Northwestern University: Legal scholar’s new website offers a picture of the criminal justice system. “Leigh Bienen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern Law, recently launched ‘2003 Chicago Murders,’ a compendium of numbers, system identifiers, dates and other information about 140 death-eligible murders in Cook County, all cases where an indictment for murder was returned during the period of Jan. 1, 2003, to June 30, 2003. The cases are divided into three subgroups based on the length of the sentence imposed. All of the data on the website, which comes from public records, includes names of the defendants and victims, defendants’ zip code and age at offense, method of killing and many more details. The data can be downloaded and analyzed by the user. “
murder
New York Times: Son Stabs Father 15 Times on Zoom Call, Killing Him, Prosecutors Say
New York Times: Son Stabs Father 15 Times on Zoom Call, Killing Him, Prosecutors Say. “A 32-year-old Long Island man was arrested and charged with murder on Thursday after fatally stabbing his father more than a dozen times while he was on a Zoom video chat with about 20 people, the authorities said. The father, Dwight Powers, 72, had been participating in the Zoom call at his home on Dixon Avenue in Amityville, N.Y., when he was attacked by his son Thomas Scully-Powers, just after noon on Thursday, the Suffolk County Police Department said.”
People: Pa. Researcher Making ‘Very Significant Findings’ in Coronavirus Killed in Suspected Murder-Suicide
People: Pa. Researcher Making ‘Very Significant Findings’ in Coronavirus Killed in Suspected Murder-Suicide. “A University of Pittsburgh researcher on the cusp of ‘very significant findings’ tied to COVID-19 infections was shot dead Saturday in what police say appears to be a murder-suicide. Ross Township police discovered the body of Bing Liu, 37, a research assistant professor in the university’s School of Medicine, in his home with gunshots to his head, neck, torso and extremities, according to a statement from the department obtained by PEOPLE.”
CNN: Three family members charged in shooting death of security guard who told a customer to put on a face mask
CNN: Three family members charged in shooting death of security guard who told a customer to put on a face mask. “Three family members have been charged in the killing of a security guard who told a customer at a Michigan Family Dollar store to wear a state-mandated face mask, officials said on Monday. Calvin Munerlyn, 43, died at a Flint hospital after he was shot in the head Friday, said Michigan State Police Lt. David Kaiser.”
UConn Today: Humanities Institute Fellow Examines Archive of School Shootings Fiction
UConn Today: Humanities Institute Fellow Examines Archive of School Shootings Fiction. “Hayley Stefan is a doctoral candidate in English and a Humanities Institute Dissertation Research Fellow who is focusing her research on the growing genre of school shooting fiction. Her dissertation is titled: ‘Writing National Tragedy: Race & Disability in Contemporary U.S. Literature and Culture.’ From her dissertation research, she has established The School Shooting Fiction Archive, which investigates school shooting fiction. The archive currently includes 76 school shooting fiction texts published between 1977 and 2019, with more than half published after the shootings in Sandy Hook in December, 2012. She spoke with UConn Today about her research.”
Florida State University News: FSU professor establishes new Emmett Till Lecture and Archives Fund
Florida State University News: FSU professor establishes new Emmett Till Lecture and Archives Fund. “The Emmett Till Lecture and Archives Fund will provide much needed support to maintain, enhance, promote and grow the Emmett Till Archives at Florida State University Libraries. The fund will primarily support an annual Emmett Till Archives lecture and add to the collection. Other activities provided by the fund may include travel for researchers and students to work with the collections and funds for student scholarships and projects produced from the Till Archives.”
Washington Post: Father of slain journalist Alison Parker takes on YouTube over alleged refusal to remove graphic videos
Washington Post: Father of slain journalist Alison Parker takes on YouTube over alleged refusal to remove graphic videos. “It has been more than four years since journalist Alison Parker, doing a live television interview in southern Virginia, was killed when a former colleague walked up and shot her and videographer Adam Ward. Despite repeated requests from her father and others, videos of the slaying remain on YouTube, as do countless other graphic videos that show people dying or that promote various outlandish hoaxes.”
