« The Nexus Between Mental Illness and Violence | Main | News Scan »

News Scan

Death Penalty: Indiana murderer David Leon Woods was executed this morning as relatives of the 77 year old man he murdered during a burglary looked on according to an AP story from the Indianapolis Star.

The unsolved murder cases of nine Massachusetts women between July 1988 to April 1989, are being re-opened by District Attorney Samuel Sutter. The remains of the nine women were found along the highway, and two more were never found. Now the property of former suspect Kenneth Ponte's previous home is being dug up, just to see if investigators can find anything specific to the case. The full article can be found here.

Leaning Towards Death: Jurors said Thursday that 32-year-old Alex Demolle should be sentenced to death for the strangling death and rape of 11-year-old Jaquita Mack in his Oakland apartment in 1999. The jury convicted Demolle of first degree murder with a special circumstance of raping a child in March. The news article of the trial by Henry K. Lee of the San Francisco Chronicle can be found here.

NYPD Trouble: An opinion article in The Wall Street Journal by Judith Miller discusses the federal lawsuits filed by protestors who were arrested during the Republican National Convention in 2004. The suits claim that police arrested nonviolent protestors merely because of their political beliefs. The allegations were based upon an analysis of 600 page "raw intelligence documents" and "summary digests of observations from both the field and the department's cyberintelligence unit" by a New York Civil Liberties Union official. The NYPD says that the surveillance of the convention was to make sure the protestors and New Yorkers were safe.

Post a comment

If you return to this page after signing in, click here for instructions.

This is a place for informed discussion of issues related to criminal law and criminal justice policy. Persons who wish to engage in ad hominem attacks, name-calling, profanity, flame wars, and general rudeness are cordially invited to do so somewhere else. For this reason, and to prevent comment spam, commenters are required to register with TypeKey, and individual comments will have to be approved before they are published for your first few comments.