Source: law360.com 9/6/24 The controversial decision by New York’s highest court to overturn Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault conviction has some lawmakers focusing intense new scrutiny on centuries-old legal jurisprudence barring evidence of a defendant’s criminal propensity. In the months since the New York Court of Appeals held in a split decision that the former movie producer had been denied a fair trial after a trial court erroneously admitted evidence of Weinstein’s past acts, lawmakers and legal experts also have been split over what legislative reforms may help hold sexual predators…
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Police Have the Right to Lie and Slander
Source: fff.org 9/10/24 To serve and protect, police are allowed to slander and destroy. Cops in many states and localities have acquired the right to lie about their shootings, searches, and practically anything else. Police have routinely planted drugs, guns, and other evidence to incriminate innocent people, while police labs have engaged in wholesale fraud blighting tens of thousands of lives. Supreme Court rulings turned a trickle of police perjury into a torrent. In 1967, the Supreme Court, in the case of McCray v. Illinois, gave policemen the right to…
Read MoreThe link between local news coverage and Americans’ perceptions of crime
Source: pewresearch.org 8/29/24 For most of the past three decades, Americans have said crime is rising in the United States, even though official statistics show a dramatic decrease in crime during that span. In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of Americans have said there is more crime in the U.S. than there was the year before. But this perception is at odds with the data: Since 1993, the nation’s violent crime rate has plunged by nearly half, while the property crime rate has fallen…
Read MoreRestricting Freedom of Movement Is a Favorite Tool for Repressive Regimes
Source: reason.com 8/26/24 Needing permission to travel hands a dangerous tool to authoritarians. When you don’t like the rules—or rulers—where you live, and trying to change things isn’t worth the time, effort, or danger, one good response is to get the hell out. Find someplace that’s more to your taste by voting for something different with your feet. But what if the local powers-that-be don’t want dissidents to go and limit paths to exit? A new report says that’s exactly what many governments around the world are doing with restrictions…
Read MoreAmerica Criminalizes Too Much and Punishes Too Much
Source: reason.com 8/6/24 When those on parole or probation are included, one out of every 47 adults is under “some form of correctional supervision.” Not only have we adopted more criminal laws at an astonishing clip, but the punishments our criminal laws carry have also grown markedly. Beginning in earnest in the second half of the 20th century, legislatures began to adopt laws that had, as Judge Jed Rakoff has noted, “two common characteristics: they imposed higher penalties, and they removed much of judicial dis-cretion in sentencing.” Notable among these…
Read MoreWhen Is Sexual Behavior Out of Control?
Source: medscape.com 7/31/24 A 25-year-old man comes in with a pulled muscle. You ask if he has anything else to discuss. Sheepishly, he says he is concerned about his use of pornography. A 45-year-old woman struggling with depression finds herself persistently seeking sex outside the bounds of her long-term relationship. Her partner is threatening to leave. She is devastated and tells you she doesn’t understand her own behavior. Do these patients have some form of sex addiction? How should a primary care clinician intervene? Is a referral to a 12-step…
Read MoreWhat Options Does the Sex Offender Registry Leave Us, If Not Sex Work?
Source: filtermag.org 7/16/24 They say that time is money, but if that’s true then mine doesn’t seem to be worth that much. I have three degrees, and two jobs where they don’t matter. In the little time I have to myself I do freelance work, and still struggle to make ends meet. A struggle felt by many, but especially by those of us laboring under the restrictions of parole and the sex offender registry. I earned my degrees in prison. I was arrested at 19 while doing survival sex work,…
Read MoreOut of Step: U.S. Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective
Source: sentencingproject.org 6/27/24 The United States is an outlier nation in that it strips voting rights from millions of citizens solely on the basis of a criminal conviction. As of 2022, over 4.4 million people in the United States were disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. This is due in part to over 50 years of U.S. mass incarceration, wherein the U.S. incarcerated population increased from about 360,000 people in the early 1970s to nearly 2 million in 2022. While many U.S. states have scaled back their disenfranchisement provisions, a…
Read MoreSotomayor Is Right: The Supreme Court Should Reevaluate Absolute Immunity for Prosecutors
Source: reason.com 7/2/24 Consider the following hypothetical: You are jailed for two years as you await trial for murder. You are facing the death penalty. You have cancer, which relapsed during your incarceration without access to adequate treatment. And it turns out you were charged based on a false witness confession, which the local prosecutor allegedly destroyed evidence to obscure. Now imagine suing that prosecutor and being told you have no recourse, because such government employees are entitled to absolute immunity. This is the backdrop for Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion…
Read MoreThe Prosecutor Paradox – Premal Dharia, James Forman & Maria Hawilo – Inquest
