9,901 articles
Pleasant Valley State Prison
Pleasant Valley State Prison (PVSP) is a California men's prison opened in 1994 in Coalinga, Fresno County, with design capacity 2,308 at custody levels I-III; known for Valley fever outbreaks and federal medical oversight.
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537, 1896) is the US Supreme Court case that upheld Louisiana's Separate Car Act and created the "separate but equal" doctrine; decided 7-1, Brown majority, Harlan dissent, overruled by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Plötzensee Prison
Plötzensee Prison (Strafgefängnis Berlin-Plötzensee) is a Berlin prison built 1869–1879, Prussia's largest prison complex. Under the Nazis it was the largest civilian execution site, with 2,891 executions 1933–1945; part is now the Plötzensee Memorial Center.
Poh Yuan Nie
Poh Yuan Nie, also known as Pony Poh or Owen Fu, is the former Singapore tuition centre principal convicted of masterminding the 2016 O-Level exam cheating scheme, sentenced to four years' jail, now subject to an Interpol red notice.
Poitou
Poitou, historic province of western France around Poitiers (Pictones/Pictavi), divided into Upper and Lower Poitou; county of the Ramnulfid counts-dukes, Plantagenet from 1152, French from 1204/1259, annexed 1369–1373.
Police brutality
Police brutality: excessive or unjustified force by police beyond lawful limits. Covers UK legal framework, use-of-force recording (866,471 reports, 2025-26), IOPC accountability, misconduct test change, US deaths data, and public health effects.
Police caution
A police caution in England and Wales has two meanings: the warning of the right to silence given before questioning, and an out-of-court sanction for admitted minor offenses.
Police corruption
Police corruption: abuse of entrusted police power for private gain, from bribery and evidence fabrication to information misuse. Covers forms, UK and US history, IOPC oversight, Met scandals, and 2025-2026 reforms.
Police misconduct
Police misconduct: breaches of police Standards of Professional Behaviour justifying discipline, and the England and Wales complaints system overseen by the IOPC, covering complaint volumes, 2025 misconduct statistics, dismissals, and 2023-2026 reforms.
Police procedural
Police procedural: crime-fiction subgenre (term coined by Anthony Boucher, 1956) whose protagonists are police detectives solving crimes through realistic investigation, evidence, and interviews; dominant detective form since the mid 1970s, spanning Ed McBain novels, Dragnet, Hill Street Blues, and NCIS.
Police use of deadly force in the United States
Police use of deadly force in the United States: lethal force by law enforcement, governed by Graham v. Connor and Tennessee v. Garner, tracked by the FBI's National Use-of-Force Data Collection, with wide policy variation and racial disparities.
Police use of firearms in the United Kingdom
UK police use of firearms: most officers are unarmed; AFOs are specially selected and trained. 17,584 firearms operations in England and Wales in 2025-26, guns fired at people in only 9 incidents.
Polish contract law
Polish contract law is the part of the law of obligations governing contract formation, rights and duties, and breach, contained mainly in Book Three of the 1964 Civil Code.
Polish Ombudsman
The Polish Ombudsman (Polish: Rzecznik Praw Obywatelskich, RPO) is Poland's independent constitutional organ for safeguarding the rights and freedoms of citizens, created by a 1987 act and operative since 1988.
Political prisoner
Political prisoner: person detained on politically motivated grounds; no agreed international legal definition, distinct from Amnesty's prisoner of conscience. Emerged 1865–1910; over one million worldwide by US State Department estimate.
Political union
Political union: states combining governing power under common institutions, from confederations of sovereign states to federations; the EU (27 members, ~450 million people) is the leading example, with Article 50 exit rights.
Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co.
Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (157 U.S. 429; 158 U.S. 601, 1895) was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision striking down the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act's 2% income tax on income over $4,000 as an unapportioned direct tax on property income; the Sixteenth Amendment (1913) largely overrode it.
Polygraph
Polygraph (lie detector): instrument recording respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance while examinees answer questions; invented by Larson in 1921, built on Marston's 1915 blood pressure test and Keeler's portable patented device; used for federal screening and investigations but usually inadmissible in court.
Population exchange between Greece and Turkey
The population exchange between Greece and Turkey, agreed at Lausanne in 1923, forcibly transferred about 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians and 500,000 Muslims between the two countries.
Population Registration Act, 1950
The Population Registration Act, 1950 (Bevolkingsregistrasiewet) was a South African law that classified every citizen and resident by race, providing the administrative foundation for apartheid until its repeal in 1991.
Porfirio Díaz
Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915) was a Mexican general and politician who served as president from 1876 to 1880 and again from 1884 to 1911, the era known as the Porfiriato.
Porn Murders
The Porn Murders (Swedish: Porrmorden) were three unsolved knife murders in Stockholm in 1989, killing workers at pornographic video stores and sex shops; no suspect was ever identified.
Pornography laws by region
Pornography laws by region cover national rules on producing, sharing, and viewing sexual material, spanning US obscenity and age-verification laws, the UK Online Safety and Crime and Policing Acts, EU DSA enforcement, and French and Council of Europe standards.
Port Arthur, Tasmania
Port Arthur, Tasmania: historic former convict penal settlement on the Tasman Peninsula, founded 1830, closed 1877, renamed Carnarvon, later a World Heritage Australian Convict Site and site of the 1996 massacre.
Posse comitatus
Posse comitatus is a federal statute enacted in 1878 that criminalizes the willful deployment of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, or Space Force for law enforcement.
Posse Comitatus Act
Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. §1385), an 1878 U.S. criminal statute barring federal military forces from domestic law enforcement except when authorized by the Constitution or Congress; principal exception is the Insurrection Act; amended in 2021 to cover all service branches.
Post–World War II Romanian war crime trials
Post-WWII Romanian war crime trials (1945-1955), chiefly at the People's Tribunal in Bucharest and Cluj under Law 312/1945, prosecuting Antonescu-era Holocaust perpetrators amid heavy but not determinative Soviet interference.
Posthumous execution
Posthumous execution is punishment inflicted on the already dead: Roman damnatio memoriae, Egyptian erasures, medieval burning of heretics' corpses, and England's Murder Act 1752 dissections.
Posthumous sperm retrieval
Posthumous sperm retrieval (PSR, PMSR) extracts sperm from dying or deceased men for later conception. First reported 1980; viable up to 3 days postmortem; consent and legality vary by country.
Posting rule
Posting rule (mailbox rule): contract-law doctrine from Adams v Lindsell (1818) under which a posted acceptance forms a contract on dispatch, not receipt; excluded for option contracts, stipulated-receipt offers, and instantaneous media.