This is not only because of privacy concerns—the people who contribute their DNA to such endeavors, whether medical or genealogical, rarely expect to have their genetic code scrutinized by cops—but also because those databases haven’t been vetted for use by law enforcement. Police in Idaho Falls, for example, were able to obtain a warrant for Usry’s cheek cells because his father’s DNA “matched 34 of 35 alleles” of that of Angie Dodge’s killer.

Elsewhere in the nation, cops are largely free to search as they see fit, which is why Idaho Falls police decided it was OK to sift through an Ancestry database of genetic data from thousands of people with no criminal records.

In Usry’s case the crime scene DNA bore numerous similarities to that of Usry’s father, who years earlier had donated a DNA sample to a genealogy project through his Mormon church in Mississippi. That project’s database was later purchased by Ancestry, which made it publicly searchable—a decision that didn’t take into account the possibility that cops might someday use it to hunt for genetic leads.

The bewildered Usry soon learned that he was a suspect in the 1996 murder of an Idaho Falls teenager named Angie Dodge. Though a man had been convicted of that crime after giving an iffy confession, his DNA didn’t match what was found at the crime scene.

Usry recalls. The grilling continued downtown until one of the three men—an FBI agent—told Usry he wanted to swab the inside of Usry’s cheek but wouldn’t explain his reason for doing so, though he emphasized that their warrant meant Usry could not refuse.

He allegedly beat her with a baseball bat, dragged her behind a car, strangled her until she blacked out on the floor and told her over and over how he would kill her if she ever left him.

Someone had poured bleach in her gas tank. Laura knew who was responsible. Her abusive ex-boyfriend, Victor Acuna-Sanchez, was out on bail and had a history of destroying her stuff. “No one else would have done this,” she told police.

Two days before she died, Laura Aceves stood on the side of the road and frantically dialed the police for the last time.

rosecution and victim services should consider a case management model for victims after trial in which each victim would be assigned to a team. The team would include a prosecutor, victim advocate and social worker to assess needs and coordinate services.

AIDS clinic assigned Steve a doctor and a social worker who identified his needs. Over the next 15 years, they helped him with meals, medication, counseling, job training, substance abuse treatment, housing assistance and finding community. This case management approach is considered best practice response to the AIDS epidemic and is largely funded by the government. These are precisely the resources every domestic violence survivor deserves.

wasn’t sure Steve – who as a disabled alcoholic with AIDS, left homeless after his boyfriend’s violence caused his eviction – would have survived the years between his court appearance and when I tracked him down for an interview. Instead, I learned Steve’s AIDS actually saved him.

. Steve’s boyfriend smashed Steve’s head with a bottle. Several months later, he slit Steve’s throat. Even though Steve nearly died, he tried everything to avoid testifying, including committing himself to the psych ward during the trial – in response to his boyfriend’s manipulative mix of threats and expressions of love.

courts only have control over defendants – they cannot order victims into treatment. That means current criminal justice reform efforts focus primarily on improving services for defendants.

majority of the victims I spoke with accessed services after the prosecution and felt those services helped them. Marina, for example, found temporary housing for her and her daughter through a domestic violence organization. Other victims got counseling or mental health medications.

ften the violence stopped and the victims survived. However, for all of these victims, trauma – not love – endured. Worse yet, every victim felt abandoned by the prosecution and left to manage that trauma on their own. For example, one victim told me she felt “dumped” after the tria

Today, Marina is afraid and alone. She is still dealing with her trauma and still hiding from her boyfriend who has since been released. She shuns intimate relationships for fear of more violence. Her daughter, now 31, lives in another state with two small children and has no contact with Marina. She has been in many abusive relationships, became addicted to meth and has tried to kill herself. Marina and her daughter are both alive, but the prosecution hardly looks like a success to me now

The judge sentenced her boyfriend to five years and prohibited him from any contact with Marina or her daughter. To me, the prosecution was a complete success. Marina viewed it differently. Furious, she screamed at me, saying I had ruined her life.

Marina suffered gruesome violence at the hands of her boyfriend. Marina testified at trial that her boyfriend tried to rip out her tongue and that she believed his threats to kill her and her 10-year-old daughter. The jury agreed and convicted him.

