The Colorado Supreme Court ruled on September 11, 2017, that the crime of unlawful sexual contact is a lesser included offense of sexual assault, meaning the two must merge. This was the second case dealing with lesser included offenses decided by the Supreme Court on the same day. In People v. Rock, 2017 CO 84, the Court
The Georgia Supreme Court sent a message to prosecutors in an October 2, 2017 opinion: A police officer’s testimony as to a defendant’s performance on a horizontal gaze nystagmus (“HGN”) test cannot, by itself, establish a numeric blood alcohol content level. The HGN test is one of several field sobriety tests used by police officers
Vanessa Thompson didn’t have the best start in life. Abused from an early age, she was just 13 when she quit school and entered the foster care system. A habit of running away and doing drugs carried her into her early 20s, and her activities ultimately led to murder charges stemming from the death of
The Georgetown University Law Center (GULC), rated among the nation’s top law schools, draws its faculty from many sources: academia, law firms, and top lawyers in government agencies. But its most recent hire, Associate Professor Shon Hopwood, doesn’t fit that pattern. As reported by CBS News’ 60 Minutes program in October, before coming to teach
Soft skills are essential to social integration. These are skills such as communication, empathy, organization and cognitive reasoning that enable people to interact more positively with each other. They’re non-academic skills that also help people become more accountable for their actions, and to pause and think before acting irrationally. While much focus is put on
Although it has a relatively low incarceration rate, Washington State still saw nearly a third of inmates released from its prisons in 2012 wind up re-incarcerated within the next three years, according to state corrections officials. For juvenile recidivism, the rate was even higher: among youths released in 2013, more than half (53%) had re-offended
When the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) relied on a pre-release program that was steeped in military-style practices, it failed inmates miserably. “(We found that) people who go through (that program) actually do worse than people that didn’t go through, so we realized that while there were a lot of individuals who had success—they were
Wading again into the murky area of how and when juror racial prejudice can upset a criminal conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halted the scheduled execution of a Georgia inmate. The move came in September in order to hear the inmate’s appeal of a lower federal court’s decision that evidence of a juror’s racially
By Christopher Zoukis In March 2015, 53-year-old Ralph Karl Ingrim suffered a seizure at a Dollar General store in Amarillo, Texas. A store clerk was kind enough to call the police to have him removed. When they arrived, Ingrim allegedly became argumentative, placed his hand on an officer’s chest, and was promptly arrested on a
During its new term started in October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of McCoy v. Louisiana, which asks whether a Death Row inmate can appeal a death sentence because his lawyer, over the inmate’s strenuous objections, admitted his client’s guilt during his trial. Robert McCoy was charged with murdering the mother, stepfather,