The Justice Files: Exonerated Top Stories

It all began last year when the victims, his own sons, realized what they had done. Nathan Hawkins was nine-years-old when he told police a story he made up.

“At nine-years-old, I didn’t know what I was doing to be …

Should Galen Baughman Spend His Life in Prison?

(bigstock)

“SVPA laws and practices refer to “mental abnormalities,” which sounds scientific. But the American Psychiatric Association has opposed such laws, citing their abuse of civil liberties and the use of unscientific ‘disorders’ as the basis for punishment. In practice, …

How Confirmation Bias Sends Innocent People to Prison

(innocence project)

“While cases like these often feature wrongdoing by individual prosecutors and police officers, a new study suggests the problem is deeper. After analyzing 50 wrongful convictions and other investigative failures, Texas State criminologists Kim Rossmo and Joycelyn Pollock …

Sex Offender Registries Don’t Keep Kids Safe, But Politicians Keep Expanding Them Anyway

Despite child sexual abuse declining by 60% between 1992 and 2010, states continue to legislate as if lenient sex offender laws are a national emergency. And, like so many other corners of the criminal justice system, the crackdown hasn’t affected …

Digital Jail: How Electronic Monitoring Drives Defendants Into Debt

Photograph by Zora J Murff for The New York Times

Yet like the system of wealth-based detention they are meant to help reform, ankle monitors often place poor people in special jeopardy. Across the country, defendants who have not been …

Punished Enough?

“Laws punishing sex offenses are still becoming harsher and more exacting, even though reported sex crimes are declining—and in fact were already declining well before these laws were passed. In consequence, the numbers keep climbing: people convicted of sex offenses …

Wrongfully Convicted Anna Vasquez Named to Houston Forensic Lab Board

“In 2006, advocates with the National Center for Reason and Justice got involved. The case was one of several they argued were involved with national hysteria around satanic ritual abuse.”

The NCRJ is proud that we could play a part …

Come Hear Super Lawyer John Swomley

Please join us for an evening of learning and discussion about one of the most controversial issues in America today!

Sex Panic and the Law:

Reflections of an attorney on the front lines

with Attorney John Swomley,

of Swomley & …

Lawsuit: Police forced false confession in deadly fire

“Money is never going to give me back these 35 years of my life, there’s no money in this whole entire earth that can repay me for the time I lost, the people that I lost, I lost even my …

Unpopular Speech in a Cold Climate

Photograph by Steven Hirsch / Reuters

“There is now such a stigma attached to people accused of sexual misconduct that anyone who defends legal principles on their behalf risks being mistaken, in the public mind, for a defender of sexual …