Injustice Watch (https://www.injusticewatch.org/commentary/)
Tens of thousands of individuals have been victimized by perpetrators who would have been locked up had the criminal justice system worked properly, the authors’ research shows. The problem is not just the wrongful conviction, but also the wrongful liberty of the culprit.
Ronnie Carrasquillo has been locked in prison for decades, since being convicted of murdering a cop in 1976. As evidence mounts that the conviction, and sentence, were wrongly imposed by a corrupt judge, Rob Warden wonders: Where is the new state’s attorney?
The U.S. Supreme Court in October will hear arguments on the travel ban that the President has called “an important tool for protecting our Nation’s homeland.” But like so many of Donald J. Trump’s assertions, that claim is dubious. It rests upon two premises, neither one consistent with actual experience. Tellingly, many clues indicate that both originated with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who began pushing them back when he was a U.S. Senator from Alabama, before the president had even been elected. The first premise: Domestic terror is predominantly an imported danger.
There are reasons to worry about Islamophobia within the Trump White House. One main concern: The views promoted by chief advisor Stephen Bannon.
Some real facts — not alternative facts — undercut the reasoning behind President Donald J. Trump’s executive order on immigration. If guarding against terrorism is the goal, this order does the opposite.
Two years after the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke’s murder case highlights the rigidity of Illinois’s firearms enhancements and truth-in-sentencing laws.
Without money bail, how do we decide who stays in or out of jail before trial? A pretrial justice expert weighs in.
We’re left with two questions in the Laquan McDonald case: Why would the process take so long, as officials have had the video since long before its public release? And will the statements of officers in other incidents also be up for review?
By gagging lawyers in the case against the police officer who shot Laquan McDonald, Judge Vincent M. Gaughan has done a disservice to the people of Chicago, their police department, the city administration, and the Cook County judiciary.
Editors Note: Today marks our first commentary from contributing editor Stephen Henderson, the Pulitzer-prize winning editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, where this column also appears.
When they buried Emmett Till in 1955, his mother, Mamie, wanted to be sure America could see her son’s battered face and head, the crushed bone and deep bruises inflicted by two Mississippi men who ravaged the life out of him. So she chose a casket with a glass top. If you could bring yourself to look inside, you couldn’t look away. And you couldn’t look past what the image said about the nation in which Till lived, where black men and boys could quickly be hung from trees or beaten to death for the slightest indiscretion, or for no reason at all. Mamie Till knew the image of her son in that casket, published in newspapers and magazines across the country, would be a call to an American reckoning, and to action.
Eighty-five years ago last week, the Illinois Supreme Court branded witness recantations categorically unreliable — a generalization that, albeit untrue, haunts the Illinois criminal justice system to this day, denying or delaying exonerations of innocent prisoners whose convictions rest on perjured testimony.
