NSB3 Blog

The pitch is simple: For no cost, a private company will help collect fines and fees owed to cities. These for-profit firms, called probation services companies, don’t charge cities anything. 

When Jack Dawley returned in 2007 to his hometown, Norwalk, Ohio, after eight years in prison and on parole in Wisconsin, he knew getting by would be difficult. He had a felony conviction and a history of past drug and alcohol abuse, although he’d been sober since 1999. He was unprepared for another obstacle, however: A few years later, he would keep landing in debtors’ prison.

Around the nation, police and prosecutors are using lyrics from rap songs to incriminate suspects and obtain convictions, often in the absence of traditional forms of evidence. In this way, rap music, and by extension the artists behind it, face unique scrutiny in the criminal justice system.

When rappers rap, they do so because it’s a form of artistic expression -- but police and prosecutors have proven to have a skewed interpretation of their songs and their motives. Instead, rap songs are being introduced in courtrooms where their lyrics are scrutinized, dissected and used to further incriminate the artists behind them. 

The ACLU in Virginia has launched what is believed to be the first legal challenge in the country against police for storing vast amounts of personal data obtained by scanning car license plates.

Lawyers for three condemned Oklahoma prisoners who claimed that the three-drug combination that could be used to execute them risked causing unconstitutional pain and suffering ran into skepticism from conservative members of the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

For a moment last year, it looked as if the Obama administration was moving toward a history-making end to the federal death penalty.

Most of the rest of the world has moved on from the death penalty, in some cases long ago. But here in the United States, in the year 2015, in the most august courtroom in the land, nine esteemed jurists sat around for an hour and soberly debated the best way to kill someone quickly, painlessly and — perhaps most important — bloodlessly.

Kate Grosmaire keeps asking herself if she has really forgiven Conor. “I think about it all the time,” she said. “Is that forgiveness still there? Have I released that debt?”

The Supreme Court on Monday spurned two appeals involving U.S. treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Believe in the Death Penalty? What would you say if I told you that over three hundred people on death row have been exonerated?