Karen Houppert is a Baltimore-based freelance journalist. Her book on indigent defense will be published by the New Press in March 2013 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright.
Along with hundreds of others, Geremy Faulkner was swept up in one of the haphazard mass arrests that are overwhelming the courts.
An overwhelmed system struggles to meet President Obama’s order to fast-track deportation hearings on 62,000 lone child migrants.
Seven years after Katrina, poor people accused of crimes are being denied their right to counsel and left to languish behind bars.
Five years after alerting authorities that she was gang-raped in Iraq, KBR/Halliburton employee Jamie Leigh Jones will finally get her day in court
Domestic violence cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute.
But every once in a while, prosecutors get handed the tools for a conviction on a silver platter: An impartial eyewitness who just happens to be a police officer.
Such was the case in a domestic violence trial that made the local papers here in Maryland last week. A cop pulling into an Exxon station saw a man hit his girlfriend in the face three times, called in back-up and had the man arrested.
I live in Baltimore, Maryland.
At the moment, that is slightly more dangerous than being an American soldier in Afghanistan.
In Afganhistan, just over eighty US soldiers have been killed so far this year. In Baltimore, we’re up to 215 murders in 2007.