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Does This Story Sound Familiar?

The Editors — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:17:06 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
Peter Applebome’s Feb. 2 column in the New York Times about the decision of the Latino community in East Haven, Connecticut to challenge the campaign of harassment some officers in that city’s police department had mounted against them recalls an anecdote author Patricia Sullivan recounted in her recent, important history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Washington Post: Defense lawyer fights racism in death row cases

The Editors — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:48:51 +0000

By Lonnae O’Neal Parker via the Washington Post There’s a steadfast cheeriness to Christina Swarns as she talks rapid fire about the contours of her day. There are the rigors of her end-to-end Manhattan commute, how rarely she dresses like a grown-up and the usual challenges of the professional working mom. But that changes when the conversation [...]

New Jersey Supreme Court Orders Sweeping Changes to Use of Eyewitness Identification

The Editors — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 20:16:32 +0000

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.

Jury Convicts Five New Orleans Police Officers in Danziger Bridge Shootings

The Editors — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 23:07:27 +0000

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.

$18.5 Million Lawsuit Taken From Wrongfully-Convicted Man

The Editors — Fri, 13 May 2011 22:26:45 +0000

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.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent: 267 and Counting

The Editors — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 14:21:39 +0000

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

Inmates’ Added Burden: “Pay to Stay” Fees

The Editors — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 19:00:17 +0000

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

City Settles Stop And Frisk Lawsuits

The Editors — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:34:23 +0000

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.

Ghosts of Mississippi

The Editors — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 21:45:02 +0000

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.

Poetic Justice: A Biracial Man Pardoning a Black Man for Dating White Women

The Editors — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 16:03:42 +0000

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.

LDF Joins Mumia Abu-Jamal Defense Team

The Editors — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:31:39 +0000

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.

New York Senate Republicans Seek to Bring Back Prison-Based Gerrymandering

The Editors — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:41:43 +0000

By The Editors
Some New York State legislators want to roll back democracy by reinstituting prison-based gerrymandering.

Major Decision Looms for New Orleans’ City Council

The Editors — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 22:12:47 +0000

By Seth DiStefano
It’s not often that building a new prison might represent a watershed moment in criminal justice reform. But in New Orleans, Louisiana, that’s exactly what is happening.

Chicago “Torture” Cop Jon Burge Sentenced: Was Justice Done?

The Editors — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:53:12 +0000

By The Editors
For nearly two decades now, it’s been clear that the once-exalted reputation of Jon Burge, a former Chicago senior police official, was not deserved. That was confirmed last June by a federal jury’s decision to convict him of two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of perjury for lying in a civil suit brought against him.

A Murder … And A Question

The Editors — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:10:14 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
“What kind of human being could set another man on fire?

This was the question that Stanley Nelson, a reporter for The Concordia Sentinel, a small weekly newspaper in the Louisiana Delta town of Ferriday, says first spurred him to exhaustively investigate the 1964 murder of a black Delta businessman, allegedly by the Ku Klux Klan.

Can “Smart-On-Crime” Work?

The Editors — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:06:05 +0000

By The Editors
The “smart-on-crime” approach to simultaneously fighting crime and fixing the flaws of the criminal justice system has been pushed most vigorously in recent years by a group of elected black district attorneys. Their practices have gained even greater visibility this year because of the campaign of San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris to become the first African American elected as Attorney General of California.

The Bell of Justice Long Delayed

The Editors — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 01:09:39 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
It tolls for Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old black Alabamian, an “ordinary man” whose desire to gain the full measure of his American citizenship led first to tragedy and then to black Americans’ triumph.

Sherrilynn Ifill: Why We Ignored the Supreme Court’s Review of Connick v. Thompson

The Editors — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 17:12:53 +0000

By The Editors
In a powerful opinion piece in the American Constitution Society blog this week, Sherrilynn Ifill, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a former staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., offers a tale of two cases considered by the Supreme Court this month and examines a gripping question: Why did one draw voluminous media coverage, while the other—involving an African-American man who, though innocent, was convicted of murder and nearly executed—was virtually ignored?

New Momentum for Criminal Justice Reform

The Editors — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:12:22 +0000

By The Editors
The momentum may be increasing for substantive reform in two areas of the criminal justice system that have fostered significant injustice.

One area involves eyewitness identification. The other involves suspects who confess to a crime during police interrogation – even though they’re innocent. Both have played a critical role in producing the crisis of mass incarceration that has overwhelmed the criminal justice system, damaged the lives of many individuals and their families, and especially undermined the stability of many individual black communities and Black America as a whole.

Supreme Court Seals the Fate of James Ford Seale, Racist Murderer

The Editors — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:54:50 +0000

By Lee A. Daniels
This week the U.S. Supreme Court turned the final key in the lock behind which sits James Ford Seale, one of the most violent of the white racist extremists who operated with impunity in much of the Deep South well into the 1960s.

Justice, At Last, For an Ordinary Man?

The Editors — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:07:03 +0000

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

The Editors — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:42:07 +0000

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

The Editors — Mon, 17 May 2010 23:11:51 +0000

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.

The Editors — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:38:36 +0000

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

The Editors — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:41:12 +0000

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.