law

Who should own DNA? All of us

by News Sources 04.14.2013

Marcy Darnovsky and Karuna Jaggar write: Most court cases involving patent law are corporate battles, with one company suing another for infringing on its intellectual property rights and, therefore, profits. Big companies fighting over big money can seem painfully irrelevant, especially when so many of us are simply struggling to get by. But the case [...]

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Video: U.S. states offering legal protection for animal abuse

by News Sources 04.10.2013
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Criminalizing justice: Taping of farm cruelty is becoming the crime

by News Sources 04.08.2013

The New York Times reports: On one covert video, farm workers illegally burn the ankles of Tennessee walking horses with chemicals. Another captures workers in Wyoming punching and kicking pigs and flinging piglets into the air. And at one of the country’s largest egg suppliers, a video shows hens caged alongside rotting bird corpses, while [...]

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While Wall Street crooks walk free, others end up jailed for life just for shoplifting

by News Sources 04.01.2013

Matt Taibbi writes: On July 15th, 1995, in the quiet Southern California city of Whittier, a 33-year-old black man named Curtis Wilkerson got up from a booth at McDonald’s, walked into a nearby mall and, within the space of two hours, turned himself into the unluckiest man on Earth. “I was supposed to be waiting [...]

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Video — U.S. policing: Institutionalising brutality?

by News Sources 07.26.2012
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America has surrendered to the NRA

by News Sources 07.24.2012

Lawrence Martine writes: Noteworthy among the responses to the movie theatre massacre in Colorado was that of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a strong advocate of gun control. He was reacting to the words of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Both gentlemen expressed deep sorrow. Neither advocated measures to address their country’s sick gun culture. [...]

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Imprisoned in America

by News Sources 06.01.2012

In a review of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J Stuntz, David Garland writes: The scandal of criminal justice in the United States is by now a familiar one, its facts are well known, its causes extensively canvassed. So what can another book tell us that we don’t already know? A surprising [...]

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Schools in the Texas police state

by News Sources 01.10.2012

Chris McGreal reports: The charge on the police docket was “disrupting class”. But that’s not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of “you smell”. “I’m weird. Other kids don’t like me,” said Sarah, who has [...]

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The growing militarisation of police

by News Sources 12.23.2011
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Obama and the rule of law

by News Sources 12.21.2011

Jeff Connaughton writes: Long silent and now contradictory, President Obama needs to deliver a clarifying speech about our financial markets and the rule of law. Speaking in Kansas on December 6, he said, “Too often, we’ve seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there’s no price for [...]

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Predator drones employed by U.S. police

by News Sources 12.12.2011

The Los Angeles Times reports: Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said. Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern [...]

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When police go military

by News Sources 12.05.2011

The New York Times reports: Riot police officers tear-gassing protesters at the Occupy movement in Oakland. The surprising nighttime invasion of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, carried out with D-Day-like secrecy by officers deploying klieg lights and a military-style sound machine. And campus police officers in helmets and face shields dousing demonstrators at the University [...]

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Senate votes not to vote on indefinite detention on Americans

by News Sources 12.02.2011

Adam Serwer writes: Can Americans be indefinitely detained by the military on suspicion of terrorism if arrested on American soil? Thursday evening the Senate added a compromise amendment to the defense spending bill that states: Maybe. Specifically, it says the bill does not alter current authorities relating to detention, leaving either side free to argue [...]

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Finally, a judge stands up to Wall Street

by News Sources 11.14.2011

Matt Taibbi writes: Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured [...]

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Former Guantanamo chief prosecutor: “A pair of testicles fell off the president after Election Day”

by News Sources 11.13.2011

Jason Leopold reports: Morris Davis speaks bluntly about some of President Barack Obama’s policy decisions. “There’s a pair of testicles somewhere between the Capital Building and the White House that fell off the president after Election Day [2008],” said Davis, an Air Force colonel who spent two years as the chief prosecutor of the Guantanamo [...]

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How the U.S. is blending law enforcement with warfare

by News Sources 11.07.2011

The New York Times reports: Late on a moonless night last March, a plane smuggling nearly half a ton of cocaine touched down at a remote airstrip in Honduras. A heavily armed ground crew was waiting for it — as were Honduran security forces. After a 20-minute firefight, a Honduran officer was wounded and two [...]

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Why does the U.S. spend more on prisons than higher education?

by Paul Woodward 11.01.2011

If California emptied its prisons today and sent every inmate to a University of California college it would save $7 billion a year! That’s one of the stunning statistics presented in the chart below, created by Joseph Staten, an info-graphic researcher with Public Administration (h/t Brian Resnick at the Atlantic.) In the land of the [...]

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Glenn Greenwald on two-tiered U.S. justice system, Obama’s assassination program & the Arab Spring

by News Sources 10.27.2011
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Palestinians could pursue war crimes charges without full statehood: ICC prosecutor

by News Sources 09.29.2011

The Toronto Star reports: In the fierce debate over the Palestinian bid for UN membership, one unseen presence has cast a long shadow. It’s that of Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court — the body Israel has long feared would take up Palestinian allegations of war crimes if its statehood bid is [...]

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How American police get away with crime against the people they are sworn to protect

by News Sources 09.28.2011
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Crime and punishment

by Paul Woodward 07.27.2011

Reading Anders Behring Breivik’s account of his preparations for his July 22 attacks in Oslo and Utøya evokes a certain dread at the sight of such a deliberate effort to cause carnage. Breivik expresses no doubt about what he is doing other than the fear that he might run out of funds and be unable [...]

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Holder defends terror trials in civilian courts

by News Sources 06.18.2011

The Associated Press reports: Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday defended the prosecution of terrorism suspects in civilian court after the top-ranking Senate Republican urged him to send two Iraqis to Guantanamo Bay rather than try them in Kentucky. Holder criticized what he called a “rigid ideology” among political opponents working to prevent terror trials [...]

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The quaint and obsolete Nuremberg principles

by News Sources 05.14.2011

Glenn Greenwald writes: Benjamin Ferencz is a 92-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, American combat soldier during World War II, and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where he prosecuted numerous Nazi war criminals, including some responsible for the deaths of upward of 100,000 innocent people.  He gave a fascinating (and shockingly articulate) 13-minute interview yesterday to the CBC in [...]

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The Obama administration’s appalling decision to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a military trial

by News Sources 04.05.2011

Dahlia Lithwick writes: Today, by ordering a military trial at Guantanamo for 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants, Attorney General Eric Holder finally put the Obama administration’s stamp on the proposition that some criminals are “too dangerous to have fair trials.” In reversing one of its last principled positions—that American courts are sufficiently [...]

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