The end of the line for Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain penitentiary came in 2009, when the state closed the century-old facility. The local landmark sat unused until Pete Waddington came upon it and hatched a plan to turn the 280-acre site into a distillery, with a...
A Virginia juvenile and domestic relations judge has been removed from the bench by the Virginia Supreme Court after he admitted contacting two key witnesses in a pending federal corruption case against his wife, the Washington Post reports. Kurt Pomrenke, 64, was elected to the...
The St. Anthony, Mn., City Council, facing “threatened litigation,” has voted to pay Diamond Reynolds and her young daughter a $675,000 settlement in connection with the police shooting of Philando Castile, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Reynolds will receive another $125,000 from the League of...
New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex maintains a “culture of violence” among both inmates and staff, despite efforts to improve conditions at the storied correctional facility, says a court-mandated study reported by NPR. The report said staff on the island “relish confrontation” with inmates,...
The following is a series of questions on the occasion of the publication of Ronald Collins and David Skover’s “The Judge: 26 Machiavellian Lessons” (Oxford University Press, 2017). Drawing from over 200 years of Supreme Court history, Collins and Skover offer 26 lessons – e.g.,...
The Virginia parole board is changing how it interprets the state’s three-strikes law in a way that could free hundreds of inmates – many of them nonviolent – who are serving prison terms significantly longer than the typical first-degree murderer, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reports. The...