Beat: PC AZ SJ CJR

A Maricopa County Attorney’s Office spokesperson said it “cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer’s statements constituted a ‘true threat.’ The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office announced Tuesday that it won’t file criminal charges against a Phoenix police officer who allegedly threatened to shoot the city’s mayor. Mayor Kate Gallego was given additional law...

Bree Burkitt Associated Press January 6, 2021 7:58 am MST

Generations of historical trauma and increased exposure to violence make young Native Americans more vulnerable to the complicated, often contradictory clutches of the juvenile justice system, legal experts say. Once in the justice system, Native children become lost in a jurisdictional web, a dysfunctional state system, and a federal system that has no proper place for them.

Calah Schlabach December 30, 2020 8:01 am MST

An estimated 76,000 young people are charged as adults each year. Most are for nonviolent crimes, such as drug and property offenses. Tens of thousands of children, mostly teens, are prosecuted as adults every year, and some serve out their sentences in prisons where most of the inmates are adults. Nationally, no single organization tracks...

Delia Johnson December 29, 2020 8:06 am MST

The Gault case determined that children have the same rights to due process as adults, including access to a lawyer. However, children are still systemically denied this right.  One day in June 1964, Gerald Gault and a friend made a bad decision. They made an obscene phone call to Ora Cook, Gault’s neighbor. Cook called...

Katherine Sypher December 28, 2020 7:55 am MST

Maricopa County-area law enforcement have shot at more people in the months since Floyd's death than during the same time frame in previous years.

Bree Burkitt December 22, 2020 10:01 am MST