For nearly a decade, I believed I was helping improve victims’ lives by prosecuting people who committed domestic violence in Seattle, Washington.

No one should be tricked, deceived, coerced, violently overwhelmed, drugged or intoxicated into sexual conduct,” she said. “Everyone has the right to determine who they engage with sexually based on both knowledge of the action and clear and informed knowledge of the actor.”

a professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law, in Columbia, who helped draft the bill. “The former is abduction. Kidnapping by fraud is if I tell them a lie to get them to accompany me to a location. It’s the same thing with rape by deception. If someone is pretending to be someone’s boyfriend or spouse and they think they’re consenting to a sexual act with that person, that seems to be rape by fraud in the same way as kidnapping by fraud.”

Donald Ward was acquitted in the Indiana case and his record expunged. Kirk Freeman, his lawyer, argued that lying and deceit didn’t count as rape. In January of this year, legislators introduced two bills that added a definition of deception to Indiana’s rape law, and also defined any sexual activity as rape if there was no consent. Neither bill was heard.

In 2014, a sexual assault by fraud bill was introduced in New Jersey after a woman was impregnated by a man who falsely claimed to be a British spy. The bill went nowhere.

Some worry that legislating deception is a slippery slope, because where do you draw the line? Is it deception if a woman dates two men concurrently and they don’t know about each other? Or what if you inject Botox into your crow’s feet and say you are younger than you are, or say “I love you” in order to have sex, but don’t mean it?

Chief Justice Mark Cady ultimately ruled in the woman’s favor, noting that Mr. Kelso-Christy had denied her the “‘freedom of choice’ that breathes life into our sexual abuse statutes.” He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In Iowa in April 2015, Michael Kelso-Christy, who was 23 at the time, created a fake Facebook account under the name of a man who had attended his high school. He messaged several women under this name, and one woman actually met him at her home, where she was waiting for him blindfolded, per his request. They had sex, and he left. Soon after, his Facebook account disappeared and he stopped messaging her. That’s when the woman realized he was an impostor, and called the police.

In some states, “If you pretend to be a particular person such as Tom Brady and the other person is relying on that claim to consent to sex, that may be deemed a sexual assault,” said Mr. Shear.

“Gender fraud” — when people misrepresent their birth gender to potential sexual mates — likewise remains a gray area. Sean O’Neill was convicted of gender fraud in Colorado in 1996, and five people have been convicted in the United Kingdom since 2012

t’s considered rape by deception if you impersonate a spouse or partner. The same is true for those who abuse medical privilege, like Larry Nassar, the doctor for the American women’s gymnastics team, who had told his patients that touching their genitals was medically necessary. He was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison.

Ms. Short does not equate trickery to obtain sex with violent rape, she does believe it should be a Class D or E felony, with jail sentences of one to four years and a fine of $10,000.

consent is “freely given, knowledgeable, and informed agreement.” This may sound obvious, but it’s actually not, because there’s no universal definition of consent in the United States.

s. Finney thought so and went to the police, who arrested Donald Grant Ward, the 19-year-old impostor. Mr. Ward, a friend of her boyfriend’s, admitted that he knew he was tricking Ms. Finney; he was charged with two counts of rape, which carries a sentence of three to 16 years.

She soon stopped to go to the bathroom and, when she returned, discovered, to her horror, that it wasn’t her boyfriend who was in bed with her.Was it rape?

while suffering from mental breakdown brought on by a methamphetamine binge, he deliberately rammed his car into a parked van and ended up in jail, where he agreed to enter a substance-abuse treatment program under the supervision of a drug court judge.

