The Indiana State Police recently announced the purchase of 777 portable breath test devices. However, this is the just the latest of an ongoing wave of more 2,600 portable devices purchased by law enforcement across the state since 2017.
New OMVI equipment but the same problems persist
DeVos announces new sexual misconduct protocols for schools
We initially wrote back in September about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s push to change how colleges and universities address sexual misconduct on college campuses. The new plan has now been released to go through a general comment period, which could bring more changes. The general thrust is that there would be additional protections to the accused students and clearer guidelines about what types of cases would be investigated by campus officials. According to reports, these changes would fix a system that failed students by allowing the assumption of guilt before due process.
Fight the evidence when facing drug charges
Few non-violent offenses hold the power to completely alter the course of a person's life like drug convictions. Although many states have shifting attitudes toward substances that are currently illegal at the federal level, Indiana is still fairly strict when it comes to drug possession.
President backs new sentencing guidelines
President Trump has put his backing behind a new bill that has tentative bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress. If signed into law, this bill would be the most substantial change to federal sentencing guidelines since 1994. The law would boost rehabilitation measures and give judges more flexibility in handling mandatory minimums that have disproportionately affected minorities. It would also reduce the expense and size of the penal system, which has three times the inmates it did 30 years ago. There are a details in this bill, but the highlights include:
Videotaping can lead to arrest
A janitor working at Bloomington High School North was arrested recently for secretly videotaping 13-year-old girls in the school’s locker room. According to news reports, the janitor placed his personal cell phone in a bag of laundry and left it in the girls’ locker room. The bag had a hole in it that enabled the device to videotape the girls while they were in the locker room changing out of their swimsuits.
