Joaquin Sapien Posts

After 24 years in prison, Jonathan Fleming was cleared of all wrongdoing in a 1990 murder. Evidence showing the Brooklyn native was in Florida at the time of the killing was withheld from the defense during the trial.

Last week, the Justice Department convened hearings under the Prison Rape Elimination Act to examine the prevalence of rape and sexual abuse in the nation’s prisons and juvenile detention centers. In a 2013 survey of more than 8,700 juveniles housed in 326 facilities across the country, 8 percent said they experienced sex abuse at the hands of the staff supervising them. Twenty percent of those who said they were victimized by staff said it happened on more than 10 occasions.

After more than a decade of national legislative efforts to end prison rape, this month was supposed to produce a significant victory: formal audits of prisons and jails around the country that would more reliably chronicle incidents of sex abuse and the consequences for its perpetrators.

But that moment of possible progress has turned out to be more complicated than many had hoped. The first round of audits will be chiefly conducted by the American Correctional Association (ACA), the very organization that has been criticized over the years for failing to identify and address safety problems at prisons across the country.

Hundreds of teen-agers are raped or sexually assaulted during their stays in the country's juvenile detention facilities and many of them are victimized repeatedly, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey. The teens are most often assaulted by staff members working at the facilities. 20 percent of those victimized said they had been violated on more than 10 occasions.

ProPublica interviews Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who led the CDC's gun violence research in the '90s when he was the director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

Last week, President Obama unveiled sweeping proposals on gun control, including a ban on military-style assault weapons, a reduction of ammunition magazine capacity and stiffer background checks on gun buyers.

We found that while legislators in Virginia, Alabama, Arizona, New York, Texas, and Colorado sometimes contemplated tightening rules after rampage shootings, few measures gained passage. In fact, several states have made it easier to buy more guns and take them to more places.