Thursday, February 14, 2013
Rough justice: Victims had a bigger trial to face with Henderson
The right of a criminal to confront his accusers is fundamental in our criminal justice system. It's never easy on the victims, but the nature of such courtroom confrontations is rarely as harrowing as it was during the recent trial of Arthur Henderson.
The 39-year-old man was convicted Feb. 11 of raping three women in a three-day period in January 2012; two attacks occurred in Ross and one in Hopewell.
Rape cases can be particularly traumatic for victims, who must sit just a few feet from their attacker in a courtroom, repeat details of sexual violence in a public forum and, as often occurs, answer very personal questions intended to undermine their credibility and make them look bad.
Read more here.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Bills aimed at lowering criminal penalties
FORT WORTH -- State lawmakers are being asked to reclassify criminal offenses, including marijuana possession and prostitution, in an attempt to reduce the state's prison population and cut costs of appointed attorneys for poor criminal defendants.
The American Bar Association, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union say prison time should be removed as a punishment for some crimes, while others believe that an overhaul of the entire Texas Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure is long overdue.
Besides saving the cost of paying for someone to be held in prison, reclassification could save taxpayers money because county officials would not have to appoint attorneys for indigent residents charged with crimes because being held behind bars is not a punishment alternative.
"Throughout the 90s the whole philosophical bent was to put people in prison and throw away the key," said state Rep. Lon Burnam, D- Fort Worth. "We have far too many people serving prison terms for nonviolent offenses instead of trying to become productive people in society. We can no longer afford to do this."
Read more here
The American Bar Association, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union say prison time should be removed as a punishment for some crimes, while others believe that an overhaul of the entire Texas Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure is long overdue.
Besides saving the cost of paying for someone to be held in prison, reclassification could save taxpayers money because county officials would not have to appoint attorneys for indigent residents charged with crimes because being held behind bars is not a punishment alternative.
"Throughout the 90s the whole philosophical bent was to put people in prison and throw away the key," said state Rep. Lon Burnam, D- Fort Worth. "We have far too many people serving prison terms for nonviolent offenses instead of trying to become productive people in society. We can no longer afford to do this."
Read more here
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Mental Illness Soars In Prisons, Jails While Inmates Suffer
Armando Cruz tied a noose around his neck and hanged himself from the ceiling of his prison cell. He left a note that ended in two chilling words.
“Remember me.”
His mother Yolanda, who was shown the note after her son's death, wants to make sure no one forgets.
“They took away my only son,” she says, her voice breaking.
Cruz killed himself on Sept. 20, 2011, during his incarceration at California State Prison in Sacramento, after a long history of mental illness. His story, first reported by the blog Solitary Watch, is an example of how the criminal justice system is ill-equipped to handle people with mental health issues. Cruz spent years in solitary confinement and died while locked in a tiny solitary cell. The rates of suicide in solitary confinement tend to be higher than in the general prison population.
Read more here.
“Remember me.”
His mother Yolanda, who was shown the note after her son's death, wants to make sure no one forgets.
“They took away my only son,” she says, her voice breaking.
Cruz killed himself on Sept. 20, 2011, during his incarceration at California State Prison in Sacramento, after a long history of mental illness. His story, first reported by the blog Solitary Watch, is an example of how the criminal justice system is ill-equipped to handle people with mental health issues. Cruz spent years in solitary confinement and died while locked in a tiny solitary cell. The rates of suicide in solitary confinement tend to be higher than in the general prison population.
Read more here.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Promoting your work on LinkedIn
In the last few years, LinkedIn has developed from what was essentially a job board into something truly useful in the academic world: an active community of practitioners, students and professors all either searching for and sharing content or promoting themselves and their work.
About LinkedIn: For those of you new to LinkedIn, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 175 million members. LinkedIn connects users through invited contacts, allowing for the sharing of knowledge, ideas, research within a network other academics and professionals. The mission of LinkedIn is “to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.”
Keep Reading
About LinkedIn: For those of you new to LinkedIn, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 175 million members. LinkedIn connects users through invited contacts, allowing for the sharing of knowledge, ideas, research within a network other academics and professionals. The mission of LinkedIn is “to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.”
Keep Reading
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?
