Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts tipped his hand that he doesn’t like much of the Voting Rights Act long before he pointedly asked a lawyer for the Justice Department who was defending the 1965 Voting Rights Act “Are Southerners more likely to discriminate than Northerners?” The part he wants to dump is the Section 5 provision that requires that certain states, nearly all in the South, get prior authorization from the Justice Department or federal courts before making changes in redistricting, district annexation, registration requirements, holding at large electio

On September 4, 21 year old Joshua Pomier will have served nearly four years in a detention center near San Bernardino, California. Pomier is charged with multiple counts of car theft and robbery. There are two deeply troubling problems with the amount of time he has spent behind bars. One, he has not been convicted of any of the crimes he’s charged with. He had barely turned 18 years old when he and another juvenile were arrested for the crimes in September 2004.

A beleaguered LAPD Chief William Bratton after weeks of being pounded and badgered by assorted right-wing talk radio show yakkers, and anti-immigrant rights groups, immigrant rights groups, and the L.A. City Council says that he’ll soon tell what LAPD officers can and can’t do in regards to the much attacked, much defended and much misunderstood Special Order 40. The controversy and the muddle has spawned much mythmaking about what the Order actually says and what it allows officers to do.

The headline was surreal. In fact, it was something that could have come straight out of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The headline screamed that the Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C. based criminal justice reform group, found in its annual report on imprisonment that more Whites are going to jail for drugs, and that Blacks are being jailed at a slower rate for drug offenses than in the past quarter century.