Criminal justice

February 05, 2016 - Daily News Briefing

A record number of exonerations occurred last year as the US justice system has come under increasing scrutiny over cases of false imprisonment.

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A confidential report by experts who monitor sanctions on Democratic Republic of Congo accuses Rwanda of recruiting and training Burundian refugees with the goal of ousting Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza. The report comes amid fears that worsening political violence in Burundi could escalate into mass atrocities. Burundi accused Rwanda in December of supporting a rebel group that was recruiting Burundian refugees on Rwandan soil, but Rwandan President Paul Kagame dismissed the allegations as "childish." The experts attributed the intelligence to 18 Burundian combatants in DRC, who said they were recruited in May and June 2015 and "given two months of military training by instructors, who included Rwandan military personnel."

As former Turing Pharmaceutical head Martin Shkreli laughed off questions about rapid price hikes for a potentially life-saving drug, angering lawmakers at a Congressional hearing on Thursday, another drugmaker, Valeant Pharmaceuticals interim head Howard Schiller, acknowledged that companies had been “too aggressive” in setting prices. Mr. Shkreli, who became the object of widespread scorn after raising the price of Daraprim, the only drug approved to treat a rare and sometimes deadly parasitic infection, by more than 5,000 percent overnight in August, appeared openly contemptuous of the hearing. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination four times, and was dismissed less than an hour into the hearing.

The IRS stopped accepting electronically filed tax returns Wednesday because of problems with some of its computer systems. The outage could affect refunds, but the agency said it doesn't anticipate "major disruptions." A "hardware failure" forced the shutdown of several tax processing systems, including the e-file system, the IRS said in a statement. The IRS.gov website remains available, but "where's my refund" and other services are not working.

President Obama's first visit to a mosque has drawn sharp criticism from members of the Republican party. He's not the first president to visit a US mosque. His predecessor, President George W. Bush, visited a mosque in the first week after the 9/11 attacks, and delivered a very similar message. But the reaction this time around was much more critical. Some 65 percent of surveyed Republicans say the next president should speak bluntly of Islam regardless of generalized criticism, pollsters found. On the other side of the aisle, however, seven in 10 Democrats said the next president should speak carefully about Islamic extremism to avoid criticizing the religion as a whole.

Recognizing the land rights and concerns of indigenous people should be a key part of global efforts to stop deforestation, an international network of forest policy groups said at a meeting in London on Wednesday. But the public and private sector businesses that are involved in producing and extracting commodities in developing countries need to put more pressure on local governments to recognize the land rights of indigenous people, argued panelists at the meeting organized by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI). Without that pressure, he and other experts warned, efforts to meet a global climate change goal set at the recent Paris talks of keeping the change below two degrees Celsius could be imperiled.

For many viewers of true crime series like the popular podcast "Serial," HBO’s "The Jinx," and Netflix’s "Making a Murderer," questions about the guilt or innocence of Adnan Syed, Robert Durst, and Steven Avery depicted in each show remain the subject of watercooler discussions and debates about the merits of the criminal justice system. But each show’s gripping tone and serial format has also prompted more direct action, including calls for a pardon for Steven Avery, the subject of "Making a Murderer." The series debates whether Avery was treated fairly.

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