The debate about how to alleviate excessive caseloads continues.
From Pacific Standard
Gary Spence, a trial lawyer best known for his victory in the Karen Silkwood case against the Kerr-McGee plutonium production plant, gave a fiery speech last November at his Trial Lawyers College. Spence has an impressive record—he never lost a case as a criminal defense attorney in his entire career. But, he said, that’s because he and other private attorneys like him can spend months or years on each case; public defenders are in a different category altogether.
“I have great respect for public defenders, but what if the public defender has a hundred cases—what if the public defender is only a public defender in name?” Spence asked the audience. “Let me tell you something. If I had a hundred cases, I’d have to plead him guilty! I’d have to make the best deal that I could make! If I had a hundred cases, I couldn’t see my client until I walked into the courtroom.” Then Spence pounded his fist on the podium, and condemned what he saw as “a system that is defrauding America out of its Constitutional rights.”
This lecture caught the attention of several members of that same system. In particular, two defense attorneys responded with blog posts on the National Association for Public Defense (NAPD) website...
Read the rest here.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Black teens who commit a few crimes go to jail as often as white teens who commit dozens
From The Washington Post
Boys are less likely to commit crimes but they are more likely to be placed in a correctional facility than they were three decades ago, according to a new study that shows the justice system for juvenile offenders has become much more punitive. The trends are particularly pronounced among boys from racial minorities, according to the paper by Tia Stevens Andersen of the University of South Carolina and Michigan State University's Merry Morash.
Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they'd committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above. A black boy who told pollsters he had committed just five crimes in the past year was as likely to have been placed in a facility as a white boy who said he'd committed 40.
More recent statistics from the Department of Justice show that the juvenile justice system has continued to treat black boys more harshly. Although the overall number of cases in juvenile court has declined sharply since 2008, blacks still account for a third of cases in juvenile court, far more than their share of the population.
Advocates for children have long protested against what they describe as a "school-to-prison pipeline," in which strict discipline and arrests in classrooms damage children's long-term prospects, making them less likely to succeed in life and more likely to run afoul of the law in the future. A year ago, the Obama administration urged schools to reconsider zero-tolerance policies, which Attorney General Eric Holder said "have significant and lasting negative effects on the long-term well-being of our young people, increasing their likelihood of future contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems."
Read the rest here.
Boys are less likely to commit crimes but they are more likely to be placed in a correctional facility than they were three decades ago, according to a new study that shows the justice system for juvenile offenders has become much more punitive. The trends are particularly pronounced among boys from racial minorities, according to the paper by Tia Stevens Andersen of the University of South Carolina and Michigan State University's Merry Morash.
Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they'd committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above. A black boy who told pollsters he had committed just five crimes in the past year was as likely to have been placed in a facility as a white boy who said he'd committed 40.
More recent statistics from the Department of Justice show that the juvenile justice system has continued to treat black boys more harshly. Although the overall number of cases in juvenile court has declined sharply since 2008, blacks still account for a third of cases in juvenile court, far more than their share of the population.
Advocates for children have long protested against what they describe as a "school-to-prison pipeline," in which strict discipline and arrests in classrooms damage children's long-term prospects, making them less likely to succeed in life and more likely to run afoul of the law in the future. A year ago, the Obama administration urged schools to reconsider zero-tolerance policies, which Attorney General Eric Holder said "have significant and lasting negative effects on the long-term well-being of our young people, increasing their likelihood of future contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems."
Read the rest here.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Utah considers major criminal justice reform, reduced drug offense charges
From St. George News
The Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice unanimously approved a series of proposed criminal justice reforms during a prison relocation meeting in November 2014 with the intended purpose of reducing prison population growth by changing the way Utah prosecutes drug offenses.
Upon request of Gov. Gary Herbert in January 2014, the “Justice Reinvestment Initiative” report was created over an eight month span with the help of the Pew Charitable Trusts public safety performance project, and has gained momentum as lawmakers consider moving the Utah State Prison in Draper.
With the intent to ensure prison beds are reserved for serious and violent offenders while breaking the cycle of recidivism by focusing on treatment for substance abusers and mental health issues, the report contains 18 recommendations, including revising the penalties for drug offenders.
One of the most significant changes in the proposal would be reducing simple drug possession from a third-degree felony, to a class A misdemeanor. The proposal also includes reclassifying drug dealing to a third-degree felony, as well as reworking drug-free zones to focus more on drug offenses where children are more tangentially tied to the drug exposure.
Under the initiative, the restructuring of sentencing guidelines for certain lower-level crimes would mean nonviolent offenders would see two to four months off their sentences where guideline recommendations is not prison, while some class B misdemeanors would be reclassified as class C misdemeanors, and more efforts would be focused on treatment and community-based resources.
Additional recommendations include improving and expanding treatment and services for offenders returning to their communities and strengthening probation and parole supervision...
Read the rest here.
The Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice unanimously approved a series of proposed criminal justice reforms during a prison relocation meeting in November 2014 with the intended purpose of reducing prison population growth by changing the way Utah prosecutes drug offenses.
