The Many Examples of the Power of Innocence Projects

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Four women stood at the front of a room, speaking before the small crowd with strong voices even though each had gone through a harrowing and emotional experience. The women – Joyce Ann Brown, Audrey Edmunds, Tabitha Pollock and Gloria Goodwin-Killian – had all been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. In total, they spent 45 years incarcerated, knowing all the while they were innocent and clinging to some hope that this fact would come to light. Now free, thanks in no small part to innocence projects around the nation, their testimonies before the crowd headlined the commencement of the Women’s Project at the Northwestern University law school’s Center on Wrongful Convictions this month. “In the Center’s 13 year history, we’ve represented four women, all of whom were accused and wrongfully convicted of the murders of their children,” said Karen Daniel, a co-director of the Women’s Project and a professor at Northwestern University.

Sandy Hook

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There’s a stretch of road in Newtown, Connecticut, 524 paces long. It leads from the official town Christmas tree at the corner of Riverside Drive and Washington Avenue up a hill and down again to a soft bend in the road at Dickinson Court where a sign hangs from a wooden post decorated with curling back wrought-ironwork that reads:
Sandy Hook School
1956
Visitors Welcome
There, next to a staging area for emergency workers and police investigators, sits a sprawling memorial to the 20 children shot and killed by a young man who was barely an adult himself. Law enforcement officials are still piecing together what happened that morning, but for now they say that Adam Lanza, 20, after killing his mother and armed with an assault rifle and some handguns shot and his way into the Sandy Hook School. He killed six staff, 20 children, and then himself. What used to be a nondescript road that connected the struggling heart of this small central Connecticut town to a municipal building has been transformed into an almost sacred path divided by a long line of orange emergency cones.

Sandy Hook

By |

There’s a stretch of road in Newtown, Connecticut, 524 paces long. It leads from the official town Christmas tree at the corner of Riverside Drive and Washington Avenue up a hill and down again to a soft bend in the road at Dickinson Court where a sign hangs from a wooden post decorated with curling back wrought-ironwork that reads:
Sandy Hook School
1956
Visitors Welcome
There, next to a staging area for emergency workers and police investigators, sits a sprawling memorial to the 20 children shot and killed by a young man who was barely an adult himself. Law enforcement officials are still piecing together what happened that morning, but for now they say that Adam Lanza, 20, after killing his mother and armed with an assault rifle and some handguns shot and his way into the Sandy Hook School. He killed six staff, 20 children, and then himself. What used to be a nondescript road that connected the struggling heart of this small central Connecticut town to a municipal building has been transformed into an almost sacred path divided by a long line of orange emergency cones.

Remembering Elementary School Shootings of the Past

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The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre Nov. 14 constitutes the second deadliest mass school shooting incident in American history, second only to the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre in which a single assailant murdered 32 individuals and injured 17 others. With an estimated 26 victims dead -- 20 of whom are children -- the recent massacre is far and away the deadliest shooting incident to ever occur in one of the nation’s elementary schools. Although mass shooting incidents in university and high school settings have occurred in the past, the Newtown, Conn. massacre serves as a rare instance of a perpetrator targeting elementary school students.

Officials Release New Details in Elementary School Massacre

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On Saturday, Newtown, Conn. officials released the names of the 20 children and six adults slain in last Friday’s shooting spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School. According to initial reports, all of the children killed in the attack were between 6 or 7 years old. State police say 12 of the young victims were female and eight were boys. All six of the slain adults were female.

UPDATE: More than Two Dozen Killed, Among Them 20 Children, in One of Nation’s Worst School Shooting Massacres

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In one of the deadliest mass shootings in United States history, 27 people - among them, 20 children - are reported dead following a gunman’s rampage at a Connecticut elementary school. Local officials say that Adam Lanza, 20, entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. early Friday morning. The alleged shooter proceeded to gun down 26 people, a majority of whom were young children ages 5 to 10, before apparently committing suicide. Initial law enforcement accounts erroneously had listed Lanza’s brother Ryan, 24, as the gunman.

Childhood Trauma Threatens National Well-Being: DOJ Task Force

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WASHINGTON, D.C. - Two out of three children in the United States experience or witness violence, crime or abuse while growing up, a public health crisis that harms their emotional, physical and intellectual development and makes them more likely to perpetrate the same trauma upon their own children, a national task force appointed by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said this week. The long-term well-being of the country is at stake unless federal and local governments and their communities act to reduce the incidence and impact of such trauma upon young Americans, the National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence concluded in its final report. The report detailed 56 policy recommendations for reducing such exposure to trauma and treating its fallout. Such exposure could occur anywhere, the report said: at home, at school, in the community and on the Internet. “There is a moral component to this question,” Holder said at a public meeting of the federal interagency Coordinating Council for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which approved the report’s release.

Groups Urge Federal, State Legislation to End Solitary Confinement of Young People

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Recently, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights Watch published  a new report titled “Growing Up Locked Down: Youth in Solitary Confinement in Jails and Prisons Across the United States.”

The publication involved interviews with more than 125 juveniles in 19 states, alongside detention officials in 10 states.