FBI releases Phantom Killer archive | More than 1,100 pages available via internet (Texarkana Gazette)
Texarkana Gazette: FBI releases Phantom Killer archive | More than 1,100 pages available via internet. “The FBI on Thursday published an extensive archive of documents — some perhaps never before available — from the investigation of Texarkana’s infamous Phantom Killer murders of 1946.” It’s not clear if any of the information is new, but it’s been released all together in one big chunk.
New York Times: Headless Body in Cave Is Identified as 1916 Ax Murder Suspect
New York Times: Headless Body in Cave Is Identified as 1916 Ax Murder Suspect. “Since 1979, the authorities in Idaho had been trying to identify a torso that had been stuffed in a burlap sack in a cave. Now, they have learned that the torso belongs to [Joseph Henry] Loveless. Given that the bootlegger appears to have died in 1916, his case is almost certainly the oldest to be cracked with forensic genealogy, a rapidly expanding forensic technique that uses individuals’ relatives in genealogy databases to identify human remains and crime scene DNA.”
‘Numbers don’t lie’: The team ‘Counting Dead Women’ in Kenya (Christian Science Monitor)
Christian Science Monitor: ‘Numbers don’t lie’: The team ‘Counting Dead Women’ in Kenya. “For years, whenever Kathomi Gatwiri complained that violence against women in her home country of Kenya was out of control, she got used to hearing the same response: prove it. So at the beginning of 2019, the academic and one of her best friends from college, Audrey Mugeni, decided they would do exactly that. They set up Facebook and Twitter pages called ‘Counting Dead Woman – Kenya’ and dedicated themselves to a grim project: creating an online archive.”
Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas: Defensores de la Democracia seeks to be a living archive of the work of journalists killed in Mexico
Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas: Defensores de la Democracia seeks to be a living archive of the work of journalists killed in Mexico. “The story of Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, the Mexican journalist who arrived in the United States more than 10 years ago to request asylum but who could face deportation, was for Alejandra Ibarra the starting point of her project Defensores de la Democracia (Democracy Defenders), a digital archive that seeks to preserve the work of journalists killed in Mexico.” The site is in Spanish and Google doesn’t offer to translate it, and I didn’t have much luck with the other translation tools I tried.
Engadget: NIST preserve JFK assassination bullets with 3D scans (updated)
Engadget: NIST preserve JFK assassination bullets with 3D scans (updated). “The 56th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was last month. Early next year, you’ll be able to see, in almost nauseating detail, the bullets that took his life. The National Archives will upload high-definition 3D images of the projectiles to its online catalog.”
New Zealand Herald: Grace Millane’s killer named on social media and by overseas publications despite suppression orders
New Zealand Herald: Grace Millane’s killer named on social media and by overseas publications despite suppression orders. “Overseas news publications are naming the man convicted of Grace Millane’s murder, despite his name still being suppressed. And in New Zealand, the man has also been named on social media accounts leaving the police to issue a warning not to state his identity on any posts. The 27-year-old man was found guilty of killing the 21-year-old backpacker last night, in a unanimous decision by the jury.”
PR Newswire: Database of Mass Shooters Compiled by Hamline Students Released for Public Use
PR Newswire: Database of Mass Shooters Compiled by Hamline Students Released for Public Use (PRESS RELEASE). “On November 19, 2019, The Violence Project, a nonpartisan think tank, will publicly release the largest, most comprehensive database of mass shooters in the United States. This new database, funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, was developed by professors Jillian Peterson and James Densley and a team of students at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. It includes 171 mass shooters from 1966 to 2019, each coded on 100 pieces of life history information.”
EurekAlert: Carnegie Mellon system locates shooters using smartphone video
EurekAlert: Carnegie Mellon system locates shooters using smartphone video. “Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a system that can accurately locate a shooter based on video recordings from as few as three smartphones. When demonstrated using three video recordings from the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 people dead and hundreds wounded, the system correctly estimated the shooter’s actual location — the north wing of the Mandalay Bay hotel.”
