From NPR
Some murder cases are harder to solve than others. The investigation into the killing of Mellory Manning — a 27-year-old woman who was assaulted and murdered in 2008 while working as a prostitute in Christchurch, New Zealand — confounded police.
They conducted an investigation and interviewed hundreds of people, but months later, they still had no solid leads.
To crack the case, the police required the expertise of an unusual specialist. Dallas Mildenhall, a white-haired scientist in his 70s, is a forensic palynologist – a pollen and spores expert who helps solve crimes. One of only a handful of such experts in the world, he has helped solve cases of murder, arson and art forgery all over the globe. He once traced counterfeit malaria drugs to the border of China and Vietnam by identifying pollen in the capsules....
...Read and Listen to the rest here.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
A New Era for Victims of Crime
From The Crime Report
With federal crime victim funding expected to nearly quadruple in the next fiscal year, states have begun to plan how to spend what amounts to an unexpected windfall.
Under the 1984 Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), all fines paid in federal criminal cases are set aside to help crime victims, but access to the funds every year was tightly limited until last December— when, as part of the federal budget deal, Congress approved a nearly fourfold increase from the most recent spending cap of $745 million to $2.36 billion.
That was good news for advocates, who have been fighting for years to get the full amount of available funds permissible under VOCA to help severely strapped crime victim organizations, such as domestic violence shelters, child abuse centers, as well as court-appointed sexual advocates, and organizations that assist homeless youth.
About $3.5 billion was paid into the VOCA fund in the last year, but victims could benefit from only a small fraction of that because of the cap....
...Read the rest here.
With federal crime victim funding expected to nearly quadruple in the next fiscal year, states have begun to plan how to spend what amounts to an unexpected windfall.
Under the 1984 Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), all fines paid in federal criminal cases are set aside to help crime victims, but access to the funds every year was tightly limited until last December— when, as part of the federal budget deal, Congress approved a nearly fourfold increase from the most recent spending cap of $745 million to $2.36 billion.
That was good news for advocates, who have been fighting for years to get the full amount of available funds permissible under VOCA to help severely strapped crime victim organizations, such as domestic violence shelters, child abuse centers, as well as court-appointed sexual advocates, and organizations that assist homeless youth.
About $3.5 billion was paid into the VOCA fund in the last year, but victims could benefit from only a small fraction of that because of the cap....
...Read the rest here.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Partisan Politics Could Mean Jail Time for Innocent People
Research shows that Republican-leaning states are less likely to pass laws to protect against wrongful convictions.
From Pacific Standard
Wrongful convictions are a serious problem in the United States. There are approximately two million convicted felons behind bars. By some estimates, as many as 100,000 of them could be innocent.
The rise of DNA technology in the 1980s led to the exoneration of hundreds of wrongly imprisoned individuals, according to the Innocence Project, a public policy organization working to absolve wrongfully convicted people. In response, many states have adopted laws that would allow inmates to access and re-test their DNA evidence. But, as Cleveland State University sociologist Stephanie Kent noticed, far fewer states mandated that DNA evidence be saved after a conviction.
“It's kind of a nasty way for these inmates to find out that even though they have the ability to test [the DNA evidence], it’s not there when they go to do it,” says Kent, who started digging into other legislative safeguards against wrongful convictions and found that few were universally adopted....
...Read the rest here.
Friday, June 5, 2015
The dirty secret of our criminal justice system
From The Age
...So what is it about our society, and so many others, that it should have turned a blind eye to the systematic misuse of power in the Catholic Church and the brutal abuse of children by the Ridsdales and Westons of the world? Where were the elders of the Church, those preaching against the inhumanity of communism and atheism and the immorality of sex outside marriage, when these disciples of god were indulging themselves? Addressing the injustice, even a lifetime after the damage has been done, is important, but we can hardly be proud that it has taken so long or that no one acted when it mattered.
And we should not forget this: while the abuse of children within the Church was being hidden away, violence against women too was also being ignored or covered-up. Imagine if the hundreds of women raped in the 1960s and '70s came forward and told their stories. Imagine if we opened up the court records from that era and gave an honest appraisal of why so many "wife killers" walked from the Supreme Court of Victoria with manslaughter verdicts....
Read the rest here.
...So what is it about our society, and so many others, that it should have turned a blind eye to the systematic misuse of power in the Catholic Church and the brutal abuse of children by the Ridsdales and Westons of the world? Where were the elders of the Church, those preaching against the inhumanity of communism and atheism and the immorality of sex outside marriage, when these disciples of god were indulging themselves? Addressing the injustice, even a lifetime after the damage has been done, is important, but we can hardly be proud that it has taken so long or that no one acted when it mattered.
And we should not forget this: while the abuse of children within the Church was being hidden away, violence against women too was also being ignored or covered-up. Imagine if the hundreds of women raped in the 1960s and '70s came forward and told their stories. Imagine if we opened up the court records from that era and gave an honest appraisal of why so many "wife killers" walked from the Supreme Court of Victoria with manslaughter verdicts....
Read the rest here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)