During a 2017 trip to Montana, Hoang Vinh Pham was heating up a bowl of noodles at a Conoco station on Interstate 94 when he looked out the window and saw something unusual: a police van stuffed with half a ton of marijuana. Around the same time, Richard Smith, a Montana Division of Criminal Investigations […]
“We’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life,” Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who was then New York’s governor, declared four days after he imposed a statewide COVID-19 lockdown last year. The goal, he explained, was to “save lives, period, whatever it costs.” Ryan Bourne’s Economics in One Virus offers a much-needed rejoinder to that […]
Former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, who fatally shot an unarmed 911 caller in 2017, was originally sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. Yesterday a state judge, responding to a recent Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that rejected the most serious charge against Noor, imposed a new sentence that is less than half as […]
Newly identified COVID-19 cases in the United States, which rose dramatically this summer, have fallen sharply since early September. Hospital admissions involving people who tested positive for COVID-19 likewise have dropped precipitously. As of yesterday, the seven-day average of daily deaths, a lagging indicator, was down by 22 percent since September 23, per Worldometer’s numbers. […]
As recently as late August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said private businesses in his state were free to require that their employees be vaccinated against COVID-19. His press secretary explained that “private businesses don’t need government running their business.” Abbott evidently reassessed that premise, because last week he issued an executive order that […]
The House of Representatives made history last December by approving a bill that would have repealed the federal ban on marijuana. Senate Democrats made history again this summer by unveiling legislation that would do the same thing. But both bills are chock-full of unnecessarily contentious provisions that make you wonder whether Democrats are serious about […]
After decades of looking, Richard Martinez finally found his dream car at Jabaay Motors in Merrillville, Indiana: a red-and-white 1959 Corvette convertible with a hard top. But when he tried to register the car back home in Kansas, the Kansas Highway Patrol (KHP) seized it as “contraband.” Now the car is sitting in a Topeka […]
Two recent reports from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) shed light on the legal treatment of sex offenders and further undermine the prevailing assumption that all members of that broad class pose similar threats to public safety. That assumption, which underlies both harsh punishments and indiscriminate registration requirements, is demonstrably wrong. In fiscal year 2019, […]
Randy Halprin was one of seven inmates who escaped from a maximum-security Texas prison in December 2000 and then robbed an Oshman’s sporting goods store in Irving. The robbers fatally shot Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins shortly after he arrived at the store. Halprin was sentenced to death in 2003 because of his involvement in […]
