Sherry Japhet breaks the law each time she applies makeup to an Idaho client. That’s why Japhet found true irony in being asked to provide makeup services to Idaho's First Lady, whose husband recently vetoed a bill that would have made it legal for Japhet to do his wife's makeup.
Virtually every rent control story focuses on local government policies. Less well known, however, is that a majority of states actually ban or restrict local governments’ power to impose rent control. And currently, in at least four states, those restrictions are under attack. Municipalities want power they are currently denied so they can impose rent control, supposedly to give local citizens “what they want.” But that raises the question of whether rent control policy should be vested at the state level or the local level.
A Michigan sheriff is defending a county jail’s decision to withhold treatment from a woman who gave birth in a jail after staff members refused to believe she was going into labor.
A lawmaker is now urging state investigators to look at the case, the same jail previously probed by federal investigators for the deaths of two inmates refused hospitalization in the past four years.
Pennsylvania politicians tried their best to pass a law making it illegal to release the names of cops who shoot citizens that result in death of “seriously bodily harm” for at least 30 days from the incident or until an investigation is completed.
The bill sailed through both the house and the senate with legislators on both sides of the political spectrum saying it was important to hide the identities of cops who kill for their own safety – even though there has not been any documented cases of killer cops being retaliated against for their actions.
Eyewitness testimony from a 7-year-old girl who saw her mother stabbed to death was the “linchpin” that put Rodney Lincoln behind bars for life for the April 1982 murder of a St. Louis woman.
The deciding factor for the outcome is now doubting her own story, and she wants her mother’s supposed killer to go free.
On Tuesday the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District denied Rodney Lincoln a writ of habeas corpus that would have forced a retrial of his 1983 conviction.
North Carolina’s Governor Pat McCrory just signed into law an act making police body camera video an official state secret. Naturally, following the events of last week, civil rights and transparency advocates are in an uproar.
Behind closed doors in secret meetings, an attorney for a Florida school board appears to have met with a local state attorney in the hopes to pursue felony criminal charges against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray.
According to emails recently obtained through a public records request, it was revealed that St. Johns County School Board Frank Upchurch III planned a meeting with State Attorney R.J. Larizza in the hopes of keeping Gray from exercising his Constitutional rights to record public officials as well as to obtain public records.
A New Jersey Crime Lab technician was suspended with pay, after he was found writing down results of suspected marijuana, before the tests were even completed, throwing 7,827 criminal cases into doubt, damaging confidence in the workings of that state’s criminal justice system.
Criminal charges have yet to be filed against Kamalkant Shah, but falsifying even a single test would be grounds for indictment.
In response to the overhyped and mythical War on Cops, New York Senators approved a new law that would make it a felony against those “inciting violence against a police officer.”
However, the bill is extremely vague and does not provide descriptions as to exactly what would be an example of inciting violence against police.
As addressed in my recent article, the Florida League of Cities is pushing for a dramatic and unwarranted change to Florida’s Public Records Act for which no empirical justification is offered.
