices in its public housing developments – most notably, its “vertical sweeps” of buildings — “routinely” subject residents and those who visit them to illegal stops and false arrests that serve no lawful purpose.



Critical Census Mistake: Mis-Counting Prisoners

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By Ryan P. Haygood
The 2010 Census affords a unique opportunity to harness the momentum of African-American civic engagement that was forged in the 2008 Presidential election — this time, to ensure complete African-American inclusion.