In my print column this week, which is available to TIME subscribers here, I write about the Trayvon Martin case and the debate we should be having–about guns, not race. We may never know if race was George Zimmerman’s motivation when he killed Martin, but we can be almost positive that Martin would be alive [...]
Crime
It’s easy to blame George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old Hispanic American who shot the unarmed boy Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26 in a gated community in Sanford, Fla. Zimmerman may end up imprisoned for decades, but Florida law should also go on trial.
When you think about innocent people suffering at the hands of power-abusing authorities, usually it’s foreign thugs jailing dissidents, or maybe cops gone bad in urban America. On Thursday, a special counsel appointed four years ago by a federal judge released a 514-page report on the abuse of power by prosecutors in the case against [...]
The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, announced some big mortgage fraud charges in New York on Wednesday, accusing three former high-level employees of Credit Suisse with jacking up the book value of bundled housing loans they were selling. In one quarter alone, Bharara charges, they overstated the value by $540 million, boosting a top [...]
Bloomberg has a good, old-fashioned investigative piece on the private business empire of David and Charles Koch, the billionaire conservative political activists who inherited their father’s small oil company and now produce everything from Dixie cups and Stainmaster Carpet to petrochemical equipment. “Koch Industries tells all of its employees around the world that its top [...]
David Kris, the former head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division and an expert in national security law, has published in a scholarly journal a lengthy defense of the use of criminal prosecution as one tool in the larger counterterrorism toolbox. Kris is universally respected on both sides of the aisle: he worked on [...]
TIME’s Dawn Reiss checks in from Chicago: On Monday, June 27, the jury returned from 10 days of deliberation and everyone gathered to hear its decision. Blagojevich blew an air kiss to his weeping wife and then clasped his hands as courtroom deputy Donald Walker began reading the verdict. The first finding of guilt led [...]
Battleland’s Adam Zagorin with the scoop: TIME has learned that a prosecutor tasked with probing the CIA – John Durham, a respected Republican-appointed US attorney from Connecticut – recently began calling witnesses before a secret federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, looking into, among other things, the lurid November 4, 2003 “homicide,” documented by the [...]
Two U.S. Presidents, the State Department and the Justice Department, an assortment of diplomats, military brass, and former judges all want the State of Texas to delay the scheduled July 7 execution of Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. But that may not be enough.
I was never a big John Edwards fan. He seemed an “ice skater”–as Mario Cuomo used to say. He skimmed the surface, without ever really exploring or grasping the issues. It seemed that he became a politician because he thought he looked like a politician. But I think his indictment today is a big waste of [...]
