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Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey at a press conference at the State House in March Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Massachusetts’ deadline to prosecute rape cases will no longer be one of the strictest in the nation under a bill Gov. Maura Healey pledged to sign into law. State law currently bars nearly all rape prosecutions involving cases with adult victims after 15 years, making it difficult to charge someone after that deadline even in cases where new evidence is likely to lead to a conviction. The new law would ensure that if DNA is matched to a suspect after that 15-year window, prosecutors could file charges indefinitely.  Healey pushed to revise the prosecution deadline for rape as part of her annual budget proposal in January. The move came after WBUR and ProPublica found that as many as 47 other states allow more time to charge rapes or similar sexual assaults than Massachusetts.  Many of those states extended their deadlines in ...

Collage by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup , America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo.  At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project. Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals. Pulling up the company’s website , I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow ...

The Supreme Court is deciding more consequential rulings than ever before in secret, issued in unsigned orders with little to no justification. Bryan Dozier/NurPhoto via AP In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court. These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and justices infrequently provide explanation of how they voted or to cite legal precedent.  The Supreme Court’s increased willingness to bypass its regular process has empowered President Donald Trump at the same time as the administration has increased use of executive authority. The court has repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked...