9,901 articles
Biographical Directory of Federal Judges
Biographical Directory of Federal Judges: FJC database of all 4,077 Article III federal judges since 1789, with service records, nomination and confirmation dates, demographics, and nightly data exports.
Biopiracy
Biopiracy: misappropriation of genetic resources and traditional knowledge without consent or compensation, often via patents. Also called unauthorised access. Key cases: turmeric, neem; frameworks: CBD, Nagoya Protocol, Cali Fund.
Birching
Birching, corporal punishment with a birch rod or bundle of birch twigs, used in British civil courts, Royal Navy discipline, schools, and the Isle of Man until its 1978 condemnation by the European Court of Human Rights and final abolition.
Birmingham Boys
The Birmingham Boys, also known as the Brummagem Boys, were an English street gang led by Billy Kimber that controlled bookmaking and protection rackets at Britain's racecourses until the 1930s.
Birmingham Six
The Birmingham Six were six Irish men wrongly convicted in 1975 of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings that killed 21 people; their convictions were quashed in 1991 after 16 years, prompting the CCRC's creation.
Birthright citizenship in the United States
Birthright citizenship in the United States grants U.S. citizenship at birth to nearly everyone born on American soil under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause, confirmed by Wong Kim Ark (1898) and Trump v. Barbara (2026), with narrow exceptions for diplomats' children, hostile-occupation births, and tribal Indians.
Biy
Biy (Kazakh: би, бий) was a Kazakh judge, orator, and tribal elder who judged disputes under customary law (adat), holding authority from the 15th century until the 1920s.
Black Bart (outlaw)
Black Bart was the alias of Charles E. Boles, an American stagecoach robber who held up 28 Wells Fargo stages in Northern California and southern Oregon between 1875 and 1883.
Black Codes (United States)
Black Codes were discriminatory state laws passed by Southern legislatures in 1865–1866 during Presidential Reconstruction, regulating freedmen's labor through contracts, vagrancy, and apprenticeship; Congress answered with the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Black Dahlia
Black Dahlia: Elizabeth Short, 22, found murdered in Los Angeles January 15, 1947, body severed at waist; unsolved despite 22 major suspects, dozens of false confessions; investigation closed 1950.
Black Dahlia suspects
Black Dahlia suspects: proposed killers of Elizabeth Short, murdered in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947. Named candidates include George Hodel, Walter Bayley, Leslie Dillon, and Marvin Margolis; the case remains unsolved.
Black Disciples
Black Disciples (BDs), a Chicago street gang founded by David Barksdale in 1966, once part of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation with Larry Hoover's Gangster Disciples; ran a massive 1989-2004 South and West Side drug-trafficking organization dismantled in a 2004 47-defendant federal takedown.
Black Dolphin Prison (Чёрный дельфин)
Black Dolphin Prison (Чёрный дельфин), officially Penal Colony No. 6 (IK-6), is a special-regime FSIN colony in Sol-Iletsk, Orenburg Oblast, Russia, near the Kazakhstan border, holding roughly 700 men, mostly life-sentenced, named for a black dolphin fountain sculpture.
Black Guerrilla Family
The Black Guerrilla Family, originally called the Black Family or Black Vanguard, is a prison gang founded in 1966 at San Quentin State Prison by George Jackson.
Black Hand (extortion)
The Black Hand (Mano Nera) was an American extortion method of the late 1800s and early 1900s, using mailed threat letters signed with a black hand; not an organization, it declined after Joe Petrosino's 1909 death and Postal Inspector crackdowns.
Black Mafia
The Black Mafia was a Philadelphia African American organized crime group formed in the 1960s, distinct from Detroit's Black Mafia Family (BMF), known for extortion, heroin trafficking, the 1972 Club Harlem and 1973 Hanafi massacre murders, and the Junior Black Mafia successor.
Black Mafia Family
Black Mafia Family (BMF), cocaine trafficking and money laundering organization founded in early 1990s Detroit by Demetrius "Big Meech" and Terry "Southwest T" Flenory; dismantled in 2005 by Operation Motor City Mafia; also the name of the 2021 Starz drama series.
Black site
Black site: a secret military or intelligence prison and interrogation facility whose existence the government denies; best known from the CIA's 2002-2008 network in Poland, Thailand, and elsewhere holding 119 detainees.
Black Swan manslaughter case
The Black Swan manslaughter case was the Florida prosecution of former ballet dancer Ashley Benefield, convicted in 2024 of fatally shooting her estranged husband Doug in 2020.
Blackmail
Blackmail: threatening to expose damaging information unless a demand for money, property, or action is met; a form of extortion. Illegal in all US states and federally (18 USC 873), and under the UK Theft Act 1968 s.21 (max 14 years).
Blackstone's ratio
Blackstone's ratio is William Blackstone's maxim from the Commentaries (1765-1769) that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer, underpinning the presumption of innocence, with variant ratios from Fortescue's 20:1 to Maimonides' 1000:1.
Blaine Milam
Blaine Keith Milam (TDCJ #999558), Texas death row inmate convicted in 2010 of capital murder of 13-month-old Amora Carson; executed by lethal injection September 25, 2025, after stays in 2019 and 2021 over bite-mark science and intellectual-disability claims.
Blanche Barrow
Blanche Barrow (Blanche Caldwell), wife of Buck Barrow, Clyde Barrow's brother; joined the Barrow gang in 1933, was captured at Platte City, Missouri, sentenced to 10 years, and wrote a memoir.
Blanche Monnier
Blanche Monnier (1849–1913), the Séquestrée de Poitiers, a Frenchwoman found 23 May 1901 after about 25 years shut in a closed room of her family's Poitiers house; mother died in detention, brother Marcel acquitted on appeal, case made famous by André Gide.
Blanche Taylor Moore
Blanche Taylor Moore (born Blanche Kiser, 1933), also called the Black Widow of North Carolina, is a former Kroger head cashier on death row since 1990 for the arsenic murder of boyfriend Raymond Reid; also suspected in other poisonings.
Bling Ring
The Bling Ring: Los Angeles youths including Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, and Alexis Neiers who burglarized celebrity homes such as Paris Hilton's in 2008-2009, stealing over $3 million; subject of Coppola's 2013 film.
Block Parent Program
Block Parent Program: Canadian volunteer child-safety network whose approved members display a window sign offering their home as an emergency refuge. Founded in London, Ontario, in 1968, nationalized in 1983-1986, RCMP-affiliated, and in decline since the 2000s.
Bloods
The Bloods, also known as the Blood gang, are a loose association of predominantly African American street gangs that formed in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Bloody Benders
Bloody Benders, a German immigrant family of four (John Sr., Ma, John Jr., Kate) who ran an inn on the Osage Mission Trail in Labette County, Kansas, and murdered at least 11 travelers from 1871 to 1873 before fleeing; their fate is unresolved.
Bloody Code
The Bloody Code is the name later given to the English criminal law of the long eighteenth century, under which many crimes, mostly property crimes, carried the death penalty.