Sexual assaults by US military in Japan unlikely to end in prison

At US military bases in Japan, most service members found culpable in sex crimes in recent years did not go to prison, according to internal Department of Defence documents. Instead, in a review of hundreds of cases filed in America’s largest overseas military installation, offenders were fined, demoted, restricted to their bases or removed from the military. Full Article

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Scalia Says Internment Ruling Could Happen Again

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told law students at the University of Hawaii on Monday that the nation’s highest court was wrong to uphold the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the court issued a similar ruling during a future conflict. Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu for violating an order to report to an internment camp. “Well of course Korematsu was…

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KY: Sex-offender registry misguided thinking

I am a sex offender. I know well the tremendous power of those words. In 2007, I pled guilty to possession of child pornography. Nothing here is meant to defend what I did or to minimize the gravity of my actions. I had a major problem with pornography, and I was far too deep in denial and too scared to reach out to anyone. Full Op-Ed Piece Related: RSO Registered sex offender wants permission to practice law  

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NV: County to charge inmates for food, doctor

ELKO — Between food, services, housing and utilities, taxpayers are footing a bill of about $85 per day for each inmate locked in the Elko County Jail, according to Sheriff Jim Pitts. With a jail population that’s almost constantly at the facility’s 120 inmate capacity, lock-up expenses add up to more than $10,000 per day and millions of dollars each year, according to Pitts’ estimation. But the sheriff has proposed shifting a portion of those costs onto the inmates. The county commission on Wednesday wholly supported the idea, which outlines a $6…

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EXONERATIONS ON THE RISE IN 2013

This week, the National Registry of Exonerations, housed at the University of Michigan Law School, released new data showing that 2013 was the high-water mark year for exonerations to date , with 87 prisoners freed. This led some legal media, like our colleagues over at Above the Law, to write headlines like “Instance of Known Prosecutor FAILS are on the Rise.” In their words, “More exonerations suggest that more resources are being spent going back over closed cases and freeing people based on new or better evidence. But the report is also chilling proof that…

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New Study Finds That State Crime Labs Are Paid Per Conviction

I’ve previously written about the cognitive bias problem in state crime labs. This is the bias that can creep into the work of crime lab analysts when they report to, say, a state police agency, or the state attorney general. If they’re considered part of the state’s “team” — if performance reviews and job assessments are done by police or prosecutors — even the most honest and conscientious of analysts are at risk of cognitive bias. Hence, the countless and continuing crime lab scandals we’ve seen over the last couple…

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We Have It All Wrong. Shunning Offenders is Not Working

A Reaction to the Woody Allen Story I’ve been working on an article about caring for the bad dad, the man who molested my sister and tore my family apart, and what it has been to sift through the wake of my father’s life in photos, scrapbooks, and letters. After he suffered a stroke early in 2013, he couldn’t care for himself and I did something I thought I’d never do — I brought him home to live with me. Full Op-Ed Piece

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