At 2:15 in the afternoon on March 28, 2010, Conor McBride, a tall, sandy-haired 19-year-old wearing jeans, a T-shirt and New Balance sneakers, walked into the Tallahassee Police Department and approached the desk in the main lobby. Gina Maddox, the officer on duty, noticed that he looked upset and asked him how she could help. “You need to arrest me,” McBride answered. “I just shot my fiancée in the head.” When Maddox, taken aback, didn’t respond right away, McBride added, “This is not a joke.”
Maddox called Lt. Jim Montgomery, the watch commander, to her desk and told him what she had just heard. He asked McBride to sit in his office, where the young man began to weep.
About an hour earlier, at his parents’ house, McBride shot Ann Margaret Grosmaire, his girlfriend of three years. Ann was a tall 19-year-old with long blond hair and, like McBride, a student at Tallahassee Community College. The couple had been fighting for 38 hours in person, by text message and over the phone. They fought about the mundane things that many couples might fight about, but instead of resolving their differences or shaking them off, they kept it up for two nights and two mornings, culminating in the moment that McBride shot Grosmaire, who was on her knees, in the face. Her last words were, “No, don’t!”
Read more here.
Maddox called Lt. Jim Montgomery, the watch commander, to her desk and told him what she had just heard. He asked McBride to sit in his office, where the young man began to weep.
About an hour earlier, at his parents’ house, McBride shot Ann Margaret Grosmaire, his girlfriend of three years. Ann was a tall 19-year-old with long blond hair and, like McBride, a student at Tallahassee Community College. The couple had been fighting for 38 hours in person, by text message and over the phone. They fought about the mundane things that many couples might fight about, but instead of resolving their differences or shaking them off, they kept it up for two nights and two mornings, culminating in the moment that McBride shot Grosmaire, who was on her knees, in the face. Her last words were, “No, don’t!”
Read more here.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Justice delayed -- and delayed and delayed
All of us go to court at some point, if only to fight a traffic ticket or do jury duty. In court, you can see an attorney eloquently pressing a point, a judge wisely guiding the judicial process, and “the people” rendering carefully considered justice.
That’s in the ideal world, the world of “Law & Order” and “Perry Mason.” Courthouses can also be dispiriting sinkholes where day after day lawyers, clerks, police, judges, parole officers, and social workers try to keep their heads up amid the wreckage wrought by violence, drugs, selfishness, and chronically bad choices. In a courthouse, humanity can too easily be reduced to perpetrators and victims. You can feel guilty just being there.
That’s why it is all the more tragic when someone innocent is sucked into “the system” and becomes its victim.
Read more here.
That’s in the ideal world, the world of “Law & Order” and “Perry Mason.” Courthouses can also be dispiriting sinkholes where day after day lawyers, clerks, police, judges, parole officers, and social workers try to keep their heads up amid the wreckage wrought by violence, drugs, selfishness, and chronically bad choices. In a courthouse, humanity can too easily be reduced to perpetrators and victims. You can feel guilty just being there.
That’s why it is all the more tragic when someone innocent is sucked into “the system” and becomes its victim.
Read more here.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Advance legal columnist: Whom does the criminal justice system favor?
Some view America's criminal justice system as favoring defendants, allowing them to exploit legal technicalities and generous plea-bargains to avoid being duly punished for their crimes. Others see a system that is stacked against defendants, one in which people, particularly the poor and underprivileged, are victimized by police misconduct, overzealous prosecutions, inadequate legal representation, and biased juries.
Though both are gross oversimplifications, each does have some merit.
For example, the United States is the only nation in the world that employs the so-called "exclusionary rule," a principle whereby most evidence improperly obtained by law enforcement is inadmissible against a defendant at trial. Such an instance occurred last Tuesday when, in People v. Gavazzi, the New York Court of Appeals suppressed evidence of child pornography obtained from the defendant's home because of a clerical error in the search warrant. Judge Robert S. Smith dissented, lamenting that the defendant would go free "because the constable has blundered."
Read more here.
Though both are gross oversimplifications, each does have some merit.
For example, the United States is the only nation in the world that employs the so-called "exclusionary rule," a principle whereby most evidence improperly obtained by law enforcement is inadmissible against a defendant at trial. Such an instance occurred last Tuesday when, in People v. Gavazzi, the New York Court of Appeals suppressed evidence of child pornography obtained from the defendant's home because of a clerical error in the search warrant. Judge Robert S. Smith dissented, lamenting that the defendant would go free "because the constable has blundered."
