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In 2012, The Maryland Supreme Court ruled that anyone who was tried by a jury before 1980 deserved a new trial due to the improper instructions judges gave to juries. According to the Unger decision, judges failed to properly explain to juries that prosecutors have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and that defendants are innocent until proven guilty.

A former Texas prosecutor and judge surrendered his law license earlier this month and agreed to serve nine days in jail for withholding evidence in the murder trial of an innocently convicted man who spent 25 years in prison.

On Thursday, November 14, the Arizona Supreme Court passed a new amendment, Rule 42, ER 3.8, to the Arizona Rules of Professional Conduct that requires prosecutors in the state to turn over any exculpatory evidence to a defense team during or after a criminal trial.

A law today that represents one of the most serious assaults on private property rights is that of civil asset forfeiture. The government can seize an individual’s car, home, cash and other property without ever charging or convicting him of a crime.

An Illinois judicial drug scandal has led to the granting of retrials for two convicted killers in less than a month. Gregory Muse, found guilty of first-degree murder in March of this year, was granted a retrial on the grounds that the presiding judge, who now faces federal heroin charges, may have been drug impaired during Muse’s trial.

A Supreme Court Justice has once again been angered by the actions of the New York state Parole Board.

A New York Eastern District Court judge in a 60 page, October 9, decision, blasted the “prosecutorial practice of filing documents that trigger enhanced mandatory minimum sentences for repeat drug trafficking defendants in order to coerce guilty pleas.”

In August of this year, a New Jersey man incarcerated for the murder of his wife for over three years, was released from a Sussex County jail after prosecutors dropped all criminal charges against him. This man languished in jail for nearly four years and was never tried for his alleged crime.

Six months after a federal appeals court overturned her murder conviction, Debra Milke has been released on bond. Milke spent more than two decades on death row after a jury convicted her of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, child abuse and kidnapping on October 12, 1990, less than a year after her four-year-old son was found shot to death in the desert outside Phoenix, Arizona.

In light of the recent exoneration of a convicted man who spent over two decades in prison due to the flawed investigation of a former Brooklyn detective, Kings County District Attorney Charles J. Hynes has ordered a review of forty cases investigated by Louis Scarcella.