NYPD Officer Allegedly Caught On Video Throwing Pregnant Woman To the Ground | Mother Jones

A little bit of power, unrestrained … is a violent and ugly thing. These days we have video in our defence. Every interaction with police should be on video. NYPD Officer Allegedly Caught On Video Throwing Pregnant Woman To the Ground | Mother Jones.

Christie Blatchford: Ban on naming of well-known child porn victim seems ludicrous, but it’s the right call | National Post

We have a saying that bad cases make bad law. “When judges stretch the law to accommodate the needs of individual cases they risk creating precedents that are not what anyone intended.” On the other hand, unyielding laws require unyielding decisions. This is why we advocate against zero tolerance laws without a relief valve for …

U.S. pushes for cross-border officers to be exempt from Canadian law: RCMP memo – The Globe and Mail

I don’t know if this is still under discussion but it’s bad thinking. The U.S. wants its border officers to operate in Canada and be exempt from Canadian criminal law. The U.S. sought similar agreements from Iraq and Afghanistan for it’s military soldiers. The problem with this idea is that it fails to distinguish between …

Somebody in this government needs to go back to law school

I’ve said a lot against the Harper Government “tough on crime” agenda. “The track record of the Harper government’s crime agenda reads like the ancient Greek myth of the hydra: For each unconstitutional law the courts cut down, two new laws — equally stupid — grow in its place.” It looks like I’m going to …

WHEN MEMORY CREATES AN INJUSTICE – Jonah Lehrer on Memory, Witnesses and Crime | Head Case – WSJ

This is an extremely important point! “More than 75,000 prosecutions every year are based entirely on the recollections of others. While perjury is a felony, the overwhelming majority of eyewitness errors aren’t conscious or intentional. Rather, they’re the inevitable side effects of the remembering process.” Most of us don’t know or believe that eyewitness accounts …

A New Direction

Previously we have been blogging about some of the basic elements of criminal law including offences and defences so that people charged with offences and looking for a criminal lawyer to represent them could become better informed about what they’ve got themselves into. There is, of course, a limited amount of information that can be …