Although many parents worry about how they will help their teens avoid the pitfalls and perils of underage drinking, some parents view it as better to embrace it. “If I can oversee it, I can control it and protect them,” the thinking goes. This is erroneous on several fronts. There…
Over the last several decades, the American criminal justice system has relied increasingly on forensic testing to definitively identify suspects, nail down timelines and prove or disprove theories about what happened and who was involved. However, there is an increasing amount of data showing that some of these methods are…
Florida’s death penalty has been the source of intense scrutiny over the last year. Last year, the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling in Hurst v. State struck down the prior capital sentencing statute allowing judges to impose the death penalty if a majority of jurors recommended death or to override a jury’s recommendation for…
A South Florida computer expert starting out his decade-long sentence for a conviction of espionage has just been found guilty again, this time of underage sex trafficking. The Miami-Herald reports defendant was accused and ultimately convicted of exploiting girls who were underage – between 13 and 16 – for sex while…
Spring break in Florida is something of a rite of passage for many college students across the country. They flock here for a brief, sunny respite from the mid-semester doldrums and flood the state’s beaches and bars. Many communities thrive off this yearly influx of younger visitors. However, state and…
Florida Senate committee members unanimously voted on a measure that would eliminate mandatory minimum sentences in 118 crimes where such requirements currently exist. Members of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee say mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, a holdover from all those “tough-on-crime” initiatives, passed SB 290, which gives judges more discretion…
Concerns about due process violation have been raised with the increasing use of a form of technology that conducts “probabilistic genotyping” as opposed to the regular DNA testing that has long been used as evidence in criminal cases. One example of this offered by ProPublica, a non-profit, Pulitzer prize-winning online…
The high-profile murder-for-hire plot case of Dalia Dippolito is slated for a second jury trial before the end of the year, now that the Florida Supreme Court has refused to hear a request from defendant to toss out the charges. In the matter of Dippolito v. Florida, justices gave no…
Prosecutors in California who withhold exculpatory evidence or tamper with evidence in a criminal case will now face felony charges themselves. The recent law, signed by that state’s Governor Jerry Brown, allows a penalty of up to three years’ prison time for prosecutors who withhold evidence that defendants could use to…
Three years ago, Florida legislators passed a controversial bill that affected almost every kind of court case in the system – including criminal cases. The change involved the standard to which expert witnesses are held in court. Their expert qualifications, their methodology, their testimony – all of this came under…