Category: Criminal Justice

Albert Woodfox, 73, is an activist and the author of “Solitary,” a 2019 National Book Award finalist. Known as one of the Angola Three, along with Robert King and Herman Wallace, Woodfox served nearly 44 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. He was released in 2016. You served more time in solitary […]

In late April 1992, residents of Los Angeles, California, took to the streets to protest after four police officers captured on video beating an unarmed black man named Rodney King during a traffic stop, a year earlier, faced no punishment at trial; three of the officers were acquitted while jurors were unable to agree on a verdict for […]

On April 22, 1987, the United States Supreme Court rejected a black man’s death penalty appeal grounded in claims of racial inequality and instead accepted proven racial sentencing disparities as “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.” In October 1978, a black man named Warren McCleskey was convicted of killing a white police officer […]

By EJI Staff, EJI On April 20, 2012, Cumberland County Judge Gregory Weeks issued the first decision under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, ruling that racial bias had played a role in Marcus Robinson’s 1991 trial and commuting Mr. Robinson’s death sentence to life imprisonment without parole. Marcus Robinson, an African American man who was […]

On April 19, 1989, a white woman was brutally raped and beaten in New York City’s Central Park. Police officers soon arrested five young men – four black teenagers and one Latino teen – and subjected them to hours of intense interrogation in order to extract confessions. Each young man later claimed that he had […]