Courts & Justice

On today’s program: Nearly 80% of state correctional facilities’ staff have not received the COVID-19 vaccine, despite its wide availability; a look at Pittsburgh’s public and private sector commitments to energy efficiency, now that city government committed to become carbon neutral by 2050; and a local author’s new book tells of how telephone-inventor Alexander Graham Bell worked with deaf people to promote speech and suppress sign language.

The commonwealth's highest court will hear arguments ahead of the homicide trial of a former Philadelphia police officer. If the appeal is successful, jurors will receive a narrower set of instructions about when an officer is justified in using deadly force.

Graham Spanier’s lawyers are expected to be in a Pennsylvania courtroom next month as a judge considers whether the former Penn State president should have to report to jail to start serving his sentence related to the Jerry Sandusky child molestation scandal.

An expanding fight over gun laws in Pennsylvania is drawing in the Legislature, the state’s highest court and the state’s biggest cities, while also featuring prominently in the three-way Republican primary race for a state Supreme Court seat.

Before the Supreme Court this week is an argument over whether public schools can discipline students over something they say off-campus. Fourteen-year-old Brandi Levy was suspended from cheerleading over a profanity-laced posting on Snapchat.

Approximately one-fifth of prison staffers have reported being vaccinated, far less than the roughly half of those incarcerated in Pennsylvania facilities.

Almost a year ago, George Floyd’s death at the hands of police office Derek Chauvin created a groundswell that, in Harrisburg, led to a surge of proposals to overhaul policing. State lawmakers are now taking stock of how far they’ve come, and how much further they’d still like to go.

For the first time, prominent Republican state senators on Wednesday put their support behind legislation in Pennsylvania to change the law to allow now-adult victims of child sexual abuse to sue their perpetrators or institutions that did not prevent it when it happened years or decades ago.

On today's program: Legal analyst David Harris weighs in on the impact of Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the death of George Floyd, and reporter Kiley Koscinski explains how the community is reacting; reporter Margaret J. Krauss previews the city’s plan to deconstruct some condemned homes that would otherwise be demolished; and nearly a year after the death of George Floyd, local Black Lives Matter leaders are planning their next steps.

An Allegheny County Council Committee has approved scaled-back legislation to create an independent police review board.