New York City is infamous for its "stop-and-frisk" policy, which allowed officers to perform a pat-down search on anyone they suspected of carrying a firearm. This resulted in tens of thousands of innocent people, the vast majority of whom were African-American or...
Month: July 2019
Do police gang databases violate people’s rights?
Around the country, there have been calls to significantly reform or even end the practice of keeping police gang databases, along with other gang policing practices. Last year, the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica found glaring errors in the Chicago Police Department's...
Study: Risk-assessment algorithms are fraught with racial bias
The Center for Court Innovation, a New York-based criminal justice reform agency, recently released a study on supposedly race-neutral risk assessment tools. These tools are widely used by courts to determine whether defendants should be granted bail or held in jail...
Supreme Court: New charges require new jury trials
Once you've been found guilty of a crime, can the government just assert that you're guilty of new crimes without having to prove it to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt?No. A plurality of the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld the basic right to a jury trial when...
SCOTUS voids death sentence after finding racist jury selection
The Montgomery County, Mississippi, prosecutor seems to have made it his career mission to convict Curtis Flowers for four 1986 murders in a small-town furniture store. Over the past two decades, he has tried Flowers for the murders six times.For each trial, the...
Criminal restitution orders leave juveniles languishing in debt
When we think of people being ordered to pay restitution to the victim of their criminal act, we typically picture that victim being an ordinary person who lost valuables in, say, a burglary. We imagine the restitution is directly tied to the criminal behavior, with...
Prison vs. probation: Equally effective at crime prevention?
Those opposed to criminal justice reform often cite worries that reducing incarceration among violent offenders would be dangerous. This argument rests on the assumption that putting violent offenders in prison is more effective at preventing future crime than other...