“I have two beautiful children and they used to be the most important thing in the world to me, but that’s changed,” Hoagland said. “The most important thing for me today is to stay clean and sober, and that allows me to be a dad to somebody.”

center of the conversation is the proliferation of drug courts. While conservatives and many liberals see the expansion of these courts as key to reform, libertarians and some on the left say society’s response to drug abuse should take place outside the courthouse altogether

“I think there are still politicians who haven’t broken free of the thinking of the past. They don’t seem to understand that there has been a sea change among American voters, who don’t always feel that incarceration is the best tack when it comes to what we do about low-level nonviolent crime.”

the number of violent crimes in Texas dropped by nearly 20,000, and property crimes fell by five times as much. The state authorized the closing of one prison in 2011 and two more this year.

n Texas, for example, lawmakers have cut billions of dollars from the prison system, while investing hundreds of millions in drug courts and in counseling programs that aim to help people recover from drug addictions and get their lives under control.

members of Congress from both parties have teamed up to introduce legislation that would reduce penalties for nonviolent drug offenders.

mid-1970s, when lawmakers first began enacting tough anti-drug policies that have collectively come to be known as the “war on drugs,” the number of people behind bars has increased fivefold, peaking at 2.2 million in 2010. Drug offenses accounted for much of the surge. From 1980 to 2010, the number of those incarcerated on drug charges shot up from 41,000 to more than a half-million.

In Texas, legislators have sharply increased investments in treatment programs and in drug courts -– specialized judicial systems whose judges can order drug offenders to undergo treatment as an alternative to jail.

these alternatives represent a major shift in America’s response to illegal drug use.

“People we’ve dealt with over and over and over again are getting treatment and getting into housing and getting jobs,” said Lt. Deanna Nollette, a supervisor in the police department. “It’s a pretty big surprise.”

With the approval of Seattle prosecutors and politicians, the police began directing repeat drug offenders to social-service workers who offered to help them pay for rent and school and referred them to business owners who were willing to hire people with criminal backgrounds.

"We are reviewing our internal processes ... taking a look at whether we need to wait for lab reports before allowing defendants to plead guilty," Chandler said.

Law professor Gross said the registry's report should be seen as a positive, as it highlights the work being done to address wrongful convictions.He also pointed to the work of the Brooklyn District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit, which in 2014 exonerated 10 individuals in murder cases that were more than 20 years old.

One of the reasons people plead guilty for a crime they have not committed is they can't make bail and have to wait in jail while waiting for trial. If they are convicted, they might get decades in prison. They plead guilty if they are offered a deal that is too good to resist."

While Harris County still tests drug evidence in cases after a guilty plea, many jurisdictions around the country don't.

Most of the 33 drug exoneration cases in Harris County in 2014 were ones where individuals pleaded guilty before a lab test was completed. There were often delays in completing tests and even when they were finished, there could be additional delays in getting the results to prosecutors or defense attorneys.

The U.S. saw a record number of exonerations in 2014, and it was due in part to 33 cases in Texas in which individuals had their drug convictions dismissed after lab tests determined they never had illegal substances, a report released Tuesday shows.

Advocates for victims have argued strongly against revisiting pre-2012 murder sentences or holding parole hearings for the convicts, saying it would inflict new suffering on the victims’ families.

In 30 cases, the new sentences have been for 50 years or more. One inmate who had been convicted of gun robbery and rape has received consecutive sentences totaling 170 years.

Florida’s defense was that Shimeek’s sentence was not literally “life without parole” and that the life span of a young inmate could not be predicted.

The 2010 decision, Graham v. Florida, forbade sentences of life without parole for juveniles not convicted of murder and said offenders must be offered a “meaningful opportunity for release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.” The ruling applied to those who had been previously sentenced.

Supreme Court decisions built on a 2005 ruling that banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders as cruel and unusual punishment, stating that offenders younger than 18 must be treated differently from adults.

“They sentenced him to death, that’s how I see it,” Shimeek’s grandmother Wonona Graham said.

He pleaded guilty to attempted murder and robbery, hoping for leniency as a young offender with no record of violence. The judge called his conduct “heinous” and sentenced him to 70 years without parole.

United States Supreme Court in 2010 and 2012 acted to curtail the use of mandatory life sentences for juveniles, accepting the argument that children, even those who are convicted of murder, are less culpable than adults and usually deserve a chance at redemption.

Ultimately, police procedures need to require more restraint when it comes to the taking of life.

“shooting a dog brings more heat down on an agency than an officer-involved shooting of a human.”

a San Diego man saw police kill his service dog, Burberry, who helped him deal with depression after the death of his father.