Source: inquest.org 6/20/24 This article is part of a roundtable about the authors’ coedited collection, Dismantling Mass Incarceration. Next week, we will publish a set of responses from progressive prosecutors, scholars, and activists, followed by a concluding essay from Dharia. In the popular imagination, lawyers argue each side of an issue, while the judge or jury makes the decision. But when we worked as public defenders, we learned that prosecutors were often the true power brokers: They chose what charges to bring, how much discovery material to provide, and whether…
Read MoreEditorial: A felony conviction should not come with a life sentence on voting rights
Source: latimes.com 5/20/24 Voting is not a privilege. It’s a right. But one group of citizens has been long denied that right in parts of the country. In half the states, including California, people convicted of felonies who have served their time in prison re-enter their communities with the right to vote automatically and immediately restored. In Vermont, Maine and the District of Columbia, people retain their right to vote even when incarcerated. But the other 25 states have at least some temporary voting restrictions on people formerly incarcerated on…
Read MoreQAnon Was Born Out of the Sex Ad Moral Panic That Took Down Backpage.com
Source: theintercept.com 4/27/24 For years, the political establishment opportunistically railed against sex trafficking. Then came Pizzagate. Americans adore a moral panic. During the Red Scare, we believed that Soviet agents were everywhere, having secretly infiltrated all levels of society. In the 1950s, the U.S. government banned switchblades over unfounded fears that we were in the throes of “West Side Story”-style knife violence. The Satanic Panic convinced Americans of the 1980s that absurd claims of ritual abuse and sacrifice were somehow credible. Around the same time, there was “stranger danger” —…
Read MorePolice Officers Cannot Violate The Fourth Amendment Law
Source: theopinionpages.com 4/25/24 It is a felony and a federal crime to impersonate someone else and intercept private communications intended for them, 18 U.S. Code § 2511. There is no exception for police, and no exception if written permission is obtained. Yet impersonating others online is the basis for police sting operations across the country. Law enforcement must be able to investigate criminal activity, but they cannot commit their own crimes while doing so. It is now customary for officers to violate Fourth Amendment law, and it is happening more…
Read MoreThe American Kennel Club’s pedophile problem
Source: Business Insider 4/24/24 [ACSOL is posting this to show pedophile hysteria in the media] The girl was 14 and attending a Dallas dog show. She and her family were talking to a prominent handler and longtime family friend, Adam Wilkerson, 31, when he asked her to help him get coffee for the group. Instead, he brought her to an empty hall closet and instructed her to touch his exposed penis. She began working as Wilkerson’s assistant a few months later. She’d been showing dogs since she was a toddler,…
Read MoreDoctors question use of ‘excited delirium’ to explain deaths of suspects in police custody
Source: abajournal.com 2/13/24 [ACSOL note: We are posting this since this concept could be used to excuse hatred towards registrants] In October 2023, three Tacoma, Washington, police officers went on trial for the 2020 death of Manuel Ellis, a Black man who died after he was punched, put in a chokehold and tased during a confrontation with police. In December, a jury acquitted the officers of second-degree murder and manslaughter. One detail in the defense’s case may have influenced the jury: A paramedic at the scene testified that he believed…
Read MoreEditorial: Providing criminal defense is not a crime. So why do some demonize lawyers for it?
Source: latimes.com 2/13/24 Shortly after Claudine Gay stepped down as president of Harvard University last month, an interesting sidelight to her years as a university administrator emerged: As dean of the faculty of arts and sciences a few years earlier, Gay was involved in removing a law professor from his secondary role as the dean of a campus dormitory. The professor, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., had caused an uproar on campus in 2019 when he joined the legal defense team of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who was accused of rape…
Read MoreHere’s Why Donald Trump Doesn’t Have to Register as a Sex Offender
Source: thedailybeast.com 1/30/24 [ACSOL’S NOTE: This article is posted to show the differences between civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions. It is NOT posted to show preference for any political party, both of which pass laws against registrants and sex offenses. Please stop all political party attack comments.] You’d think someone found liable for sexual assault would be considered a danger to society, but unfortunately the law says otherwise. Being on the sex offender registry isn’t punishment, according to the Supreme Court of the United States. Which is to say,…
Read MoreDavid French: When the right ignores its sex scandals
Source: twincities.com 1/29/24 Let me share with you one of the worst and most important recent news stories that you’ve probably never heard about. Late last month, the Southern Baptist Convention settled a sex abuse lawsuit brought against a man named Paul Pressler for an undisclosed sum. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 and alleged that Pressler had raped a man named Duane Rollins for decades, with the rapes beginning when Rollins was only 14 years old. The story would be terrible enough if Pressler were simply an ordinary predator.…
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