You probably assumed that a unanimous jury was required for a criminal conviction, but the truth is that two states had allowed non-unanimous juries in criminal cases. Louisiana and Oregon were the hold-out states, and Louisiana changed its constitution to require...

Many common forensic evidence-gathering techniques are less reliable than you may have been led to believe by “CSI.” In fact, some of them appear to have little scientific basis. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report on the state of forensic...

People who have committed parole or probation violations make up a surprisingly large proportion of the prison population in the U.S. Some 280,000 parole or probation violators are incarcerated at any given time.In 13 states, they account for a third of all prisoners....

A year ago, a man stood outside of an Alabama church begging police to kill him. His wife said he had been suicidal and had held a gun to his head earlier so she had hidden the gun in the church. The police arrested the unarmed man and retrieved the gun.He hadn't been...

Whether police pull over a driver for a broken tail light or running through a stop sign, sometimes the encounter does not end with the original problem. In some cases, a seemingly minor traffic stop may instead end in the driver's arrest.For the situation to involve...

Our criminal justice system is meant to protect defendants' rights. Many of our constitutional amendments were specifically written to guarantee certain rights for criminal defendants, including the right to due process of law, to have competent counsel, to be free...

The Fourth Amendment guarantees freedom from "unreasonable" searches and seizures by government agents like police officers. That has generally meant that the police are required to obtain warrants before they arrest someone or search their property -- unless the...

"I want my truck back. I've always wanted it back."When an Indiana man was caught selling a small amount of heroin, he accepted that he would be charged with a crime. He accepted it when he was convicted and sentenced to a period of house arrest and then probation....

"When the government tracks the location of a cell phone," writes Chief Justice John Roberts, "it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone's user."The observation comes in Carpenter v. U.S., a case the U.S. Supreme Court...

The keto diet is all the rage these days. It was the most searched diet on Google in 2018.  It is a low carb way of eating, similar to the Atkins diet that was popular in the early 2000s. But what many eating keto may not realize, is that it can actually cause a...