Free Republic

Inmate rights lawyers filed a legal motion Monday to cap the population in the California prison system. The motion was filed in a pending class-action lawsuit in Sacramento, already settled on behalf of the plaintiffs, to improve mental health care in the prison system. A second motion was expected to be filed later in the day in San Francisco in the class-action case that regulates overall health care in the system. A press release filed by the attorneys cited two 2004 reports as saying that the prison population should be reduced to anywhere from 111,300 to 138,000. The prison population...

A man sentenced to death for the slayings of a young Texas couple camped in the Idaho wilderness must be released or retried, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. Mark Henry Lankford has been on Idaho's death row for more than two decades for the 1983 bludgeoning slayings of Marine Capt. Robert Bravence and his wife, Cheryl. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Lankford received ineffective assistance from his attorney

The Supreme Court on Wednesday debated the case of an accused murderer whose conviction was thrown out because the victim's family wore buttons bearing a picture of their loved one to the trial. The justices waded into issues of defendants' rights, struggling with the question of whether the buttons visible to the jury in the case of Matthew Musladin denied him a fair trial or were a harmless expression of grief. The state of California is seeking to reinstate Musladin's conviction. In another case, the justices considered when a judge's discretion to impose additional time behind bars violates a convict's...