Can You Measure Justice

Cheating

2011-08-11T09:20:00.000-07:00

An article in today's (August 19, 2011) Chronicle
of Higher Learning reports an experiment done at
Duke University. Two students in a class of 500
sent email to everyone in the course. It purported
to have a link to a question from a previous exam
that would help in the current exam. They then
counted how many people opened the link. More than
half had clicked on the link. There is no
way to determine if clicking was done out
of curiosity or to actually cheat.

The apparent willingness to cheat raises the issue
of whether this reflects a lack of ethical values
that can be factored in to the reasons for criminal
acts. Crime rates have actually been reported as
lower recently which on the surface appears to be
an anomaly. The expectation in a poor economy with
unemployment rates high is that there would be more
crime.

One explanation is that potential victims have little
or nothing worth taking. Another might be that high
unemployment means more people are about and would see
the criminal which would lead to faster apprehension.

Obviously when dealing with why a person does or does
not do something, we can only speculate or rely upon
what we are told.

Do you have an explanation? Could it be tested?

Totally unrelated to the criminal question, is
another that came to my mind when I read the article.

I was bothered by a class with so many students and
the limited opportunities for class discussions. Yes,
professors can still ask questions and students will
answer either verbally or with clickers, but only a
few students will actually speak up.

When you personally are in lecture hall classes, do
you believe that you are gaining as much from the
course as when you are in a small seminar-type setting?
Do you find yourself physically present but mentally
far away or even half asleep?

Would an online course have equally or more benefit
than a 500 person lecture hall course? Why or why not?

Solitary on Death Row

2010-11-19T10:40:00.000-08:00

This article from the Texas Observer discusses

the effect of solitary confinement on death row

inmates.

Solitary can drive an inmate into a mental state

of insanity and the Supreme Court has said that

you cannot execute someone who is insane if they

do not understand that they are going to be

executed.

In Japan the condemned do not know when they

will be executed and each day wait to learn in the

morning if it is going to happen that day. Unlike in

the US, a Japanese prisoner is required to sit in a

specific manner all the time. There is also no

communication with another person. CNN did a

report on Japanese death row inmates that can

be read at

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-09-10/world/japan.executions_1_death-row-amnesty-international-mental-illness?_s=PM:WORLD

Our Super Max prisons use the same total isolation

concept for inmates. You can read about SuperMax

prisons, especially the one in Colorado, at

www.supermaxed.com/Federal-SM-Page.htm

For additional information go to bing.com and

type in SuperMax prison. Bing.com is an excellent

search engine and I personally prefer it over

Google. But any of the many search engines will

provide you with information.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Budget Cuts Have High Criminal Justice Impact

2010-11-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

The federal government is not alone in dealing with

budget woes. Unlike the federal government, however,

many states have a state constitutional requirement that

the budget be balanced.

To deal with inadequate amounts of revenue, states are

looking to make cuts in all programs. Some of the current

proposals are going to directly impact the criminal justice

system.

One proposal which appears to be getting wider support than

in the past involves sentencing guidelines and practices. Because

states like West Virginia literally have no room in the regional jails,

legislators are considering alternatives to jail time for low level

offenses.

One of the many complaints heard about having sentencing guidelines

is that the judges have no discretion to tailor a punishment to the

individual offender. Legislators feared making any changes

because an opponent would label them as "soft on crime." Budget

woes and voter concerns about the economy and deficits is making

it more likely that guidelines will soon be changed.

Research has shown that some alternatives work well and do not involve

the costs of incarceration. The odds are that more of these will be

considered in the months to come and be more acceptable to the

public.

What do you think of changes made because of the budget deficit?

Criminalize or Legalize

2010-10-31T19:26:00.000-07:00

A number of states will be asking voters on Tuesday to
consider whether or not to legalize marijuana for medical
reasons. There does not appear to be any consensus on
whether or not this is good public policy.

One problem is that what relief, if any, relies on anecdotal

evidence. Scientific evidence requires facts that can be tested

by others with the same results; obviously this is a weakness

when one depends on anecdotal evidence. But allowing for

this weakness, it appears that those who are taking a wide variety

of chemotherapy drugs do report getting relief from the nausea

when they are allowed to use marijuana.

The problem, or a major one, lies in the inability to have any

meaningful way of controlling the writing of prescriptions

for those who want it for any other purpose beyond

just control of nausea after chemotherapy.

The recent conviction of Howard K. Smith associated with his

obtaining drugs for her is a good example of prescription abuse.

The wall between government and patient/doctor privilege

must be high enough to be unscalable.

Another factor is that if it is a prescription then insurance

will be asked to pay for it or part of its costs. With talk of

government involvement in health care costs, the partisan

arguments may get hostile and raises another issue that

will be highly divisive at a time when

unity is needed to face our economic woes.

If marijuana is legal, then states can tax it and thus raise revenue

much as is done with lottery tickets and alcohol. This is opposed

forcefully by many conservatives for religious and moralistic

reasons. Many point to the results in the growth of crime families

when alcohol was first prohibited and then legalized.

Studies will need to look at results in California where it is legal

in many areas. In fact courts are being asked to decide whether

states have the constitutional right to legalize something that

is contrary to federal governmental policy.

It is important that information be made available that

shows both sides of the argument as well as the underlying

research to establish the argument. Since this is becoming

a major issue on the ballot box, and in some states, is being

raised as a possible constitutional amendment. Each of us must

begin to think about our position and the research that we

have looked to in reaching the position. For some

it is, and will always be, a question of religion or our interpretation

of morality. For others it will be a question of research results.

Where do you personally stand?

Prosecutorial Misconduct

2010-09-23T17:34:00.000-07:00

Innocent people spend years in jail and there
is nothing done to prosecutors when it is shown
that they prosecuted an innocent person KNOWINGLY.

An article in USA today brings attention to the
large number of cases that have come to light.

An off-Broadway play called the Exonerated called
attention to the problem a few years ago. A Chicago
newspaper ran a series of articles when the governor
pardoned a large number of inmates who were found to
be innocent.

The Innocence Project which involves journalism students
as well as law school students does a great deal of
searching for proof of wrongful convictions.

The main thing is to realize that it can happen to you,
a middle class person who has never had so much as a
parking ticket. Proving innocence is difficult to do.
How can you prove you were somewhere (maybe at home)
alone at a specific time? Do you keep every receipt you
ever get to have time stamps available (no one I know
does)?

Read this article and realize that these things happen
and the worst part is that nothing happens to the
prosecutor when misconduct is proved. But the innocent person
becomes an ex-felon for life unless the case generates
enough media or political attention to end in a pardon.

Assisted Suicide

2010-09-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

Switzerland has recently revised its policy about
assisted suicides and Great Britain stopped prosecuting
those who went to another country to help someone commit
suicide.

Three of the United States allow assisted suicide -- Oregon,
Washington, and Montana. I have not seen any published
numbers to indicate whether or not many take advantage of it
or not.

It raises a host of issues involving end of life that became
part of a national debate when a young woman, Terri Schiavo, who
was in a long term coma and never expected to recover, had her
husband and family fighting over whether to pull the plug to the
artificial machinery that was keeping her alive. It was even
litigated and a topic of discussion in Congress. She eventually
was transferred to a nursing home and without life
support finally died after a few weeks.

Sciavo's case also revived the use of medical directives and
medical power of attorney forms. Today anyone who is hospitalized
is asked about whether they want resuscitation used if needed.

Because there are so many ethical and religious aspects to discussions
of issues such as assisted suicide, consensus will probably never
be attainable. But predetermining our wishes on quality of life
and steps to take if we are comatose and in a vegetative
state is something each of us owes to family members
who should not be required to make decisions without
any indication of the person's desires.

About the only time this is an area of discussion, especially
with younger persons, occurs when the news reports on a traffic
accident victim who is in a coma. Then some younger folk may
state something to the effect of
wanting or not wanting life support continued indefinitely.

There have been cases of spouses who were fulfilling the wishes of the
other and faced charges and in some cases were sent to prison on charges
of homicide.

In 2007 Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, was released
from prison after 8 years. He became known as Dr. Death because
of his assistance to those who wished to end their lies and were
chronically ill with no chance of recovery. He did not do anything
himself to end a life but did provide the means for the individual
who wished to die.

A case involving Elizabeth Bouvier involved her refusal to be force
fed; she went to court claiming her right to make medical decisions
based on her own standard of the quality of life. By the time all
the appeals ended, she decided she wished to live.

Don't take Presumption as a given

2010-09-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

Two Americans are in jail in Juarez after being
accused of drug trafficking. They have been found
guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison.

BUT their claim, supported by three witnesses, is
that the military planted the drugs in their truck.
One witness was killed before the trial and the
other two disappeared.One cannot overlook the fact
that the vast majority of prisoners, worldwide, claim
innocence.

However we also know of cases where years
later prisoners are released and then exonerated because
they were innocent all along and should never have been
sent to jail/prison for a crime they did not commit.

