Pennsylvania requires unanimous approval from a five-member pardon board before people incarcerated on life sentences can ask the governor for clemency. While 19 other states, including New York and California, allow the governor unilateral clemency power, Pennsylvania is among...

The Batson v. Kentucky ruling, which prohibits prosecutors from rejecting potential jurors based on race, promised to curb wrongful convictions and protect the lives of many, particularly Black individuals caught in the criminal legal system. However, according to the...

The Poor People’s Campaign, organized by Martin Luther King, began assembling in Washington DC to advocate for America’s poor. Thousands joined together in a demonstration that lasted six weeks and became known as Resurrection City. King was assassinated a month before the rally.

NEW YORK — Advances in DNA testing have contributed to more than 600 exonerations in the United States since 1989, according to the Innocence Project, even as structural barriers continue to limit access to post-conviction analysis. At the same time, the organization reports that...

Prosecutors in Chicago are continuing to resist efforts by individuals who have already been proven innocent to clear their records, raising ongoing questions about whether those records should remain or be formally expunged in the name of justice.

The Innocence Project partnered on the new play, starring Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson, which tells the story of Pennsylvania death row exoneree Nick Yarris. “If I made up Nick’s story, no one would believe it,” playwright Lindsey Ferrentino told the Innocence Project.

The American criminal legal system is often compromised by systemic gaps in equity, transparency, accessibility, and resources. The Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) at Santa Clara Law educates and equips students to help combat these challenges.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A coalition of lawmakers, public defenders and advocates gathered at the State Capitol this week to push for increased funding and structural reforms to California’s public defense system, warning that overwhelming caseloads, staffing shortages and...

On May 4, 1970, in Kent, Ohio, 28 National Guardsmen fire their weapons at a group of anti-war demonstrators on the Kent State University campus, killing four students and wounding nine. The tragedy was a watershed moment for a nation divided by the conflict in Vietnam...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday condemned the NYPD’s violent arrest in Brooklyn of a man mistaken for a drug dealer, calling it “not only incredibly disturbing, but also unacceptable.”

A recent report has found that for every five inmates Ohio executes, one is freed from death row. Since Ohio reinstated the death penalty in 1981, the state has executed 56 individuals. In the same period, 12 people were exonerated, translating to a roughly one-to-five ratio of exonerations to...

A seemingly narrow procedural rule masks a broader attempt to reshape oversight of government lawyers. During her tenure as attorney general, Pam Bondi proposed a regulation that would require state disciplinary authorities to delay investigations and proceedings against federal government...

The U.S. confines nearly 2 million people in prisons, jails, and detention centers, a fact which we only know by piecing together data from siloed parts of the criminal legal system. But even this number does not capture the full picture of the U.S. system of mass punishment, which...

Amid rampant abuse by federal agents, state legislatures can pass critical laws that allow people to take federal agents to court for violating their rights. Over the past year, federal agents have arrested U.S. citizens, dragged children from their beds in the middle of the night, smashed...

In a scathing exposé by Inquest and the Prison Journalism Project, the dire and inhumane conditions at the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado and New Jersey State Prison have been laid bare, revealing a grim reality of oppressive living and hygiene standards.

The state can no longer saddle defendants with court fees when charges are dismissed. Prosecutors are backing legislation to restore them. In early January, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down the practice, ruling that judges and prosecutors can no longer charge defendants...

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has struck down mandatory life sentences in felony murder cases, a move long sought by criminal justice advocates who have condemned these across-the-board punishments as excessively harsh.

On the morning of May 3, 2017, Suffolk County prosecutor Glenn Kurtzrock was preparing to call the lead detective in a murder case — his final witness — when the defense attorney noticed something odd. There was a two-year gap in the detective’s memo book.

Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses a federal court ruling blocking the Trump administration’s transfer of Biden-commuted death row inmates to a federal supermax prison, examining the constitutional and procedural issues surrounding that action.

Wrongful convictions are often defined by numbers: the number of lives upended, the number of years unjustly served, and the number of systemic failures that allowed such injustices to occur. Reduced to statistics, the personal stories of those wrongly convicted — marked by...

For defendants who can afford to hire private counsel, word of mouth matters a lot. The decision about who will represent them is one of the most consequential choices they will make in the entire criminal process, yet it must be made in a system that offers little meaningful...

New York City paid $117 million in 2025 to settle lawsuits involving accusations of police and prosecutorial misconduct, many for incidents that occurred decades ago, including a wrongful conviction in a 1987 murder. The amount was about half of the $206 million the city paid out...

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of justice, courts, and laws? For most people, it is a system designed to protect everyone equally. However, that is not the reality we live in today.

A bill that would revise Washington’s Wrongly Convicted Persons Act and streamline the compensation process for individuals who have been exonerated recently passed the House Committee on Appropriations.

