The Supreme Court last week heard a case from a family whose home was wrongly raided by the FBI, after which they were barred from bringing their civil suit to trial. Before the Court: Should the plaintiffs have been able to sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA)? Oral arguments got into […]
After spending 45 days in a Cobb County, Georgia, jail on a charge of attempted kidnapping, Mahendra Patel was released on Tuesday on a $10,000 bond after a judge determined he was not a threat to the community. Patel, 57, was arrested on March 18 and initially denied bail after a mother accused him of […]
President Donald Trump told reporters today that he is dropping the nomination of Ed Martin to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia because of slipping Republican support for Martin in the Senate. “He’s a terrific person, and he wasn’t getting the support from people that I thought,” Trump said at the White House. […]
It’s rare to see politicians of any stripe fight against sex-trafficking overreach—or any tough-on-crime gestures, really. In California, Democrats have been finding out what happens when you do. After pushing back somewhat against an overly carceral bill targeting prostitution customers, they were tarred by Republicans as having voted “to protect predators” and being “a threat […]
President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he’s ordered the federal government to rebuild and reopen the infamous Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. However, that plan will likely require a massive investment in a dysfunctional federal prison system that can barely staff the prisons it currently operates. “REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “The reopening […]
Today’s guest is John Arnold—the former Enron wunderkind and billionaire philanthropist (and Reason Foundation supporter) who’s determined to hack America’s most expensive and least accountable public sector systems in areas such as criminal justice, education, and pensions. (Fun fact: He was once called “the most hated man in pensionland” by Governing magazine due to his reform […]
In this week’s The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss how President Donald Trump is de-prioritizing due process by not adhering to a ruling from the Supreme Court. They also talk about how Harvard University’s tax status could be in jeopardy and reflect on the legacy of Pope Francis. 0:00—Introduction 0:12—The Pope’s legacy 5:56—Is […]
Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration, by Rachel Elise Barkow, Harvard University Press, 320 pages, $35 “The United States is now a world leader when it comes to incarceration,” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and co-author Janie Nitze noted last year in their book Over Ruled. They added that […]
When Willonte Yates, Malik Perry, Dayonta McClinton, and three other young men arrived at a CVS on College Avenue in Indianapolis on a Tuesday night in October 2015, they were there to rob the pharmacy at gunpoint. It did not go as planned. McClinton helped guard customers. Yates, who dubbed himself the “mastermind” of a […]
This afternoon, I filed a motion for the Boeing 737 MAX crashes victims’ families whom I represent in the criminal case against Boeing. As readers of the blog will recall from my earlier posts (e.g., here, here, and here), Boeing previously agreed to plead guilty to the charge of conspiring to defraud the FAA in […]