A Closer Look at How Police Departments Resist Reform From Within Their Ranks
by Jayson Hawkins
The last few years have seen a growing awareness of systemic problems in the way American police operate. Efforts to reform the system have been stymied by a number of factors, including the racial ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Before Alice Sebold wrote her New York Times Bestseller, The Lovely Bones, she published a haunting memoir recounting her rape in 1981 when she was a freshman at Syracuse University. The book, Lucky, details not only the experience but also how she saw her attacker ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Despite the constant glamorization of forensic evidence analysis that has become so common on TV shows, regular readers of CLN should be well aware that what passes for “science” in many actual cases amounts to little more than wishful thinking on the part of prosecutors and law ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Increasing attention to excessive police force has hopscotched across the country in recent years as one city after another found itself in the spotlight for incidents of police brutality that were caught on film or glaring dishonesty by cops was made public. Troopers from the Louisiana State ...
by Jayson Hawkins
The five-plus decade battlefield of America’s war on drugs and crime is littered with dishonesty, abuse, and failure, which goes far to explain why 50 years of social war has achieved nothing beyond the growth of a massive police state and increased unrest in over-policed communities.
Many ...
by Jayson Hawkins
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is credited with accelerating many trends that were already emerging before the plague struck. From work-at-home to mRNA vaccines, many of these new trends seem to have won a permanent place in the new normal. While working via Zoom might not ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Lawrence Montoya was only 14 years old back in 2000 when Denver cops accused him of being involved in the murder of Emily Johnson, a local teacher. During the first two hours of interrogation, Montoya refuted detectives’ allegations of his presence at Johnson’s house over 60 times. ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Devantee Jones-Bernier did not have any drugs on him when police executed a search warrant on the apartment where he was visiting some friends in Worcester, Massachusetts. Marijuana was found in the unit, and so Jones-Bernier was initially charged along with everyone else there. Police also took ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Orwell’s warning that “Big Brother is watching” has hung over western society for decades, sometimes confirmed by revelations of unauthorized government wiretaps, sometimes rendered ridiculous by the paranoid rantings of conspiracy theorists. In the post-9/11, cyberspace driven, the Patriot Act world of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks, however, ...
by Jayson Hawkins
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution offers a guarantee of the assistance of an attorney when accused of a crime. This guarantee has become a trope in countless movies and TV shows where suspects are advised: “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided ...
