The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "legal rights" ...
-
Jay Sekulow's Golden Ticket
How Jay Sekulow, a leading lawyer of the Christian right, used funds donated to the American Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit organization, to benefit himself and his family. The story revealed that ACLJ and affiliated organizations under his or his family's control paid more than $2 million for residences for Sekulow, as well as additional funds for planes and bodyguards, and that he "outsourced" his own legal services in ways that obscured his actual salary.
Tags: nonprofit; lawyer; legal services; ACLJ; American Center for Law and Justice; Jay Sekulow; Christian Right; fraud
-
May I See Some Identification? The Real ID Act will change current New Mexico driver's license laws and could pose a serious threat to civil liberties
The author investigates the impact that the Real ID Act, which mandates a federal ID card system, could have on New Mexico. The author explores the ways that the new law could affect immigration, civil liberties, and states rights. The author focuses specifically on how the law will affect New Mexico's illegal immigrants, because the bill nullifies a current state law that allows illegal immigrants to legally receive a New Mexico driver's license.
Tags: ID; immigration; naturalization; Real ID Act. Driver's License
-
Sex Appealed: Was the U.S. Supreme Court Fooled?
The author proposes that the U.S. Supreme Court was fooled into basing it's decision in Lawrence v. Texas on Right to Privacy grounds. But, Law says, those grounds actually did not exist because the arrests were invited. This discrepancy is important, because the Lawrence case set a precedent for privacy cases regarding same sex marriage, adoption, employee benefits, etc.
Tags: court; judge; sodomy; homosexuality; same sex marriage; constitution; constitutional challenge; police; privacy; legal precedent
-
Police Force Under Surveillance
The Bakersfield Californian goes beyond the legal mumbo jumbo to find out what really goes on in the force. Reporters talk to former and current officers and members of the community to contribute to their article. The result is an unbiased, honest review of what role racism plays in the Bakersfield Police Department.
Tags: police; cops; brutality; racism; department of justice; doj; racial profiling; bias; civil rights; false charges; harassment; misconduct
-
Hidden Horrors: California Dairy Workers Face Danger and Abuse
Workers in California's dairy industry generally live and work in the same place, and therefore do not speak out about poor working conditions for fear of losing their homes and/or their jobs. Rose Arrieta finds that in 2001, Cal OSHA investigated the state's dairies following the deaths of two workers. Fines were handed down, but there have been no inspections since then. Arrieta discovers that these workers are "modern-day slaves." Workers who aren't working at a "satisfactory" pace are beaten, those with injuries are told to work or they won't get paid, and some are threatened by their employers if the worker complains to legal authorities about inadequate pay.
Tags: dairy industry; California OSHA; Marin County; Sonoma County; human rights abuse; civil righs abuse; Department of Food and Agriculture
-
Price of Polygamy
This story investigates the town of Colorado City, on the border of Arizona and Utah. The town is a religious community that has shirked social norms to live according to standards of a fundamentalist sect of the Mormon Church. The citizens practice polygamy, and young women are forced into arranged marriages as teenagers. People who have escaped from Colorado City share horror stories about rape and abuse. Furthermore, because men in these families only legally marry one wife, the other women in the household are considered single mothers and therefore qualify for welfare. What results is millions of taxpayer dollars going to a community where abuse is common and basic human rights are denied.
Tags: human rights; family; polygamy; child abuse; domestic violence; Church of Latter Day Saints; welfare abuse
-
Innocents Abroad
Parents have resorted to abductions, sometimes with violent consequences, in order to gain custody of their children because the international system designed to mediate such disputes is fatally flawed. Newsday documented cases in which parents hired mercenaries to snatch back their children from foreign countries. The reporter also documented cases in which, even when courts rule that parents have the right to gain custody of their children, a jumbled legal system often prevents of delays lawful transfers for years. There are more than 1,000 American children being unlawfully held overseas.
Tags: abduction; custody; mercenaries; child recovery; parental kidnapping; Hague Convention on International Child Abduction; U.S. Borders; recovering abducted children; child custody; Hague Treaty; international custody; International Courts; Parental Kidnapping Crime Act; FBI
-
The Big Gun: Fifty-caliber sniper rifles can shoot through bullet-proof glass and cinderblock walls and hit targets a mile away -- and they're perfectly legal.
This article talks about the dangers of fifty-caliber sniper rifles. According to the author, "The rifles...are the biggest firearms you can buy without a special dispensation from the government. Fifty-caliber rifles shoot ammunition designed to chew up armored vehicles, and they're accurate, in the right hands, at a mile or more. They can shoot through bulletproof glass, armored limousines, cinder-block walls...from as far away as the Washington Monument through the forehead of someone standing on the steps of the Capitol. And any eighteen-year-old can buy one with no more paperwork than it takes to buy a .22 at Wal-Mart."
Tags: guns; violence; fifty-caliber rifles; .50 rifles; rifles; ammunition; long-range guns; bulletproof
-
Sham System: Foreigners Seeking U.S. Work Visas Often Land in Hell Instead
The Journal reports that "want ads for jobs that aren't vacant amount to a mixed-up feint in a painfully mixed-up game by which honest, well-off and capable foreigners gain the right to work legally in the U.S. The law insists that an employer search for a qualified American before hiring anybody who isn't one. Americans who apply for the jobs are duped, companies that offer the jobs are duplicitous."
Tags: visas; H-1B; employment; jobs; foreign workers; green cards
-
Unclogging Gideon's trumpet: Mississippi suits are the latest to attack state defense funding.
The National Law Journal examines the state of criminal defense spending by states, most notably Mississippi. David E. Rovella writes "defense lawyers contend that budgets for already-overtaxed indigent defense systems are flat or have been cut. And in states without a public defense system, they argue, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright, which guarantees state-funded indigent criminal defense, is ineffective." The National Law Journal writes about "three lawsuits filed in a recent weeks have challenged the way Mississippi provides criminal defense to the poor. They are the latest in a handful of suits nationwide attacking what defense lawyers say is the hidden price of war on crime: the erosion of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel."
Tags: Gideon v. Wainwright; right to counsel; Sixth Amendment; U.S. Supreme Court; Mississippi; public defense; public defender; law; legal; public defense system; lawsuits; poor; crime