There were other stories of children who'd gone missing before Etan Patz. Sometimes even sensational cases. But this one was different. He wasn't a famous person's son, like Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. He was just a kid doing what kids did back then. Roaming freely on his street. And unlike the nearly 30 children who disappeared and were murdered during the same period in Atlanta, Patz had a father who is a photographer. Overnight, New York City was plastered with images of his sweet-faced little boy under the chilling word "Missing." Eventually that face became the first to appear on a milk carton.

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Chapman was sentenced to death in 1994 at the age of 26 for the murders of Betty Jean Ramseur and Tenene Yvette Conley in Hickory, N.C. After more than a decade of court appeals, Superior Court Judge Robert C. Ervin ordered a new trial based on revelations that detectives “lost, misplaced or destroyed” several pieces of evidence that pointed to another suspect. It was also discovered that lead investigator Dennis Rhoney lied on the witness stand at Chapman’s original trial. Shortly thereafter, the district attorney dismissed all charges against Chapman due to lack of sufficient evidence leading to his exoneration in 2008.

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One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie's father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie's whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, "People Who Eat Darkness," is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

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Less than a month after Russell Pearce crowed at a Gilbert, Ariz., Tea Party meeting that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's "immigration policy is identical to mine" -- a brash claim that Republican operatives scrambled to explain -- the self-proclaimed Tea Party president and architect of Arizona's punitive immigration law might now be scrambling himself. Pearce has previously praised J.T. Ready, the alleged gunman in Wednesday's  tragic killing of five people in the same Phoenix suburb.

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An open and shut case of domestic terrorism for the state, it would seem. But curiously Grady is not facing any domestic terrorism charges, once again raising the question of whether the FBI and U.S. Attorneys' Offices apply terrorism laws equally when prosecuting ideologically motivated crimes. While Islamists and animal rights and environmental activists regularly spend years behind bars under terrorism sentences, antiabortion criminals are seldom punished as severely. Grady, it would seem, is the latest antiabortion activist accused of a crime that would be harshly punished if, say, he had done it in the name of Allah or Mother Earth.

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Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate.  The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T and IBM.

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Before being committed to St. Peter, Opheim had served a five-year prison sentence for molesting an 11-year-old boy. (He also has admitted to molesting nearly 30 other children.) He is currently the only sex offender to ever be successfully released from the state’s Sex Offender Program.

The historic significance of the moment, however, was lost on many residents of Golden Valley, Minn.

Before Opheim’s scheduled release in March, according to news reports, concerned residents of the town packed a community meeting hall to hear the terms of Opheim’s release, meet his social worker, and express their fears of living alongside a convicted sex offender.

Although Opheim will live in a halfway house, be accompanied by a social worker in public at all times, be forced to consent to regular polygraph testing, and wear a GPS tracking device, residents were still uneasy.

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As the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the failure of authorities to arrest his killer, George Zimmerman, continues to grab headlines, many conservatives and gun rights advocates insist that race has nothing to do with it. Some have also rallied to the defense of Florida’s “stand your ground” law, the self-defense legislation under which Zimmerman was able to avoid arrest. Yet not all stand your ground claims are so successful. Not too far from Sanford, Fla., a black man named John McNeil is serving a life sentence for shooting Brian Epp, a white man who trespassed and attacked him at his home in Georgia, another stand your ground state.

It all began in early 2005, when McNeil and his wife, Anita, hired Brian Epp’s construction company to build a new house in Cobb County, Ga. The McNeils testified that Epp was difficult to work with, which led to heated confrontations. They eventually decided to close on the house early to rid their lives of Epp, whom they found increasingly threatening. At the closing, both parties agreed that Epp would have 10 days to complete the work, after which he would stay away from the property, but he failed to keep up his end of the bargain.

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Who is Mark Judge? He is some guy writing an opinion column for Tucker Carlson's online magazine, "Assumption of Trayvon Martin's Guilt Illustrated." (He is also the author of some awful-sounding book about being a right-wing Catholic who likes rock 'n' roll music, and he once wrote an unintentionally funny review of John McWhorter's book about hip-hop.)

What happened is, he had his bike locked to his car while he went to services on Good Friday, and when he came back, his bike was gone, and he doesn't think a nun stole it so basically his parents lied to him when they said "we are all the same" and his favorite movie is no longer "In the Heat of the Night." (The deductive reasoning on display is staggering: It couldn't have been monks, must have been black people.)

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After her mother’s death, Fatima said she found “a letter next to her head saying, ‘Go back to your country, you terrorist.’” The accusation sparked outrage and brought national media attention to the murder. And yet, within days, publicity-craving Islamophobes Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer were pushing an alternative motive: that Alawadi’s death was, in fact, an “honor killing.” Geller crowed, “I surmised that the murder of Shaima Alawadi appeared to be Islamic, rooted in Islamic teachings and culture …”

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SO 1 enables LAPD officers to file Suspicious Activity Reports on observed behaviors or activities. Where things get murky, however, is how SAR guidelines categorize constitutionally protected, non-criminal and commonplace activities such as using binoculars, snapping photographs and taking notes as indicators of terrorism-related activity. The SARs are coupled with the LAPD's iWatch program, a campaign the police pioneered to encourage regular citizens to report "suspicious" activity, including “a person wearing clothes that are too big or too hot for the weather,” or things that just plain old don’t “look right.”

