Chris Francescani

A convicted child sex offender who has allegedly been tied by DNA evidence to the scene of a brutal 2002 murder of a young West Virginia woman got away with the crime while four men were wrongly convicted, according to defense attorneys who submitted their evidence to prosecutors more than a year ago without a response or any legal action.

Later this month, the convicted child sex offender will be released from prison after serving two years in a prison in Ohio. Court records indicate that he is serving time for raping and impregnating a 12-year-old girl.

Long before mass media, a city’s newspapers were its chief sources of information: its champions, entertainers and story-tellers -- exposing corruption and abuse and peddling eye-popping gossip, sports scores and sensational crime.

The careers of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, two of the most colorful, talented newspaper columnists of the late 20th century, are the subject of a new HBO documentary.

The film is a romantic, unsentimental elegy to the last generation in American print journalism when newspapers really, truly mattered.

High-profile attorney Michael Avenatti is a professional race car driver who appeared frequently on television news programs, tangled with the president on social media and briefly flirted publicly with the prospect of running for president himself in 2020.

Avenatti’s visibility on the national stage has grown substantially in the past year. Yet in roughly the same time frame, his personal and professional legal disputes seem to have been steadily dragging him towards a significant financial reckoning.

The nation’s largest police force said Tuesday it is adding drones to its crime-fighting arsenal.

The move is particularly significant benchmark for U.S. law enforcement agencies because smaller police departments often follow the lead of larger, big city forces like the New York Police Department.

“The NYPD has a trailblazing effect when it comes to new technology and almost all aspects of policing,” said Christopher Dickey, author of “Securing the City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force," which chronicled groundbreaking technology innovations under former commissioner Ray Kelly.

Does Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren really have Native American blood running through her veins?

It's scientifically impossible to know for sure, according to a collection of leading geneticists, industry experts, research scientists with expertise in indigenous genetics and Native American leaders who spoke with ABC News.

The process of tracing one's ancestry is still evolving, geneticists told ABC News, and efforts to establish genetic affiliation with an indigenous group like Native Americans are at best thorny and uncertain, and, in the extreme, offensive.

Think your new wireless Apple Airpod ear buds are pretty special, don't you?

The U.S. Department of Defense is working with a Silicon Valley startup to fine-tune a crystal-clear, two-way radio so small it clips to your tooth.

The device, nicknamed the "molar mic," is designed to transmit an encrypted, wireless signal clear enough to whisper in a hurricane and hear back with equal clarity -- all inside your head, with no earpiece.

Mark Mooney, a veteran New York reporter, editor and author whose cool head, easy charm and love of the craft made him a revered mentor in numerous newsrooms, died at 66 of cancer.

Mooney wrote his own obituary, “My last byline,” which was published by his wife on the day of his death.

Mooney’s news career stretched from the age of typewriter ribbons to Twitter, and he worked for a variety of outlets, including the United Press International wire service, The New York Post, the New York Daily News, ABC News and CNNMoney.

Bob Dylan’s best songs have always stimulated an impulse in listeners to want more of him, a magnetic need to penetrate the songs themselves and to figure out the enigmatic artist within.

The first time that Paul Simon met Dylan, he followed Dylan around his house “picking up every loose scrap of paper he could find -- anything with words on it -- and stuffing them in his pockets,” singer Melissa Manchester said in 1975.

“He said he was dying to find out how Dylan did it.”

In a harrowing survival story emerging from Hurricane Harvey’s assault on southeast Texas, a pair of journalists documenting a seemingly routine civilian boat rescue survived near-electrocution and blunt force trauma, and clung to tree branches for 18 hours through hallucinations and relentless rainstorms before being rescued by chance late Tuesday morning.

Employing a vicious defense strategy that sought to exploit race, gender, age and social activism, Cosby’s defense team went low early and kept on going -- launching stunning, mostly unfounded broadsides against the judge, the prosecutor, the witnesses and the jurors -– and openly mocked the widely accepted scholarship of a renowned expert on sexual assault.

In the roughest day yet for Bill Cosby’s defense team, a so-called toxicology expert acknowledged on the stand on Thursday that he had Googled data for his expert report, that his sole active license was a driver’s license and that one of the scholarly publications he listed on his curriculum vitae was in fact a letter to the editor.

In a crucial pre-trial ruling that could help determine the fate of comedian Bill Cosby, a Pennsylvania judge ruled Thursday that he will allow five additional accusers to testify about allegedly being drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby over the years.

Jurors in the federal terrorism trial of Noor Salman, the wife of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, got a gripping sense of the brutality of the 2016 massacre as they watched eerily-silent black-and-white security footage of the killer pacing through gaps in a sea of bodies on the club’s dance floor, firing slugs indiscriminately into anything that moved.

Two days of key pretrial hearings in the felony sexual assault case against comedian Bill Cosby ended on Tuesday without a ruling on one the most critical issues at stake: whether or not as many as 19 additional Cosby accusers should be allowed to testify for the prosecution at a trial that begins this month.

The Pennsylvania judge at the center of the criminal retrial of comedian Bill Cosby on sexual assault charges could rule as soon as early next week on a critical motion that may reshape the Commonwealth’s case as it heads into jury selection later this month.
"I think the outcome [of the case] virtually turns on that ruling," said Yale Law School professor Steven B. Duke.