It’s official, and it’s one more amazing step into the future at Life of the Law: we have a new Executive Director. Six years after Nancy Mullane, Tom Hilbink and Shannon Heffernan launched the first…
Look around. Change is happening. People you know and people you pass on the street are in transition. They are transforming their lives. Unless you stop to hear their story, you may miss it. Each…
Veronica Martinez is a mother in prison. While she was in the county jail awaiting trial she gave birth to her daughter Amaya Martinez. While the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports 4.9% of women are…
Mother’s Day is the one day of the year we set aside to honor mothers. Some do it with flowers and cards. For women who are in prison and their children who are being raised by grandmothers, aunts or guardians on the outside, the day can be especially difficult.
Is ‘looking Mexican’ a legal reason for the Border Patrol to stop a car? Federal law says agents have to have ‘reasonable suspicion’ that something illegal is happening. But what that means depends where you are, and whom you ask.
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.
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.
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 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.