I’ve been enjoying WRAL’s website lately. The News and Observer is putting more content behind a paywall, and WRAL has had a series of interesting criminal justice stories. The most recent is this one, an inside look at North Carolina’s Crime Victims Compensation Fund. Prosecutors, VWLAs, and law enforcement officers may be especially interested in the story’s perspective on how well they are doing at connecting eligible victims with compensation. In other news: Obama commutes sentence lengthened by typo. The New York Times has the bizarre story here, but in a nutshell, a federal drug defendant was sentenced to an extra three years in prison because of a scrivener’s error in the calculation of his sentencing guidelines. No one noticed the problem until the defendant himself did several years later, and at that point, he was time-barred from fixing it. President Obama stepped in and cut the sentence back to what it should have been all along. Over at Sentencing Law & Policy, Doug Berman says he is “disgusted” by the “inhumane” conduct of the federal prosecutors who invoked the time limits on federal habeas petitions to defeat the defendant’s claim. I don’t know enough to agree, but it certainly sounds bad. The panopticon is here. And it’s in Compton. (The pan-Compti-con?) Gizmodo reports here on an initiative by Compton, California police to use aerial surveillance cameras to record absolutely all out-of-doors activity in a 25 square mile area, allowing them to create a lasting digital record of criminal activity. It’s [...]
Faculty Coordinators