Read more here.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Portland Shooting Not Forgotten
While much of the nation grieves for the tragic loss of 26 people in a Newtown, Conn., shooting, a community on the West Coast is still trying to come to grips with its own loss after a gunman opened fire in a Portland-area shopping mall.
The Clackamas Town Center was reported to have had 10,000 holiday shoppers in and out of its stores on the day Jacob Tyler Roberts arrived and began randomly firing a semiautomatic weapon in the shopping center’s food court, killing two and seriously wounding another before turning the gun on himself.
No motive has been determined, and family and friends of the shooter say he was a mild-mannered man who never showed any signs of mental disturbance or violent tendencies. He was employed and had plans for the future that he spoke of often; all things that seem to set him apart from many shooters, including Adam Lanza, although details about the Connecticut gunman are still murky.
Read more here.
The Clackamas Town Center was reported to have had 10,000 holiday shoppers in and out of its stores on the day Jacob Tyler Roberts arrived and began randomly firing a semiautomatic weapon in the shopping center’s food court, killing two and seriously wounding another before turning the gun on himself.
No motive has been determined, and family and friends of the shooter say he was a mild-mannered man who never showed any signs of mental disturbance or violent tendencies. He was employed and had plans for the future that he spoke of often; all things that seem to set him apart from many shooters, including Adam Lanza, although details about the Connecticut gunman are still murky.
Read more here.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
W.Va. inmate crowding study homes in on drug abuse
West Virginia can likely reduce prison crowding by assessing more quickly the risks posed by offenders and providing substance abuse treatment to those on probation, parole and other community-level supervision, researchers told state officials Monday.
The recommendations are among several findings emerging from a study of the state's criminal justice and corrections systems by the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. The project of the Justice Center at the nonpartisan Council of State Governments began scrutinizing West Virginia's situation earlier this year. With plans to present more formal proposals in January, its staff on Monday updated a panel that includes corrections and court officials, legislators, county prosecutors, defense lawyers and community leaders.
Read more here.
The recommendations are among several findings emerging from a study of the state's criminal justice and corrections systems by the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. The project of the Justice Center at the nonpartisan Council of State Governments began scrutinizing West Virginia's situation earlier this year. With plans to present more formal proposals in January, its staff on Monday updated a panel that includes corrections and court officials, legislators, county prosecutors, defense lawyers and community leaders.
Read more here.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Treating them as victims, not criminals
Two years ago, Los Angeles County probation officer Michelle Guymon was asked to help child abuse experts study human trafficking. She imagined a globe-trotting break from 23 years in the trenches managing law-breaking teens. "I figured I'd be traveling the world," she said. But Guymon never left home. The human trafficking victims she studied were local girls forced into sex — not much different from the hundreds she'd encountered in juvenile hall, locked up and punished for working the streets.
"That was an 'aha' moment for me," she recalled.
Guymon had spent years in the county's probation camps "working with young girls who had come into the system as a result of a prostitution-related offense. But I never really saw those girls as being sexually exploited."
"I had more of a judgment thing: 'You need to quit that. This is not a good thing to be doing.' I thought I was a good therapist, but I missed it," she said.
"I didn't make the correlation with the girls I had been working with: These are the girls being sexually exploited. This is not just some bad choice they made."
That was then. Now Guymon is serving on a county task force charged with translating that insight into policy. Its goal? Finding ways to keep young girls out of prostitution, and young prostitutes out of the criminal justice system. Treating them, finally, not as criminals but victims.
Read more here.
"That was an 'aha' moment for me," she recalled.
Guymon had spent years in the county's probation camps "working with young girls who had come into the system as a result of a prostitution-related offense. But I never really saw those girls as being sexually exploited."
"I had more of a judgment thing: 'You need to quit that. This is not a good thing to be doing.' I thought I was a good therapist, but I missed it," she said.
"I didn't make the correlation with the girls I had been working with: These are the girls being sexually exploited. This is not just some bad choice they made."
That was then. Now Guymon is serving on a county task force charged with translating that insight into policy. Its goal? Finding ways to keep young girls out of prostitution, and young prostitutes out of the criminal justice system. Treating them, finally, not as criminals but victims.
Read more here.
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