On Monday the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that police violated the 4th amendment when they placed a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days. In his opinion on the case, Justice Anthony Scalia wrote that the use of GPS constituted a "search" and therefore requires a warrant. This ruling may have an impact on other cases where GPS was used, as well as other types of surveillance mechanisms.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in a case that could have broad implications for how modern surveillance technology is used to track criminals. The question at stake in The United States v. Antoine Jones is whether Fourth Amendment protections from "unreasonable searches and seizures" extends to GPS tracking and where the boundaries between public and private space lies in an era when many people are increasingly trackable through smart phones and other digital devices.

Kelley Williams-Bolar, a mother of two girls in Akron, Ohio, served nine days in prison in January. Williams-Bolar was convicted of falsifying documents to allow her daughters to attend school in a better district than the one where they reside. She was working as a teacher's aid before the conviction and was studying to become a teacher, but having two felony charges would likely have kept that from happening — until Ohio Governor John Kasich announced he was going to reduce Williams-Bolar's convictions to misdemeanors.

After weeks of fighting accusations of sexual assault against a hotel maid, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, is facing new allegations. Tristane Banon, a French novelist, is filing a criminal complaint against Strauss-Kahn for attempted rape in 2003. The statute of limitations for rape cases in France is 10 years. Will this case be negatively affected by the outcome of the first case? Or by the media’s attention?

Illinois' embattled ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich was found guilty yesterday on 17 counts of corruption, and could face up to 20 years in prison. Blagojevich was caught on tape trying to extort money in exchange for President Obama's vacated Senate seat in late 2008. Blagojevich had maintained his innocence throughout the trial, and was surprised by the guilty verdict. “I, frankly, am stunned," he told reporters. 

Yesterday the first Guantánamo detainee to be tried in a federal civilian court was acquitted of all but one of the charges against him. In total Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani faced nearly 300 charges of conspiracy and murder in the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by the state of Texas in 2004. He was tried, convicted, and executed by lethal injection for setting fire to his home and killing his three young daughters, on December 23, 1991.

But forensic investigators have called the facts of the case into question – most notably whether the fire was arson, or an accident. (Willingham maintained his innocence to the very end, passing up a chance to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence.)

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, describes the first day of hearings in the controversial Supreme Court case between the Westboro Baptist Church and a man who is suing them for protesting outside his son's military funeral in 2006.

The first civilian trial for a former Guantánamo Bay detainee begins today. Tanzanian-born Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is accused of bombing embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, killing hundreds.

WNYC Reporter Ailsa Chang is covering the trial.

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, will soon stand before the nation’s top court to argue for their constitutional right to protest outside soldiers’ funerals. In their view, American deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s punishment for the country’s acceptance of homosexuality.

Albert Snyder is the plaintiff in the case; his son, U.S. Marine Matthew Snyder, was killed in Iraq in 2006. The WBC went to Snyder's funeral in Maryland, holding signs that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and other fiery epithets. Snyder fought the group and won in a lower court, arguing the church deliberately sought to inflict emotional distress, but that decision was overturned at a higher court. The Supreme Court has traditionally been very reluctant to impose limits on our freedom of speech, even offensive speech: will this case qualify?

The Supreme Court will hear arguments next week in a case that may test the limits of free speech. What's something you’ve heard or read that you thought should be outlawed?

Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock could potentially face a court-martial after becoming the first of 5 soldiers to face an Article 32 hearing – the equivalent of a grand jury – yesterday, on charges of murdering 3 unarmed Afghan civilians. 

Marcus Mabry, associate national editor for The New York Times, has been following this story and shares the developments with us.

Click after the jump to see a video of Morlock confessing to the murders.

To people in Miami, Charles Perez is a familiar face. He used to be a television news anchor, and he’s currently writing a book called “Confessions of a Gay Anchorman.”

But behind Charles’s familiar face and authoritative television presence is a journey to parenthood that has been incredibly difficult, at times. Charles and his husband wanted to adopt a child. But in the state of Florida, it’s still against the law for gay and lesbian people to adopt. In order to adopt, they temporarily moved to Illinois, and then later to Kansas, where they were eventually able to adopt their daughter.

Sometimes a word is just a word. But other times, it’s an indicator of something more troubling on the part of the speaker. Take, for example, the word “boy.” When being used to refer to a small child, most of us don’t think twice. But when the word “boy” refers to an adult black man, and the speaker is his white supervisor who’s just passed him up for a promotion, it takes on a much different meaning.

It’s for this reason that John Hithon, an employee of the Tyson chicken processing plant in Gadsden, Alabama, sued his employers for workplace discrimination.

Jury selection is set to get underway today in his controversial trial of 23-year-old Canadian Omar Khadr, the only Westerner remaining at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba. Khadr currently faces five charges of war crimes, including the fatal wounding of U.S. Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer in Afghanistan. Khadr has been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay since the age of 15. This trial is the first war crimes trial under the Obama administration. 

There are between six and eight million adopted people in the United States and the vast majority of them will never have access to their original birth certificates. All information on their birth parents is sealed. For decades, several advocacy groups have been trying to change this, claiming that humans have a right to own their own histories.

It's a major day for the Supreme Court. It's not only the first day of Elena Kagan's confirmation hearings, but also the last day of the court's term and the end of Justice Stevens' tenure on the bench. But before the court breaks for the summer, there are four remaining cases on which the judges are expected to rule.

The Supreme Court on Thursday narrowed the scope of a law that has put people like former Enron Chief Jeffrey Skilling behind bars. The law, known as the "honest-services law," makes it illegal to "deprive another of the intangible right of honest services."  In a unanimous ruling, the justices said the law’s language was too broad. The decision sends Skilling's case back to the lower courts and calls into question other recent convictions under the same law, including the charges against Conrad M. Black, the newspaper executive convicted of defrauding his media company, Hollinger International, as well as Joseph Bruno, one of the most prominent politicians in New York.

The question everybody is asking this week has been, who is 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad, the man held and accused of placing a car bomb in New York's Times Square over the weekend? After two days of intense interrogation efforts, news continues to trickle in about the motives and connections behind the attempted attack.

Democrats unveiled a framework for immigration reform yesterday, just as cities across the country are bracing for big May Day protests by Immigrant advocacy groups. The groups are hoping to put pressure on Washington to speed up changes to current laws, which some say endanger families with members that have come to the U.S. illegally.