‘The State of Texas vs. Melissa’ creates empathy for Lucio, but the film lacks a clear and balanced exposition of the deeply troubling facts of the case.
Criminal Justice
In a blistering memoir, attorney Brittany K. Barnett explores the traumatic aftermath of the war on drugs.
Scott Henson and Chas Moore have been working for years to stop police brutality. They say that sweeping, systemic change is needed.
Despite opposition from the local police union, the city passed Texas's most expansive ‘cite-and-release’ policy.
"When you're in a rural community, it's difficult to receive services and be very discreet about it. … Those complexities are amplified at this time."
In one of the worst legislative sessions for criminal justice reform in years, bipartisan legislation got caught between an ugly fight between the police lobby and prominent Democrats.
Big-city prosecutors are now driving the conversation around mass incarceration, and some lawmakers and law enforcement officials just can’t abide that.
There’s been a lot of news around the subject of the notorious ”affluenza” defense this week.
Brian T. Encinia, the police officer who arrested Sandra Bland, has been charged with perjury—and that’s likely to be the extent of the criminal justice system’s involvement in the case.
A panel determined that District Judge Jeanine Howard undermined public confidence after a controversial statement.
Transparency and action after an officer-involved shooting could indicate a fundamental shift.
It’s time to consider what role social media should have in policing.
Mimi Swartz cross-examines the Court of Criminal Appeals’ unprecedented sanctions against a death penalty lawyer.
The way Texas punishes truancy is downright Kafka-esque—and it’s finally getting a lot of attention.
Nine years after Hannah Overton’s nightmarish journey through the criminal justice system began, it ended just as abruptly.
Post-Ferguson, post–Eric Garner, post–Tamir Rice, relations between police and the people they’re tasked to protect and serve are especially strained—even as far from where those events happened as Texas.
Max Soffar is dying on death row, where he sits for a crime I'm certain he didn't commit. Maybe this letter will convince you to let him spend his last days at home with his family.
A ruling on the extreme conditions at the Louisiana State Penitentiary may affect several lawsuits pending in Texas.
For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job required her to watch condemned criminals be put to death. After 278 executions, she won't ever be the same.
After the Houston Chronicle's shocking and revealing depiction of what can happen with a grand jury, the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice is pushing for change.
Excerpts from his book "Getting Life: An Innocent Man's 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace."
Yesterday, when we unveiled the cover of our July issue featuring Rick Perry, we also told you about “The Perry Report Card,” an upcoming magazine feature where, as the title suggests, we graded the tenure of the governor on eight areas of public policy. We invited you to weigh…
The State of Texas uses pentobarbital for lethal injections, a drug with a long and complicated history. But the question everyone wants answered remains: Is it a painless way to die?
For 28 years, parole officials tried to get him to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. He refused—and never wavered. This is why he is the bravest man I know.
The video proving that Brelyn Sorrells acted in self-defense the night he fatally stabbed another man had been sitting in the prosecution's office for fifteen months.
Change.org doesn't seem to change much, but it reveals that thousands of people have a problem with Judge Jeanine Howard.
No system is perfect, but a number of the imperfections in Texas' system are showing all at once.
The state managed to find a new supply of Pentobarbital, the drug it uses to perform lethal injections, but officials aren't saying where it came from.
Sex offender registries are popular in the abstract, but maybe ordinances isolating sex offenders shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all policy.
Anthony Graves was wrongfully convicted of capital murder in a trial where the prosecutor, Charles Sebesta, withheld evidence that could have helped prove Graves’s innocence. So why hasn’t Sebesta been held accountable for his egregious misconduct?
Held in custody for 42 hours, 37-year-old Sarah Tibbetts died after being arrested while in possession of someone else's credit card and trace amounts of marijuanta in baggies in her purse.
Jerry Duane Martin killed a correctional officer as he tried breaking out of prison, and tonight he will be executed. But the man who tried escaping with him, and who some believe is also culpable for the officer's death, hasn't been convicted of the six-year-old crime.
Four women spent more than thirteen years in prison because of bad science and scurrilous tales told by children who had been coached by an adult. They’re free now, but who else is sitting behind bars based on these types of false accusations?
What will an independent audit of Anderson’s old criminal cases turn up?
A small group of committed protesters show up to nearly every execution in Huntsville to exercise their civil rights in what has become a sort of ritual.
Graves used funds he received from the state for his wrongful conviction to set up a law school scholarship in the name of Nicole Cásarez, the Houston attorney and journalism professor who fought for eight years to secure his freedom.
In a committee hearing Tuesday, the exoneree and newlywed pushed for a bill that would change the statute of limitations for offenses involving prosecutorial misconduct.
In his biennial address on the state of the judiciary, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court remembers the Alamo.
Jonathan Green was put to death Wednesday for the 2000 murder of a 12-year-old girl, but his lawyers maintained until the end that their client was mentally ill and thus unsuitable for execution.
Marvin Wilson, an inmate with an IQ of 61 and the reasoning skills of a grade school student, was the latest to die in the Huntsville death chamber.
Yokamon Hearn was also the first person in Texas to be executed with the new single-ingredient lethal formula, pentobarbital.
A shortage of pancuronium bromide forced the state to abandon the three-drug cocktail it has used to execute prisoners since 1982. But another drug has surfaced that will do the job.
Gawker got wind that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Connally Unit recently was shut down due to "chronic staff staffing shortages and water outages."
Researchers from Texas A&M found that laws similar to Texas's castle doctrine actually lead to more homicides instead of deterring crime.
Former state district judge Charlie Baird shares the 18-page exoneration order that he never got to issue with The Huffington Post.
Beunka Adams, who was pronounced dead on Thursday night at 6:25 p.m., participated in a deadly convenience store robbery in 2002.
A clip from the PBS show's episode on Kerry Max Cook and his quest for exoneration.