Attorney General Eric Holder has announced new guidelines on racial profiling for federal law enforcement agencies in the wake of the Ferguson, Mo., and New York police killings of two African-American men.
Commentary: Attorney General Eric Holder has taken almost unprecedented, lightning-fast first steps to potentially bring civil rights charges against the officer who shot Michael Brown.
Residents of Ferguson "are struggling to find peace in the chaos" that has followed the shooting death of an unarmed teen by a police officer and "as people of Christ, we are struggling to find direction in the unrest," said Archbishop Robert Carlson of St. Louis.
"We are all aware of the turmoil and tragedy our St. Louis community is experiencing," he said in a letter Monday to Catholics of the archdiocese.
A coalition of critics is urging Obama to drop the practice of permitting religious groups to hire and fire based on a person's faith when they receive federal money.
A couple of years ago, a woman I'll call Ann saw me give a television interview about prison sentencing reform. She phoned me right away to tell me about her son, who, she said, received a 10-year sentence in federal prison for his second marijuana possession. A lawyer was filing an appeal, but she didn't know if he would be successful.
Alas, I didn't have any hope to hold out to her. Congress seems even less likely than the Missouri legislature to shorten drug possession sentences, and such reform benefits are almost never retroactive, though there's no reason they couldn't be.
In light of the proposed death penalty for 20-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, "Jesus weeps ... again" at the injustice, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men said in a statement Wednesday.
"Christ calls us to love our enemies and travel the long, difficult, but humanizing and liberating road to reconciliation," the conference said.
The CMSM statement came in response to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announcing the federal government will seek the death penalty against Tsarnaev, currently being held in federal prison for his alleged role in the Boston Marathon attacks.
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