ArcaMax

Among the most powerful people in the justice system are prosecutors and the judges to whom they present their cases. The way our system is set up, judges must rely on whatever facts a prosecutor puts forth inside their courtroom.

It is the prosecutor who weighs the evidence police have gathered and then decides who is charged with a crime. ...Read more

There are some citizens who, in this season of Thanksgiving, believe America is going to hell in a handbasket. I am not one of them.

From my perch in the world of crime and justice, I find more than 686,000 reasons to be thankful. That's the number of full-time law enforcement officers in the United States: 686,665 sworn officers, to quote the ...Read more

What do you think of when you hear the word "whistleblower"? Perhaps "tattletale" or "snitch" pop into your mind. Maybe the word conjures up the image of a person who, at great personal risk, comes forward to reveal illicit activity the public needs to know. Either way, as you have likely noticed, the term whistleblower has been in the news a ...Read more

Here's a word from the field of crime I'm betting you've never heard before: hybristophilia. It's pronounced HIGH-briss-toe-feel-ee-uh, and it's such an obscure word some dictionaries don't even include it -- yet.

Expert criminologists and mental health professionals define hybristophilia in a scientific way: a syndrome in which sexual arousal ...Read more

Rep. Katie Hill didn't have to resign, but she did. She had not been found guilty of sexual impropriety, although the House Ethics Committee had launched a formal investigation into whether the married California representative had engaged in an affair with a congressional staffer.

Hill denied the affair with her male staff member, but after ...Read more

Remember the name Ed Stack. As the CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods, a chain of 727 stores nationwide, he has shown more leadership in trying to solve the nation's gun violence problem than all the politicians in Washington combined. Stack, 65, isn't just talking the talk, he's walking the walk down the path of citizen involvement -- even though it ...Read more

As odd as it might seem, suicide used to be against the law in the United States. How in the world could you punish a dead person for taking that final, fatal act? Still, some states continue to have laws on the books labeling attempted suicide as a criminal act, although prosecutions have been rare.

The latest statistics show more than 47,000 ...Read more

Imagine a day when hardly anyone is able to get away with murder. Think about that. If there were a way to almost guarantee a killer would be discovered and punished, wouldn't the murder rate go into freefall decline?

Frivolous thinking, you say? Well, consider the forensic crime-fighting advances that have been developed in recent years.

...Read more

Say you invented something that became so popular more than a billion people around the globe used it. Wow! You'd be famous worldwide and one of the richest people on earth.

But then, say you discovered some of your customers were criminals using your product in nefarious ways. Terrorists were using it to communicate deadly plots among ...Read more

This is not a column about impeaching our current president. This is a column about the impeachment process and the history of the legal route our nation is obliged to follow to oust a federal official.

In the 231 years since the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Congress has seriously considered impeachment only a handful of times -- just 19, ...Read more

A famous Greek myth recounts the tale of the diabolical King Sisyphus. He was punished for his many murderous actions by being forced to roll a huge boulder up a hill. No matter what method he used, each time Sisyphus neared the top of the hill, the boulder would crash back to the ground, ensuring his punishment was eternal.

I'm reminded of the...Read more

We live in a remarkably overregulated world. Yet, almost unbelievably, there are few hard-and-fast laws to protect those who want to create a baby the nontraditional way. When something goes wrong following a surrogate or in vitro arrangement, the aggrieved parties often find themselves in a murky space without a clear-cut legal leg to stand ...Read more

The woman's Facebook page reveals she is a high school graduate, fit and trim-looking and nicely dressed. She lives in small town in the southern U.S. and is a devoted Christian who loves animals. Each photograph shows her with a beaming, trusting smile. She is almost always seen standing alone, and a simple scroll down her Facebook page makes...Read more