Past Due: Examining the Costs and Consequences of Charging for Justice in New Orleans

In 2015, government agencies in New Orleans collected $4.5 million in the form of bail, fines and fees from people involved in the criminal justice system and, by extension, from their families. Another$4.7 million was transferred from the pockets of residents to for-profit bail bond agents. These costs have become the subject of considerable public attention. Because many "users" of the system have very low incomes or none at all, there is growing concern that charging for justice amounts to criminalizing poverty, especially when people who can't pay become further entangled in the justice system. In 2015, the city spent $6.4 million to incarcerate people who couldn't pay bail or conviction fines and fees. By focusing on bail decisions and fines and fees assessed at conviction, Past Due, and its accompanying technical report, reveals the costs and other consequences of a system that tries to extract money from low-income people and then jails them when they can't pay

Racial Disparity in Marijuana Policing in New Orleans

In national research, self-reported marijuana use is similar across races, but in New Orleans, black people are disproportionately arrested for marijuana offenses, including simple possession. While some states have legalized marijuana in recent years, the consequences for marijuana possession in Louisiana remain severe—under state law, repeated convictions for simple possession are punishable by multi-year prison sentences. This report illuminates through quantitative analysis the persistent racial disparities in marijuana policing from 2010 to 2015, and discusses the impacts of statutory and policy reforms the city has implemented to date. Through these findings, the report aims to guide state and local policymakers toward further improvements to lessen the harm even seemingly minor police encounters inflict on black communities, and inspire other jurisdictions to examine their own practices

Maintaining the Presumption of Innocence in Date Rape Trials Through the Use of Language Orders: State v. Safi and the Banning of the Word Rape

This note evaluates the use of language orders in date rape trials in which the defense is consent through a case study of State v. Safi, in which Tory Bowen claims that Pamir Safi date raped her. In that case, the trial judge granted a motion by the defense to prevent the prosecution and any of their witnesses from using words such as rape and sexual assault. Using State v. Safi as a starting point, the author examines the use of such trial orders from the perspective of both defendants and victims. The author concludes that a modified version of such language orders would effectively preserve the presumption of innocence afforded to all criminal defendants without sacrificing a fair opportunity for victims to see their attackers convicted

MagicPairing: Apple's Take on Securing Bluetooth Peripherals

Device pairing in large Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is a challenge for device manufacturers and users. Bluetooth offers a comparably smooth trust on first use pairing experience. Bluetooth, though, is well-known for security flaws in the pairing process. In this paper, we analyze how Apple improves the security of Bluetooth pairing while still maintaining its usability and specification compliance. The proprietary protocol that resides on top of Bluetooth is called MagicPairing. It enables the user to pair a device once with Apple's ecosystem and then seamlessly use it with all their other Apple devices. We analyze both, the security properties provided by this protocol, as well as its implementations. In general, MagicPairing could be adapted by other IoT vendors to improve Bluetooth security. Even though the overall protocol is well-designed, we identified multiple vulnerabilities within Apple's implementations with over-the-air and in-process fuzzing