Category: Civil Law

Editor’s Note: The following is an adaptation of a talk delivered by the author at a Manhattan Institute event on July 27.

my new book, Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most, is not about me. It’s first and foremost about the far too many victims of the sorts of injustices that inspired the title—injustices like the 2019 murder of a young, unarmed Chicago mother allegedly shot by a parolee with nine prior felony convictions (including for second-degree murder); like the little boy forced to run for his life in that same city this summer, backpack in tow, as he dodged bullets meant for the group of young men he just happened to be walking past at the time; like the young woman who police say was stabbed to death in her Lower East Side apartment earlier this year by

An 1870 West Virginia law criminalizing most abortions must be reinstated, Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) told the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in a brief urging it to overturn a state trial judge’s decision blocking the law’s enforcement.

The action is the latest salvo in just one of myriad battles being fought in state courts throughout the country, where abortion rights advocates have turned to state laws and constitutions to restore rights recently gutted by the US Supreme Court.

West Virginia’s criminal provision has never been repealed, and its disuse stems from Roe v. Wade, not state policy, Morrisey said. The state will suffer “extreme irreparable harm” if Kanawha County Circuit Judge Tera L. Salango’s July 18 preliminarily injunction isn’t lifted, he said.

The injunction allowed the state’s only abortion clinic, Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, to resume services after it shut down in the wake

CNN
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Recounting his yearlong effort to pass the First Step Act, Jared Kushner in his forthcoming memoir describes the numerous and ultimately unsuccessful efforts by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to thwart the landmark criminal justice reform legislation.

In his upcoming book, “Breaking History: A White House Memoir,” Kushner details several efforts by Sessions to stymie his efforts to amass an unlikely coalition of conservative and liberal lawmakers – and to dissuade then-President Donald Trump from backing them.

In one instance, Kushner writes that Sessions’ team at the Justice Department successfully thwarted an April 2018 committee markup of the legislation by recommending last-minute changes to the legislation that amounted to “poison pills” and which Kushner at the time described as “ridiculous ” and in “bad faith.” Sessions’ feuds with Kushner over the reform effort and his numerous attempts to block the process were thoroughly reported at the time.

Through an

Putting a former president on trial for alleged criminal behavior would be the first prosecution of its kind in American history. It would also do much toward restoring the myth that no person or corporation is above the law. As James Doyle has explained, putting Trump on trial “redeems American justice.”

Looking both backward and forward, I would argue that putting the former racketeer in chief and his accomplices on trial for sad conspiracy to overthrow the US government — arguably the ultimate constitutional crime — is more tangible than the abstract goal of redeeming American justice. In this insurrectionary moment, “substantive” due process justice trumps “procedural” due process justice.

After the first five public hearings held by the House select committee investigating the organized and coordinated activities of Donald J. Trump and his allies to steal the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, it

Secretly videoing or taking photographs of people under their clothes or sharing “deepfake” pornography without consent could lead to prison sentences of up to three years, under recommendations by the Law Commission of England and Wales.

The reforms broaden the scope of criminal law to protect victims from having intimate images taken or shared without their consent, practices known as downblousing and upskirting, or having their faces superimposed on pornographic images and circulated without their agreement.

But campaigners say the reforms do not go far enough and the government is making a “grave mistake” in not taking a tougher stance.

“Sharing intimate images of a person without their consent can be incredibly distressing and harmful for victims, with the experience often scarring them for life,” said Prof Penney Lewis, the law commissioner for criminal law.

Lewis said these offenses were currently dealt with under a “patchwork” of criminal offenses that