A throng of about 100 protesters rallied Thursday evening in a march from the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office to the San Jose Police Department. They had three demands.

A local nonprofit has helped defendants save a combined 1,862 years of incarceration by advocating for reduced sentencing, acquittals and rehabilitation.

Free speech doesn't mean that speech is free from consequences. A San Jose police officer is learning that lesson now, as the department investigates threatening comments he made online against people protesting the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police.

Willard Birts Jr. kept in close contact with his daughter, Angela, throughout his life sentence in prison. Neither realized their close bond would one day help him gain his freedom.

Santa Clara County inmates will continue receiving mail after jail officials abandoned a contentious plan to limit correspondence to just postcards. Jail chief John Hirokawa originally brought up the idea earlier this summer in hopes of limiting the amount of drugs smuggled in through envelopes or postage stamps. But the community put up a fight, saying the mail restriction could dry up prisoners’ ties with friends, family and life outside their cell. The county jail and Elmwood Correctional Facility receive about 200,000 pieces of mail a year. If the postcard-only policy passed, the county would have become the first in Northern California to enact such a ban and one of a few-dozen in the nation.

Text messages, emails, Facebook and Twitter announcements brought more than a hundred community members to San Jose’s City Hall on Sunday, as part of a protest and march in response to the not guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin case.