Justice

April 28, 2014 - Prisoners' advocates call the reforms a step forward, but they don't address discrimination in presidential pardons or apply to everyone serving harsh sentences from outdated guidelines.

April 25, 2014 - Mabel Williams, who with her husband, Robert F. Williams, advocated armed self-defense against racist violence in Jim Crow North Carolina, has passed away. In exile in Cuba during the 1960s, she and her husband launched Radio Free Dixie and published the influential underground newsletter The Crusader.

April 17, 2014 - A new study sheds light on how the color of your skin influences the quality of the air you breathe. And while the South ranks relatively high for environmental inequality, it turns out that it's among the regions with the least disparity between whites and nonwhites when it comes to lung-damaging air pollution exposure.

April 17, 2014 - Mississippi's surveillance of civil rights activists in the 1960s turned it into a police state. Today, widespread government spying has turned the entire United States into a police state.

April 4, 2014 - The ruling means that the woman whose drug use had her facing a possible life term can at most be charged with manslaughter in the death of her stillborn daughter.

March 28, 2014 - Civil rights groups suing North Carolina over its voter suppression law scored a victory in federal court this week with a ruling that state lawmakers must release some e-mails and other documents related to the bill's passage.

March 28, 2014 - This week Amnesty International released its annual report on the death penalty worldwide, finding that the United States executes more people than just four other countries -- China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It also shows that when it comes to state-sanctioned killing, the U.S. South is an outlier among outliers.