DALLAS (AP) - The Dallas prosecutor who built a reputation for freeing wrongfully convicted inmates says he has an idea to advance criminal justice reform in Texas: allowing defendants to appeal convictions and sentences on the basis of race.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
This sentence spoken by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been quoted countless times as expressing one of America's bedrock values, its language almost sounding like a constitutional amendment on equality.
Yet today, 50 years after King shared this vision during his most famous speech, there is considerable disagreement over what it means.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - A father and son have been sentenced to prison following convictions in a sweeping federal racketeering case in which prosecutors accused them as racist gang members who conspired to attack black people to force them out of a Southern California bedroom community.
African-American children are nine times more likely and Hispanic children three times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison. Thanks go to the State of Idaho for assembling a national fact sheet, which gives us a snapshot of the plight of these children who are often the forgotten victims of crime. The average age of children with an incarcerated parent is eight years old; 22 percent of the children are under the age of five. And there’s more bad news.
