Supreme Court Strikes Down Ban on Sports Gambling

Here’s what you’ll find on today’s show:

— On Monday, the Supreme Court paved the way for states to begin legalizing sports betting. In a landmark decision, the court struck down a federal law passed by Congress in 1992 known as the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. The act had previously banned sports gambling in almost all states across the country. The court’s decision was the result of a case brought by the state of New Jersey, but it has implications nationwide as Daniel Wallach, a partner at Becker and Poliakoff and a nationally recognized gaming and sports attorney, explains.

— For white people living in the Boston area, the median net worth for their household is $247,500. For African-American, the median net worth is eight dollars. That’s according to William “Sandy” Darity, a public policy professor and director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, who studied this with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Psychologists at Yale published a study last year that found that Americans, and higher-income whites in particular, vastly overestimate progress toward economic equality between blacks and whites. In fact, the racial wealth gap is a problem that’s persistent, and has barely changed over time, even outside of Boston.

— 41 years ago, an all-white jury convicted Johnny Lee Gates, an intellectually disabled black man, for the murder of a white woman in Georgia. Despite little to no evidence and another lead in the case, police and prosecutors obtained a videotaped confession, which was rare for the time. They also produced a fingerprint of the defendant after taking him to the location and having him walk through the home. Authorities had not been able to produce any of Gate’s fingerprints from the scene on previous attempts. It took an all-white jury a little more than an hour to come back with guilty verdict and a sentence of death.