Recently a New York man was released after 27 years when
in fact he was innocent all along. How do you compensate
for taking so many years and life experiences away from
someone? How do you compensate for the horrors endured
while locked up?

A most interesting aspect of this story from Juarez
is the fact that in Mexico an accused is presumed to
be guilty and has the burden of proving innocence. Consider
the handicap of trying to gather evidence to prove
a government agency planted evidence against you or
tortured you or in anyway infringed upon your basic civil rights.

In our country and in many western nations, the presumption
is that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. Proving
innocence when unjustly accused is difficult enough without
the added problem of having the burden of proof.

Americans tend to take our Bill of Rights for granted and do
not stop to realize that any one of us could be falsely accused
because of mistaken identity or any of a litany of hard to
imagine occurrences. Go to
and read about a woman who spent 9 years in prison for a crime she
had nothing to do with.

The show Sixty Minutes, which has the resources, were able to prove her
innocence as well as that of another gentleman, also prosecuted by
the Dallas District Attorney's Office. It would be nice to think
that these two are a rarity but unfortunately every state has some
who should never have been sent to prison. Even after being shown
to be innocent, the stigma of the accusation follow one for life.

Budget cuts and Effect on Death Penalty Defendants

2010-07-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

An article published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette as well as the New York Times
details a Georgia Supreme Court ruling involving a death penalty defendant.

Georgia has a severe budget crisis and the state ran out of money to pay the attorneys for Jamie R. Weis who is facing the death penalty. The prosecutor recommended that two overworked public defenders, who he specifically named, should take over the Weis defense.

When Mr. Weis objected, the issue went before the Georgia State Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that Mr. Reis should accept the public defenders to help solve the state's budget crunch.

The public defenders made three motions that asked the court to remove them from the case because they had neither the time nor experience to provide a death penalty defendant with an adequate defense. In addition there is no money to pay for any type of investigation which would be a severe handicap for any appointed counsel. Nor is there money for any expert witnesses.

Normally prosecutors have no role to play in the selection of defense counsel. In addition once counsel is on record for a defendant, it takes exceptional reasons for any changes to be allowed by the court.

"Two states, Georgia and Louisiana, take a less sporting attitude, saying poor defendants may be forced to switch lawyers long after the case is under way and must take whomever the state can afford at the time." (New York Times article).

The famous United States Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright established the right of defendants to adequate counsel. The current United States Supreme Court is being asked to grant certiorari to hear this case.

As states continue to deal with budget deficits, more and more criminal justice
participants will face difficulties.

Privacy carried too far

2010-06-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

Anything carried to the extreme usually has unexpected
consequences and this is a good example. Privacy laws
to protect juvenile should be limited to status offenses
and not to serious acts of delinquency. The public has
the right to some protection and in this case, providing
the video would probably prevent future assaults by the
offender.

D.C. Juvenile Detention Officials Won't Provide Videos To Police

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Police who responded to a disturbance Sunday at Washington, D.C.'s juvenile detention center made what should have been a routine request: to view surveillance videos to determine responsibility for the assault of a staff member and other possible crimes. Instead, they ended up in court because the city's confidentiality laws for juvenile offenders precluded release -- even to the police -- of this material. How much more absurd does the situation have to get before the D.C. Council does something about rules that show more regard for those who break the law than those who need its protection, asks the Washington Post in an editorial.

A worker at the center had his jaw broken and three other staff members were injuired in the hour-long melee. It appears the incident started when a group of youths objected to the end of a basketball game and refused to return to their housing units. The police investigation was momentarily stymied when the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services cited a confidentiality statute in refusing to make information available. There are good reasons for protecting the privacy of youths who commit crimes; mainly, so they can have the chance of rebuilding their lives without the lifelong stigma of their youthful offenses. But Washington's laws are overly broad and unusually strict, making it a crime for anyone to release any information about a juvenile case. Attorney General Peter Nickles, who is reviewing the juvenile justice system, said he's increasingly convinced that strict confidentiality laws harm public safety by shrouding the system in such secrecy that public confidence is undermined.

Washington Post

Connecting Prisoners and their children

2010-06-18T16:50:00.000-07:00

This topic is mentioned in the text.

Prisons Work To Reconnect Inmate Fathers With Their Children

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More than 1.7 million children have a parent in U.S. prisons, says USA Today, citing the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of children with a father in prison grew by 77 percent from 1991 through mid-2007. And those children are two to three more times likely to wind up behind bars themselves, says Christopher Wildeman, a University of Michigan sociologist who has studied the effects of imprisoned parents.

To combat that trend, Louisiana's Angola prison and other institutions across the U.S. sponsor two programs aimed at reconnecting prison dads with their children: Returning Hearts, a day-long carnival-like celebration where inmates spend eight hours with their kids, and Malachi Dads, a year-long training session that uses Bible passages to help improve inmates' parenting skills. Inmates must show good behavior to participate, says Angola Warden Burl Cain. Once they feel reconnected to their family, their attitudes improve, he says. Around 2,500 inmates have participated in Returning Hearts since it began in 2005. Malachi, which started in 2007, currently has 119 men. "The ones who were problematic before are not problematic anymore," Cain says. "Prison didn't straighten them out; their kids straightened them out."

USA Today

Supreme Court has a new Miranda decision

2010-06-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

In the past the Supreme Court required that a
suspect must clearly and unequivocally
state the desire to have a lawyer. The Court
has now gone a step further.

The Court has now held that if a suspect wishes
to remain silent (the first of the Miranda Rules),
the suspect must clearly state that he/or she
is invoking the constitutional right to remain silent.

Somehow the idea that one must speak in order
to remain silent is strange to write or even talk about.
But the Court has over the years endorsed Miranda
while requiring that a suspect articulate any
rights that are to be invoked.

Once a right is invoked by articulation, there
is no longer any question that police must
stop all interrogation and not ask any
further questions, no matter how much
time has passed.

The suspect could still contact the police
and inform them that he/she no longer
wishes to invoke silence, but without this
articulation, interrogation could not be
used as evidence, nor anything said ever
used in any manner to make a case
against the suspect.

The bottom line is that anyone who wishes
to utilize a right must clearly state the intention.

Good News - crime is going down

2010-05-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

The preliminary UCR for 2009 shows a decrease in all types of violent crime. This raises some interesting questions. Unemployment is high and new graduates are facing a dearth of job openings. So one wonders about the relationship of employment and crime.

Community policing is now widespread in the US; could this be a factor in the decrease? Does more unemployment mean more eyes are on the look-out, ready to intervene if they see situations that could escalate into violence?

There is no lessening of gang membership so how does gang membership relate to violent crime? The data raises more questions than it answers.

Here are some more top line numbers from the report:

All four categories of violent crime declined overall compared to 2008: robbery, 8.1 percent; murder, 7.2 percent; aggravated assault, 4.2 percent; and forcible rape, 3.1 percent. Violent crime declined 4.0 percent in metropolitan counties and 3.0 percent in nonmetropolitan counties.

The largest decrease in murders—7.5 percent—was in cities with populations ranging from 500,000 to 999,999. The only increases in murders were found in cities of 25,000 to 49,999 (up 5.3 percent) and nonmetropolitan counties (up 1.8 percent).

All overall categories of property crime also decreased when compared to 2008. Motor vehicle theft was down 17.2 percent; larceny-theft, 4.2 percent; and burglaries, 1.7 percent. Motor vehicle theft, which experienced the largest decrease in a single property crime category by far, fell significantly in all four regions of the country—down 18.5 percent in the Midwest, down 17.5 percent in both the Northeast and the West, and down 16.3 percent in the South.
Arson declined across the board, with reported decreases across all population groups and all four regions of the country—11.6 percent in the West, 10.6 percent in the South, 9.2 percent in the Midwest, and 8.6 percent in the Northeast.

The 2009 crime statistics are preliminary; the final report will be issued this fall.

Past full-year reports:
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | More

- More About the Uniform
Crime Reports (Statistics) - Frequently Asked Questions

The report also contains individual 2008 and 2009 figures for all eight crimes—murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and arson—by cities with populations of 100,000 or more.

Court rules on juveniles and life without parole

2010-05-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that giving a juvenile a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for any non-homicide violates the 8th Amendment.

While it is possible that Graham the youngster in the case will probably be sentenced to 40 years, knowing that he has the possibility of gaining parole makes a tremendous difference to an inmate.

Young people tend to act on impulse and most of their crimes (non gang related) lack premeditation. Thus the Court recognizes that there is a difference in the sentence that a youth should receive from that given to one who is past the age of majority.

It is interesting to note that Florida is the state that most often used life without parole as a sentence for youth who commit heinous crimes. Hopefully juries and
sentencing judges will begin to consider the immaturity of the offender in determining the punishment. Substantial punishment is reasonable but consideration about a person's redemption must also be a factor.

