Tag: Justice

Chicago police have released dozens of hours of footage from the investigation into the attack actor Jussie Smollett reported he suffered. CNN's Ryan Young has the details. #CNN #News

A 26-year old former US Army soldier who served in Afghanistan has been charged with plotting terror attacks in the Los Angeles area, the Justice Department said. Mark Steven Domingo allegedly sought to detonate improvised explosive devices containing nails this…

According to a top Catholic cardinal in Munich, files that may have contained proof of abuse in the Catholic church may have been intentionally destroyed. #CNN #News

Washington (CNN)Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller's confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans. Under the special counsel regulations, Mueller must submit a "confidential" report to the attorney general at the conclusion of his work, but the rules don't require it to be shared with Congress, or by extension, the public. Barr would also need to inform Congress if the Justice Department prevented the special counsel team from pursuing any investigative steps. Trump said Wednesday that it's "totally up to Bill Barr" as to whether Mueller's report comes out while he is overseas in Vietnam next week. "That'll be totally up to the new attorney general. NBC News reported recently the probe would be done by mid-February. While the Mueller investigation may soon come to a close, there continue to be court cases that will be handled by other federal prosecutors. In addition, Mueller has referred certain matters that fell outside the scope of the Russia probe to other US Attorneys to pursue. And the grand jury that Mueller's prosecutors used to return indictments of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and several Russians hasn't apparently convened since January 24 the day it approved the criminal charges against Stone. But also visiting them more often than ever before are the prosecutors from the DC US Attorney's Office and others in the Justice Department who've worked on the Mueller cases.

Mayor London Breed picked the right time and the right governor to ask for clemency for her imprisoned brother. The San Francisco mayor said the attorney for brother Napoleon Brown suggested that “Jerry Brown would probably be more open” to the request because it was his last year in office. In his first stint as governor, Brown issued 400 pardons and just one commutation. This time around, he has pardoned 1,100 and commuted 152 sentences. So Breed would never have a better opportunity to make the case that her brother, who has served about half his 42-year sentence for a 2000 robbery and involuntary manslaughter, received an excessive sentence and deserves another chance at freedom. She has received legitimate criticism over the way she highlighted her title — “MAYOR LONDON BREED” in block letters at the top of her correspondence to the governor — as well as disclosures that she testified as an alibi witness, claiming she saw her brother sleeping on a couch on the night the robbery went down. We thought about it, we discussed it, we even weighed it: Should we do this because this could be problematic?” The decision was that attaching the prefix “Mayor” to her name did not really matter, in her view. The reason I got into politics and the first place, and doing the work that I’ve done even before I was an elected official, had everything to do with what happened to my family growing up in the city, and the challenges we experienced.” I can’t begrudge Breed for wanting to free her brother, and I respect her putting herself on the line to assure the state that she would help provide the support to allow him to succeed outside the prison walls. These are among the questions a governor must consider. The easy way out — see: Gray Davis — is to pretend the justice system always gets it right, and that every inmate who remains in prison, however unfairly, is one less potential Willie Horton to crop up at election time.

He called on all Floridians to learn about and from the case. Though these men now lie in graves, their stories linger in search of justice.” DeSantis’ announcement comes after Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis announced on Wednesday that he would support the pardons. DeSantis indicated he might not wait until the next meeting of the Executive Clemency Board, which is not scheduled until March. That board is made up of DeSantis and the other Florida Cabinet members, Patronis, Fried, and Moody. DeSantis said he would make it a priority for the first meeting of the Florida Cabinet in January. Yet in the 20 months since, the Executive Clemency Board led by Gov. On Wednesday, informed of Patronis’ decision to put the matter on the agenda for the next Executive Clemency Board, Greenlee’s daughter Carol Greenlee emotionally declared, “Thank you Jesus!” DeSantis urged all Floridians to become acquainted with the case and to learn from it. “I appreciate the Legislature’s unanimous resolve and CFO Jimmy Patronis’ recent request that the Clemency Board consider the case. I look forward to reviewing the report of the Office of Executive Clemency and making the cases of the Groveland Four a priority for the first meeting of the Florida Cabinet in January. “Seventy years is a long time to wait, but it is never too late to do the right thing.”

Rather than follow succession protocol and appoint Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as the Acting Attorney General, Trump bypassed Rosenstein to install a relative unknown, former Iowa U.S. Attorney Matthew Whitaker. Having spent 24 years at the Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor, I didn’t think Trump could reach any lower than Sessions, but it appears Whitaker was hiding in the false-bottom of the president’s barrel of applicants. Whitaker brought the FBI in and charged McCoy with using his elected office to extort money. McCoy recently said his two year fight against Whitaker’s charges ruined him financially and emotionally and he is convinced being a Democrat and an openly gay lawmaker is what motivated Whitaker’s decision to charge him. After Whitaker left the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he took a paid position on the advisory board of a Florida company that is now under FBI investigation and that the Federal Trade Commission says “bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.” According to court documents obtained by the Miami New Times, when people tried to get their money back, Whitaker used his position as a former federal prosecutor to scare them off. Last year, he authored an article slamming Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as “going too far.” Whitaker did this without ever reviewing the evidence in Mueller’s possession. With his appointment as Acting Attorney General, Mr. Whitaker now will be in charge of the very investigation he trashed. Federal prosecutors have the power to begin or end an investigation against someone. They have the power to charge someone with a crime. For attorneys at the Department of Justice, every day brings opportunities to do the wrong thing.

The family of the security guard who was shot by police in Chicago when they responded to a call about a shooting at a bar is speaking out about his death. The mother of his son along with their lawyer…

Matt McCoy, who has served in the Iowa Senate for more than 20 years, claims Whitaker targeted him years ago because he was a Democrat and openly gay. At the same time, Whitaker was the young, conservative, Republican U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa. McCoy said it was a $2,000 business dispute with a private consulting client who wouldn't pay a bill. "I believe it was a political prosecution, there’s no doubt in my mind, I’m 100 percent certain that it was,” McCoy said. Whitaker was criticized heavily in Iowa's press, with reporters questioning why McCoy was prosecuted and legendary Des Moines Register editor Gil Cranberg asking if Whitaker’s case was "misplaced zeal or partisan politicking?" He tried and failed to become an Iowa Supreme Court justice, he failed in a run for Senate and he seemed to have limited success in private practice. FACT went after dozens of Democrats, Democratic organizations and especially Hillary Clinton. They filed ethics complaints, federal election commission complaints, anything they could to legally hamstring Democrats. "I think when you're looking at an organization that is focused almost exclusively on investigating individuals of one party and one political persuasion, and that the head of that organization is now going to be installed as the attorney general of the entire United States, that sets off a number of alarm bells,” said Sarah Turberville, director of The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight. The Justice Department defended Whitaker’s decision to prosecute McCoy in a statement late Friday.

Kimberly Bergendahl’s interest in justice and the law started when she was just 7 years old. Her father’s struggle with alcohol was rocky at times and the Tiverton, Rhode Island, police came to her home more than once. After her parents divorced, Bergendahl, still in her preteens, discovered her voice, arguing frequently with a crusty landlord when she believed he was failing to uphold his side of the bargain in keeping her mother’s subsidized four-room apartment properly maintained. It is exactly that experience that assistant professor Bergendahl believes makes her a better instructor when it comes to teaching “The Politics of Crime and Justice” (POL 3827). “I’ve seen the law from the good end and I’ve seen it from the bad end,” says Bergendahl. “I want my students to see me as a person who has had real world experiences and not just someone who comes in professing to know everything or who is looking to present one particular point of view. My students know that I don’t use the class as a soapbox to promote a specific agenda.”