By a Biometrica staffer Drug related offenses accounted for almost one-third of all cases reported in fiscal year 2022, the United States Sentencing Commission (called “the Commission” hereon) said in its annual report. That makes drug offenses the single largest category of...
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 Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic struck, all manner of criminal activity also increasingly shifted to the virtual world. That included human traffickers, who began to use online channels more and more to conduct their activities. They used digital...
By a Biometrica staffer On Monday, Dec. 6, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) published data on nearly 8.9 million criminal offenses reported via the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) in 2020. Of the total 8,879,728 offenses reported in 7,560,867 incidents, 60.5%...
By a Biometrica staffer U.S. prosecutors recently announced that they have filed sex trafficking charges against Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, the Philippine national who founded a church called Kingdom of Jesus Christ, as well as two U.S.-based administrators of that church. The superseding...
By Aara Ramesh On Wednesday, Oct. 27, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a Virginia man, 26-year-old Zackary Ellis Sanders, had been convicted by a federal jury for producing, receiving, and possessing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The DOJ alleges that...
By Aara Ramesh In August, police in Dallas, Texas, arrested former dentist David Thomas Hawkins, 75, for an aggravated sexual assault — that happened nearly four decades ago. In 1985, Hawkins had raped at gunpoint Carrie Krejci, and since then had successfully...
By a Biometrica staffer October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month and the Department of Justice (DOJ) is kicking that off by announcing more than $476 million in Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) grants, it said in a statement on Tuesday,...
By a Biometrica staffer There's been a large increase in the number of sextortion complaints made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) warned at the start of this month. As of July 31, 2021,...
By Aara Ramesh On Wednesday, Aug. 11, a federal jury of seven men and five women was impanelled in New York in the trial of disgraced R&B superstar Robert Kelly (known professionally as R. Kelly) on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. This...
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 a Biometrica staffer The Covid-19 pandemic turned the whole world upside down in a manner of speaking, but for some sections of global society, the impact was darker and more pronounced. Last Tuesday, we gave you a brief overview of the...
By Aara Ramesh Among the many verdicts handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court last month was the unanimous affirmation of the right of tribal law enforcement officers to detain non-Native people who they reasonably suspect to have been involved in a...
By a Biometrica staffer In a move likely may have a far-reaching ripple effect, on Friday, June 25, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that Facebook can be held responsible for its users engaging in illegal sex trafficking activities on the site, regardless...
By Aara Ramesh A landmark law intended to radically alter the landscape of sex trafficking online has had a limited impact in the three years since it was enacted, according to a recent report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)....
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 Tuesday, June 1, Pope Francis made a long-awaited change to the criminal section of the Code of Canon Law, or Catholic Church law: The changes explicitly criminalize the sexual abuse of adults by priests who misuse their...
By Jan Edwards May 25 was International Mission Children’s Day. Globally, more than one million children are reported missing every year. ICMEC considers any child under the age of 18 whose whereabouts are unknown to be “missing.” This includes children who have...
By a Biometrica Staffer If you talk to any investigator working in child protection, he or she would tell you it is a mentally, emotionally and physically exhausting job, because of the nature of often horrifying crimes they are constantly investigating, the...
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 Anand Vasu Cornell D.A. Johnson, of Chicago, was sentenced to 45 years in prison on April 13 for producing child pornography involving multiple minors. Senior U.S. District Judge Michael M. Mihm called Johnson the “ringmaster” of the operation and said that...
By Barbara Jean Wilson I was eight years old when my mother’s boyfriend, “Uncle Bob,” as he asked me to call him, touched me, and told me not to tell anyone. He said he was doing what he needed to make me...
By a Biometrica staffer On Monday, April 12, erstwhile and disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein made his appearance via video conference along with his attorneys at an extradition hearing. He was secretly indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles a couple...
By a Biometrica staffer Michael David Miller of southwestern Missouri was sentenced on March 9 to 20 years without parole, for using a social media app to contact 12- and 13-year-old girls in Canada and induce them to engage in sexually explicit...
By Anand Vasu The Arizona House passed Bill HB 2889 that will ensure convicted child offenders would not have the option of probation, parole or work release. This means that an individual serving a 10-20 year sentence, would not have the chance...
By a Biometrica staffer January 27, 2021 Groping a child through clothing does not constitute sexual assault, the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court ruled last week, drawing outrage across the country. On Wednesday, India’s top court suspended that ruling and...
By a Biometrica staffer Ten men from around the US have been sentenced for taking part in a child pornography enterprise and conspiracy, the US Department of Justice said in a statement. Of the ten, three are based in New York, two...
By a Biometrica staffer A middle school teacher from Fontana, California, was arrested on child pornography charges by special agents with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Josue Gamaliel Vidal Quintanilla, 28, who teaches mathematics at Shandin Hills...
By a Biometrica staffer Alexander Nathan Barter, a resident of Joaquin, Texas, was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison on Thursday for child exploitation violations after he solicited the murder, necrophilia, and cannibalism of a minor on the dark web. Undercover...
By a Biometrica staffer A resident of Kansas has been indicted by a federal grand jury on federal child pornography charges, the US Department of Justice said in a statement. The three-count indictment charged Jeffrey Pierce, who lives in Topeka, with producing...
By a Biometrica staffer Three men from Philadelphia were charged for their roles in a sex trafficking operation that exploited numerous minors from 2016 through 2017 by a federal grand jury, the US Department of Justice said in a statement. Andre Michael...
By a Biometrica staffer Daniel McMahon, a resident of Florida, was sentenced to more than 3 years in prison for two separate racially-motivated crimes, the US Department of Justice said in a statement. The first of the two involve him threatening an...
By a Biometrica staffer An American man was indicted for exploiting teenage boys in Laos, where he taught English, the US Department of Justice said in a statement. Michael Sebastian, 52, was indicted on three counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct...
A former Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Corrections Officer was sentenced to 42 months in prison and three years supervised release for sexually assaulting two women | © Pawel Strykowski - Dreamstime.com By a Biometrica staffer A former Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Corrections...