“One of the reasons we fought a bloody war against Britain was we didn’t like these soldiers stopping people on the street willy-nilly….We went to armed revolution against the strongest nation in the world in order to have these protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. They’re not technicalities. They’re real. … Indeed, the ability to…
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[He] was in the middle of a string of 17 robberies of city business in 22 days, police say. … [In 2005] Lomax was sentenced to 21 years in prison, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. When the case came back to court on June 22, Baltimore Circuit Judge John Addison Howard gave Lomax…
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The BBC reports that one crime was solved for every 1,000 police cameras in London last year. The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. … David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: “It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is…
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Out of the blue (at least to me), the BBC reports: The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption. … The Argentine court ruled that: “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state.” Supreme Court President Ricardo…
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An op-ed by Tony Newman in the New York Daily News. While New York has a reputation as a tolerant and open-minded city and New York State effectively decriminalized simple possession of up to 25 grams of marijuana more than 30 years ago, Gotham has made so many pot arrests that it now has the…
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Stanley Fish gets to the issues on teaching the craft of writing in “What Should Colleges Teach?” I was blessed to have good English teachers throughout my Evanston public-school education. I also had good and literate parents. Collectively, they somehow taught me skills I use pretty much every day: write, type, and edit (though I…
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[Detroit Police Chief] Evans reiterated his sense that people feel Detroit is supposed to have crime. He said he goes out two nights a week and works the streets, stopping motorists who rarely have driver’s license, registration, insurance. “What I say is: ‘Do you drive north of 8 Mile like this?’ And they say, ‘Hell…
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“New formula lets meth users make drug in soda bottles, avoid anti-drug laws.” The AP story by Justin Juozapavicius.
In a Heritage Foundation foundation report by Charles Stimson and Andrew Grossman, I learned a very surprising fact: Convicted persons in the United States actually served less time in prison, on average, than the world average and the European average. Among the 35 countries surveyed on this question in 1998, the average time actually served…
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Perhaps nothing speaks better to our broken justice system than the fact that people–guilty and innocent alike–are held in jail for more than year beforetrial. Lise Olsen reports in the Houston Chronicle: Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial, at least 500 county inmates [out of 11,500] have been locked up…
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