by Gene Weingarten | Aug 15, 2026 | Criminal Justice, culture, Opinion
At 1 p.m. Saturday, 17-month-old Daniel Coleman will be memorialized in Atlanta. As of Friday night, it was unclear whether his mother will arrive at the mortuary in handcuffs. After a fraught legal battle, she won permission to attend the service. Deja Coleman will arrive in a police car. She may or may not be handcuffed. The sheriff’s office will decide whether she can wear civilian clothes appropriate for a funeral or if she will be in a green polyester prison jumpsuit. Coleman has been incarcerated since July 29, the day she accidentally killed her son.
This unspeakable tragedy happens alarmingly often to parents from all walks of life — mothers and fathers of every race, rich and poor, absentminded and fanatically organized.
Last month, Coleman, 29, forgot to drop her youngest child, Daniel, off at daycare after she walked her other two children, ages 6 and 4, inside; she soon left Daniel in her car in the employee parking lot of the hospital where she worked as an assistant nurse, and he sweltered to death. Neither Coleman nor the police contest that narrative. By all accounts, what happened to Daniel was an accident occasioned by sleep deprivation and stress. Friends describe Coleman as a cheerful, upbeat person and a devoted mother. Her pastor, Jesse Hardy, said “she would run through a brick wall for those children.”
What makes this case unusual is that Coleman has been charged with second-degree murder. In Georgia, such a crime carries a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 10 years.
This unspeakable tragedy happens alarmingly often to parents from all walks of life — mothers and fathers
by Leslie Morgan Steiner | Aug 7, 2026 | Criminal Justice, Opinion
At 26, I should have been preparing to walk across the stage at Wharton business school holding an MBA diploma. Instead, I was standing on my own in a Philadelphia courtroom about to ask a judge for a piece of paper that could save my life.
Doom was my dominant emotion. When I told the judge that my husband — also a Wharton MBA candidate — held a loaded gun to my head and savagely beat me more times than I could remember, I knew the judge would likely believe my husband, not me.
When I saw Ohio Rep. Max Miller’s livestream video denying allegations that he abused his ex-wife Emily Moreno and their daughter, I felt my body go on alert.
Because standing across from me in court was my husband — a tall, blond, athletic Irish American in his early 30s, a magna cum laude Ivy League graduate, a former Wall Street investment banker, the first member of his family to graduate from college.
They say abusers are charming. Somehow this implies that if you were smart enough, you would see the invisible warning on their forehead stating, “I AM CHARMING AND CREDIBLE SO THAT I CAN KILL YOU ONE DAY WITH IMPUNITY.”
I wasn’t that smart. No one really is. He had fooled me and I knew he would fool the judge. No one would believe me, I thought. I was sure the next time, he would make good on his threats to destroy me.
This all happened long ago. This past Sunday, when I saw Ohio Rep. Max Miller’s livestream video denying allegations that he abused his ex-wife Emily Moreno and their daughter, I felt my body go on alert. Miller has denied allegations of abuse that include throwing hot water at Moreno, holding a gun to her head and possibly fracturing his 2 1/2-year-old daughter’s collarbone. Yet watching him
by Steve Benen | Aug 4, 2026 | Criminal Justice, Justice Department, Maddowblog, News, Politics
When Donald Trump decided to blame “vandals” for his Reflecting Pool fiasco, many of the president’s critics pointed to the inconvenient fact that these nefarious scoundrels did not appear to exist in reality. Many of the White House’s Republican allies, however, clung to a specific argument.
That some people were formally accused by prosecutors of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, Republicans said, suggested that Trump’s claims couldn’t be entirely made up. After all, these GOP partisans argued, if the president’s claims didn’t have at least some merit, the charges wouldn’t have been filed in the first place.
This argument has collapsed in humiliating fashion in recent days.
The most notable example came late Friday, when U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., moved to drop her felony case against former Olympian David Hearn, conceding that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by “botched work” performed by the project’s contractor, not by criminal conduct.
Hearn, however, was not alone. The New York Times reported:
Prosecutors in Washington are dropping charges against three more defendants who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. […]
Along with Mr. Hearn, prosecutors moved to drop charges against three others: Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers, who all were charged with destruction of property less than $1,000.
