A Minnesota Killer and Serial Rapist Will Serve Less Than Six Years for the Murder of Lorri Mesedahl
A Star Tribune article on Lorri Mesedahl’s murder in 1983.Newspapers.com A Minneapolis murderer and serial rapist, Darrell Rea, slipped through the fingers of local law enforcement for decades after killing 17-year-old Lorri Mesedahl in 1983—sexually abusing his stepdaughters and raping two more women in the years that followed. On Tuesday, in Hennepin County District Court,…
The Chilling Story of Three Women Haunted by the Same Rapist—And How the Law Failed Them
Mother Jones illustrationSomething about the sound of the knock at the front door made Mary-Scott Hunter think a neighbor was in trouble. She had just arrived home from her job at a corporate training company, and she was mulling over an earlier fight with her girlfriend, but the knock jolted her out of it: five…
The Subtle But Important Significance of Today’s Supreme Court Decision on Racial Bias
Curtis Flowers’ attorney Sheri Johnson leaves the Supreme Court after oral arguments in March. J. Scott Applewhite/AP The Supreme Court on Friday overturned the conviction of Curtis Flowers, a black man on death row in Mississippi, and found that the prosecutor who tried the case violated the Constitution by striking so many black jurors during…
Cory Booker Promises to Grant Clemency to a Record Number of Nonviolent Drug Offenders
Sen. Cory Booker at a presidential campaign stop in New Hampshire in AprilSteven Senne/AP New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, whose presidential campaign has focused largely on criminal justice reform, just made a big promise to incarcerated people: If elected, he pledged Thursday morning, he would immediately initiate clemency proceedings for roughly 17,000 people in prison…
The Los Angeles County DA Has Put 22 People on Death Row. Not One of Them Was White.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie LaceyAlex J. Berliner/AP In Los Angeles County, only people of color have been sentenced to death in the last seven years. In a new report titled “The California Death Penalty Is Discriminatory, Unfair, and Officially Suspended: So Why Does Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey Still Seek to Use…
How Did a Man Who Murdered Three Muslims Receive a Presumption of Racial Innocence?
Travis Long/The News & Observer/AP; Albin Lohr-Jones/Sipa USA/AP; Diedra Laird/TNS/Zuma In the old photos, the ones taken right after he was arrested for gunning down three Muslim students in their North Carolina home, Craig Stephen Hicks appears as a dumpy, chinless man with a mousy beard cut too high above the jawline. The style, if…