Rounding up some criminal justice news and notes over holiday week

One easy way to catch up on a number of criminal justice stories and commentaries is to do a round-up of headlines and links. So here goes:

From the AP, "Judge denies 19-year-old's ask to attend father's execution"

From the Arizona Republic, "States under scrutiny for recent lethal injection failures"

From the Atlantic, "The Crime Spike Is No Mystery: By zooming out and looking at the big picture, the question of what causes violence becomes quite answerable."

From Ball and Strikes, "The Supreme Court Is On Another Execution Spree"

From Law Dork, "Failures of capital punishment: Alabama, Missouri, and Oklahoma"

From Rolling Stone, "‘Digitized Love’: How Prison Mail Bans Harm Incarcerated People"

From The Conversation, "The criminal justice system is retraumatizing victims of violent crime"

From the New Republic, "The Supreme Court’s New Second Amendment Test Is Off to a Wild Start"

From the New York Times, "The Search for Beauty in a Prison Cell"

From the Wall Street Journal, "The U.S. Knows How to Reduce Crime: Evidence-based strategies like ‘focused deterrence’ don’t conform to partisan slogans, but they have been shown to work"