Big Law partners and in-house counsel, take note: the rules governing attorney discipline are shifting fast under the current administration, prompting some intense online reaction. In a move that’s sparking fierce debate across social media channels, the Trump Justice Department has...

A San Francisco judge has found the elected Public Defender Mano Raju in contempt of court, setting the stage for a hearing on March 24 that could determine whether monetary sanctions will be imposed and, more broadly, how far courts can go in compelling defense attorneys to...

Nearly five years after New York set up a statewide watchdog to police prosecutors, the office has handed down just one public censure while hundreds of complaints sit unresolved. That contrast, a body with the power to investigate but limited capacity to do it, is fueling frustration from...

A recent report from the UC Berkeley School of Law Criminal Law and Justice Center concludes that prosecutor-initiated resentencing in Alameda County has reduced thousands of years of incarceration and...

New York State spent a record $450.6 million on prison healthcare in 2025, according to a February report by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, even as the aging incarcerated population driving these costs reoffends at some of the lowest rates in the system and continues...

MEDIA ALERT NEW YORK STATE SENATOR SALAZAR AND ASSEMBLYWOMAN WALKER JOIN WITH NEW YORK STATE EXONEREES TO PUSH LEGISLATION EXPANDING RECORDING OF LAW ENFORCEMENT INTERROGATIONS

Despite evidence that cashless bail doesn’t increase crime, several states are moving to restrict it. When most of downtown Houston has shut down for the night, bail bond row is still wide awake. At least 10 surety businesses dot the blocks surrounding the...

Mark your calendars—The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice's Fourth Annual Spring Gala is happening April 30, 2026, from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM at Westchester Manor!

The number of complaints against New York's state and local judges has been on the rise for several years, according to a new report by the state’s top judicial watchdog. There were 3,363 complaints filed against state, county and local judges in 2025, according to a report released Monday by...

A federal judge has declined to disturb a $3 million jury verdict against the city of Philadelphia and several police officers in a civil rights lawsuit stemming from a wrongful conviction, rejecting post-trial challenges from both sides and denying...

Manhattan, NY, February 27th, 2026 – The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice has filed a motion with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan seeking an Order authorizing the federal district court to consider...

The recent fatal shooting of Renee Good by a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis has already prompted intense public debate, much of it unfolding before the relevant facts are fully known.

An extraordinary legal experiment is unfolding in Oklahoma, where a new state law, the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, passed in 2024, offers prisoners a chance at freedom. Under the law, a domestic-violence victim who is serving time can petition for a reduced sentence, which the law mandates if...

California’s criminal justice system looks different in a very tangible way compared to when Gov. Gavin Newsom took office seven years ago. It has fewer prisons thanks to a dramatic decline in the number of people the state is incarcerating. It’s directing more resources to rehabilitation programs.

Just weeks ago, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Renee Good during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. At around 9am on Saturday, a Customs & Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti.

2024 was something of a watershed for the use of clemency in capital cases. In November 2024, President Joe Biden issued a mass commutation of 37 federal death sentences. A month later, outgoing North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper granted clemency to 15 people on his state’s...

The latest impactful and emotionally charged documentary from director Dawn Porter (John Lewis: Good Trouble; Luther: Never Too Much) opens with author Ta-Nehisi Coates (also an executive producer) recounting his memories of...

U.S. Men's Hockey Team: Apologize and Skip Trump's State of the Union in Solidarity with the U.S. Women's Hockey Team!

A young man with the mind of a child was executed by a system that mistook compliance for guilt. Joe Arridy’s story exposes how justice can function perfectly on paper while failing catastrophically in practice.

Belva Lockwood’s interest in law and politics brought her from upstate New York to Washington, D.C., in 1866. Later that year, she opened her own seminary school for women and became part of a community of progressive women activists who participated in the temperance and suffrage movements.

Two Southern California residents who say they suffered traumatic brain injuries after being struck in the head and face by so-called “less-lethal” projectiles during protests against federal immigration raids have filed civil rights lawsuits against the City and County of Los Angeles, alleging...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to make arrangements to allow some of the Venezuelan migrants deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador to return to the U.S. at the government's expense.

The SAVE Act would require all Americans to prove their citizenship with documentation unavailable to millions and upend the way every American citizen registers to vote. Quick summary:

Some former federal prosecutors say the discrepancies in how the Trump administration is describing protest behavior may create a credibility problem for current prosecutors.

After his first reggaetón track went viral on SoundCloud in 2016, Bad Bunny left his job as a supermarket bagger and stepped into public view. With eccentric haircuts, painted nails, skirts, and fluorescent glasses, he disrupted the hyper-masculinity that defined...

An Ontario County Court judge has dismissed a high‑profile gang‑assault case after finding that prosecutors failed for nearly a year to meet mandatory discovery obligations and were not ready for trial within the state’s statutory deadline.