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Akron Legal News
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California diversion program allows some to keep vehicular manslaughter charge off driving record
In California, you can kill someone with your car and not even have a point on your license.
That's because of a criminal justice reform law passed in 2020, allowing judges to effectively erase a misdemeanor case from existence. It shields people accused of "low-level" crimes from the stigma of having a conviction on t ... (full story)
Court finds judge’s misstatements did not invalidate guilty plea
A trial judge’s misstatement about Ohio’s self-defense law and pretrial ruling to not give a self-defense jury instruction did not invalidate a Hamilton County man's guilty plea, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court affirmed Demarco Gowdy’s conviction for aggravated assaul ... (full story)
State
Rural schools hit by Trump's grant cuts have few options for making up for the lost money
SHELBYVILLE, Ky. (AP) — When the funding for Shannon Johnson's job as a school mental health counselor came to an abrupt end, two years into a five-year grant, she thought about the work left to be done.
Johnson taught elementary and middle-school students in rural Kentucky how to navigate conflict, build resilience and ma ... (full story)
ABA report finds AI is rapidly impacting the legal profession
Once the subject of debate, generative artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly being integrated into the legal profession, impacting the way many tasks are carried out.
In fact, as attorney and journalist Bob Ambrogi discusses in a Dec. 16 post on LawSites (https://www.lawnext.com/2025/12/aba-task-force-ai-has-moved-from-experi ... (full story)
How does Pittsburgh have 20,000 vacant homes and a housing shortage?
418 Rochelle Street looks like an ordinary row house at first glance. Backed against a hillside in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Knoxville, its porch is messy, but that's hardly unusual.
A reporter walked up the front steps one windy day this November to take a closer look, peered through the front window and saw something that ... (full story)