Weekend Roundup: A Taste of Freedom

by Matt Kelley · 2008-12-20 07:55:00 UTC
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Pictured above is Miguel Roman, who walked out of a Connecticut prison after serving 20 years for a murder he didn't commit. Meanwhile, Efren Paredes, convicted of murder in Michigan at age 15, continues to protest his innocence, and asked the governor for a pardon. And Jimmy Ates was freed in Florida after the FBI ballistic evidence against him was revealed to be unreliable.

On to the drug war. It was a pretty good year for marijuana reformers, with decriminalization passing with overwhelming support in Massachusetts and medicinal marijuana passing in Michigan. Bruce Mirken wraps up a successful year on the Marijuana Policy Project blog.

Meanwhile, 2009 could be the year for medicinal marijuana in New Jersey. And lawmakers in Jersey this week marked the one-year anniversary of the day the death penalty died in their state.

More interesting pot news from Alternet this week: we learned that more 10th graders smoke pot than smoke cigarettes and that pot has been around for a while (like, 2,700 years). And Scott Thill asks if Bill Richardson at Commerce could mean good things for marijuana reform.

In case you didn't know, Lil Wayne has a thing or two to say about the drug war.

Enough about drugs. Let's talk for a moment about fraud, guns, illegal head scarves, private prisons and other cheery topics for a Saturday morning.

Democracy Now! chimed in this week on the impact of the Madoff scandal on criminal justice nonprofits, and one of the biggest financial frauds in American history continued to grip the front pages, as the NY Times today tries to grapple with how this thing happened.

A Georgia woman went to jail for refusing to remove her hijab in a courtroom. (that's the state of Georgia, not the country)

I reported weeks ago on the imminent release of Albert Woodfox - one of the group of Louisiana prisoners known as the Angola Three. Well, he never got out. NPR has the story.

Texans are protesting a private prison today, and Californians are asking why they have to spend $400 million on a deluxe death row.

And, lastly, the district is at it again. Washington, D.C., this week passed a strict new gun law to follow the ban it saw overturned last summer in the Heller case.

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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