Upon request of Gov. Gary Herbert in January 2014, the “Justice Reinvestment Initiative” report was created over an eight month span with the help of the Pew Charitable Trusts public safety performance project, and has gained momentum as lawmakers consider moving the Utah State Prison in Draper.
With the intent to ensure prison beds are reserved for serious and violent offenders while breaking the cycle of recidivism by focusing on treatment for substance abusers and mental health issues, the report contains 18 recommendations, including revising the penalties for drug offenders.
One of the most significant changes in the proposal would be reducing simple drug possession from a third-degree felony, to a class A misdemeanor. The proposal also includes reclassifying drug dealing to a third-degree felony, as well as reworking drug-free zones to focus more on drug offenses where children are more tangentially tied to the drug exposure.
Under the initiative, the restructuring of sentencing guidelines for certain lower-level crimes would mean nonviolent offenders would see two to four months off their sentences where guideline recommendations is not prison, while some class B misdemeanors would be reclassified as class C misdemeanors, and more efforts would be focused on treatment and community-based resources.
Additional recommendations include improving and expanding treatment and services for offenders returning to their communities and strengthening probation and parole supervision...
Read the rest here.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
In Search of an Impartial Jury
Mass media is just the latest challenge for courts in an ongoing quest for impartial jurors—a goal that might be nearly impossible to achieve.
From Pacific Standard
Who should decide the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 21-year-old behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing? The same question can be asked in Colorado, where James Holmes, the troubled gunman who opened fire on a crowded Colorado movie theater in 2012, awaits trial. In both cases, the search for jurors has begun.
The 6th Amendment guarantees these men the right to an impartial jury—one that is without pre-existing knowledge of the case or biases against the defendant, and will come to a decision based only on the information presented during trial. Both the Tsarnaev and Holmes cases are high-profile ones. They received widespread media attention, raising questions about court's ability to deliver an impartial jury. But the truth is, mass media is just the latest challenge courts have faced in an ongoing quest for impartial jurors.
While jury selection is arguably the most important aspect of any trial, the process has never been scientific. Lawyers and judges have always relied on intuition to weed out jurors with explicit biases—the ones people readily admit to having—and implicit ones, the perceptions and stereotypes that reside in our subconscious....
...Read the rest here.
From Pacific Standard
Who should decide the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 21-year-old behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing? The same question can be asked in Colorado, where James Holmes, the troubled gunman who opened fire on a crowded Colorado movie theater in 2012, awaits trial. In both cases, the search for jurors has begun.
The 6th Amendment guarantees these men the right to an impartial jury—one that is without pre-existing knowledge of the case or biases against the defendant, and will come to a decision based only on the information presented during trial. Both the Tsarnaev and Holmes cases are high-profile ones. They received widespread media attention, raising questions about court's ability to deliver an impartial jury. But the truth is, mass media is just the latest challenge courts have faced in an ongoing quest for impartial jurors.
While jury selection is arguably the most important aspect of any trial, the process has never been scientific. Lawyers and judges have always relied on intuition to weed out jurors with explicit biases—the ones people readily admit to having—and implicit ones, the perceptions and stereotypes that reside in our subconscious....
...Read the rest here.
Monday, February 2, 2015
Prison bus initiative helps bring inmates, family together | Inmates who stay connected with family have a better chance of turning their lives around
From CBC News
A prison inmate who stays connected with family and gets to see them while in jail has a better chance of turning their life around once they get out, but for some whose loved-ones are incarcerated, significant challenges stand in the way of visits.
Research has shown that getting to see family can be very beneficial for prisoners. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, for example, says the chances of an inmate re-offending dropped 31 per cent among those who received visits during the year prior to their release.
The number of visits also had a notable impact - each visit reduced their odds of re-offending after release by about 4 per cent.
"People outside, they probably just see us as criminals,” says Nathan Trudeau, who is serving time in Ontario’s Warkworth institution for armed robbery.
“They don't look at us like human beings. They think that our lives don't matter and we change as soon as the door's locked, but we're people too. We're convicts, we've done bad things, but some of us plan to change."
And while visits can help bolster that desire to change, they can also help the families of inmates in return...
...Read the rest here.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Should we be sending the elderly to prison?
From the New Statesman
With more old people behind bars than ever before, British prisons are slowly turning into dysfunctional nursing homes with a few visitors and a crippling sense of despair. While research suggests that the cognitive abilities of a child are comparable to those of the elderly, should there be an upper age limit for criminal responsibility akin to the infancy defence?
Thanks to our ageing population and the surge in harsher sentences, over 60s are the fastest growing group within our prison population. Over the last decade, their numbers increased by more than double, and by March last year, there were 102 prisoners aged over 80 and 5 who were 90 or older.
The problem lies in the fact that the majority of the older prisoners, particularly those over 60, suffer chronic illness or disability. Yet most prison estates are designed for the young and able. Norwich prison has Britain’s only elderly ward, and it mainly accommodates lifers. The multi-storey wards, narrow doors and the tough regime make for a particularly intimidating and inaccessible environment for elderly prisoners...
