By a Biometrica staffer This midterm election season, along with the state of the economy, the country's crime rate has been under the scanner. Forty percent of U.S. registered voters said crime is an extremely important issue when it comes to their...
By a Biometrica staffer Fraud accounted for 30.1% of all organizational offenses during the near-30 year period between fiscal 1992 and 2021. Environmental offenses was the second largest offense category at 24%, according to a report published late last month by the...
By a Biometrica staffer By now, most of us have probably read that on Tuesday, June 21, Senate bargainers reached agreement on an incremental yet necessary bipartisan gun violence bill. The bill is in response to recent deadly mass shootings in Texas...
By a Biometrica staffer The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) published what it called the first complete enumeration of tribal court systems operating in the United States. Termed the National Survey of Tribal Court Systems (NSTCS), it consists of three surveys specific...
By a Biometrica staffer At Biometrica, child safety and protection has always been at the heart of what we do. We ended 2021 with a look-back special at various issues surrounding this all-important public safety subject that took centerstage through last year....
By a Biometrica staffer Well over 700 years ago, Song Ci, a Chinese judge, is said to have personally examined the crime scenes of physical assaults or difficult murders. His book, The Washing Away of Wrongs, was written around the year 1247...
By a Biometrica staffer In March, Biometrica did a round-up of some of the key crime, prison, and law enforcement bills with most support in the House in 2021 up to that point. Today, we pick a few crime-related bills in the...
By Deepti Govind In the late 1960s, a New York-based attorney named Bertram Hirsch was sent to North Dakota to assist with a custody dispute case on behalf of the Spirit Lake Tribe. At that point, Hirsch was employed by the Association...
By a Biometrica staffer Earlier this year, the Measures for Justice (MFJ) project released a comprehensive report that looked at data collection — or lack thereof — in the criminal justice system in 20 states across the country. What the organization found...
By Deepti Govind Just three weeks ago, the Department of Justice said a 53-year old Maryland resident, Jeffrey John White, was sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison for possessing thousands of files of child pornography. When the case was...
By Deepti Govind It was just last Tuesday, July 28, that the House select committee formed to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol convened its first hearing. At that hearing, the entire nation heard the emotional testimony of four...
By a Biometrica staffer Two weeks ago, a Department of Transportation (DOT) Inspector General audit found that states fail too often when it comes to transmitting driver electronic conviction notifications in a timely manner to federal regulators, Transport Topics reported. What does...
By Charlotte Spencer There have been nearly 100 bills introduced so far this year that address the opioid epidemic. It seems everyone can agree this is an issue that needs to be addressed, but very few have managed to get any support...
By a Biometrica staffer On Monday, July 26, the United States government said it will not be lifting existing travel restrictions due to concerns over the highly transmissible delta variant of Covid-19 and the rising number of coronavirus cases in the country,...
By a Biometrica staffer On Wednesday, July 21, a legislator in Wisconsin proposed what's known as "Kayleigh's Law" in the state legislature to help protect certain sexual assault victims from their attackers. The proposed bill would allow those who have been victims...
By a Biometrica staffer On Wednesday, July 14, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Cory Booker, and Sen. Ron Wyden unveiled a draft of their bill to legalize marijuana at the federal level. The proposal seeks to remove the drug from the Controlled...
By Aara Ramesh With the world slowly beginning its journey back to some semblance of normal, after a trying 18 months, climate change is jostling its way back into the limelight. Debates have recently been spurred by the two-front war America was...
By a Biometrica staffer A total of 1,864 suspects in matters involving violations of federal hate crime statutes were investigated by U.S. attorneys during the fiscal years 2005 to 2019, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) said in a report published last...
By Charlotte Spencer Plenty of bills are proposed that never become law. This summer, however, several crime and law enforcement bills have made progress in the process of becoming law. Here are the summer’s top movers so far in terms of bills...
By Charlotte Spencer Federal gaming law may be changing soon if any of the several proposed pieces of legislation currently in front of Congress pass this year. In this article, we review a few notable pieces of proposed legislation that touch on...
By a Biometrica staffer On Monday, June 21, a federal appeals court decided to put a judge's decision to overturn California's 30-year-old ban on assaults weapons on hold. However, the legal battle is expected to continue for months and could eventually end...
By Charlotte Spencer Earlier this year we discussed pending legislation in an article titled, “Pending Hate Crime Legislation in Front of Congress,” published April 22, and a February 4 article titled, “More Legal Firepower Proposed in Battle Against Child Abuse.” More has...
By Charlotte Spencer The Combating Human Trafficking in Commercial Vehicles Act (hereafter, the Act) is a relatively new law designed to help do exactly what its title suggests. The Act — S. 1536 — passed the House and Senate in 2017, and...
By a Biometrica staffer On Monday, June 7, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued model legislation for states to use as a blueprint to create their own extreme risk protection order (or ERPO) gun removal laws — sometimes called "red flag" laws...
By Dmitry Shifrin, Mary Tobin & Lindsay Dailey Polsinelli PC, Chicago, Illinois Biometric information and biometric identifiers are becoming more highly regulated in today’s data privacy and cybersecurity conscious landscape. Like other types of personal data, biometrics have the potential to identify...
By Aara Ramesh The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week ruled decisively in favor of tribal law enforcement, reaffirming their authority over federal crimes on their land. In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Stephen Breyer, the land’s highest court on June...
By Charlotte Spencer The United States’ DNA database laws, many may be surprised to find, are not uniform across the country. Rather, they are a patchwork of laws that vary in when DNA can be taken, why DNA can be taken, how...
By Aara Ramesh The Gordian knot that is the gun control debate in America has flared up in recent weeks, as the number of mass shootings has surged and as the National Rifle Association (NRA) is battling bankruptcy and corruption charges in...
By Aara Ramesh On May 18, Governor Doug Ducey signed into law a bill that excludes narcotic drug testing products from an existing law that classifies them as illegal drug paraphernalia. The particular target of this action are fentanyl test strips (FTS),...
By Aara Ramesh It might be tempting to think that child sexual abuse is a phenomenon of the digital age, a purely modern trend. While it is true that the epidemic has worsened with the advent of the internet, it has been...
By Charlotte Spencer Protective orders, also known as protection orders, are designed to protect people or animals from an ongoing threat. They are often used in domestic violence cases, and can vary a lot by jurisdiction. They are not by any stretch...
By a Biometrica staffer Wisconsin's first wolf hunt in six years did little to resolve man-wolf conflicts, and may have harmed breeding among as many as 100 wolf packs instead, a report by conservation group Wisconsin’s Green Fire said. During the last...
By a Biometrica staffer The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) will hear oral arguments on April 28 in a case involving a former high school cheerleader, which is expected to have major implications on the way schools can view and...
By Anand Vasu On April 21, the Manhattan District Attorney announced initiatives that would change the way cases with regards to prostitution and unlicensed massage would be prosecuted in the jurisdiction. District Attorney Cyrus R Vance Jr., who heads one of the...
By Charlotte Spencer As of April, 2021, Congress is considering several different pieces of legislation which address hate crimes. Many of them focus on hate crimes directly. Others have a different focus, but also take on the subject of hate crimes. Here...
By a Biometrica staffer On April 19, Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey signed a package of bills into law, with an aim of bettering the criminal justice system to make it more respectful and responsive to victims of sexual assault crimes....
By Charlotte Spencer There is a form of abuse that is still not illegal in most of the United States, not because anyone decided it should be legal, but because of a lack of awareness. It often accompanies other forms of abuse,...