Mary Moriarty, a former public defender, became Minneapolis’s top prosecutor last year after persuading voters shaken by the murder of George Floyd that she could improve public safety by reining in police misconduct and making the criminal justice system less punitive. Turbulence quickly followed. The attorney general of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, a fellow Democrat who…
O.J. Simpson, who died on Wednesday at 76, lived a life that made him one of the most famous people in America, as well as, at various times, the most celebrated and most reviled. A Heisman Trophy winner when he played football at the University of Southern California, he reached superstar status as a running…
In the end, it was a discarded piece of chewing gum, casually spit on the ground in 2021, that was the key to solving the cold-case murder of a college student that had confounded the authorities in Oregon for more than four decades. Robert Arthur Plympton had been under police surveillance since the authorities determined…
An Alaska woman who arranged to have her best friend killed in 2019 after a man she met online promised her $9 million to do so was sentenced on Monday to 99 years in prison, state prosecutors said. Judge Andrew Peterson of Anchorage Superior Court sentenced the woman, Denali Brehmer, 23, of Anchorage, who pleaded…
The city of Boston issued a formal apology on Wednesday to two Black men who had been falsely linked to the death of Carol Stuart, a 30-year-old pregnant woman who was shot in 1989, in one of the most famous cases in the city’s history that spotlighted its racial disparities. Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett…
A 48-year-old Vermont man was charged on Monday with three counts of attempted second-degree murder in the weekend shooting of three young men of Palestinian descent on a Burlington street, a violent episode that stunned the small city. As investigators sought to determine whether the shooting could be classified as a hate crime, local officials…
A local prosecutor in California has secured what he says is the state’s first murder conviction in connection with a fatal fentanyl overdose, marking a legal milestone in the efforts to curb sales of the increasingly deadly drug. The prosecutor, District Attorney Morgan Gire of Placer County, said that a 21-year-old man pleaded guilty last…
All told, the public defender’s office had taken on six fentanyl murder cases in the last several months that were pending, and each one followed the same pattern: An addict sold, distributed or shared drugs that directly resulted in someone’s death, which technically met the definition for first-degree murder and the possibility of a lifetime…
For 34 years, Leo Schofield Jr. has been imprisoned in Florida for the murder of his wife, Michelle Schofield. He has maintained his innocence and has been denied parole three times, even after another man convicted of murder in a separate case admitted to the killing. Supporters and criminal justice advocates who have rallied around…
A Maryland appeals court on Tuesday reinstated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, the subject of the “Serial” podcast who was freed last year after he had spent 23 years fighting charges that he had killed his former high school girlfriend. The Appellate Court of Maryland ruled that a trial court had violated the right…