New Hampshire gave its new voter ID law a test run in the state’s primary Tuesday, and the results were less than reassuring.

The law, which was passed by the Republican-controlled legislature in June over Gov. John Lynch’s (D) veto, was set to be phased-in in three stages. First, voters in this week’s primary would be asked for, but not required to have, ID before voting. Second, in the November general election, those who don’t have a voter ID will be required to sign an affidavit swearing their identity before voting. Third, beginning next year, voters who don’t bring ID to the polls will not be permitted to vote.

However, in precincts around the state on Primary Day, there was widespread confusion among election officials about what was required from voters to cast a ballot. The Concord Monitor has more:

Ken Ward, a Democrat from Rollinsford running for the House, said election officials told him incorrectly he couldn’t vote without an ID yesterday morning. “I had one in my pocket, but I knew I didn’t have to produce it,” said Ward, 50.

Ward said more than half the officials knew him. Eventually, they told him to sign an affidavit, even though affidavits aren’t required yet, he said. Ward assented and said he doesn’t plan to file formal complaints.

The League of Women Voters and the New Hampshire Citizens Alliance for Action said similar circumstances, in which officials presented misleading information, occurred throughout the state.

Voters without identification were turned away from two wards in Manchester, the groups said.

In addition, Granite State Progress sent over the following pictures, where signs incorrectly told citizens that voter ID would be required to vote:

If this many problems occurred in a low-turnout primary, it doesn’t portend well for what’s expected to be a high-turnout election in November.

The family of a woman who died after her custody at Maricopa County Jail is suing the office of the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, alleging authorities neglected her and deprived her of necessary medications for days, allowing her to slip into a diabetic coma.

The local ABC affiliate reports on the circumstances that led to Deborah Braillard’s death, after she was detained for a minor drug possession charge:

Witness[es] said that Deborah was constantly moaning and crying out in pain, asking for help, repeatedly vomiting, defecating on herself and having seizures.

“She would shake. Her body would stiffen up,” said Tamela Harper, an inmate in the jail with Braillard. “They never did anything to help her.”

Inmates said they begged officers to do something.

“They were telling everyone, ‘There’s nothing we can do about it. This is jail. Get over it,”’ Harper said.

Harper added that officers said Braillard was “kicking drugs” and that she was “getting what she deserved.”

Medical reports would later prove the guards were wrong.

As the trial begins, ABC15 Arizona says a series of reports will “shed light on what experts call a broken system inside Maricopa County jails that has led to needless deaths and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars paid out in lawsuits.” The family’s lawyer, Michael Manning, has won six other lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Office for jail-related deaths, and calls conditions there “deplorable.”

And Arpaio faces several lawsuits alleging racial profiling, including one on behalf of a class of Latinos, and another by the Department of Justice, which alleges a slate of grievous practices targeting Latinos, from assaulting pregnant women and ignoring rape, to random, unlawful detention of Latinos and use of racial slurs.

For many victims of domestic abuse, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has been a resounding success, and a lifeline. Since then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) wrote the legislation in 1994, the country’s infrastructure for dealing with rape and abuse has vastly improved, saving countless women’s lives and livelihoods.

As the country celebrates the 18th anniversary of the legislation, here are some of the victories achieved through VAWA:

• Victims can call for help. The National Domestic Violence Hotline was established as part of VAWA. It currently serves over 22,000 victims a month and has taken a total of 3 million calls.
• Law enforcement officers are trained to help victims. 500,000 law enforcement officials, judges, and prosecutors a year are trained with VAWA funding to help domestic abuse victims.
• Partner violence and homicides fell. From the year before VAWA’s passage until 2008, the number of women being killed by partners dropped 43 percent, and partner violence against women fell 53 percent.
• Stalking became illegal. Before VAWA, stalking was not a federal crime. The law established stalking as a felony offense.
• Rape is rape, no exceptions. Since the passage of VAWA, each state in the United States has updated its laws so that rape by a partner is treated equally to rape by a stranger.

But the outlook for VAWA is not quite as positive as its retrospective. A reauthorization of the law is currently embroiled in a partisan fight between Republicans and Democrats. Different versions of the bill have passed the House and Senate, but the two chambers appear unable to come to consensus on a final bill — in large part because Republicans will not accept expansions to the program that would aide Native Americans, LGBT victims, and undocumented immigrants.

Officer Patrick Tuter crashed his car into Michael Vincent Allen’s truck in Mesquite, TX yesterday after an extended attempt to chase down the latter. What happened directly after the stop, we’re not quite sure of, potentially because Mesquite PD deleted the photos detailing it. But we do know how the encounter ended — Allen is dead after Tuter discharged about 41 shots.

Mitchell Wallace and and his family witnessed the incident:

After Allen pulled into a driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac in an attempt to make a U-turn, his truck was pinned between two police cars with one of the police cars striking Allen’s truck from the front, said Wallace’s 17-year-old son, Cameron.

‘From the time they yelled, ‘Get out, get out,’ they didn’t give him three seconds to get out,’ Mitchell Wallace said, adding that he counted about 20 bullet holes in Allen’s truck.

