Law Education

NEW YORK, Nov 18 – High-profile accusations of child sex abuse in the United States have refocused attention on laws that are meant to protect the rights of the accused but in fact can help pedophiles escape prosecution.

Experts say statutes of limitation that prevent criminal charges being brought after a certain number of years may need to be reconsidered in the sex abuse of children because victims typically need years before they are able to come forward.

The latest case in the spotlight involves an assistant basketball coach at Syracuse University in the New York state. The coach, Bernie Fine, has declared his innocence and he was cleared in a university investigation in 2005.

Like the child sex abuse scandal rocking Penn State University football, the Syracuse accusation involves the coach of a highly profitable sports program in a university town with a fervent fan base. Find more info…

The widow of a 44-year-old man killed by a Ventura police officer says her husband was shot “without justification and without warning” after the officer responded to a domestic dispute at their home, according to a claim for damages filed recently with the city.

Lucky Lopez’s claim about the May 20 shooting of her husband, Mario Lopez, is a precursor to a lawsuit, which her lawyer said they intend to file.

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His half-brother, Jonathan Barr, will have to wait while paperwork related to a decades-old juvenile conviction is worked out, his attorney said.

“Another one or two days or whatever after doing 18, 20 years, it’s like a drop in the bucket,” Craig Cooley of the New York-based Innocence Project said.

A judge on Thursday vacated the convictions of Harden, Barr and another man, Robert Taylor, after DNA evidence pointed to another suspect. Taylor was released Thursday from Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet.

The other two, Robert Lee Veal and Shainne Sharp, served shorter sentences that ended years ago for the rape and shooting death of 14-year-old Cateresa Matthews in 1991 in Dixmoor, Ill.

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A huge increase in state funding of political parties, worth up to £100m over a five-year parliament, is being proposed by a government-commissioned inquiry.

The funding, which would be shared out according to the number of votes each party receives in a general election, would be presented as a way of compensating them for a huge loss of income as a result of introducing new caps on individual donations to parties. It would also be seen as a way of repackaging state funding that already goes to opposition parties.

The Tories have argued that a £50,000 cap on individual donations would see their party lose as much as a third of its donor income.

The state funding idea has been pushed hardest by the Liberal Democrats, who currently have the least independent income and are likely to benefit the most from the proposals. T

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WASHINGTON, Oct 21 – The U.S. Appeals Court for the 10th Circuit ruled on Friday that the government properly designated millions of acres of national forests as off limits to logging and road construction, overturning a lower court ruling in a long-running battle over preserving the land.

For the second time, the appeals court, based in Denver, overturned a decision by a federal judge in Wyoming who had found the ban that covered some 58.5 million acres of forest lands exceeded the U.S.

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