Trusting Police is hard in some areas

2010-03-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

March 19, 2010

Linked to Police Misconduct, 185 Drug Cases Are Dropped

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) — Charges have been dropped or convictions vacated in 185 drug cases in one of the nation’s most crime-ridden cities, because information gathered in a criminal investigation of five police officers suggested that evidence could have been tainted, a prosecutor announced Friday.

One of the officers, who resigned, pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to conspiring with other officers to deprive other people of their civil rights.

The former officer, Kevin Parry, admitted that he planted drugs on suspects, conducted illegal searches, threatened to bring additional charges against suspects who refused to cooperate, stole drugs and money from suspects, and paid informants — many of them prostitutes — with drugs in exchange for information.

Friday’s announcement and Mr. Parry’s plea were the first information about the situation to emerge since the investigation began in November.

At least four of the police officers were suspended then. The Camden County prosecutor, Warren Faulk, would not say whether the fifth had been removed from duty.

The prosecutor’s office reviewed more than 400 cases over the last five years in which one of those five was the arresting or investigating officer, Mr. Faulk said. They seemed to not have behaved inappropriately in some cases, like domestic violence calls, Mr. Faulk said.

But in 185 cases involving more than 180 suspects, Mr. Faulk said, there was reason to drop charges or vacate convictions. It was not clear how many people were released because of the investigation, but 81 of them had received prison or jail sentences.

Yvonne Smith Segars, who heads the state’s public defender’s office, called the developments “unprecedented.”

Horrific Doesn'Even Begin to Discribe this

2010-03-19T14:56:00.000-07:00

Horrifying acts' common thread: troubled kids

Update related to New Postings

2010-03-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

I will be having open heart surgery in the relatively near future. I am not sure
how long it will be until I am once again feeling up to searching for new
articles to post on this blog.

But with the help of my doctors and the Lord, I expect to be back at it in a month or so.

I will be home until Tuesday, March 23, so I may post one or two until then.

C.L. Segal

Sexting

2010-03-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

Appeals Court Rejects Prosecution Threat In "Sexting" Case

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the the first case to challenge the constitutionality of prosecuting teens for "sexting," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia upheld an injunction that barred a Pennsylvania prosecutor from bringing child pornography charges against girls who refused to attend a class he had designed to educate youths about the dangers of sexting, the Legal Intelligencer reports.

A unanimous three-judge panel concluded there was no probable cause to bring any charges against the girls who had appeared in various states of undress in photos shared among a group of teens. Missing from the prosecutor's case, the court said, was critical evidence about who exactly had transmitted the images. As a result, the court said, any decision to prosecute the teens after they refused to take the class would therefore be retaliation against them for asserting their First Amendment rights. The panel found that former Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. had violated the rights of parents by usurping their roles. "An individual district attorney may not coerce parents into permitting him to impose on their children his ideas of morality and gender roles," wrote Judge Thomas Ambro.

Legal Intelligencer

Prison Populations Getting Smaller

2010-03-17T11:43:00.000-07:00

March 16, 2010

Report Finds States Holding Fewer Prisoners

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

State prison populations, which have grown for nearly four decades, have begun to dip, according to a new report, largely because of recent efforts to keep parolees out of prison and reduce prison time for nonviolent offenders.

State prisons held 1,403,091 people as of Jan. 1, nearly 6 percent fewer than a year before, the report said. Prison populations have fallen in 27 states in that period, while they have risen in 23.

“It’s too early to tell whether this is a tap of the brakes or a shift into reverse,” said Adam Gelb, the director of the public safety performance project of the Pew Center on the States in Washington, which produced the report. Still, Mr. Gelb said, seeing the state prison numbers dip for the first time since 1972 “took us a little bit by surprise,” he said.

In the same period, the population in federal prisons increased by nearly 7 percent.

The results broaden the conclusions in a report issued this month by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that looked at efforts to reduce the prison populations in Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey and New York. That report found that all four states had achieved reductions, with New York reaching a 20 percent reduction and New Jersey 19 percent over a decade.

Marc Mauer, the executive director of that group, said the reduction was actually overdue, since crime rates have declined for some 15 years. “That’s the puzzling piece — why did this take so long?” he asked. The lag, he said, was partly the result of longer sentences and partly because of tough standards in many states for revoking parole.

The Pew report noted that while the squeeze on state and local budgets had contributed to efforts to reduce prison populations, “financial pressures alone do not explain the decline.” At least part of the fall-off resulted from changes like California’s decision to reduce the number of low-risk people on parole returning to prison because of technical violations, and Texas’ decision to step up its residential and community-based treatment programs.

“If you had to single out the most common reform that we’re seeing,” Mr. Gelb said, “it’s various strategies to hold parole violators accountable, short of jamming them back into a $25,000-a-year, taxpayer-funded prison cell.”

Releases of prisoners, however, have been controversial. Crime Victims United of California, a nonprofit group, sued the state last month over its efforts to reduce the number of inmates in its prisons, claiming that releases driven by overcrowding would violate a 2008 voter initiative.

The new report does not deal with the prisoner levels in local jails. A 2009 report by the Pew center that did count local jail inmates concluded that 1 in 100 adults in the United States lives behind bars.

The new report concluded that whatever the long-term trends, with 1.6 million people in state and federal prisons and an estimated 700,000 in local jails, “the United States will continue to lead the world in incarceration for the foreseeable future.”

Indigents not getting best defense says article

2010-03-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

Decision could be influential in other states as well

March 15, 2010

Key New York Suit Calls Public Defender Programs Inadequate

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

A class-action suit to be argued next week in New York’s highest court has become a test of a national strategy by civil liberties groups to challenge what they say are failed public defender programs in many states.

Because an estimated 80 percent of felony defendants in large states are too poor to hire their own lawyers, and because the case is being watched around the nation, the case has the potential to alter the shape of the criminal justice system.

Filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the lawsuit is a broad challenge to a patchwork system that has been described by decades of studies and commissions as dysfunctional, underfinanced and “in crisis,” with often poorly trained and poorly supervised lawyers handling huge caseloads. It says indigent clients have been failed by their appointed lawyers all around the state.

“The eyes of the nation will be on New York as it decides this crucial issue,” a brief filed by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers argues.

As the system works now, defendants who are unhappy with their appointed lawyers can generally make those claims only after they are convicted. The court then reviews each appeal case by case. But the civil liberties lawyers argue that a broad review is necessary because the arrangement has not addressed systemic failings that unconstitutionally leave tens of thousands of defendants without meaningful representation in every part of the state.

The state has fought hard against the suit, which was first filed in 2007, arguing that if New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, allows it to proceed — and a court later uses the case to order the state to upgrade the public defender system — it would be a judicial invasion of the authority of the Legislature and the governor. Such improvements, some lawyers say, could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

In one filing, the state argues that by appointing lawyers it fulfills its constitutional obligations. “It cannot be seriously contended that plaintiffs have been denied the right to counsel,” the state says. The state’s defender system includes Legal Aid Societies, private lawyers who are appointed by the courts, and local public defender offices.

Next Tuesday, the Court of Appeals is to consider whether the suit can proceed. A half-dozen friend-of-the-court briefs portray the scheduled argument as a critical step in defining the meaning of a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1963. The decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, declared that the Constitution required states to provide lawyers for indigent defendants.

In recent years, there have been cases similar to the New York one in states like Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana and Washington, with settlements, lower court decisions and inconsistent rulings. The Michigan Supreme Court is to hear a challenge to its public defender program next month.

The New York class-action suit was filed in the name of a Rochester woman, Kimberly Hurell-Harring, and 19 other people who were facing criminal charges in five counties: Onondaga, Ontario, Schuyler, Suffolk and Washington. The question before the Court of Appeals is whether the class action presents an issue that the courts can consider.

Ms. Hurell-Harring claimed that an upstate public defender did little for her but pressure her to plead guilty after a felony arrest for trying to sneak marijuana to her husband, who was in prison. Others among the named plaintiffs said that lawyers provided for them were overwhelmed with cases and failed to investigate or make basic legal arguments.

“I was just a number, a docket number,” said Edward Kaminski, a retired auto mechanic who faced larceny charges in 2007 and dealt with a series of lawyers from the Legal Aid Society in Suffolk County on Long Island.

Louis E. Mazzola, a senior lawyer at the Suffolk Legal Aid Society, said lawyers there disagreed with the way their work was described in the suit. But he said budget pressures “drive everything we do.”

“From a client’s point of view,” Mr. Mazzola added, “it’s not a great system.”

The civil liberties case has placed New York officials in the awkward position of defending a $400 million locally financed system that a 2006 commission said did not provide effective representation to “a large portion of those entitled to it.”

Law enforcement officials are divided over the case, with arguments on each side filed by groups of former and current New York prosecutors. Some prosecutors say the case overstates the problems with public defender programs. In some areas, the system is “working well and protecting every right,” said Kathleen B. Hogan, the president of the State District Attorneys Association.

