One of the first things I did after starting at Policy Watch last summer was ask the Department of Public Safety to give me tours of a few of the state’s 53 prisons. I’d done the same thing at my last job, in Connecticut. My thinking is, if I’m going to write about a state’s prison system, I owe it to readers and those locked within to see some those places firsthand. A guided tour is not the best way to get a sense of how incarcerated people are treated each day, but it has some advantages. While prison officials can present a sanitized version of their correctional facilities, they cannot change each building’s architecture, the layout of the housing units or the size of the cells in which the incarcerated live, locked away for years at a time.
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courts
courts
Cases were moving slowly through Courtroom 2A on Monday morning. Several of those whose names were written on a criminal docket pinned to the wall in the lobby grumbled that they had to get a move on. They didn’t want to spend their whole day at the Chatham County Courthouse. The room got quiet when District Court Judge Samantha Cabe called Garima Sinha’s name. Sinha took her place beside her public defender, Melissa A. French, and stood in front of a microphone, her back to what would soon become a rapt audience. Sinha had been charged with assault and battery and injury to real property, both misdemeanors, and assault by strangulation, a felony.
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Learn more in the District Attorney’s annual report.
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In mid-December, Texas’ highest criminal court revoked the state attorney general’s ability to use his office to prosecute election-related cases without the request of a district or county attorney. In an 8-1 opinion, the all-Republican court weakened Attorney General Ken Paxton’s power to independently go after perpetrators of voter fraud, a problem he says is rampant but is actually exceedingly rare.
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Undermining a basic right: Republican politicians espouse a truly radical stance on public education
It’s a bedrock principle of American law that average people can vindicate their legal and constitutional rights in courts of law and have those courts compel or prevent acts of other branches of government. From preventing the taking of private property without compensation, to ordering necessary services for, say, people living with disabilities, or even an incarcerated person, such action can take several forms.
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The justices of the North Carolina Supreme Court are currently debating how they should handle conflicts of interest. Indeed, two Republican justices are now the target of motions to “disqualify” based on alleged conflicts in a case challenging a pair of constitutional amendments adopted and placed on the statewide ballot by the legislature in 2018.
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Breaking the Republicans’ veto-proof majority was the Democrats’ and voting rights activists’ short game. Their long game? Ending partisan gerrymandering for good in North Carolina. Common Cause, the North Carolina Democratic Party and a group of individual voters filed a lawsuit earlier this week in Wake County Superior Court challenging the...
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