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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.