Ms. Hogan, the Warren County district attorney, said that allowing a sweeping challenge would bring chaos by encouraging thousands of defendants to claim their lawyers were inadequate and their convictions should be overturned.

But Corey Stoughton of the Civil Liberties Union, the lead lawyer in the case, said defense programs were chronically starved of money for decades because officials in every branch of government never made the adequate representation of indigents a political priority.

Because of the poor quality of representation, innocent people are convicted and defendants routinely face pressure to plead guilty, Ms. Stoughton said.

“The case-by-case method fails,” she said. “The political method fails. For decades, the State of New York has been on notice that the public defense system is in crisis and fails to meet basic constitutional responsibilities.”

She said the case was a priority of the state’s Civil Liberties Union that could go on for years.

Gov. David A. Paterson has recognized there are problems in the current system and has proposed legislation that would create an Office of Indigent Defense to evaluate the system. The bill would also provide a modest $7 million increase in state subsidies.

Last year, the Legislature passed a law intended to limit defenders’ caseloads in New York City, where on average Legal Aid lawyers each handle more than 700 cases a year. But it is not clear that adequate financing will be provided.

The society’s attorney in chief, Steven Banks, said the suit could be important in the city in providing a meaningful way to force the government to meet what he said were the requirements of the Gideon v. Wainwright decision.

Mr. Banks said the Hurell-Harring case raised a clear question for the courts — “whether Gideon and the right to counsel has meaning or not.”

Around the country, some lawyers have said they detect a concerted strategy by civil liberties lawyers to challenge public defender systems. If so, that may be due largely to the efforts of Robin L. Dahlberg, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. Ms. Dahlberg has been working on the issue since the mid-1990s, developing what she described as a model for such cases.

“There is a recognition among national groups,” she said in an interview, “that where all other efforts to reform a system have failed, litigation may be the only alternative.”

Should Iraqi and Afghanistan vets get reduced sentences

2010-03-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

How do you feel about giving vets of the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars a break when they commit a crime?

March 15, 2010

Defendants Fresh From War Find Service Counts in Court

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — When Judge Robert C. Chambers handed down Timothy Oldani’s federal sentence for selling stolen military equipment on eBay, he gave the former Marine a break.

In Iraq, Mr. Oldani had performed the jangling work of detonating improvised explosive devices and had seen six of his fellow Marines burned alive in an armored vehicle. He left the service with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress syndrome that, the judge concluded, had clouded his judgment. Under federal sentencing guidelines, the prison term could have been nearly five years; Judge Chambers decided on just five months, with three years of supervised release and treatment.

Many veterans like Mr. Oldani have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq burdened by post-traumatic stress, drug dependency and other problems. As veterans find themselves skirmishing with the law, judges are increasingly finding ways to provide them with a measure of leniency.

“More and more courts are noticing and asserting, in a variety of ways, that there seems to be some relevance to military service, or history of wartime service, to our country,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and an expert on sentencing.

At the federal level, judges are bucking guidelines that focus more on the nature of the crime than on the qualities of the person who committed it. States, too, are forming special courts to ensure that veterans in court receive the treatment their service entitles them to.

While veterans are not considered to be more likely to be arrested than the rest of the population, estimates released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2008 found 229,000 veterans in local jails and state and federal prisons, with 400,000 on probation and 75,000 on parole.

There are about 1 million veterans of the two current wars in the Veterans Affairs system so far, said Jim McGuire, a health care administrator at the agency. He cited statistics suggesting that 27 percent of active-duty veterans returning to civilian life “were at risk for mental health problems” including post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Judges have recognized that many of those returning from war are carrying a heavy burden of damage that might not be physically visible. As one federal district judge in Denver, John L. Kane, wrote in an order giving a defendant probation instead of a prison sentence, the soldier “returned from the war, but never really came home.”

The judges’ decisions are part of a broader fight over sentencing, and over once-rigid federal guidelines that tend to punish the crime while giving little weight to the specific circumstances of the defendant. The guidelines explicitly state that “good works” like military service “are not ordinarily relevant” in determining whether to give sentences below the recommended range.

The Supreme Court, however, in a series of cases, has declared that the federal sentencing guidelines are advisory, not mandatory. The United States Sentencing Commission is considering proposals that would allow military service or other evidence of “prior good works” to be considered as mitigating factors in sentencing decisions.

The Supreme Court seemed to signal greater consideration for military service in a decision in November throwing out the death penalty for a Korean War veteran who was convicted in 1987 of murdering his former girlfriend and her boyfriend. Calling for a new sentencing hearing, the justices wrote that lawyers for the defendant, George Porter Jr., should have presented evidence of “the intense stress and emotional toll that combat took” on Mr. Porter, who suffered from “dreadful nightmares and would attempt to climb his bedroom walls with knives at night.”

In Mr. Oldani’s case, his lawyer, Christian M. Capece, an assistant federal public defender in Charleston, said something about Mr. Oldani struck him at their first meeting. When Mr. Capece mentioned that he, too, had served in the Marines, he expected the usual warm response: Where did you serve? Did you see combat? Instead, Mr. Capece said, “there was nothing from him.”

Mr. Oldani spoke with what clinicians call flat affect — an absence of emotion or change in tone — and to Mr. Capece, it seemed clear that “this kid was really messed up by his experiences out there.”

Mr. Oldani, 25, pleaded guilty last year to selling night vision equipment stolen from a base in Georgia by his brother, and prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum that he “committed a serious crime and he merits serious punishment.” Judge Chambers, however, citing the evidence of the effects of the war on Mr. Oldani, concluded that “the personal characteristics of the defendant warrant a sentence lower than the guideline range.”

Judge Kane faced a similar choice when he opted for the sentence of probation for John Brownfield Jr., a former Air Force firefighter from Cañon City, Colo., who admitted accepting a bribe for smuggling tobacco into a prison while working as a corrections officer. In a 30-page sentencing memorandum, the judge cited Mr. Brownfield’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, which included dealing with gravely wounded soldiers and civilians, and wrote that with so many members of the military returning with serious mental health issues, “we are now, in a manner of speaking, charting unknown waters.”

At the state level, special courts to deal with the problems of veterans are being formed across the nation, modeled on the special courts to deal with drug and mental health issues. Twenty-one veterans courts are in operation, said West Huddleston, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals.

The first such court, in Buffalo, has handled about 130 cases, said Judge Robert T. Russell Jr., who created it in 2008.

New York kicked off a statewide program last year; Judge Judy Harris Kluger, chief of policy and planning for the state court system, said veterans “may have a unique set of issues that we try to help them with.”

Mr. Huddleston praised court programs that connect veterans with treatment, but added, “We should not be mitigating an offender’s case or disposition just because they are a veteran,” which he suggested “doesn’t make sense from a constitutional perspective.”

Professor Berman agreed that automatic deference to veterans could raise issues of equal protection, but “nobody is yet really talking about military service as a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

In fact, some of the new court programs have been carefully devised to avoid the appearance of blanket leniency. “People were concerned veterans were going to get an unfair advantage,” said Jack B. Zimmermann, a military law specialist who helped Texas shape a new pilot program. Defendants enter the Texas program, Mr. Zimmermann noted, only if the judge and prosecutor agree.

“These men and women have served their country and have been injured,” he said. “We as a society have an obligation to treat them.”

Was this a California Abberation?

2010-03-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

The question we need to ask ourselves and the state criminal justice association is whether Texas has taken steps to insure that this is not something that happens routinely. Are we keeping tabs on sexual predators and seeing that they are monitored for the safety of our children and our community.

Review Set Over Case of Molester

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 12, 2010

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SACRAMENTO (AP) — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered a review of the way the state handled a molesting case involving a man who is now charged with murdering one California teenager and is under investigation in another killing.

Pool photo by John Gibbins, via Associated Press

John A. Gardner III, who spent five years in prison for molesting a 13-year-old, has now been charged with killing a teenager.

The order came a day after The Associated Press reported that the man, John A. Gardner III, could have been sent back to prison in 2007 for parole violations and evaluated for possible commitment to a mental hospital as a sexually violent predator.

“We must learn from what happened in this case to make sure the public is protected,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said Friday in a statement detailing his order to the State Sex Offender Management Board.

Mr. Gardner, 30, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Chelsea King, 17, whose body was found early this month in San Diego County. He is also a suspect in the killing of Amber Dubois, 14, who disappeared as she walked to school in Escondido early last year. No charges have been filed in that case.

Mr. Gardner pleaded guilty in 2000 to molesting a 13-year-old neighbor. He spent five years in prison and three years on parole before being released from supervision in September 2008.

Parole records showed that he could have been sent back to prison in 2007 and 2008 for violations that included living too close to a day care center.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has said it is trying to determine if actions regarding Mr. Gardner’s parole were consistent with policy and the law.