Yet it happens all the time: Sometimes dogs are killed when police enter a house to seize drugs, but just as often it seems they die when officers have the wrong information entirely. In July, police in Topeka, Kan., killed the dog of a retired judge when they entered his back yard on a false burglary call, and in 2008 Maryland police notoriously raided a mayor’s house and killed his dogs, on the mistaken belief that he was part of a drug ring

Officers “need to realize they’re there to neutralize, not control.”

Trainers say that in many cases, officers simply have no idea how to read a dog’s body language.

Yet killing isn’t necessarily the only option. After all, just like police officers, postal workers regularly encounter both vicious and gregarious dogs on their daily rounds. But letter carriers don’t kill dogs, even though they are bitten by the thousands every year. Instead, the Postal Service offers its employees training on how to avoid bites.

Research by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals suggests that half of all police firearm discharges involve the shooting of a dog. In Buffalo, local news channel WGRZ conducted an in-depth investigation of the city’s practices, concluding that police shot 92 dogs in a three-year period, with a single officer responsible for 26 shootings.

Dutchess’s owners are still grieving the loss of their dog, who used to sleep in bed with their 8-year-old son, and are stunned by the turn of events. “All she would have done was put some slobber on his shoes,” says Gillian Palacios

she naturally bounded out to greet him. In a moment captured by disturbing surveillance footage, as Dutchess came toward the officer, he instinctively fired three gunshots into her head

Nor need they be incomprehensible. Adopting a criticalapproach offers an effective way of responding to the numbers we are sure to encounter. Being critical requires more thought, but failing to adopt a critical mind-set makes us powerless to evaluate what others tell us. When we fail to think critically, the statistics we hear might just as well be magical

Claims about social problems usually involve arguments about the problem's causes and potential solutions. The critical might ask whether these arguments are convincing. Are they logical? Does the proposed solution seem feasible and appropriate? And so on. Being critical -- adopting a skeptical, analytical stance when confronted with claims -- is an approach that goes far beyond simply dealing with statistics.

In practice, however, the critical need not investigate the origin of every statistic. Rather, being critical means appreciating the inevitable limitations that affect all statistics, rather than being awestruck in the presence of numbers. It means not being too credulous, not accepting every statistic at face value.

very statistic has flaws. The issue is whether a particular statistic's flaws are severe enough to damage its usefulness. Is the definition so broad that it encompasses too many false positives (or so narrow that it excludes too many false negatives)? How would changing the definition alter the statistic?

People choose definitions, measurements, and samples for all sorts of reasons: Perhaps they want to emphasize some aspect of a problem; perhaps it is easier or cheaper to gather data in a particular way -- many considerations can come into play. Every statistic is a compromise among choices. This means that every definition -- and every measurement and every sample -- probably has limitations and can be criticized.

In order to interpret statistics, we need more than a checklist of common errors. We need a general approach, an orientation, a mind-set that we can use to think about new statistics that we encounter. We ought to approach statistics thoughtfully. This can be hard to do, precisely because so many people in our society treat statistics as fetishes. We might call this the mind-set of the Awestruck -- the people who don't think critically, who act as though statistics have magical powers. The awestruck know they don't always understand the statistics they hear, but this doesn't bother them. After all, who can expect to understand magical numbers? The reverential fatalism of the awestruck is not thoughtful -- it is a way of avoiding thought. We need a different approach.

But can't you prove anything with statistics? It depends on what "prove" means. If we want to know, say, how many children are "gunned down" each year, we can't simply guess -- pluck a number from thin air: 100, 1,000, 10,000, 35 trillion, whatever. Obviously, there's no reason to consider an arbitrary guess "proof" of anything. However, it might be possible for someone -- using records kept by police departments or hospital emergency rooms or coroners -- to keep track of children who have been shot; compiling careful, complete records might give us a fairly accurate idea of the number of gunned-down children. If that number seems accurate enough, we might consider it very strong evidence -- or proof.

Who counts child gunshot deaths, and how? What is meant by a "child" (some C.D.F. statistics about violence include everyone under age 25)? What is meant by "killed by guns" (gunshot-death statistics often include suicides and accidents, as well as homicides)? But people rarely ask questions of this sort when they encounter statistics. Most of the time, most people simply accept statistics without question.

Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled