Daniel Lewis Lee is scheduled to be the first federal prisoner executed in 17 years on Monday, but this afternoon a federal judge put a temporary halt to it due to COVID-19 infection fears. The judge is not concerned that Lee might get infected. Rather, the scheduling of his execution is being challenged by relatives […]
New York City is seeing a spike in shootings and homicides, and New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea blames bail reforms and COVID-19-related releases of inmates for the increase. But the New York Post looked over the New York Police Department’s own data and found there’s no relationship between this new wave of violence and […]
Two California Bay Area Democrats are responding to the current push for police reform by giving police and prosecutors more tools to punish people. San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton and Bay Area Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D–18th District) are teaming up to introduce a local ordinance and a state bill, respectively, that will create both criminal […]
A week ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and state officials acknowledged a massive coronavirus infection spike in San Quentin State Prison, affecting nearly a third of its prisoners. No deaths were reported. Just a week later, the prison has reported six deaths. The state’s prison system has reported 28 deaths overall from the virus […]
In Los Angeles and New York City, law enforcement agencies are still resisting efforts to shine a light on individual officer misconduct by withholding body camera footage and ignoring public records requests from media outlets. In the middle of a massive nationwide push for more police accountability and fewer police officers on the city payroll, […]
Bad news for freedom lovers as we approach Independence Day weekend: A bill compromising online speech and privacy just passed unanimously in the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. The “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies [EARN IT] Act of 2020” purports to fight the spread of child pornography online. Page after page of the bill […]
Among the unexpected beneficiaries of last week’s Supreme Court decision banning workplace discrimination against LGBT people are fraternities, sororities, and other single-gender college organizations. This may take a little explanation. In 2016, Harvard leaders decided that they didn’t like the school’s exclusive, single-gender final clubs, dismissing them as creating “forms of privilege and exclusion at […]
After A&E canceled the police ride-along reality show Live PD in response to growing criticism and activism about how police officers treat black people, host Dan Abrams insisted that part of the purpose of the show is to provide additional transparency into how officers operate in the field. Abrams said that he thought the show […]
Nearly a third of the 3,500 inmates incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison in California have tested positive for the coronavirus as of Monday. California is one of the states seeing new spikes in COVID-19 infections, with nearly 225,000 infections across the state and 6,000 deaths as of Monday. Total deaths in the state still […]
This morning the Supreme Court declined to stop the first federal executions to take place since 2003. Attorney General William Barr announced last year that the federal government would be restarting federal executions, scheduling five convicted murderers who had been sitting on death row for years. The executions were originally scheduled for the end of […]