“We are taking every appropriate step to review these case factors to determine if these potential infractions warranted a return to prison on their merits,” Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said in a statement.

Oscar Hidalgo, a spokesman for the department, has said Mr. Gardner had been considered a low- or moderate-risk sex offender, based on the assessment in use at the time.

Mr. Gardner was not sent back to prison in 2007 because he corrected the residency violation by moving, Mr. Hidalgo said.

Gangs are problems in suburbs and rural areas

2010-03-01T08:43:00.000-08:00

There is an article today that relates to the changing complextion of gangs.

No long are gangs a mostly major city presence; the article also reveals the changing demographics, racial and gender changes that are occurring.
This is multipage article and is one of three parts.

Paying off Huge Benefits at Low Cost

2010-02-15T18:57:00.000-08:00

An article about Ohio's re-entry program proves that recidivism can be lowered
if the needs of those trying to re-enter society are met.

"One of the first of its kind in the country, Richland County Re-entry Court has worked this way for 10 years, processing 1,000 or so felons like Marshall, who've served at least six months in state prison.

In the movies, they're outfitted with a freshly-pressed suit, $100 in cash and a pack of cigarettes.

In real life, they barely get bus fare and emerge clad in a penitentiary jumpsuit.

"I call them the vast unready," Judge James DeWeese said of re-entry court participants. "They're uneducated, unskilled, unemployed, unhoused and unused to self-government. It's surrogate parenting."

The program can lend help in many forms.

One man had to get his teeth fixed for work, which federal grant money paid for. Others need glasses, food or bus fare. All of them need jobs."

In a 2006 study, Ashland University professor Jeffrey Spelman found 124 of nearly 600 re-entry court participants, just 4 percent, were arrested for a felony within one year of successful completion of the program. The average recidivism rate nationally for those who did not participate in a re-entry court program was 44 percent in the first year.

Why are we not duplicating this program everywhere?

Hard to Believe but True

2010-02-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

A former bank robber became a jailhouse lawyer in prison who
specialized in petitions for certiorari. His work so impressed the
Solicitor General that he is currently assisting this ex-con to get into
law school.
This is truly a must read article that shows redemption is a possibility with
positive results for society and individuals.

What is Proper Punishment

2010-02-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

15-year-old Phoebe Prince, a student at South Hadley High School in
Massachusetts, committed suicide after being bullied both at school
and online.

This is not the only student suicide attributable to bullying ; an 11-year old
who lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, is believed to have taken his own
life after he was repeatedly called "Gay." The school had been notified about
the bullying, but the boy would not name the others involved. The parents
are suing the school administrators and the school district.

Bullies have existed for centuries, but not cyber bullies. Because what is
posted remains ad infinitem, the harm is no longer limited to the attackers
and the victim.

There are a number of proposals making cyberbullying an offense. How will
this proposed law be allowed to stand in the face of our right to free speech?
Free speech has been limited when it incites to violence: you cannot scream
"Fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire.

The laws of libel are civil penalties: money assessed to compensate for damages.

Should Congress and state legislators be petitioned to legislate criminal
penalties for on-line bullying. How will we define bullying? If I call attention to
the fact that you are obese (you weigh 200 pounds and are five foot three feet tall),
is that cyberbullying when what I wrote is true?

As we advance in the world of technology, we encounter new problems and must
begin to decide what society will and will not accept as behavior involving the
new technology.

What do you think we should do about the problem of cyber bullies?

Shackling Juveniles No Longer Allowed in New York

2010-02-04T10:12:00.000-08:00

In an article in the New York Times, it was reported that
"The new policy, contained in a memorandum issued Monday
by Joyce Burrell, a deputy commissioner at the state
Office of Children and Family Services, prohibits shackles from
being used under any circumstances for youths held at so-called
nonsecure and limited-secure youth prisons. Those facilities
typically hold youths who have committed nonviolent offenses
equivalent to misdemeanors." The office defines shackling as linking
together handcuffs, feet cuffs and a waist belt.

It is hard to understand why the term "prison" is used to classify
a facility that is non-secure or even limited-security whose residents
have committed the equivalent of misdemeanors.

Exceptions are made for those youth considered to be violent or
dangerous. The correction officers union is planning to sue
because it is felt that officers are being put into dangerous situations.

When a juvenile is transferred, handcuffs are allowed to be used but
only for frontal cuffing.

The new orders come after a lawsuit brought against the Office for Children
Juvenile and Family Services where the finding concluded that staff
were routinely violating rules.

Other changes will undoubtedly be made in the New York juvenile facilities
amid a growing number of reports of abuse taking place.

It is important to keep a watch on the situation to determine if there are
unexpected consequences that emanate from the new law.

Would taking steps to provide mental health and other services to these
youth instead of placing them in facilities be a wiser choice? New York is
facing severe budget cuts that will undoubtedly impact the services that
can be provided.

Do you agree with the policy? Why? Why not?

Child Abuse reported to be down; but is it?

2010-02-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

Federal Study Finds Dramatic Decline In Abuse Of Children

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A new federal study documents a dramatic decrease in
serious child abuse, especially sexual abuse, reports
the Associated Press. Experts credit law enforcement
crackdowns and public awareness campaigns.

The findings are in the National Incidence Study of
Child Abuse and Neglect, a Congressionally mandated
study conducted periodically by the Department of
Health and Human Services.

A lot of questions are raised by the study, but the headlines
of the article about the study bother me the most. The study
ended in 2006 well before the downward spiral of
economic troubles that started with the housing market and
foreclosures and continued into unemployment and people
losing money in stocks and assorted investments.

Four years is a very large time lag. Have cases of sexual abuse,
mental abuse, psychological abuse, and physical abuse of
children truly declined? If there is a reported decline, can we
believe that children are no longer subject to abuse or that
cases are no longer being reported. Or are the signposts
of the possibility being overlooked in larger classrooms and
more impersonal neighborhoods?

In the past, it was the norm for senior citizens to remain in
their own homes, except for major disabilities, and know
everyone in the neighborhood and the generalized schedules
of each. Today many active seniors are moving into senior
citizen complexes; more and more households have working
women; fewer people really know and visit with their neighbors.
All of this creates barriers to spotting signs of abuse in both
children and adults.

Add to the above a culture where people do not want to be
involved and are fearful that reporting a potential problem
will put the reporter in the middle of a police investigation and
possible reprisal actions.

Let's hope that the headline continues to be true to this day, but
keep a vigilant eye out for a child who needs intervention.

Associated Press

New Series about Juvenile Justice System

2010-01-26T11:04:00.000-08:00

This link will take you to three videos that involve the
juvenile justice system: why kids join gangs as well
as what it is like being in the system.

These videos are quite well done and present a
realistic view of the life of a juvenile delinquent.

Sea of stability is proof of theories

2010-01-26T10:11:00.000-08:00

We keep reading about how the stability of an area is
dependent upon neighbors who know one another and
know what is going on in the area. Los Angeles has a small
mile-wide area that is not plagued by homicides which
occur all around it.

The article about this neighborhood and the safety it
offers is living proof that some things really work and
it is possible to have havens of safety.

This article is really a must read and you should take
the time to do so.

Technology Tried to Keep Youngsters Away from Meth

2010-01-25T18:01:00.000-08:00

A Mendocino County (California) sheriff is attempting a new means
of trying to get young people to avoid using methamphetamine. He is using
a software program that shows a person presently and then makes changes
to show the effects after months and years of methamphetamine use.

You can read the article here, but the concept is unique.

It will be interesting to see if the demonstration has positive results.

Do you think it is worth trying? Do you think it will work?

$10 BILLION in tax dollars could and should be saved

2010-01-20T09:53:00.000-08:00

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency has issued a report
that shows the foolishness and costliness of not utilizing proven, workable
alternatives to incarceration for non-violent crime and non-sexual crime
offenders.

Crime and Justice News summarizes the report this way:
A new report calculates potential cost savings
in four populous states: California could save
$1.4 billion, Texas $2.4 billion, New York $1.1 billion,
and Florida $271 million. The council contends
that as of 2008, 414,000 U.S. men and women
were incarcerated for nonviolent, nonsexual crimes
not involving significant property loss.

Most of these prisoners could be eligible for

effective and cost-saving sanctions such as

drug courts, drug treatment, electronic monitoring,

or work release programs. These alternatives to

prison and jail have been proved effective and

could be promptly expanded, NCCD maintains.

The costs and operations of the alternatives

are well documented - and served as a basis

for the report's cost comparison. These costs

were compared to the current costs of incarceration

for 80 percent of the likely eligible incarcerated population.

So the question that immediately pops up is why we are

not using these alternatives to maximum advantage.

One primary reason is probably the American public's

perception that alternatives are little more than a slap on

the wrist. It is imperative that our media begin to focus

on these alternatives as demanding but effective means of

preventing recidivism.

