Once a criminal defendant has paid his or her debt to society there’s usually a mechanism available to allow them to clean the slate and start over. Record “expungement” varies from state to state, but most states offer some form of record clearance that allows a rehabilatated defendant to wipe the slate clean and claim […]
California joins the growing list of states requiring police to record custodial interrogations. Quoting from a local listserv post, here’s the story:
Senate Bill 171, authored by Senator Elaine Alquist (D-San Jose) was approved by the California Legislature late last night. After more than a year and a half of debate, negotiations and amendments, the […]
A new tool has become available for law enforcement to catch speeders (and who knows that other applications to come): laser guns. Although the guns have limitations (e.g., the requirement of a direct line of sight, making them less useful in bad weather), they make it far easier to target an individual automobile, making up […]
From the antipolygraph.org blog comes this story about 2 United States citizens of Pakistani descent being denied re-entry into the United States because of their refusal to submit to a polygraph examination. I find it amazing that this quackery remains a mainstay of law enforcement, particularly on something as important as terrorism investigation. Given how […]
We put them on planes and they help us to reconstruct what happened when things go terribly wrong. So it makes sense that black boxes would start appearing in automobiles; it fits thematically with the trend toward digitally memorializing all testimonial information in order to assure accurate reconstruction of disputed events.
Tell that to the New […]
Federal courts have been using the ECF/Pacer online filing system for a long time, making most court documents available to all litigants. But for the first time ever, a federal court has placed all evidence in a criminal case onto the Internet. And it’s one hell of a case: United States vs. Zacarias Moussaoui.
It’s a […]
This is really starting to worry me. Defendants have learned that if they attack their lawyers in front of the jury when the case isn’t going well, they can ask for a mistrial. What’s a judge going to do, let the jury that witnessed them attack their laywer in court carry on as if nothing […]
Another police beating was caught on video, this one resulting in the tragic death of what appears to be a completely innocent and mentally disabled shopper. The scene was captured by in-store surveillance cameras at a convenience store in Spokane, Washington. The decedent, Otto Zehm, is seen walking into the store and is immediately […]
It was bound to happen. With most police cars now equipped with laptop computers and real time online data access, it’s not surprising to see new technologies emerging to aid law enforcement in keeping an eye on, well, all of us. I’ve done ride-alongs with the Issaquah Police Department and I was surprised at how […]
False confessions are a strange animal. Most people just can’t conceive of why anyone would ever confess to a crime they didn’t commit, particularly serious crimes like homicide or rape. But when you look closely at the many cases where exactly that has happened, you see a familiar recurring pattern: defendants in custody are simply […]