Justice (courts/crime/law)
Fines not paid by out-of-state violators
Gregory Korte of The Cincinnati Enquirer analyzed nearly 100,000 parking tickets issued in Cincinnati last year, finding that “Kentucky violators rarely pay anything at all, because the office responsible for collecting fines doesn’t trace out-of-state license plates. That resulted in an out-of-state collection rate of just 2.5 percent, compared to 87.9 percent overall.” Fines for…
Read MoreExpunged records raise concern over judicial fairness
Steve Myers of the Mobile Register reveals the existence of hundreds of court cases where convictions were removed from the public record. “The practice of expunging records came to the forefront recently due to the case of Mobile County school board President David Thomas, who was arrested for drunken driving in 1998. Before he was…
Read MorePolice response times longer in certain areas
Paul Goodsell and Lynn Safranek of the Omaha World-Herald examined 911 calls between 2000 and 2004 to find that “police took longest to respond to west Omaha calls. East of I-680, it took an average of 6 minutes and 31 seconds last year for the first officer to arrive on the highest priority calls. West…
Read MoreProblem cops keep badges through troubled system
Ron Menchaca and Glenn Smith of the Charleston Post and Courier investigated South Carolina’s agency that oversees law enforcement, finding “endemic failures in the state’s system for tracking police officers that allow problem cops to keep their badges despite histories of misconduct and even criminal behavior… Until three years ago, the state turned a blind…
Read MoreGang leaders control crime, despite incarceration
Michael Montgomery of American Radioworks spent five months investigating following inmates at staff at Pelican Bay State Prison in California. He found that prison gangs are controlling crime “far outside prison walls and across the country.” Some of the gang leaders were already serving life sentences and are now facing prosecution for crimes committed outside…
Read MoreOfficials fail to act on abuse claims
Michelle Roberts of The Oregonian found that warnings about abusive behavior by state parole officer Michael Lee Boyles went unheeded for years, and Oregon officials acted only after the suicide of a young man supervised by Boyles. “State officials received repeated and detailed warnings from a family raising concerns about Boyles and his behavior with…
Read MoreAffluent residents more likely than minorities to show up for jury duty
Andrew Tilghman of the Houston Chronicle analyzed local court data to show that “residents of Harris County’s predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods are up to seven times more likely to show up for jury duty than those in the county’s lower-income, mostly minority neighborhoods.” The paper used the area’s more than 140 ZIP codes to divide…
Read MoreTraffic stop study raises racial profiling questions
Karisa King and Kelly Guckian of the San Antonio Express-News analyzed 12 months’ of traffic and pedestrian police stops, finding that “blacks were more than three times as likely as whites to face certain types of police searches. Yet police found contraband in the searches at about the same rate for both races, a finding…
Read MoreProblems with judiciary system plague city
Jerry Mitchell of The (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger reports that the Hinds County judicial system “at times resembles an elephant balancing on toothpicks. A yearlong investigation by The Clarion-Ledger has uncovered many long-term problems that have not been addressed.” The county had fewer prosecutors and fewer indictments in 2004 than similar-sized cities. “Between 1998 and 2003, the…
Read MoreScam stole land from the dead
Mike Hoyem of The (Fort Myers) News-Press has a new twist on Florida land deals: the use of phony deeds to sell land owned by dead people. “Forged signatures, faked notarizations, phony witnesses and easy access to land records via the Internet are robbing the dead and their relatives of land as property values in…
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