Marin County, California has served as “Ground Zero” in the ongoing fight against judicial corruption, thanks to decades of public outcry, FBI investigations, judicial recall attempts, state and outside audits, and privately commissioned reports about the serious harm that the courts are causing in residents’ lives. The Marin Courts have engaged in questionable behavior for as long as anyone can … [Read more...]

The Leonard Lopate Show: Are Child Sexual Abuse Cases More Common Than We Think? In the early 1990s, a new narrative emerged that child sex abuse cases were part of a “moral panic” that produced a witch hunt, and the children who testified were not reliable and easily swayed by prosecutors. But Ross Cheit reveals that the issue had not been blown out of proportion at all. His book The … [Read more...]

Dr. Nicole Brown’s quest to understand her misbehaving pediatric patients began with a hunch. Brown was completing her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, when she realized that many of her low-income patients had been diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These children lived in households and neighborhoods where violence and relentless stress … [Read more...]

They had both lost, one mother in criminal court, the other in family court. But Mary Winkler, convicted of voluntary manslaughter for shooting her husband, got her children back. The other parent never did. “I was sitting in my living room in disbelief,” Florida mother Linda Marie Sacks said of watching a 2008 TV news story about Winkler. “All I did was try to protect my children and raised … [Read more...]

In Broward County, Fla., Spate of Judges in D.U.I. Arrests MIAMI — Lawyers gawked from office windows last month when a BMW S.U.V. swiped a parked police cruiser in the parking lot of a courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, then slammed into a gate over and over again. A judge was at the wheel. As lawyers used smartphones to snap pictures of the morning spectacle, Judge Lynn D. Rosenthal became … [Read more...]