In addition because of the "if it bleeds, it leads" journalism

credo, few realize that most crimes are non-violent property

offenses whose perpetrators have abuse or mental problems

that need treatment. The public also needs to become aware

of the effectiveness of alternative treatments and be willing

to fund them.

Those who run for public office and advocate the alternatives

to incarceration must NOT be called soft on crime. The message

must be sent, loudly and clearly, that incarceration is not

effective as a means of preventing recidivism for non-violent,

non-sexual crime offenders. Prison beds should be reserved for

the true predators among us who need to be keep apart from

the rest of society.

Small Steps but True Success

2010-01-18T11:48:00.000-08:00

This article describes a relatively small program that assists people coming out of
halfway houses with job skills and job themselves.

Those who take Intermediate Corrections courses learn about the hazards involved
when someone is on probation or parole and is unable to find employment. This
program has been going since 1984 and in the ensuing years has only had two of its
graduates return to jail, which is pretty impressive.

Here is a quote from a posting about the article:
Kevin Lynch runs a 25-year-old St. Paul-based business
that makes no profit and has an annual worker
turnover rate of about 400 percent. His Rebuild
Resources Inc., says St. Paul Pioneer Press
columnist Ruben Rosario, provides services
and jobs for people in recovery, particularly
ex-offenders returning to the community.
About 68 percent of nearly 1,000 graduates
since 1984 landed permanent jobs over the years.

This article is well worth your time and shows that even small programs
can have great impact.

DO NOT CLICK LINK

2010-01-18T10:20:00.000-08:00

UTA Today in an article warned about the proliferation of malware that
can and WILL infect your computer. The reason is that cybercrime
kits are becoming readily available, cost less than before, and are
even said to be user friendly.

The article states that "newbie cybercrooks and veterans alike
are using DIY kits to carry out phishing campaigns at an
accelerated rate, security researchers say. They've been
blasting out fake e-mail messages crafted to look like official
notices from UPS (UPS), FedEx (FDX) or the IRS; or account
updates from Vonage, Facebook or Microsoft Outlook (MSFT);
or medical alerts about the H1N1 flu virus.

The faked messages invariably ask the recipient to click on a

Web link; doing so infects the PC with a banking Trojan,

a malicious program designed to steal financial account log ons.

Often, the PC also gets turned into a "bot": The attacker silently

takes control and uses it to send out more phishing e-mail."

DO NOT CLICK ANYTHING THAT ARRIVES IN EMAIL.

GO to the site itself instead (by typing the address into your

browser itself) and see if there is any notice related to

the matter the email addressed.

I made it a rule years ago that I would never click on an attachment

or go to a link within an email. It is the

safest way to avoid an infected machine.

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2010-01-17-internet-scams-phishing_N.htm?csp=Tech

Will names on Twitter Deter DUI?

2010-01-15T14:48:00.000-08:00

In an article today, there is a discussion about the decision of the Montgomery
County and Houston area district attorneys to post the names of those charged
with DUI during the Christmas-New Years time frame. It is a matter of public
record, so it is considered legal to list the names.

Will this cyberspace shaming work? It seems questionable. But the problem
is that although charged, there is no guarantee of a finding of guilt. The
names will turn up on searches years into the future and could impact jobs,
as well as other important life changes.

Will there be any deterrence? Most who sit down to drink have no intention
of becoming too drunk to drive or even consider the possibility.

Deterrence theory relies of swift, sure, punishment and posting names after
the fact does not appear to lend itself to the concept of deterrence.

Do you think this is a workable idea that will lessen DUIs?

Transfer to Adult System is not granted automatically

2010-01-14T14:32:00.000-08:00

An article in the Fort Worth Star Telegram reported on the request by the

Assistant District Attorney who was prosecuting a case involving robberies

of two elderly people, an 85-year old was beaten during one, to have a 16-year

old certified to stand trial as an adult. The prosecutor had cited what he called

the "shocking brutality" of the crimes as well as the youth's criminal history. He

had been placed on deferred-prosecution probation following charges of writing

gang graffiti on a school desk and being a suspect in the burglary of a friend's home.

State District Judge Jean Boyd, however, denied prosecutors’ request, saying that

the teen had not yet been afforded all of the services available within the juvenile system.

If convicted in the juvenile system, he could face up to 40 years of confinement,

including time in an adult prison after he reaches age 19. He will be 17 next month.

The immediate question is why he did not receive the services the judge refers to

already. Was the decision too lenient? Will getting the services in the juvenile system

keep this youngster out of trouble in the years ahead?

There is no mention made of his being confined or who will oversee the services needed.

Why would something like this automatically not be considered a violation of probation?

Hopefully the decision was wise and juvenile services will have the outcome that is

desired; only time will tell.

Facebook is bringing Prosecution to the Foolish

2010-01-13T09:49:00.000-08:00

When you talk on a cellphone, it is always possible that someone can hear

your conversation. Obviously what you post on Facebook and elsewhere

can also be observed by others - people forward things; things considered

private are viewed by others.

OMG! Nobody told the bomb squad it was a joke.

Four New Jersey teens had some Facebook fun"?" Sunday night,

talking with one another online about how they were going to

destroy their high school.

But come yesterday morning, Belleville HS was swarming with cops,

police dogs, FBI agents and the Essex County Sheriff's Bomb Squad,

who evacuated the school and searched it for evidence of an impending attack.

They didn't find anything incriminating.

"At this point, we think it was just talk," said Belleville Police Deputy

Chief Mark Minichini. "But we took it very seriously."

The teens -- two 16-year-old girls, one 17-year-old girl and

a 17-year-old boy -- triggered the emergency by writing about

ways they could blow up or set fire to the school, authorities said.

The teens were charged with making terroristic threats, creating

a false alarm and conspiracy.

Ranting and raving on Facebook can have dire consequences. A University

of Michigan student found police waiting for her when she showed up for a

class -- she had voiced her anger after being dumped and said she would like

to stab that person. Threats posted on Facebook are reported and can be

prosecuted under harassment-type laws.

Some find themselves rejected when applying to graduate school or even to

college and the cause, rarely admitted by the schools, revolves around a

posting on MySpace or Facebook that produced a negative impression

of the candidate. Examples go on and on.

The answer is old fashioned. Do not post or email anything that you do not

want to see as headlines in the local newspaper. If you write anything while angry,

save it and read it 24 hours later before you decide to post it. Then the wise

choice is probably to use the delete key.

The other often forgotten part of posting involves the impression you create by

using poor English or making errors in spelling and/or homonyms. What may be

acceptable as a Twitter is not acceptable when characters are not limited.

When you Twitter, it is a considered by some groups as a status change. I was

quite surprised to see something a relative Twittered show up on a totally

unrelated network group. It appeared as if this person had changed jobs, when

in reality, she was just remarking about where she was visiting. Never hit send

until you read what you are posting to be sure it is what you want to say.

Postings, unlike paper, remain available seemingly forever. Some sites are

being created specifically to allow you to find things from decades ago.

Words that are spoken can never be totally obliterated and

apparently neither can postings. Discussion Boards that are part of courses

on Blackboard or other school-type systems are limited to those enrolled

in the class and not open to public view. Thus what is posted on a

class discussion board which is limited to class members will not be

viewed by the general public.

But remember that what you put on Twitter or MySpace or Facebook

can be viewed, even if you select the privacy choice. Anything that

you post can always be copied and sent to others.

Negative comments can have unintended consequences.

A good rule of thumb that remains true is:

if you cannot say something nice, say nothing.

Wishing those of you who are in school a great spring semester.

When jurors and the Internet connect-mistrials may result

2010-01-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

An interesting article appeared in the Washington Post which
detailed the problems that judges are having with jurors who
turn to the Internet for information .

One juror would did not understand the term "lividity" and how it
related to the victim's death, looked up the meaning on Wikipedia.
The case was thrown out and another trial ordered as a result of the
appeal's court learning what had happened.

This raises an interesting question. Why if jurors are to weigh the
evidence presented in the courtroom should they be prohibited from
using a dictionary to get a word's definition? Smartphones, laptops,
netbooks, and desktops are now a ubiquitous part of today's society.

It makes sense to instruct jurors not to post about the case on Facebook,
or Twitter or MySpace since they have long been instructed not to
discuss the case outside of the deliberation room.

You cannot compare the knowledge base of today's jurors with those
at the time of the original jury trials in the colonies. Early jurors knew
the victims and the accused and obviously brought that knowledge
into discussions with other jurors.

Experts spout statistics, but jurors may or may not know what the
numbers mean in terms of the likelihood of something matching or
occurring.

It is time to consider the knowledge that should be given to the jury
and end the "which lawyer spins the best tale" basis for a
conviction. Whether it is knowledge from "Law and Order" or "CSI,"
today's juror does not enter the courthouse with a blank screen for
a mind.

We claim that critical thinking and analysis are important concepts for
students to master. This cannot occur in a vacuum; one takes everything
heard from witnesses and viewed in exhibits to reach conclusions. These
conclusions have been influenced by our own past experiences.

