William Hibbitts is JURIST’s Deputy Editorial Director. He files this report from Halifax, Nova Scotia.  Yesterday, March 30, the Mass Casualty Commission investigating the 2020 Nova Scotia spree shooting released its final report, marking the culmination of a prolonged investigation into Canada’s worst mass shooting and the RCMP’s ignominious response to it. In a country where [...]

Moldovan police Sunday arrested 54 people during an anti-government protest in the capital city of Chișinău hours after police announced the arrests of seven people linked to a Russian-backed plot to destabilize the country. According to Viorel Cernăuțeanu, the head of Moldova’s General Police Inspectorate (IGP), the plot included incidents of “destabilization and mass disorder” [...]

Canadian Supreme Court Puisne Justice Russell Brown Friday released a statement denying wrongdoing after the Canadian Judicial Council announced that it was reviewing a complaint against the Justice. Chief Justice Richard Wagner, after a conversation with Brown, placed him on leave from the court on February 1 as a result of the investigation. The US [...]

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Thursday denied plotting to assassinate the president of the Russian-backed breakaway state Transnistria. The denial comes after the Transnistrian Ministry of State Security (MGB) said it thwarted an SBU-orchestrated terrorist attack targeting multiple Transnistrian government officials. The MGB claimed in its statement that a number of suspects in the [...]

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen Monday reached a deal to resolve their disagreements surrounding the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol. The deal, called the Windsor Framework, will replace the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol, which regulated trade between Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the [...]

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Wednesday ruled that two South Carolina school disturbance laws cannot be used to prosecute students for disruptive behavior. The could said that children as young as seven were referred to prosecutors by their schools under these laws. One law makes it a crime to “conduct [...]

The five former Memphis police officers implicated in the death of Tyre Nichols Friday pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and various other crimes. The pleas came during the officers’ first court appearance on charges of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official suppression and official misconduct in relation to Nichols’ beating and death. During [...]

The Minnesota Supreme Court Wednesday upheld a state law prohibiting convicted felons from voting while on probation or parole in a 3-1 ruling. The law at issue, Minn. Stat. § 609.165 (2022), restores a felon’s right to vote upon the “discharge” of their sentence, meaning that a felon is only able to vote in the [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada Friday published two opinions which respectively struck down the mandatory minimum sentence for discharging a firearm into a house and upheld the two mandatory minimums for armed robbery with a firearm. The court handed down both decisions simultaneously. In R v. Hills the court considered whether the four-year mandatory minimum [...]

The Trump Organization Friday was fined $1.61 million, the maximum amount allowed by law, after being found guilty of various fraud charges in a New York state court. Former President Trump’s companies, The Trump Corporation and The Trump Payroll Corporation, were assessed fines of $810,000 and $800,000 respectively. A New York jury found both entities [...]