Several newsworthy items have cropped up lately, so I wanted to take a day to highlight some of them. First and foremost, the News and Observer has a troubling front-page story, here, about the SBI's investigation into allegedly fraudulent dismissals of DWI cases in Johnston County. Not the sort of publicity the court system needs. Also in the newspapers today, the New York Times has an editorial, here, about Virginia Senator Jim Webb's proposal to re-examine the criminal justice system, and in particular, to assess whether the system relies too much on incarceration. Senator Webb's proposal appears to be motivated by some of the same concerns raised by the Pew Center on the States in the report that I previously blogged about here. The fiscal crisis likely makes the Senator's proposal more palatable than it would be otherwise. Returning to a subject I've written about before, a federal judge in Philadelphia just issued a temporary restraining order, prohibiting a state prosecutor from filing child pornography charges against three female teenagers who sent pictures of themselves in their undergarments via cell phone. For the news story, see here; for my previous post on so-called sexting, see here. I'll be writing soon about a couple of United States Supreme Court decisions, but I wanted to take a moment to mention that the Court just ordered briefing, in connection with a pending case, about whether it should overrule Michigan v. Jackson, 475 U.S. 625 (1986), which held that once a defendant requests his "Sixth [...]
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