Over at Racked, Marien Komar has written a fascinating piece on both the history of contraband cosmetics in prisons (did you know that you can make lipstick from the dye of a book cover?), as well as the importance of makeup to incarcerated women today.
Ohio woman Tyra Patterson, the subject of the Guardian’s 2016 three-part look into the flaws of the U.S. criminal justice system, was released on parole on Christmas Day after serving 23 years for the murder of 15-year-old Michelle Lai, despite not being the one who killed her.
The Tennessean reported that a 26-year-old Nashville woman named Katie Layne Quackenbush was charged with attempted murder on Monday for shooting 54-year-old Gerald Melton on August 26, sending him with critical injuries to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he remains today.
Welcome to Barf Bag, a daily politics roundup to help you sort through the chaotic Trumpian news cycle.
In 1999, Richard Anthony Jones was given a mandatory sentence of 19 years after a witness identified him as one of three men who had stolen her cell phone in a Walmart parking lot. On Thursday, he was released after proving that he has a doppelganger with the same first name who lived near the scene of the crime.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, busy as he is with baldly involving himself in an investigation he is supposed to be recused from, has managed to find time to shove a largely unwilling country back into the catastrophically racist war on drugs of the ‘80s and ‘90s. In a two-page memo issued on Thursday, Sessions…
Here’s a bit of good news to help you contend with most of the bad: Chelsea Manning will be released from prison sometime next week, just five months after former President Obama commuted her prison sentence in one of the final acts of his presidency.
Here is a last gasp of good news from the Obama administration, something nice to go out with before all the bad: on Thursday, President Obama granted 330 commutations, the most ever in a single day.
In a breaking, staggering bit of good news, President Obama has commuted the prison sentence of former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who has been imprisoned for seven years for leaking military documents in 2010. Obama drastically reduced Manning’s 35-year sentence. She will now be freed on May 17.
On a Saturday evening last January, Gynnya McMillen was staying at her mother’s apartment complex in Shelbyville, a city of 15,000 in northern Kentucky. Gynnya, 16, lived in foster care but was allowed weekend visits with her mother, Michelle McMillen, since their long-strained relationship had begun to improve. That…
The Justice Department is planning to end the use of private prisons in the United States, the Washington Post reports. The government has concluded that prisons run by private corporations are “both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services” than prisons run by the feds, the paper says.
The latest available statistics from the Justice Department document 1 in 36 adults, or 6,851,000 people, as having been under the supervision of the U.S. correctional system in 2014. Of that number, 744,600 were held in local jails. A new report from the Vera Institute of Justice and the Safety and Justice Challenge…
The murder conviction of Brendan Dassey, one of the defendants depicted in Netflix’s documentary series Making a Murder, has been overturned, according to the Associated Press. A U.S. District Court judge ordered that he be released from custody within 90 days.
For all the excitement over the opening of new seats on the Supreme Court, little attention is paid to the makeup of state courts. A new report from the American Constitution Society finally analyzed the demographics and found that the judges in these courts, who are in charge of presiding over 90 percent of the cases…
There is something uniquely odd about sitting in a theater of good-looking, affluent young people applauding the idea of increasing the number of well-trained, well-paid public defenders in the United States, but that’s what you’ll get at Dean Strang and Jerry Buting’s 20-city “Conversation on Justice” speaking tour.
Pennsylvania politics have been plagued by a convoluted series of backstabbing and retaliation, most recently concerned with hundreds of inappropriate emails exchanged between two justices, their friends, and their colleagues.
In 1994, Tyra Patterson—then 19—was involved in the assault and robbery of a of a group of young women that left one of them—15-year-old Michelle Lai—dead from a gunshot wound to the head. It is known beyond doubt that Patterson did not pull the trigger, but her participation prior to Lai’s death remains unclear.
In Michigan, Wayne County’s head prosecutor is bringing justice yet again. Kym Worthy, along with a band of Detroit women, have pushed to get 30 years’ worth of accumulated untested rape kits processed. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s more than 11,000.
The Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based nonprofit that challenges racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, released a vivid retelling of America’s direct transition from slavery to mass incarceration.
In the late afternoon on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, a petite Korean mother of one walked into the lobby of the Yolo County Jail wearing army fatigue pants, with tears streaming down her face. Convicted by a jury in February, she’d been locked up in the Northern California holding facility for a total of nine months. In…
