For eligible people detained before trial across the country, the right to vote can depend on a tenuous chain of requests to the institution holding them. Across the country, however, election officials and advocates are working to ensure eligible voters can cast a ballot from jail.
From the right to own semiautomatic rifles to the rules governing voter registration, the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court term will see the justices tackle a broad swath of constitutional and access to justice issues.
Since the mid-1980s, DNA testing has exonerated hundreds of wrongfully convicted people and reshaped the criminal justice system. Rodney Reed's decadeslong unsuccessful effort to test the belt prosecutors say he used to kill a woman, however, shows how difficult access to post-conviction DNA testing can be, even for prisoners with credible innocence claims.
The U.S. Supreme Court has considered dozens of emergency petitions involving executive policies since President Donald Trump's return to office. While justices often defend their emergency rulings as stop-gap measures, people at the center of those cases — who've lost their legal status, jobs, or federal funding — say that even interim decisions have had lasting effects on their lives.
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For eligible people detained before trial across the country, the right to vote can depend on a tenuous chain of requests to the institution holding them. Across the country, however, election officials and advocates are working to ensure eligible voters can cast a ballot from jail.
From the right to own semiautomatic rifles to the rules governing voter registration, the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court term will see the justices tackle a broad swath of constitutional and access to justice issues.
Since the mid-1980s, DNA testing has exonerated hundreds of wrongfully convicted people and reshaped the criminal justice system. Rodney Reed's decadeslong unsuccessful effort to test the belt prosecutors say he used to kill a woman, however, shows how difficult access to post-conviction DNA testing can be, even for prisoners with credible innocence claims.
The U.S. Supreme Court has considered dozens of emergency petitions involving executive policies since President Donald Trump's return to office. While justices often defend their emergency rulings as stop-gap measures, people at the center of those cases — who've lost their legal status, jobs, or federal funding — say that even interim decisions have had lasting effects on their lives.
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October 16, 2026
With the midterm elections approaching, a coalition of local and national nonprofits are seeking volunteers, especially lawyers, to safeguard the vote during an election with more states in play as battlegrounds and growing anxiety about federal interference in local elections.
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October 16, 2026
The Second Circuit has been ordered to take another look at a murder-for-hire conviction in light of the high court's new miscarriage-of-justice exception for criminal appeal waivers, and the top courts in Pennsylvania and Michigan will look at the retroactivity of new sentencing rules. Here, Law360 highlights access to justice stories arising from litigation, verdicts and judgments you may have missed.
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October 16, 2026
Law professor Suja A. Thomas spoke with Law360 about the experiences that inspired her new documentary “The Best Justice System in the World," about the disappearing jury trial. Thomas discusses the challenge of using humor to explore injustice and why she believes restoring the jury's role is essential to reforming the legal system.
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October 15, 2026
Attorneys for a New York man shot by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while his son was in the car renewed their attempt to free him from detention, saying he is still in need of medical attention.
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October 15, 2026
Muscogee (Creek) Nation Principal Chief David Hill is asking an Oklahoma federal court to dismiss a challenge that looks to block the tribe from denying citizenship to descendants of people once enslaved by the Indigenous nation, arguing that it can be achieved only through a constitutional amendment and legislative process.
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October 15, 2026
Three nonprofits are mounting a legal challenge to a provision of the North Carolina state budget that strips funding for civil legal aid services historically provided by the state's Interest on Lawyers' Trust Accounts program, saying the maneuver flouts directives by the Tar Heel state's top court and violates the First Amendment.
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October 14, 2026
The U.S. Department of Justice has proposed a bill to Congress to bolster the use of the death penalty in both state and federal courts, in a bid to advance a related executive order President Donald Trump signed at the beginning of his second term.
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October 13, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court said Tuesday that it would not review an Eleventh Circuit decision stripping qualified immunity from a fingerprint analyst who is facing allegations that she fabricated evidence that sent a wrongly convicted man to death row.
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October 13, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to consider whether prisoners can appeal denials of their federal habeas corpus petitions if there is a circuit split on the issue underlying their petition, even if their home circuit has precedent against them.
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October 09, 2026
A Florida sheriff must face a former immigrant detainee's civil rights suit alleging the sheriff failed to address known risks at the county jail where a deputy sexually assaulted her, a Florida federal judge ruled Friday.
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October 09, 2026
The Eleventh Circuit has ruled that a man convicted of robbing two auto parts stores should be resentenced because changes in the federal sentencing guidelines retroactively updated language relating to the physical restraint of a victim.
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October 07, 2026
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed this week to hear a challenge to a geofence warrant just months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie v. U.S. that such warrants implicate Fourth Amendment search protections.
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October 06, 2026
Determining who can prosecute crimes committed in Indian Country requires navigating a complicated mix of tribal, state and federal authority, a Michigan federal prosecutor told law enforcement officials and advocates Tuesday at a statewide summit focused on missing and murdered Indigenous people and human trafficking.
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October 05, 2026
The Michigan Supreme Court has taken up an appeal asking it to decide if a landmark decision that bans the inclusion of previously acquitted charges as a factor for sentencing applies retroactively even after a sentence has been appealed.
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October 05, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday vacated a Second Circuit decision dismissing the sentencing appeal of a man who pled guilty to a role in a murder-for-hire plot, telling the circuit court to take another look in light of the high court's new miscarriage-of-justice exception for criminal appeal waivers.
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October 05, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to review a Tenth Circuit decision denying a former Tulsa police officer qualified immunity from a civil suit alleging she used excessive force when she shot and killed an unarmed man.
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October 05, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a Fourth Circuit ruling that blocked a federal prisoner's constitutional challenge to a sentence enhanced under the formerly mandatory federal sentencing guidelines.
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October 05, 2026
A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that police were incorrectly granted a geofence warrant because their application failed to establish a "nexus" between a string of gas station robberies and a potential suspect's cellphone location data.
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October 05, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge to a John Doe warrant and the warrantless collection and DNA testing of trash items used to convict a man in 2024 for the rape of a Penn State student in 1995.
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October 02, 2026
A divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court won't order a new rape trial for a man even though a prosecutor improperly implied the man's retaining an attorney was an indicator of guilt, finding the evidence in his case is so overwhelming that it outweighed the prosecutor's error.
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October 01, 2026
A New York federal judge vacated a 2025 policy change that gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents "unfettered discretion" to arrest noncitizens at immigration courthouses after the government admitted guidance cited for the shift never applied to immigration courts.
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October 01, 2026
The Michigan Court of Appeals has "conditionally reversed" a man's conviction for "child sexually abusive activity," with a panel finding that his counsel did not correctly challenge a police sting operation, causing him to be ineffectively represented at trial.
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October 01, 2026
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee suspended the state's executions Thursday and ordered a third-party investigation into the botched execution of death row prisoner Christa Pike, who remained hospitalized after surviving two doses of the sedative pentobarbital.
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October 01, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to review whether the Trump administration can detain unauthorized immigrants without bond until their immigration cases conclude, regardless of whether they had already been living in the country.
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September 30, 2026
A Florida state appeals court Wednesday ruled that a nanny convicted of felony murder after forgetting she left a 10-month-old inside a hot car should be tried again, saying prosecutors used an improper underlying charge as a basis for the felony murder charge.