By Sandy . . . Mary Moore of Clayton County, Georgia, was 21 years old in September of 2022. That is surely very young to be a corrections officer and a security specialist in a county jail, responsible for assuring that jail detainees were secured; but that is what she was. In late September, she was arrested and jailed for…
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By Michael Karlik . . . Even while recognizing the defendant’s only sexual offense happened 25 years ago, that he had served his prison sentence, and that he had the cognitive abilities of a second grader, the federal appeals court based in Denver declined to order a lesser sentence for Kayode Dobosu’s failure to comply with certain conditions of his sex…
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By Steve Lash . . . BALTIMORE, MD — A sharply divided Maryland high court ruled Tuesday that a convict’s placement on the Sex Offender Registry qualifies as “punishment” for a sex offense, meaning that all elements of the crime required for placement – such as the victim’s age – must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt at trial or…
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By Chiara Eisner . . . Carol Nesteikis, 66, has never committed a crime. But for two years, from six in the evening to six in the morning the next day, she lived under de facto house arrest with her 32-year-old son, Adam. It wasn’t because she wanted to. The home itself was a kind of punishment, she says. Adam…
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Used with permission By Guy Hamilton-Smith . . . Oscar Wilde, writing from his cell in the Reading Gaol where he was imprisoned for homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century, observed that “society reserves for itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what…
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Fourth Circuit Affirms Doe v. Cooper Oral Arguments September 16, 2016. Paul Dubbeling Attorney for the Plaintiff
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By James Neighbors . . . Back before the judicial system became a sprawling monster of inefficiency and inequity, justice was served in America. The punishment fit the crime, and once you got out of prison, ALL of your rights were returned, including gun ownership and voting rights. Not so much in America today. In the “kinder, gentler” America as…
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By Sandy. . . Imagine being fourteen years old today, in a world where technology is changing the rules faster than they are being written. John Grasso, a criminal defense attorney and a former police officer, has captured that situation with the brilliant and apt metaphor of stepping into quicksand. You don’t know it’s there until you are in it,…
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Author Dr. Marty Klein . . . There’s currently a campaign to recall a Superior Court judge in my county. Judge Aaron Persky presided over the 2016 trial of Stanford student Brock Turner, who was ultimately convicted of digitally penetrating an unconscious woman on campus. With Turner a young first-timer with no previous police record, the Probation Department recommended a…
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By Sandy . . . Some members of our society are shadow people, so marginalized that they are hanging on by their fingernails. Some have a slightly firmer grip, but they are perched precariously close to the edge, so close that they can be hurled into the abyss by a mere word, accusation, or click of a mouse. In Florida…
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