Injustice Watch (https://www.injusticewatch.org/commentary/)
Strawberry Hampton is suing the Illinois department of corrections over abusive treatment she says she endured as a transgender woman inside the state prison system. Last month, she sat down with Injustice Watch audience engagement manager Charles Preston to describe her experiences.
Rob Warden tells how a 16-year old could so vividly, but falsely, describe being raped — a story that put Gary Dotson, though innocent, behind bars for a decade.
Nationwide, approximately one in three of persons who have been exonerated by DNA had been convicted in whole or part on the testimony of witnesses who later recanted. Rob Warden writes on the 30th anniversary of Gary Dotson’s exoneration: It is long since time to stop distrusting the recantations?
Rob Warden asks: Should a gang-related murder conviction stand solely on recanted identification testimony of a single gang member?
Federal officials tried to big foot Illinois prosecutors, and try Brendt Christiansen in federal court so that he might face the death penalty. A jury in Peoria rejected that effort, as Injustice Watch co-founder Rob Warden writes.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who died at 99, believed that government should be neutral. In 2019, the question is whether that model can still survive.
Rob Warden writes that seeking the death penalty against Brendt Christensen is likely only to bring anguish to the families of both the victim and the killer, and to cost taxpayers considerable money. And in addition, writes Warden, the odds are against Christensen actually being executed.
The voting is by secret ballot, and judges cast their ballots in a process that is independently administered by the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts — an arm of the Illinois Supreme Court.
A prosecutor with long record of winning death sentences has concluded that capital punishment is inherently arbitrary and should be abolished.
If jurors in staged performances can’t consistently come to the same result — what does that say about real life?
Victims of sexual attack can easily make mistakes in trying to identify the stranger who committed the assault. That has nothing to do with the identification by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