Read the rest here.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
College courses creep back into prisons: A RAND study suggests the privately funded programs reduce the rate of reoffending.
From the Portland Press Herald
SEATTLE — Every week, they slide books through the metal detectors — novels by Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, copies of the U.S. Constitution, texts on sociology, psychology and comparative religion.
Then dozens of professors and instructors from Washington state’s public and private colleges surrender their driver’s licenses and car keys to an armed guard, walk through the detector themselves and pass through a perimeter fence topped by coils of gleaming razor wire.
They have come to teach some of the state’s most unlikely college students: men and women serving time for felonies such as rape, robbery and murder.
Many think inmates don’t deserve the kind of higher education that law-abiding citizens must pay tens of thousands of dollars to get, a view that led lawmakers, as part of a get-tough-on-crime push in the 1990s, to bar federal and state money from supporting college classes in prison.
But now, such classes are starting to creep back, operating on shoestring budgets with private money, in the belief that they will more than pay for themselves by giving felons skills that can help them get jobs, reducing the recidivism rate...
...Read the rest here.
Monday, January 26, 2015
'Fairness for All': Cuomo Seeks Criminal Justice and Prison Reform
Responding to the ongoing controversies over the non-indictment of a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, Gov. Andrew Cuomo laid out a seven-point plan to change the way cops and communities interact and to reform legal proceedings involving police-related fatalities.
Mr. Cuomo, speaking today during his State of the State address, asserted his proposals would help heal the deep wounds formed in the months after Officer Daniel Pantaleo applied a lethal chokehold to Garner, a black man, and after Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan did not convince a grand jury to indict Mr. Pantaleo for murder.
“The promise of equal justice is a New York promise and it is an American promise. We are currently in the midst of a national problem where people are questioning our justice system,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, told the Albany audience, alluding to similar controversies like the one surrounding the death of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. “And they’re questioning whether the justice system really is fairness for all. And whether the justice system really is colorblind. And that’s not just New York, it’s a problem all across the country.”
...Read the rest here.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Obama Calls For Criminal Justice Reform In State Of The Union
From The Huffington Post
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama used part of his State on the Union address on Tuesday to call for bipartisan criminal justice reform.
Obama referenced the protests over the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York last year, and said that while people may have differing opinions on those tragedies, there is room for agreement on criminal justice reform more broadly.
"We may have different takes on the events of Ferguson and New York. But surely we can understand a father who fears his son can’t walk home without being harassed. Surely we can understand the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the front door at the end of his shift," Obama said.
"Surely we can agree it’s a good thing that for the first time in 40 years, the crime rate and the incarceration rate have come down together, and use that as a starting point for Democrats and Republicans, community leaders and law enforcement, to reform America’s criminal justice system so that it protects and serves us all," he continued.
In the wake of unrest in Ferguson and protests across the country this fall, Obama formed a presidential commission to look at policing issues. The commission is expected to offer recommendations in March.
Watch the video here.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
The End of Gangs
From Pacific Standard
Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California’s streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world?
In 2007, when housing prices were still heated, factory worker Simon Tejada put his home on the market. It was a well maintained three-bedroom in the Glassell Park district of Northeast Los Angeles, and the structure was appraised at $350,000. (Tejada had bought it for $85,000 in 1985.) But only one offer came in: $150,000. “Your house is fine,” the guy told Tejada. “The neighborhood’s awful.”
I met Tejada a few months later. I had been writing about gangs in Los Angeles since 2004, when, after 10 years as a writer in Mexico, I’d returned home to take a job with the Los Angeles Times. My reporting took me into scores of working-class neighborhoods and cities within Southern California, places like Pacoima, Watts, Azusa, Hawaiian Gardens, Florence-Firestone, and Harbor Gateway.
Gangs ravaged all these locales. Walls were covered with graffiti. Shootings were constant. In many of these neighborhoods, Latino gangs had taken to attacking and killing random black civilians, turning themselves into the leading regional perpetrators of race-hate crime...
...Read the rest here.
Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California’s streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world?
In 2007, when housing prices were still heated, factory worker Simon Tejada put his home on the market. It was a well maintained three-bedroom in the Glassell Park district of Northeast Los Angeles, and the structure was appraised at $350,000. (Tejada had bought it for $85,000 in 1985.) But only one offer came in: $150,000. “Your house is fine,” the guy told Tejada. “The neighborhood’s awful.”
I met Tejada a few months later. I had been writing about gangs in Los Angeles since 2004, when, after 10 years as a writer in Mexico, I’d returned home to take a job with the Los Angeles Times. My reporting took me into scores of working-class neighborhoods and cities within Southern California, places like Pacoima, Watts, Azusa, Hawaiian Gardens, Florence-Firestone, and Harbor Gateway.
Gangs ravaged all these locales. Walls were covered with graffiti. Shootings were constant. In many of these neighborhoods, Latino gangs had taken to attacking and killing random black civilians, turning themselves into the leading regional perpetrators of race-hate crime...
...Read the rest here.
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