Crime & Courts

Similar to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, five cheerleaders for Kennesaw State University decided to kneel during the national anthem at a football game to protest unjustified killings by police officers. When the school decided to move them off the field if they were going to kneel, Tommia Dean, one of the cheerleaders, filed a lawsuit against the school's higher ups for restricting her freedom of speech.

In a 5-2 vote, the South Fulton city council agreed to lighten the punishment for possessing less than an ounce of marijuana to a maximum of a $150 fine with no jail time—making the punishment for pot possession more akin to a traffic citation. After Clarkston and Atlanta, this makes South Fulton the third city in metro Atlanta to reduce the penalty for possessing a small amount of pot.

Atlanta Police Lieutenant LeAnne Browning recalls her days as a patrol officer. “Our lieutenants would say, ‘Okay, I want you to look at the beat books so you can know what’s out there on your beat.’ Well, the beat books are like this thick with reports,” she says, holding her hands a couple of feet apart. “And you’d sit there and thumb through it all, and there was no time because they were then kicking you out of the precinct to handle calls.” She pauses before pointing to her computer screen. “That’s the old way of doing things. This­—it’s right here.”

Last year, at a time when the use of death penalty had dropped to historic lows nationwide, Georgia executed nine people convicted of murder, more than any other state. Don’t expect that pace to continue.

Today the trial of Andrea Sneiderman ended where it began—on the witness stand of Courtroom 5-D at the DeKalb County Courthouse. There clad in jailhouse orange, she sobbed and begged Superior Court Judge Gregory Adams for leniency: “Please let me go home.”

The DIY nature of mixtapes is crucial to understanding the success of Spinrilla, a mixtape website and app founded in 2013 by Dylan Copeland after he left Georgia State University.

How $4,000 mattresses and blue-light boxes help Atlanta’s small army of night owls get a good day’s rest.

From the rigid and amateurish brushstrokes, the piano that caught Zheng Li’s eye in Z Gallerie definitely was not his work. But the angle and shape of the instrument—and even the color palette—were almost identical to his 2004 Piano No. 9.

BJay Pak, U.S. attorney in the northern district of Georgia, is the supercop tackling the region's most important crimes. The most prominent open investigation Pak is handling is the longstanding corruption pay-to-play probe at City Hall under the Kasim Reed administration.

If no plea deal is reached, Tex McIver’s trial is slated to begin October 30. In court today, chief prosecutor Clint Rucker also argued that a 1990 incident in which McIver set loose his two German Shepherds on a red Mustang near his house on Cravey Trail in northeast Atlanta, then fired his gun at the car, would be relevant for a jury to hear.