ThinkProgress A progressive who vowed to end mass incarceration is poised to be Philadelphia’s next top prosecutor A criminal defense attorney who campaigned on a progressive platform — promising not to lock up nonviolent offenders and to end both cash bail and mass incarceration —is the favored contender to become Philadelphia’s next top prosecutor. “The era of tough-on-crime rhetoric is coming to a close as voters realize that overzealous prosecutors have abused their power […]
Vox Why it’s so hard to prosecute a hate crime If a state does have a hate crime law or federal law enforcement gets involved in a case, the important thing here is that someone must commit an actual crime to be charged with a hate crime. That crime can then be elevated to a hate crime if there’s enough evidence to suggest that the […]
WGBH NSF chief defends basic research in face of proposed budget cuts “We just cannot afford to give up,” said NSF Director France Cordova, delivering the keynote address at the opening of a new $225 million science and engineering complex at Northeastern University. Without mentioning Trump by name, Cordova said deep cuts would be devastating to scientific research and the economy. “The discoveries that have made such […]
ModernHealthcare Cherry-picking patients may be business as usual for not-for-profits like Mayo “Tax-exempt hospitals, tax-exempt organizations, are perceived by the public to have this higher social standard. They’re expected to behave in ways that are not profit-driven,” said Gary Young, director of the Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Research at Northeastern University in Boston, who was the lead author of the 2013 NEJM study. Those expectations […]
Mother Jones Hate Crimes Are Rising But Don’t Expect Them to be Prosecuted Jack Levin explained why it’s important to prosecute hate crimes with the full force of the law in an interview with Mother Jones: “The perpetrator is sending a message when he commits the hate crime,” Levin said, noting that hate crimes send ripples throughout the targeted community. “We need to send the message back that […]
Attacks against LGBT community rarely prosecuted as hate crimes Prosecutors say proving a hate crime can be difficult and can weaken their overall argument to a jury. But some criminologists say prosecutors have a duty to pursue hate crimes convictions nevertheless, because bias attacks terrorize entire communities, not just individuals. “It is important to charge, even if you’re not going to get a few more […]
The Christian Science Monitor Winning not the only thing? A college football ethics shift True, the changes might be mostly the result of colleges doing damage control in a media era that has made coverups harder. But those very factors could fuel the trend further. “This wasn’t a conversation people were having 10, 15 years ago,” says Dan Lebowitz, executive director of the Center for the Study of Sport […]
The Brockton Enterprise Stock options for executives carry unintended consequences CEO compensation took off in the 1990s because activist shareholders, board members and academics, all mating like alley cats, pushed to better align management’s interests with those of shareholders. So corporations began to award stock options to senior managers. Executive stock options have been a controversial topic for some time because of the fortunes executives […]
A judge just publicly called out prosecutors who he thinks may have cheated Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University who has written in depth about prosecutorial misconduct, told HuffPost that Kozinski’s naming of names is a “significant and bold act.” Medwed said this kind of “shaming by naming” is often criticized as a breach of professional courtesy. The argument, he said, is that prosecutors are public servants […]
WGBH The Annie Dookhan mess: The lingering responsibility of prosecutors to clean it up The Boston Globe recently published a letter from Michael O’Keefe, the district attorney for the Cape and Islands, criticizing Yvonne Abraham’s column about the current status of the 2012 drug lab scandal wrought by the actions of rogue chemist Annie Dookhan. O’Keefe properly identified “the lack of oversight of the state Department of Public Health […]
Her brain tormented her, and doctors could not understand why “I hate myself, and my brain,” Pam Tusiani wrote in her journal while under 24-hour watch on the fourth-floor psychiatric ward of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital. “Nothing is worse than this disease.” When Tusiani wrote those words in 1998, doctors had little understanding of the disorder that was troubling her, and all these years later […]
WCVB TV Prosecutors must prove text messages led to suicide Some legal experts say it may have been a reach for prosecutors to charge Carter with manslaughter. Massachusetts does not have a law against assisted suicide. “Causation is going to be a vital part of this case,” said Daniel Medwed, a Northeastern University law professor. “Can the prosecution prove that she caused him to kill […]