Portside

Access to the courts is now barred for more than 60 million American workers

Missouri stayed the execution of Marcellus Williams, but why was he sentenced to die in the first place?

Presidents have thought before that they could roll those wimpy-looking nerds with their gavels and robes. It usually doesn’t work out all that well.

Courts are scrambling to rule on state election laws in time for the elections being held later this year.

There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.

Public defenders know that the trouble with our justice system extends far beyond abusive policing.

Drug possession is the No. 1 reason people were in Cook County Jail last year. That’s been the case for the better part of the past decade. Since 2006, people have been booked and released more than 100,000 times for possession, according to jail records. And during that same time period, taxpayers have spent $778 million jailing people on the lowest-level possession charges.

And though I am still young, and still searching for answers, I have started down a path where dignity is derived from the law of love, and though it has been said that this trial is personal and not political, I maintain that the personal cannot be divorced from the political.Whereas nonviolent civil disobedience is the manifestation of my ideology, it is rooted in a love ethic that is central to my identity.

Matt Taibbi discusses his new book, "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap." The vast majority of white-collar criminals have avoided prison since the financial crisis began, while an unequal justice system imprisons the poor and people of color on a mass scale. Taibbi explores how the Depression-level income gap between the wealthy and the poor is mirrored by a "justice" gap in who is targeted for prosecution and imprisonment.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states and local governments with a history of discrimination no longer needed to submit new voting laws for federal approval. Now, voting rights advocates are trying to put them back under oversight using the courts and Congress.