by Ed Lyon
Readers of Criminal Legal News and Prison Legal News are familiar with the fact that criminal convictions occur mostly as a result of guilty or no-contest pleas.
A recently released report by the Pew Research Center confirms a steady erosion of citizens asserting their right to a ...
by Ed Lyon
Television crime dramas really do reflect reality when they show that one of the first things that occurs in an arrestee’s life is an arraignment. It is at this proceeding a judge hears whatever evidence the government’s and arrestee’s attorneys present, along with their arguments for a ...
by Ed Lyon
As reports of police abusing and even murdering citizens continues to rise over the years, databases of their misdeeds are emerging all over the U.S. These databases provide citizens with a great deal of transparency into these crimes that were formerly shrouded in secrecy by police departments, ...
by Ed Lyon
In today’s world of technological marvels, electronic monitoring has far surpassed being useful merely to virtually imprison pretrial releasees and parolees. Nanotechnology has enabled parents to keep their children on an electronic tether while Big Brother sees a lot more than most people would ever believe — ...
by Ed Lyon
Peacefully sleeping the night away, grandmother Charlene Klein was rudely awakened by Allentown, Pennsylvania, cops beating on her door on May 2, 2016. A law-abiding citizen, she opened her front door in response to the Knights in Blue’s persistent pounding, only to find herself entering one ...
by Ed Lyon
Television crime dramas like Bones and CSI that depict sterile, efficient crime labs seem to be little more than good art imitating bad life as instance after instance of shoddy work and poor conditions from Wisconsin [CLN, March 2019, p.30] to Texas [CLN ...
by Ed Lyon
In the early 1970s, an armed team entered a Stockholm, Sweden, bank to rescue hostages being held by bank robbers, as well as to, hopefully, arrest the robbers.
To the rescuers’ shock and surprise, the hostages took up weapons with their captors to fight against ...
by Ed Lyon
Citizens encounter cops in many ways. Cops respond to emergencies, provide security at some public gatherings and private forums, direct traffic, and address children in schools. Aside from uniform colors and headgear styles, cops look pretty similar with their utility belts, shoulder patches, collar tabs, badges and ...
by Ed Lyon
A state-sponsored formal religion in the U.S. is forbidden by the nation’s Constitution. Regardless, one part of the country’s ethos closely approaches a level of worship. That part is freedom. Enshrined in the Pledge of Allegiance as “the land of the free,” the U.S. nonetheless incarcerates ...
by Ed Lyon
In August 2018, California’s legislature passed Senate Bill 10, designed to reform the state’s cash bail system. Cash bail is commonly associated by oppression of financially poor arrestees as a means to keep them incarcerated until they are tried, which far too often results in coerced guilty ...