"I knew who had committed the crime because of the ring." What ring?
The ring left in a tub after washing out dirty items? The ring where
boxers compete? The ring on a female's left hand? The ring of a cellphone?
etc? there are many, many different meaning of this one word. For the
testimony to be valuable, we need to know which definition of the word is
used.

The time has come to either only allow bench trials where judges may
look up information or revisit the type of information that is given to
a jury. Intelligent people want to know -- if I am on trial, I want an
intelligent jury, don't you?

Hawaii proves deterence theory works

2010-01-10T11:44:00.000-08:00

In 2004 Hawaii state trial judge Steven Alm decided to try to do
something to stop the revolving prison doors. This article informs
us that in many states, the majority of prison admissions come not
from arrests for new crimes, as you might think, but from probation
and parole violations. Nationwide, roughly two-thirds of parolees fail
to complete parole successfully.

To a large degree when there is a positive drug test or a missed appointment
the probation/parole officer will speak with the violator but not enforce
the rules with immediate jail time. The message that goes out is that
rule compliance is not really important.

Enter Judge Alm. He called a group of sex offenders and another group of
drug offenders to his courtroom and stated quite plainly that any violation
meant immediate arrest and jail time. No ifs, ands, or buts.

While he expected to see some positive results, what actually happened
was nothing short of amazing. Within a 6-month period, violations fell
by 93%. In comparison groups the compliance rate was 14%.

The program is called HOPE which stands for Hawaii's Opportunity Probation
with Enforcement. Take the time to read the entire article and learn how
effective this type of program was in Boston where gang members were the
focus.

The time has come for citizens to demand reforms such as this. Bills are
being introduced in Congress, but we must also see that the state
legislatures get on the band wagon. Unless we contact our legislators and
let them know that this is the type of reform we want to see, nothing will
happen. We can not afford to overcrowd our prisons with violators whose
conduct could, should, and must be changed for their sake and ours.

More Prosecutorial Misconduct

2010-01-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

A county judge ordered release for a man who was sentenced four years
ago in a child molestation case where even the victim says it was NOT this
man. The article is sure to get your blood boiling as you read how this
was a pattern in the prosecutor's office and not an isolated incident.

This excerpt gives you a small indication of what type of misconduct
was involved:

The decision casts a shadow over the career of Deputy District

Attorney Troy Benson and further tarnishes the reputation of

the District Attorney's Office, which has come under fire in

recent years for alleged prosecutorial misconduct.

Uribe's conviction on charges he sexually assaulted a young

relative was overturned by an appellate court in 2008, after

a finding that the District Attorney's Office had improperly

withheld a videotape of the purported victim's physical exam,

which was turned over only after Uribe had been sentenced.

A defense expert then reviewed the videotape and said it

contradicted the prosecution witnesses' testimony that

the child had been assaulted.

Prosecutors have since acknowledged the existence of

about 3,300 of those videotapes dating back to 1991

that were never provided to trial attorneys, as required by law

Police and Fire Departments And Budget Crunch

2010-01-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

In an article today on the Plain Dealer newspaper web site,
Cleveland, Ohio, has announced that police and firemen will no
longer be able to automatically extend their retirement past aged
65 years. Those who wished to remain on the job after reaching
aged 65 in the past were allowed to do so nearly every time.

The decisions are now made by the Safety Director and not the
City Council. He anticipates that 20-25 will be eligible to retire
and that extensions will only be made based on the needs of
the agency. Both the Fire Chief and the Police Chief have been
asked to assess agency needs to help determine if an extension
should be considered.

You will want to read the article and pay attention to the costs of
unused vacation and sick pay to the city when someone retires. In
most non-government employment, those who do not use their
vacations days, lose them. Will the current economic crunch
cause governments to reconsider the accumulation of vacation
days and even sick days?

Do you think the current policy should remain?

Limited Immunity Yes; Total Immunity Absolutely Not

2010-01-05T12:51:00.000-08:00

Because of a 12 million dollar settlement, the Supreme Court will not be
considering whether prosecutors should have absolute immunity from

prosecution according to an interesting article in today's Christian Science

Monitor.

The two innocent men, Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee, had spent
nearly 26 years in prison for a murder they didn’t commit.
Once the truth was discovered and they were released,
they sued the prosecutors in Pottawattamie County, Iowa.

The investigation into their claim of innocence revealed that
prosecutors had helped to gather and present false testimony
that resulted in their life without parole sentences.

Qualified immunity that offers prosecutors protection from most lawsuits
except when they have violated a clearly established constitutional right
is the doctrine that those involved in criminal defense and the innocence
project were urging the court to follow.

Prosecutors wanted absolute immunity. Prosecutors are normally given
absolute immunity for actions taken during a trial. But the many recent
revelations about prosecutorial misconduct should require the judicial
system to back qualified immunity. No one in a democracy should ever
be allowed to violate another's constitutional rights with total protection.

A web search using prosecutorial misconduct reveals literally thousands
of articles of such instances. Many, if not most, of the cases involve
poor defendants and often members of a minority. There is a well
written book called Arbitrary Justice about the frequency of abuse
that is taking place. I wrote a review of this book for the Law and Courts
section of the Political Science Association Book Reviews; you can read it here

Judges and Warden Say Man Scheduled for Execution is not Guilty

2010-01-03T09:42:00.000-08:00

The crime occurred in 1983, within a week an escapee was arrested, tried and
convicted of killing members of a California family. One child did not die immediately
and said 3 white men were responsible. When the escapee's picture was shown on
television, the boy said it was not that man.

The article and the reason why so many believe the man on death row is innocent,
but is scheduled to be executed, is truly frightening. The opponents of capital
punishment who have long clung to puzzling clues and hints of police misconduct
have been joined by a prison warden, 11 federal judges and five jurors now
bothered by allegations that Cooper was framed.

When serious questions of guilt arise, governors and/or boards of pardon and parole
should automatically see that the sentence is commuted to life without possibility
of parole to prevent the execution of someone who might be innocent.

Going ahead with an execution when so many raise questions appears to be a
travesty of justice

Supreme Court had a light load

2010-01-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

In years gone by, the Supreme Court handed down over 100 opinions
by the end of a term. That is no longer the case.

In a Washington Post article, The Chief Justice who gives a
traditional State of the Judiciary Report wrote the following:

Criminal case filings rose 8 percent in 2009 over the previous year,

and the number of defendants in the federal system set a record at

nearly 98,000. "The number of criminal cases reached its highest

level since 1932, the year before ratification of the Twenty-first

Amendment, which repealed prohibition," Roberts wrote.

He said the increases came in cases related to immigration, fraud,

marijuana trafficking and sex offenses. Immigration filings

climbed to record levels, mostly because of allegations of

"improper reentry by aliens or fraud or misuse of a visa

or entry permit," according to the report.

The number of bankruptcy filings grew 35 percent from

the 2008 total, a result of the nation's struggling economy.

Roberts noted that it was the highest number of filings

since 2005, when there was a rush to file in advance

of a new federal law that changed standards.

He noted that his own court had a modest uptick in its

workload in the term that began in October 2008.

The court heard arguments in 87 cases,

and 83 of them were decided in 74 signed opinions.

That compared with 67 signed opinions in the previous term.

Another article in the New York Times provides some

interesting facts about the actual numbers of cases

heard by the federal courts.

The Positive Side of a Poor Economy

2009-12-30T15:11:00.000-08:00

Because of revenue shortfalls, states are taking another look at the prison
population and re-evaluating the type of criminal who requires incarceration.

The end result is that prison populations (except in Florida) are dropping along
with lower national crime rates. This has not happened for the last FOUR DECADES.

To read more about this, click here for a Los Angles newspaper article.

The next consideration is going to revolve around the death penalty, in my opinion.
The many needed types of appeals and habeas petitions that are required
for a death penalty inmate cost a state millions of dollars. Remember that the state
invariably pays for the inmate's legal expenses as well as those of the prosecution.

Contrast this with the cost of keeping someone incarcerated for life
without possibility of parole and any cost/benefit analysis will lead to
the life sentence.

While the death penalty may not be stamped out, those eligible for
it will probably be more narrow (terrorist, serial killers, and child rapists).

It should prove interesting to see whether the public's vengeance
will be lessened by economic realities.

Wishing all readers a healthy and Happy New Year

Willing to give up some privacy to fly safer?

2009-12-29T10:30:00.000-08:00

There is a screening unit available in Amsterdam that CANNOT be used on passengers flying into the United States because of privacy issues. The machine is a whole body xray type device that would show up anything taped to the body. The pictures are not saved and anything that would prevent a terrorist from boarding a plane is fine with me.

