With more than 300,000 words and over 800 amendments, Alabama’s Constitution is 40 times longer than the US Constitution, and holds the record for being the longest active constitution in the world. Originally written in 1901 by men seeking to establish the law of white supremacy in the state, the constitution still requires racially segregated schools and outlaws interracial marriage, laws that have been nullified by the United States Supreme Court.
Diana Adams believes the family law system is at least 20 years behind cultural changes. She helps non-traditional families—such as three people in love—find a simulacrum of the protection offered by legal marriage. But her real goal is to change our idea of what “marriage” can be.
Thousands of kids are arrested in school every year. About a third of U.S. schools have a regular police presence on campus; some school districts even have their own police forces. As the number of law enforcement officers on campus has gone up, so, too, have the number of arrests, often for low-level misdemeanors. Life of the Law’s Alisa Roth investigates one student’s case, and examines the uncertain legal terrain police, teachers, administrators and students face in American high schools.
For eighteen years, California’s three strikes law leveled harsh penalties against repeat felons: anyone with two felony convictions received 25 years to life for committing a third felony. In 2012, Californians voted to change the three strikes law, allowing some of the prisoners sentenced under it to petition for release for time served. Curtis Penn is one of those prisoners. Life of the Law executive producer Nancy Mullane chronicles the day Curtis was released from prison.
This hour-long special hosted by Al Letson features three of Life of the Law’s best stories of 2013. Letson leads listeners through the virtual world of games and the law, into a conflict over social mores and the law, and through the unspoken rules and real laws of city life, block by block.
United States incarcerates six times as many women as it did thirty years ago. Many of these women are already mothers, and four percent of incarcerated women enter prison pregnant. What happens to the babies born in the correctional system? What happens to the children left behind, as their mothers serve out their sentences?
It’s not unusual at all to leave prison anywhere across the country owing fees, fines, or other costs to the local court. The city of Philadelphia alone is trying to collect some $1.5 billion in judicial debt owed back to days of the Nixon Administration. But should courts try to collect from a population, ex-inmates, who have 70 percent unemployment rate?
It’s hard to imagine Supreme Court Justices working outside of Washington, D.C. But for the first half of our country’s history, they spent much of their time traveling as circuit court judges. And it may have made them better Supreme Court justices.
In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute people with mental disabilities. But the Court left it up to individual states to define mentally disabled. After the Texas legislature failed to agree on a definition, a decision from the Court of Criminal Appeals became the de facto definition, a definition based in part on John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men.
Over the past 20 years, there’s been a revolution in the science of arson investigations. Many of the clues that had been used for decades to determine that a fire was not accidental, especially the analysis of burn patterns on walls and floors, have been proven to be false. Texas is one state that is re-examining arson convictions that may have been based on junk science.
