Criminal Justice
Former top Calif. football prospect exonerated
First he cried. Then Brian Banks — exonerated of a rape conviction that cost him five years in prison — walked outside the courthouse and seized the moment of freedom he had dreamed of for so long. “This is the first step in reinventing my life,” he said after a judge issued his ruling Thursday, [...]
Time to dump the criminal justice system
How is it that African-Americans seem to be missing the mass incarceration of our male population? More than 3 million Black households have a close relative presently or previously on parole or probation. The number of Black men in prison has grown to the point that more African-American college-aged men are in jail than in [...]
Resignation of chief in Trayvon Martin case rejected
The Sanford city commission rejected the resignation of the police chief harshly criticized for his handling of the Trayvon Martin case. The commissioners voted 3-2 Monday to reject the resignation of Bill Lee. The majority blamed the uproar surrounding Martin’s death on outsiders. Police did not initially charge 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer [...]
Rate of interracial murder on the rise in US
The slaying of Trayvon Martin in Florida and the recent shooting spree of five blacks in Oklahoma are part of a broader, but little-noticed, change in how Americans kill each other. Over the past 30 years, black-on-white murders rose from 6 percent of all homicides to 8 percent, according to a study of 550,000 homicide [...]
A Shameful Race-Based System of “Justice”
April 22 marks the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the Court ruled that a defendant cannot rely upon statistical evidence of systemic racial bias to prove his death sentence unconstitutional, no matter how strong that evidence may be. McCleskey has been roundly condemned as a low point [...]
