Criminal Justice

St. Louis attorneys and activists say judges are often denying defendants bond entirely after the Missouri Supreme Court in 2019 made it harder for courts to detain people on cash bail pretrial. “It’s a classic case of the system recalibrating and in some ways achieving many of the same results,” said Blake Strode, executive director of civil rights law firm ArchCity Defenders.

"The Court's confidence in Strickland's conviction is so undermined that it cannot stand," the judge wrote. Strickland's wrongful imprisonment for nearly 43 years is among the country's longest.

Jail admissions in St. Louis County declined over the past decade, but the average length of stay increased by 56%.

The Bail Project's Mike Milton is starting a new diversion program that will work with the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office: The Freedom Community Center. He discussed it with John Nanney of UMSL on St. Louis on the Air.

Since late December, five protests have erupted at the Justice Center in downtown St. Louis. This latest came Sunday night, when a group of detainees broke windows on the third floor and threw objects out the windows. Inmates could be heard chanting, “We need help” and “We want court dates.”

Advocates are celebrating a new law that will end wealth-based pretrial detention in Illinois. With Gov. J.B. Pritzker's signature yesterday, the state becomes the first in the country to eliminate cash bail.

Both Senate Bill 600 — the “Crime Bill” signed by Gov. Mike Parson last month — and some key proposals being pushed at the crime-focused special session now underway in Jefferson City could lead to longer sentences for Missouri defendants. Sarah Johnson of the Missouri State Public Defender and Brendan Roediger, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law, discuss the real-life ramifications.

Defunding police departments is a major goal for many Black Lives Matter protesters, but for some people, it’s a scary idea — and that’s true for many St.…

A former Missouri state senator, Jeff Smith was sentenced to a year and a day in prison after being charged with two felony counts of conspiracy to…

State Rep. Shamed Dogan returns to Politically Speaking to talk with St. Louis Public Radio’s Julie O’Donoghue and Jason Rosenbaum about his efforts to…