For eligible people detained before trial, 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.
Previous
Next
For eligible people detained before trial, 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.
-
November 12, 2026
A divided Second Circuit panel affirmed a decision to free a man after he spent decades in prison for a Connecticut murder, holding that his trial attorney should have investigated the claims of an eyewitness who could have cleared him.
-
November 12, 2026
A Sixth Circuit panel has revived a Michigan prisoner's constitutional lawsuit, finding that two previously dismissed lawsuits did not count as strikes under a federal law restricting inmates' ability to file cases without paying court fees, while one judge urged Congress to close loopholes that allow prisoners to repeatedly bring meritless claims.
-
November 10, 2026
A Seventh Circuit panel has ordered immigration officials to reconsider a Jamaican man's bid to reopen his deportation case.
-
November 06, 2026
Two descendants of Black people once enslaved by an Indigenous tribe implored an Oklahoma federal court to keep alive their challenge to an effort to deny them citizenship in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, saying the tribe's principal chief has for more than a year defied a tribal Supreme Court ruling that gave them the right and is wrongly trying to use an immunity claim to avoid a federal treaty that guarantees them citizenship.
-
November 06, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court will wrap up its November sitting by hearing disputes over whether federal or state law should control how much compensation landowners receive for private condemnations under the Natural Gas Act and if the U.S. Department of Labor can use in-house courts to issue civil penalties for violations of its temporary agricultural worker program.
-
November 05, 2026
Outgoing California Gov. Gavin Newsom moved to commute the sentences of all 548 of the state's death row prisoners to life without parole, saying Thursday that the death penalty was morally unjustifiable.
-
November 04, 2026
The Texas solicitor general urged the U.S. Supreme Court during oral arguments Wednesday to overturn a decision allowing a death row prisoner's successive habeas claim for intellectual disability under new diagnostic standards, saying the challenge did not qualify for a rare exception under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
-
November 03, 2026
A Jamaican national who told Law360 he feared the end of his three-decade stint in a New York prison would lead to being deported to Jamaica, where he would likely be killed, is seeking asylum after being taken into immigration enforcement custody last week.
-
November 02, 2026
A New Jersey federal judge tossed a proposed class action Friday challenging the Garden State's practice of keeping newborn babies' residual blood spots without parental consent, finding the parents haven't alleged viable Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment claims, in part because the state agreed to destroy the blood spots at issue.
-
November 02, 2026
Some U.S. Supreme Court justices considering a First Step Act case Monday appeared caught off guard by a government lawyer's argument that the defendant's impending release from prison renders the appeal moot.
-
October 30, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court will begin its November sitting by hearing oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of Colorado's universal preschool program and a dispute asking the justices to settle a circuit split over whether defendants in civil lawsuits can seek summary judgment based on unpled affirmative defenses.
-
October 30, 2026
The highest criminal court in Texas has ruled that a man cannot suppress evidence that he had an illegal firearm in his car because a vehicle inventory taken by police did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights, even if the search did not follow department policy.
-
October 29, 2026
The Fourth Circuit has extended a stay preventing the removal of a self-represented noncitizen detainee who said his "mental condition" prevented him from fully arguing his case to an immigration judge, finding that the full administrative record is needed.
-
October 28, 2026
Washington jurors returned a $52 million verdict in favor of 23 plaintiffs who accused the state's Department of Corrections of allowing an active tuberculosis outbreak to fester and spread to hundreds of people at its prison facilities over nearly two years.
-
October 28, 2026
The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office has accused the chair of the city's Police Oversight Commission of selling witness information to a man held in prison on attempted murder charges in a domestic violence case.
-
October 27, 2026
An Eleventh Circuit panel on Tuesday reversed a Florida federal judge's decision to reduce on compassionate-release grounds the 39-year sentence of a man convicted of robbing drug dealers, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's recent opinion in a similar case, Rutherford v. U.S.
-
October 27, 2026
The Tenth Circuit ruled that a man convicted of killing an Oklahoma state trooper nearly 30 years ago cannot have a portion of his conviction dropped, finding Tuesday that under federal law, killing a law enforcement officer in furtherance of a drug offense meets the definition of a crime of violence.
-
October 27, 2026
A Michigan federal judge approved a $500,000 settlement Tuesday in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the mother of a 17-year-old girl killed in the 2021 Oxford High School shooting, bringing an end to litigation against the school district after the Sixth Circuit ruled school officials were entitled to qualified immunity.
-
October 27, 2026
A Georgia federal judge declined to block the transfer of hundreds of federal pretrial detainees to a facility roughly 200 miles from Atlanta's federal courthouse, calling defense lawyers' argument that their clients' constitutional rights were being violated premature.
-
October 26, 2026
A woman who says a former Detroit police officer kidnapped and raped her at gunpoint in 2005 has filed a proposed class action seeking more than $10 million from the city, alleging officials ignored warnings about the officer and allowed nearly 12,000 sexual assault evidence kits to go untested, concealing his identity for two decades.
-
October 23, 2026
A Connecticut appeals court on Friday ordered a new trial for a man convicted of sexual assault of a child, ruling the prosecutor was incorrectly allowed to ask witnesses to evaluate the credibility of the victim's testimony.
-
October 23, 2026
A Washington federal judge granted final approval to a $4.2 million settlement to end class claims that Rapid Investments LLC and Axiom Bank NA charged former prisoners excessive and unfair fees on prepaid debit cards that held their personal cash that was returned to them upon release.
-
October 23, 2026
A New York state appeals court has ruled that a man is entitled to a new trial on drug possession charges after it was discovered that a trial judge had an off-the-record conversation with a juror to resolve a dispute about how to decide the case.
-
October 22, 2026
The Sixth Circuit has ruled that a man convicted for his role in a gang kidnapping did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in an Instagram group chat log seized from another street gang member, so he could not challenge search warrants for other members' social media accounts.
-
October 22, 2026
A Manhattan federal judge has granted preliminary approval to a $60 million settlement resolving claims that New York City stripped property owners of their homes and accumulated equity through a foreclosure program that plaintiffs say disproportionately affected Black and Latino communities, attorneys said Thursday.