Topics: Your Personal Rights - 1497 results

Can police track your location via your cell phone without so much as obtaining a warrant? The answer, for now, is maybe. At issue is the practice of pinging a phone through the service carrier to create a real-time GPS or triangulation data point that law enforcement can use to figure out the phone’s location. A ruling issued in March by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the judges would “assume without deciding that pinging is a search.” …

A federal court on Mar. 28 struck down an Indiana law, inspired by Arizona’s infamous SB 1070, that reportedly allowed police to arrest immigrants without warrants. With that lawsuit, immigrant advocate groups have basically shut down state efforts to pass laws that give police unfettered power to bust suspected illegal immigrants.   Indiana Can’t Create an Immigration Crime The Indiana law, SB 590, was passed in 2011. Two of its provisions were especially disturbing to immigrant advocate groups including the …

A patient who was given a shot of a contrast dye that left him unable to move won a $5 million verdict against GE Healthcare, the maker of the dye. Paul Decker, a retired Ohio man suffering from kidney disease, was given a single dose of Omniscan, a contrast agent administered before body scans like MRIs to help technicians and doctors read the scans more clearly. Decker developed a condition called nephrogenic systemic fibrosis after the 2005 scan. NSF is …

A federal jury has ordered police in Long Beach, Calif., to pay $6.5 million to the family of a man shot dead by police officers. Douglas Zerby was sitting in front of a friend’s apartment in December 2010 when two officers shot him 12 times. They thought he was holding a gun; he was playing with a garden hose with a metal nozzle. Zerby’s family sued the police department, arguing officers Victor Ortiz and Jeffrey Shurtleff didn’t identify themselves, order …

As a regular observer of our criminal justice system, there are few things more maddening than to watch a prosecutor or other law enforcement officials simply refuse to say, “We got it wrong.” Despite overwhelming evidence of innocence, some police officers and district attorneys remain steadfast in having convictions stand or, at best, will cut deals to release defendants only if they plead no contest (often called an Alford plea), while maintaining their innocence. Yes, most district attorneys are elected officials and apologizing is …