A Supreme Court case being heard next week is the latest fallout from the ‘Bruen’ ruling, which put practically all of the nation’s gun laws into question.
Alan Berlow
Alan Berlow is a freelance journalist.
Posted inDispatches
A New New Low
If Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee get their way, the United States may soon have a law that could permit state-sanctioned murder. Sound improbable? Naturally the bill’s chief sponsor, John Kyl of Arizona, doesn’t say his measure would do that. He’s given the bill a genial moniker — the Streamlined Procedures Act — and […]
Posted inFeatures
Requiem for a Public Defender
A long, dreary corridor of black-marbled linoleum serves as a makeshift waiting room for defendants scheduled to be tried at the Spalding County Courthouse in Griffin, Georgia, 40 miles south of Atlanta. More than 50 men and women, mostly black, stand along a pale yellow wall or sit on a dark oak bench, waiting to […]
Posted inFeatures
The Broken Machinery Of Death
No longer can a jury wantonly and freakishly impose the death sentence; it is always circumscribed by the legislative guidelines. –Gregg v. Georgia Twenty-five years ago this month, on July 2, 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 in Gregg v. Georgia to reinstate the death penalty after a brief official hiatus. Implicit in the […]
Posted inFeatures
Lethal Injustice
Since he took office in January 1995, George W. Bush has presided over more than 120 executions, accounting for more than a third of the executions in the nation at large during that time. Bush is not, of course, entirely responsible for this astonishing record, and he typically dismisses any questions about it by noting […]