Portside

Albert Woodfox’s conviction for the 1972 murder of a prison guard, Brent Miller, has been overturned several times, yet he has remained in prison. The state had planned to mount a third trial against him, even though all of the witnesses to the murder have since died. Wallace will now go free Friday because of a plea deal with the state.

Researchers have been hard at work studying how it is that innocent people sometimes go to prison for crimes they did not commit. A recent report documented that in 2015 there were a record number of exonerations in the United States, as many as one in four involving false confessions. Here are three pathways to a false confession.

Extermination, extinction, genocide--themes of history so horrible, we seldom want to consider how close they are to our own homes. Poet Esther Kamkar reports from a Zuni friend who cannot forget what happened here,

Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation's statehouses - and could well win the presidency - but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning. The need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how whoever wins in the general election, and governs once in office.

The Vermont senator's success so far demonstrates the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections. Piketty's doesn't see Sanders as following in the footsteps of Europe's social democratic models, but rather leading the United States toward a possible return to the nation's pioneering 20th century experiments with extremely progressive taxation and social spending.