Wallace and his wife were asleep when the gunshots began, but they quickly made it to the porch to see Allen’s passenger being pulled from the truck and a police dog jumping into the cab. The German shepherd bit Allen in the neck and jaw area and dragged him out of the truck and onto the pavement, Wallace said.

Police officers pulled the dog off, flipped Allen on his stomach and handcuffed him before checking his pulse. Autopsy results are pending on the cause of Allen’s death.

Wallace says his phone contained photographs documenting the events that were deleted by the police. He says Mesquite officials confiscated the phone for four days, without a warrant, after the evidence was already deleted. Officer Tuter has been placed on restricted duty and is currently the subject of both a criminal investigation by the Mesquite police as well as an internal investigation in Garland, TX, Tuter’s home department.

The police cannot legally delete photographic evidence of an arrest and cannot seize the photographs without a court order except in exceptional circumstances. The Washington, D.C. Police Department is currently facing a lawsuit over the seizure of photographic evidence of a police vehicle colliding with a motorcycle, though the D.C. police have updated their policies for the better since the incident. Similar allegations of photograph seizure have cropped up around the country despite a Department of Justice letter informing police departments that documenting the police is a Constitutional right.

At least one public college in Arizona is prepared to offer young undocumented immigrants who successfully applied for work permits under President Obama’s new deferred-action program the lower in-state tuition rate, a significant break for as many as 80,000 students eligible in the state.

Officials from the 10 campus-Maricopa Community Colleges determined that work permits fulfill their requirement that students provide proof of legal residency in Arizona. According to spokesman Tom Gariepy, a legal review determined that federally-issued work permits are already on a state-approved list of documents that are accepted by the Arizona Board of Regents as proof of residency.

The move by the Maricopa Community Colleges is in direct opposition to Governor Jan Brewer’s (R) firm anti-immigrant policies. On the same day that immigrants began applying for work permits through the federal government, Brewer issued an executive order forbidding state agencies from providing any new benefits to deferred action recipients, including in-state tuition.

The decision that the state-approved list trumps Brewer’s order could open the door for several other state universities to follow suit. Arizona State University and the University of Arizona — which together enroll almost 90,000 undergraduates — both include work permits on their lists of documents accepted as proof of residency, and the state board of regents is currently reviewing existing law to see if these newly-legal immigrants qualify for lower tuition:

The regents, Paquet said, “are continuing to review the statute in light of the board’s strong desire to facilitate access to higher education for all students within the constraints of applicable law.” Proposition 300, which took effect in 2007, “states that students must prove lawful immigration status to be eligible for in-state tuition at Arizona’s public universities,” she said.
[...]
The regents are reviewing to see if work permits granted through the deferred-action program will also be accepted to meet the lawful-residency rule for in-state tuition.

To date, just 12 states allow for undocumented immigrants to qualify for in-state tuition, while Arizona is one of four states that have expressly prohibited them from qualifying. In June, a small college in Colorado also took steps to provide greater access to higher education for that state’s undocumented immigrant population, offering a lower tuition rate to those who qualified.

California’s prison system is severely overcrowded and expensive, but incarceration for those sentenced to life without parole is not the state’s most costly form of punishment. With a state initiative to eliminate capital punishment on the ballot this November, an updated study by a law professor and a federal appeals court judge projects that California’s death penalty system would cost taxpayers between $5.4 and $7.7 billion more between now and 2050 than if those in death row were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

During that time, the study projects, about 740 more inmates will be added to death row and 14 executions will be carried out, while more than 500 of those prisoners will die from suicide or natural causes before the state executes them. Compared to life without parole — the state’s second-most-severe punishment — the costs of the death penalty system include higher incarceration costs due to security and other requirements, and astronomical litigation costs — both for individual appeals and for lethal injection litigation.

Ninth Circuit Senior Judge Arthur L. Alarcón and Loyola Law School Los Angeles adjunct professor Paula M. Mitchell explain in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review:

[T]here is absolutely no support for the contention, advanced by some pro-death-penalty organizations, that replacing the death penalty with LWOP [life without parole] will increase housing or medical care costs for the state. Death-row inmates grow old and need costly medical care, just as LWOP inmates do. Indeed, death row inmates receive the same medical care that LWOP inmates receive, but it is provided at a premium due to logistical problems and security concerns that are endemic to providing healthcare to aging inmates on San Quentin’s death row. The vast majority of death-row prisoners who have died in California have lived out the remainder of their natural lives in state prison, just as LWOP inmates do. This is because most death-row inmates die in prison of natural causes. They just do so in a much more costly manner than do LWOP inmates.

If the state were to pass the proposed SAFE California Act (Proposition 34), $30 million per year would be reallocated toward the 46 percent of homicide cases and 56 percent of rape cases that go unsolved, according to statistics from the California Attorney General’s office.

Since 1989, California has sentenced two men to death who were later exonerated and released from prison. In 2011 and 2012 alone, five California men who were wrongfully convicted of murder but received lesser sentences were exonerated and released from prison, according to the study.

The National Registry of Exonerations — a database of those who were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated since 1989 — reports that California had the second-highest number of wrongful convictions in the country at 97 (tied with Texas). The state with the highest number, Illinois, eliminated the death penalty in 2011.