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They were riddled with more than 30 rounds from an AK-47, as well as shots from a Glock.  A few hours earlier, a man in his 40s was shot to death with  children playing nearby at the  Belfield Recreation Center.  The victim, 43, was shot twice in the neck, once in the face and once in the head.  Police said he died at the scene.

It was, tragically, not an unusual day in the “City of Brotherly Love.”

As of March 28, the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) reported 85 homicides since the beginning of the year — the majority of them committed by firearms.

That's a 6 percent increase over the same period last year — and if the upward trend continues, Philadelphia will be on course to beat last year's already grisly record. There were 324 murders in 2011, an increase of 6 percent over 2010.

While homicide was on the wane last year in most major U.S. cities, Philadelphia has continued to defy the national trend that has taken violent crimes like murder off the national news radar.

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Martin's story has sparked grief, anger and expected outbursts of racist online commentary since his death on Feb. 26. That's when George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch volunteer and overeager 911 caller, gunned down a young man with no criminal record after telling police he looked "suspicious" and "on drugs." Zimmerman has claimed he was acting in self-defense, a tough assertion to make stick when you kill a young man who was carrying a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman has not been arrested.

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The decision by the largest faith-based pension fund in the United States came in response to concerns expressed last May by the church’s immigration task force and a group of national activists.

“Our board simply felt that it did not want to profit from the business of incarcerating others,” said Colette Nies, managing director of communications for the board.

“Our concern was not with how the companies manage or operate their business, but with the service that the companies offer,” Nies added. “We believe that profiting from incarceration is contrary to church values.”

It was an important success for a slew of activists across the country who are pushing investors and institutions to divest from the private prison industry.

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Enshrined in our highest governing document, this principle had been considered uncontroversial for most of American history. But then we saw the advent of state-sanctioned torture and forced confessions in the last decade, and now a new criminal prosecution in Denver may end up with a court declaring that the mind can be forcibly opened to searches under a threat of jail time.

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"Voter fraud" is a right-wing obsession used to justify restrictive ballot access-limiting measures that are actually designed to suppress turnout among people who tend to vote for Democrats. It does not and cannot exist in anything approaching a large enough scale to affect an election, and even isolated incidents of fraud prove difficult for right-wingers to dredge up to prove that their concerns have merit. Dozens of people have spent years tirelessly attempting to prove that organized "voter fraud" is a real thing and all they have ever managed to prove is that sometimes lazy volunteers make fake registration forms, sometimes former felons mistakenly vote despite being disenfranchised, and sometimes people double-vote. There is nothing remotely resembling coordinated voter fraud, carried out with the intention of stealing an election, taking place anywhere in the United States. Those who sincerely believe that there is are deluded, though most of the people who constantly crow about it don't sincerely believe in it; they just want to make it harder for blacks and Latinos and poor people to vote.

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What is it that makes this particular piece of jewelry so potentially valuable? Is it the elegance of the piece? Is it the fact that it was purchased by an internationally renowned, Oscar-winning director? Or is it because the ring was allegedly worn by his pretty, pregnant wife the night she was savagely murdered by the Manson family?

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"Don't Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America" is Kennedy's passionate account of that work, which has seen striking results not just in the roughest sections of Boston but in many of the bleakest neighborhoods of the United States. While his goals were lofty -- healing toxic relationships between the police and blighted communities, rewriting the conventional wisdom on gangs, drugs and violent crime -- Kennedy proposed solutions so simple that cops often laughed him out of the room.

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Today, in an astonishing twist, New York is one of the safest cities in the country. Its current homicide rate is 18 percent of its 1990 total -- its auto theft rate is 6 percent. The drop exceeded the wildest dreams of crime experts of the 1990s, and it's a testament to this transformation that New Yorkers now seem more likely to complain about the city's dullness than about its criminality.

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In 2001, just after Rick Perry assumed the job, he vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice of arresting those suspected of class C misdemeanors — fine-only crimes that don’t require jail time, such as traffic offenses.

But fast-forward to 2007. That year, he signed a law allowing police officers to issue citations instead of making arrests for certain class A and B misdemeanors, including marijuana possession. Perry’s reversal came about in part because the state faced a projected shortfall of 17,000 inmate beds.

In Texas and other red states, formerly law-and-order GOP lawmakers are taking the lead in reforming criminal justice systems.

That shift is the result of two curves sloping in opposite directions — a dramatic fall in crime rates and exploding state spending on corrections (the second-fastest-growing category of state spending behind Medicaid).

So should a Republican win the presidency, a return to get-tough approaches seems unlikely. Yet ill-targeted budget cuts or sensational crimes linked to reforms still could take policy in the other direction.

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