by Matt Clarke
On September 27, 2017, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas held that a judge must issue a jury charge on self-defense in a prosecution for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon even if the defendant’s version of events supporting self-defense is weak, contradicted, or not credible. ...
by Matt Clarke
In September 2017, the terms of a $4.8 million confidential settlement between the Kansas City Police Department and an unarmed man whom police officers shot 20 times were made public. The man had sued police for using excessive force in responding to the report of an alleged ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 19, 2017, the Maryland Office of the Public Defender released a video recording made by Baltimore Police Officer Richard Pinheiro's body-cam showing him planting drugs in a backyard then "discovering" them a few minutes later. Because of the video recording, a man who was held ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 4, 2017, prosecutors dropped criminal charges against two Harris County sheriff's deputies who publicly performed a body cavity search on a Black woman on June 20, 2015. This prompted her attorney, Sam Cammaack, to release a dash-cam video recording of the incident he calls "rape ...
by Matt Clarke
The parents of a North Dakota State College of Science student have filed a lawsuit against a deputy sheriff and the county he works for, alleging he used two arrests--for sales of marijuana totaling 3.3 grams – to bully their son into becoming a confidential informant, with ...
by Matt Clarke
A recent investigation by Reuters revealed that over 1,000 people died after being socked by Taser "conducted energy weapons." Tasers are marketed as a "non-lethal" alternative to firearms, but Reuters discovered that the Tasers' electroshock was listed as a cause or contributing factor in 153 of the ...
by Matt Clarke
In July 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota (ACLU) filed a lawsuit alleging law enforcement authorities in South Dakota forced catheters into four men, one woman, and a toddler to acquire urine samples for drug tests. Two of the men were willing to voluntarily ...
by Matthew Clarke
In the summer of 2017, the Houston Police Department announced that it was ending its longstanding practice of using $2 field test kits for drugs that had frequently been used to persuade defendants to plead guilty—even when they were innocent.
In December 2016, the Timothy Cole Exoneration ...
