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Three months have passed since a judicial panel in New York heard arguments to unseal documents that could reveal whether federal prosecutors covered up evidence that New York financier Jeffrey Epstein and others were running an underage sex trafficking operation. In March, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit seemed poised to release some documents in the case. The appeals panel gave all parties in the case until March 29 to file additional pleadings. Several challenges were subsequently filed, but the court has yet to make a final ruling.
McClatchy
The New York Police Department is still listing children as young as 13 in its secret gang database, police officials told a New York City Council committee yesterday. The database is growing, currently including 18,084 people, up 2 percent from last June, when the NYPD last testified about the database. The increase came despite the removal of some 2,125 names from the registry — because the police added nearly 2,500 people to the database. The NYPD won’t disclose who is included in the database, and there is no mechanism for a person to challenge their inclusion.
The Intercept
It has been used to identify more than 40 murder and rape suspects in cases as much as a half-century old. It has led to guilty pleas and confessions, including in one case where another man was convicted of the crime. Genetic genealogy — in which DNA samples are used to find relatives of suspects, and eventually the suspects themselves — has redefined the cutting edge of forensic science, solving the type of cases that haunt detectives most: the killing of a schoolteacher 27 years ago, an assault on a 71-year-old church organ player, the rape and murder of dozens of California residents by a man who became known as the Golden State Killer. But until a trial this month in the 1987 murder of a young Canadian couple, it had never been tested in court.
The New York Times
The papers of anti-immigration activist John Tanton housed at the University of Michigan should be public record, a Michigan Court of Appeals panel has ruled. The panel reversed a 2017 Court of Claims decision against Hassan Ahmad, who brought the complaint against UM under a Freedom of Information Act request. Ahmad was seeking access to 10 of the 25 boxes of papers donated by Tanton to UM’s Bentley Historical Library. Tanton donated the papers with the request that those boxes remain closed until April 2035, in accordance with the terms of the gift.
MLive
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