Convict

The city of New York recently witnessed a record payout to George Bell, falsely convicted of murder in 1999, after it emerged prosecutors had deliberately hidden evidence casting doubt on his guilt, giving false statements in court. Bell is the latest in a long line of people, especially Black Americans, unfoundedly convicted. More recently, Jabar Walker and Wayne Gardine were cleared after decades in prison. Conviction integrity units across North America have found serious flaws with many long-standing…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain With hate crimes, context is everything, and events outside of the United States—like the war between Israel and Hamas—can have far-reaching and potentially tragic consequences. Vermont police arrested a man in Burlington on Nov. 27, 2023, for allegedly shooting three 20-year-old Palestinian…

On 6 February 2020, around 11.15am, a 16-year-old boy stepped out of Brighton’s Regent Hotel and walked towards the terraced green of Regency Square. He had with him a handful of small, pebble-sized packages, some bound in blue plastic, the others in white. The different colours let him know which contained heroin, and which cocaine. Plain clothes police officers watching the boy soon discovered another 115 similar wraps in the hotel room he had been staying in.Just over a year later, at the crown court in Lewes, a jury…

Troy Smocks was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison and banned from the now-dormant social network Parler after he made violent threats on the app in the wake of the January 6th riots. Now Smocks is suing Parler for $370 million, accusing the company of violating a controversial Texas law which bars social media platforms from censoring users for their political beliefs.Smocks’ Parler posts advocated for the insurrection on January 6th, 2021, and he rallied for more violence the next day. “Over the next 24 hours, I…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Once a rape case reaches court, juries in England and Wales are more likely to convict than acquit a defendant, and this has been the case for at least 15 years, according to a large-scale analysis of all jury verdicts by UCL's Professor Cheryl Thomas. The paper also found that the jury conviction…

On November 20, 1945, in Nuremberg, Germany, once prime real estate for torchlit Nazi pageantry, currently reduced to ruins by Allied bombing, the International Military Tribunal, an unprecedented experiment in transnational jurisprudence, convened in the city’s Palace of Justice, one of the few buildings left standing. The four victorious powers — the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — had hauled the loser, Nazi Germany, before four judges and a global jury to be held accountable…

A jury’s journey to convict Nikola Corp. founder Trevor Milton of defrauding investors involved negotiations with initial holdout jurors and tense debates about whether the former electric-truck executive acted with criminal intent, producing an unusual mixed verdict.Three women, known during the trial as Jurors 1, 5 and 6, described to The Wall Street Journal how a federal jury in New York over five hours came to find Mr. Milton guilty of two wire-fraud charges…