I chose my friends poorly, and your friends have a tendency to rub off on you. And so I started making poor decisions. The next night I made a plan of how to do it, and I did it. And I didn't get caught doing it, [but] I got caught afterwards.
The Department of Justice offered a startling confession to a court on Tuesday, acknowledging that it repeatedly made a 'material mistaken statement of fact' while defending Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of noncitizens at immigration court.
Victims' Commissioner Claire Waxman expressed her delight at the government's decision, stating that the change is long overdue and acknowledges the years of campaigning led by bereaved families like Tracey Hanson, who sought justice following the tragic death of her son Josh.
Jason Thompson, a guard at HMP Isis, was suspended as the Metropolitan Police investigated his involvement in smuggling drugs and contraband into the prison. He was sentenced to four years and six months for conspiracy and misconduct.
Under the reform, courts must stop handing out such short prison terms other than in a number of specific or exceptional circumstances. MPs passed the measure as part of the government's plan to end the population crisis in prisons.
The case against Alexander Villa has long been contested, with troubling questions about how his conviction was secured, including confessions that were later recanted and evidence that appears shaky or missing.
"What's most problematic is that the extraordinary has become ordinary. It's just a matter of course now that when you issue an opinion that some people don't like, you're going to get threats, you're going to get death threats, and that is obviously problematic on many levels."
Andrew Paul Johnson, 45, is among several January 6 defendants who have been charged with new crimes since Trump's sweeping act of clemency for Capitol rioters. On his first day back in the White House last year, Trump pardoned, commuted prison sentences for or ordered the dismissal of cases for all 1,500-plus people charged in the attack.
As prison sentences have become longer, and as more prisoners are given whole-life tariffs or given minimum sentences of 20, 30 or 40 years, it is harder to persuade them to hold back on their violent instincts. They have nothing to lose. If you are serving a long sentence, you can feel as if you don't have a life ahead of you—your family may well have disowned you, your relationships may have broken down.
He said not to tell anybody," one of Johnson's victims testified. Both children later testified that they were too afraid to tell any adults about what they had endured, according to trial records obtained by NPR. "We were scared," Johnson's other victim testified. "Like, we didn't realize that this stuff was not okay because we were 12 years old."
Donald Marler, 31, was transferred to North Kern State Prison on Jan. 7, two months after pleading no contest to voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of 38-year-old Nicholas Lord. In exchange for his plea, prosecutors threw out a murder charge, court records show. At Marler's preliminary hearing last April, a woman who was one of Lord's roommates testified that the two men started arguing about a stolen car inside their shared residence on June 7, 2022.
On Friday, two far-right judges greenlit the Trump administration's radical reinterpretation of federal law that would sweep millions more immigrants into mandatory detention, potentially expanding the mass deportation machinery in new and horrifying ways. Their 2-1 decision for the 5 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would transform the entire United States into a permanent border zone where unauthorized immigrants can be jailed indefinitely without bond, even years after they arrived.
Judge Indira Talwani of the Boston District Court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the termination of the legal status of more than 8,400 immigrants living in the country under family reunification parole, a measure announced by the Department of Homeland Security in late 2025. The decision was issued on Saturday night and prevents the government from ending the humanitarian parole granted to relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents from Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
During an investigation into fraudulent unemployment assistance, federal law enforcement asked Tran about a false letter he gave to unemployment agency officials in an attempt to have his benefits reinstated after they were temporarily suspended, said prosecutors.
Federal prosecutors had sought the death penalty on a murder charge, but U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett threw the murder count out in January along with a related firearms charge. At issue was whether the underlying charges, two federal stalking counts, qualified as "crimes of violence." Judge Garnett concluded they did not.
A total of 10 gunshots rang out from the ICE officers, leaving Pretti lying supine and motionless in the middle of the street. He was declared dead at the scene. Video of the incident appeared to contradict the Department of Homeland Security narrative that Pretti approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, and that the officers were forced to shoot in self-defense.
The open-ended sentences, which were scrapped in 2012 and have been described as psychological torture by the UN, have left thousands trapped in jail for up to 22 times longer than their original tariff. This includes many who were children at the time of their offence and handed a type of IPP sentence for under-18s called a Detention for Public Protection (DPP) jail term.
On Friday, Gonzalez was sentenced to 15 years to life in state prison for giving Dreith counterfeit fentanyl pills called "blue M-30s." She also got an extra four years and four months for other felony convictions related to selling drugs. "This sentencing reflects the seriousness of the defendant's actions and the devastating and deadly consequences of distributing fentanyl," Fresno County Dist. Atty. Lisa Smittcamp said in a statement.
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