Michael Brick's ambitious piece in today's New York Times about the wide ranging narcotics prosecutions in the housing projects of Brooklyn omitted some important details which suggest that the "historic conspiracy" referred to by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office was not the series of drug transactions being...

In the layman's view of the criminal-justice system, defendants go to trial, are convicted or acquitted of certain charges, and if convicted, are sentenced for the offenses. But try to explain the reality of being sentenced for acquitted conduct, and you're likely to be met with stares of astonishment. "You...

While the last episode of The Wire may not have wrapped up quite as cleanly as some closure-loving commentators would have liked, the final act of the writers -- captured not on the little screen but in the pages of Time Magazine -- was a stunning and brazen act of...

If there is one truism about America it is this: we are obsessed with crime and punishment. Every lurid tragedy produces calls for tougher laws and harsher punishments and these days, when calamity strikes, someone goes to prison (except for #9 below).

And so, herewith, 2007's top 10 criminal...

So it looks like one good thing happened this little-noticed election day. Comeuppance for Oregon prosecutor Joshua Marquis, the staunch death penalty defender who has argued over the years that innocent people basically never get convicted and that even DNA exonerations don't mean someone is actually innocent. Though the final...

It's hard to match the schadenfreude that comes from reading a headline like "Conservative Authors Sue Publisher" particularly when the publisher is the odious Regnery and mewling plaintiffs are "authors" like Jerome R. Corsi, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson and Richard Miniter -- men who have collectively penned...

Maybe it's just the east coast, but I have to say that 30 Rock didn't feel like a hotbed of labor activity this afternoon. There were a lot of writers--actually too many for the small "pen" erected by the NYPD. There was also an excellent band, a fine snare drummer,...

My very cool WGAE card came in the mail a few weeks ago, followed four days later by a strike authorization form. So just when the golden doors of promise had miraculously swung open for me, I will be spending my time marching in a little circle in the midst...

Christopher Pittman killed his grandparents with a shotgun. He was 12-years-old, stood 5-foot-2 and weighed 96 pounds. He had already been hospitalized for attempting suicide. Despite his age, size and psychiatric history, Christopher was tried as an adult and sentenced to 30 years in adult prison. Just last week, the...

Katha Pollitt is one of America's most versatile and visible feminists. For more than a decade she's contributed a trenchant column to The Nation. Virginity or Death! -- a collection of her Nation Columns -- was published by Random House in June. Savaged in a New York Times book...

Alan Newton left a New York prison last week after serving 22 years for a rape he didn't commit. Though eligible for parole for nearly a decade, he was repeatedly denied his freedom because he insisted on his innocence. Through repeated motions, and letters from his prison cell, Newton relentlessly...

A few weeks ago, a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled that statements made in the workplace may not actually be protected by the first amendment. The ruling has been criticized as a serious setback for whistleblowers, and it may well be. But Garcetti v. Ceballos says something else too --...

In this midst of the great immigration debate, it makes sense to pause for a moment to consider some the interests arrayed against relaxed enforcement of our labyrinthine immigration policies. Who, after all, stands to benefit from stepped-up enforcement? How about the Prison-Industrial complex and it's web of for-profit prison...

So I get this e-mail from the Center for Court Innovation today. They're a very well-funded very official arm of the Unified Court System of the State of New York: very serious business.

And they've started a blog.

And they very sweetly asked me to take a...

It's not easy to find heroes these days--particularly political ones. Looking across the landscape of the left, there remain a few rhetoricians, an awkward academic or two, and of course our aging rock star of an ex-president. And then there are the grannies.

I suppose it should come as no...

Ed Rosenthal, the Guru of Ganja, has good reason to fear the feds. It was the Feds after all, pursuing a strangely anti-federalist agenda, that slapped the handcuffs on Mr. Rosenthal and charged him with growing marijuana, and it was the feds that brought and won a case in the...