For the White House, this is a genuine political disaster. With four collapsed cases, it appears increasingly obvious that the incumbent president’s embarrassment at his own failure led him to advance these fraudulent claims to the American public.
Common sense suggests that Trump should try to change the subject and hope people forget that he spent
by Duncan Levin | Aug 1, 2026 | Congress, Criminal Justice, Opinion
President Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general permanently and renominate him again after recalcitrant Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are out of the Senate underscores what this confirmation process is really about.
It is not about who will run the Justice Department but whether the Senate will endorse what Blanche has already done there.
Rejecting the nomination would not immediately remove Blanche from the department’s leadership.
Blanche, the acting attorney general since April, was previously the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general, overseeing the department’s criminal and national security work. If Trump withdraws the nomination, Blanche could remain in control — potentially well into 2027 — under federal statutes governing succession and acting appointments. Rejecting the nomination would not immediately remove Blanche from the department’s leadership.
Set aside, for a moment, that the Republican opposition publicly blocking Blanche’s confirmation currently consists of two senators — both acting only after their political futures were settled. The context leading up to this week’s confirmation standoff is important.
Play
Trump may wait out GOP holdouts on Blanche nomination
July 31, 2026 / 09:31
Blanche was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer from 2023 through 2024. As a former federal prosecutor, Blanche gave legal vocabulary and professional credibility to Trump’s grievances about investigative “witch hunts” and “corrupt” prosecutors. Blanche helped turn Trump’s belief that prosecution is political warfare into a theory of law enforcement.
Then Trump placed him in charge of law enforcement, and the defense theory became the governing philosophy.
Consider the record: Under Blanche, the DOJ has repeatedly pursued people Trump publicly identified as enemies. Cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General
by Anthony Coley | Jul 31, 2026 | Congress, Criminal Justice, Opinion
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche would have us believe the story ended when he declared President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund dead. It didn’t. Recent news this week shows the administration may not need that fund at all.
Two days before the Senate Judiciary Committee was set to vote Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general, the Justice Department announced a seven-figure payout to Paul Vaughn, an anti-abortion activist whom Blanche has described as a victim of Biden-era weaponization. Vaughn is not a Capitol rioter, and his case is not theirs. But The New York Times reported the settlement for what it is: proof that this DOJ is willing to use an existing federal statute — the Federal Tort Claims Act, or FTCA — to compensate people it believes were victims of political prosecution.
The DOJ doesn’t need a new commission or a special compensation fund to if it chooses to compensate Jan. 6 defendants.
No commission. No $1.8 billion fund. No press conference about “victims of lawfare” seeking redress. Just a settlement, quietly reached, through the same legal machinery that hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants are now lined up to use.
That machinery didn’t appear this week. It was there before there was a fund, and it will be there long after Blanche has finished talking about the fund as though it were the whole story.
Congress enacted the FTCA to compensate people harmed by government negligence or misconduct. It has been used to resolve claims involving everything from medical malpractice at Veterans Affairs hospitals to the FBI’s failures preceding the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church. It was designed to compensate victims
by Keisha N. Blain | Jul 30, 2026 | Criminal Justice, Opinion
In a striking example of how misinformation can spread during a developing news story, a viral Facebook post claimed that Nolan Wells, the Black Mississippi teenager whose death after visiting a Gulf Coast island with a group of white friends remains under investigation, was related to the legendary journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. But Michelle Duster, a verified descendant of Ida B. Wells, says that there is no historical or genealogical evidence linking the two and that she does not know of anyone alive today with the last name Wells who can claim a familial connection to her great-grandmother.
“It is important during this incredibly sensitive time to validate with credible sources any information that is shared,” Duster told me. “Despite viral social media posts implying a connection, Nolan Wells is not related to my great-grandmother Ida B. Wells. They simply share the same last name, as many others do.”
Nolan Wells is not related to my great-grandmother Ida B. Wells. They simply share the same last name, as many others do.michelle duster
As the investigation into the death of the athletically talented 18-year-old college student continues, social media has been rife with misinformation, including doctored images, fabricated audio recordings and unsubstantiated claims about what happened that weekend. Some of those unsubstantiated claims include the role race may have played in Wells’ death, including claims that he might have been killed by white people.
Again, we do not yet know how or why Nolan Wells died, and there is no evidence to date to prove any of those claims, including those alleging that race played a role in his death. But for
