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Justice (courts/crime/law)
Kansas City speeders plead to lower offenses
Michael Mansur of The Kansas City Star used computer-assisted analysis of court records to show the court repeatedly allows thousands of speeders and red-light runners to reduce dangerous moving violations to defective-equipment pleas. That means tickets for serious violations are pleaded down to offenses such as broken taillights, which means no points against a driver’s…
Read MoreFlorida law fails in treatment of sexual offenders
Jason Grotto of The Miami Herald analyzed more than 100,000 cases of sexual crimes, reviewed court cases, state records and documents and conducted dozens of interviews to show that seven years after the passage of the Jimmy Ryce Act, Florida’s program for screening, confining and treating the worst sexual offenders is failing. The four-part series…
Read MoreMurderers go unpunished in Newark
Jonathan Schuppe and William Kleinknecht of The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger analyzed homicides in Essex County between 1998 and 2003 and found killers went unpunished more often than they went to prison. In the cases in which a defendant was convicted, more than a quarter led to prison sentences of 10 years or less. “Essex County…
Read MoreFlawed criminal justice system
Fredric N. Tulsky, with staff writers Julie Patel and Mike Zapler, data analyst Griff Palmer and research librarian Leigh Poitinger, of the San Jose Mercury News , reviewed every criminal appeal originating out of Santa Clara County Superior Court for five years to show that the Santa Clara County’s criminal justice system is systemically troubled…
Read MoreLoopholes put school bus drivers with violations on roads
Brad Branan of the Tucson Citizen used court records to show that Arizona school bus drivers with criminal records or multiple moving violations are escaping state regulatory enforcement and putting children and other motorists at risk. The investigation found that drivers with criminal records or multiple traffic violations are among the most accident prone at…
Read MoreJudge violates federal law
Will Evans of the Center for Investigative Reporting, writing for Salon.com, reviewed court and financial records and found that a judge nominated by President Bush to one of the highest courts in the nation has apparently violated federal law repeatedly while serving on the federal bench. Judge James H. Payne, a Bush-appointed chief judge in…
Read MoreNYC police avoid reporting grand larceny
Paul Moses of The Village Voice reports that New York City’s falling crime rate may not entirely credible. “The number of lost-property reports filed with police jumped by 44 percent from 1997 to 2004, according to a document the NYPD released to The Village Voice in response to a freedom-of-information request. Nearly half of that…
Read MoreAnalysis of high court shows just 29 abortion rulings
Keith Epstein and Doug Stanley of the Tampa Tribune analyzed Supreme Court voting data archived by Michigan State University political science Professor Harold J. Spaeth, finding that “since 1953, the Supreme Court has formally ruled on abortion, a privacy issue, only 29 times. Abortion-related cases account for only 0.5 percent of all rulings handed down…
Read MoreAlito takes hard line on crime, immigration
Amy Goldstein and Sarah Cohen of The Washington Post, with a team of reporters and researchers, categorized Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s rulings and compared them to other federal appeals court judges, finding that “Alito has taken a harder line on criminal and immigration cases than most federal appellate judges nationwide, including those who, like…
Read MoreProposal would push sex offenders out of half of Calif. urban areas
Jim Miller of The (Riverside, Calif.) Press-Enterprise used geographic information system (GIS) software to study the impact of a proposal by Gov. Schwarzenegger and others to prohibit registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school in California. The analysis shows that “At least half of California’s urban areas would become…
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