A resident and two gun owners advocacy groups filed suit on Thursday against the village of Deerfield, Il., saying the municipality does not have the authority to ban assault weapons under a 2013 state law, the Chicago Tribune reports. The suit was filed three days...
“In many states, if the sheriff does something wrong, it’s not clear who’s supposed to do something about it, which means no one is going to do anything about it,” Mirya Holman, a political scientist at Tulane University who studies sheriffs, tells Governing . “A...
It’s April, which means it’s time to start speculating about which justices might announce their retirements at the end of the term. Many assume that decision is heavily influenced by a justice’s desire to be replaced by a like-minded jurist. But a recent study by...
Massachusetts’ top court issued another sweeping dismissal order stemming from misconduct by a former chemist at the Amherst, Ma., drug lab and two former state prosecutors, the Boston Globe reports. The order vacates an estimated 11,000 convictions in 7,700 criminal cases, most of them from...
The fatal police shooting of a mentally ill Brooklyn man raises questions about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s neighborhood policing program, reports the New York Times. Saheed Vassell was known as an idiosyncratic local figure. Plainclothes anti-crime officers who answered a smartphone alert...
Dallas County books 67,000 people into jail each year. In the hulking jail complex, the seventh largest in the U.S., magistrates hold around-the-clock hearings to determine bail. On any given day, about 70 percent of the jail’s 5,000 inmates are there because they can’t afford...