INSTEAD you can read this article about the ease of getting a device on board a plane

I copied the article from http://www.jsonline.com/news/80244882.html

Experts say anyone who's determined to smuggle bomb components onto a flight can do so

By Meg Jones of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: Dec. 29, 2009

Smuggling explosives onto a plane - as happened on a Detroit-bound flight Christmas Day - is not difficult, aviation security analysts say. If someone really wants to bring bomb-making components onto a commercial plane, it can be done.

Perhaps bomb-sniffing dogs or a pat-down or the new high-definition screening devices might have detected the chemical explosive Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab secreted on his body. Then again, they might not have caught him, considering passengers can bring 3-ounce containers of liquids on board.

"You don't have to be James Bond to figure this out," said Todd Curtis, an aviation industry security expert.

One security analyst says only two changes have made flying safer since Sept. 11, 2001 - stronger cockpit doors and passengers more willing to resist terrorists, which is just what happened in the skies near Detroit.

Bruce Schneir, a security expert and author, pointed out that Chechen terrorists used the same method to bring down two Russian airliners on the same day five years ago when female passengers smuggled the same type of chemical explosive aboard in their underclothes.

"Anyone who thinks they couldn't do this isn't paying attention," said Schneir, who has been an adviser to the Transportation Security Administration.

"There's no way to prevent this, absolutely not. The way you become safer is through investigation and analysis," Schneir said. "Clearly there was a breakdown, and the breakdown happened long before he got to the airport."

Though some airports overseas may appear to have lax security screening standards compared with the United States, all passengers traveling on U.S.-bound flights must go through security screening that's as strict as that in American airports. Security screening at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, which is where Abdulmutallab boarded the flight to Detroit, is similar to American security procedures.

It's possible high-definition screening devices, which clearly show body contours, will be used in more U.S. and overseas airports.

"You can say 'Well, he got through Nigeria's screening and Amsterdam's security.' He probably would have gotten through ours, too," said Tom Bunn, a retired Pan Am and United pilot who is president and founder of SOAR, a program that helps people who fear flying. "If they do such a good job of lining his underwear (with explosives), it's not going to show up except for this high-definition screening device."

Security rules in flux

Meanwhile, in-flight security rules appear to have relaxed after a clampdown that prevented passengers from moving around the cabin an hour before landing. At the captain's discretion, passengers can now keep blankets and computers on their laps. A Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman said the agency was "continually reviewing and updating" security measures.

Restrictions on in-flight entertainment systems that show the plane's path were also lifted.

For practical reasons, it's not possible to pat down every passenger or have bomb-sniffing dogs examine every suitcase and carry-on bag, said Curtis, a former Boeing airline safety engineer who founded an aviation safety Web site, AirSafe.com.

Bunn pointed out that the December 1988 explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was caused by a radio packed with explosives. At the time, security screening was much more stringent at European airports than in the U.S. It wasn't until after Sept. 11, 2001, that security at American airports became just as stringent.

"Clearly it's a cat and mouse game. We can develop technology which will be very effective in staying ahead of what terrorists can do, but it will require a lot of money and public will to do it. We tend to do things like closing the barn door after the horses have bolted," Bunn said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Police in LA Oppose Financial Disclosure Rules

2009-12-28T09:07:00.000-08:00

Following the scandals that involved police and members of the public in the Los Angeles Rampart Division (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal ), LAPD ordered that members of gang units be required to complete financial disclosure forms. The police union and some veteran officers opposed this and the Police Protective League has filed legal challenges that have to date been unsuccessful. What has resulted are vacant positions with gang units that some are blaming on the disclosure requirements.

Financial disclosure forms have been used and are being used by other police departments and federal agencies with seemingly no problems. The L.A. Police Protective League claims the other forms are not as extensive.

Both sides raise legitimate issues. It appears to an outsider that the actions of the veteran officers who are preaching to new recruits about the dangers of disclosure forms raises a multitude of questions. The forms are extensive and require officers to disclose outside income, real estate, stocks and other assets. They also have to report the size of bank accounts and debts, including mortgages and credit cards. And the disclosures apply to any financial holdings a cop shares with family members and business partners.

Read the article and decide for yourself why this is having such an impact on filling open positions.

A Prison In One's Home

2009-12-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

If you are exceptionally wealthy, charged with a crime, and considered a flight risk, bail is no longer the only alternative. There are now companies who specialize in setting up security and guaranteeing the court that the individual will abide by all conditions of release within their own homes. These conditions can include not being allowed to open a window or go out on the balcony, no visitors who are not on an approved list, no Internet, ad infinitum.

Although one would assume that being confined within one's own home would be everyone's first choice, some find institutionalized is more appealing and less confining. Surprising but true.

This article provides some insight into what is involved when an outside company is your "jailer."

Taking away an individual's freedom causes mental anguish no matter how pleasant the surroundings.

Kill Your Husband and face execution or freedom

2009-12-24T12:06:00.000-08:00

Two women in similar circumstances killed their husbands and put forth battered woman's syndrome as a defense. A pastor's wife served less than 90 days in a mental health facility and the other woman is facing execution. Both cases were tried in Tennessee.

In an attempt to explain the different outcomes, a local reporter has put together an excellent article. You can read it here. This is another example of how uneven justice can be.

Court Fees Go Up

2009-12-22T08:15:00.000-08:00

This is of general interest. It comes from a blog called
Grits For Breakfast:

Monday, December 21, 2009

I know, you're shocked: Texas fines, fees, court costs went up in 2009

Just in from the Comptroller:

Court Costs, Fees and Fines for Justice, County, and District Courts: Summary of legislative changes made by the 81st Texas Legislature, Regular Session, 2009 (pdf)

Let's run through a few highlights from this rather dry document:

As usual, what we see here is for the most part a one-way ratchet: Only new fees are created and costs only ever go up. Fees charged for documents and routine job functions of the courts are increasing. (The only notable exception to that trend is the allowance for waiver of a fee for expunction related to an acquittal.)

There's a new fee for being arrested:

WARRANT FEE: A defendant convicted of a felony or misdemeanor shall pay $50 for a law enforcement agency’s execution of an issued arrest warrant, capias or capias pro fine, if the agency requests the court, not later than the 15th day after the date of execution, to impose the fee.

And there's another fee for not arresting you but instead writing a notice to appear in court:

Arrest Fee: $5 for issuing a written notice to appear in court following the defendant’s violation of a traffic law, municipal ordinance or penal law or for making an arrest without a warrant. (Art. 102.011, Code of Criminal Procedure)

There's a new $25 fee for anyone who elects to pay fines on a time payments, split 60-40 between the state and county courts..

The new veterans court program notably includes a "reasonable program fee not to exceed $1,000" along with "a testing, counseling and treatment fee in an amount necessary to cover the costs of any testing, counseling or treatment performed or provided under the program."

Adult probationers and parents of youth committed to TYC will be assessed a $34 fee to have their DNA swabbed for inclusion in the statewide database.

I also learned for the first time from this document about a bill that received little attention during the 81st Legislature (certainly by me) but which threatens to create a lot of mischief for folks caught up in the spiral of criminal fines and civil fees associated with unlicensed drivers and no-insurance tickets. Dubbed "Eric's Law," here's the comptroller's description:

House Bill 2012, effective Sept. 1, 2009, amends Section 521.457, Transportation Code, by enhancing the penalty for the offense of operating a motor vehicle without a valid driver’s license from a Class C misdemeanor to a Class B misdemeanor if it is shown at trial that the person was operating the motor vehicle in violation of the motor vehicle liability insurance requirement, and to a Class A misdemeanor if it is shown at trial that the person was operating the motor vehicle in violation of that requirement and caused or was at fault in a motor vehicle accident that resulted in serious bodily injury to or the death of another person.

With one in four Texas drivers still uninsured despite millions of no-insurance tickets given, I seriously doubt this new law will change the number of uninsured drivers on the road. And the reason Texas' has so many drivers without licenses is that after they get a no-insurance ticket, the state suspends their driver licenses if they can't pay their steep "Driver Responsibility Fee," which is a civil penalty paid for three years after the offense on top of any criminal fines.

(BTW, I learned last week that the Department of Public Safety will next month finally be releasing its long-awaited new rules on indigency and amnesty programs for the Driver Responsibility Program. Stay tuned on that score. State Rep. Sylvester Turner's staff is trying to convince DPS to share the proposed rules with stakeholders before posting them in the Texas Register.)

HB 2012 will discourage indigent drivers from complying with the law by increasing fees and fines so high they can never pay their fines and fees and also pay for auto insurance. If Texas cities had good public transportation, that might not be a problem. But with 25% of drivers uninsured, if starting tomorrow they all complied with the law and quit driving, it would actually disrupt the economy from so many people unable to work.

This change won't do any more than the old law to encourage drivers to buy insurance or renew their licenses. Instead it will jack up the fines they owe to an unreasonable amount, needlessly fill up the jails with more low-level cases, and, for indigent drivers, compel counties to pay for more attorneys for Class B misdemeanors. In other words, the new law creates a lot of problems with no real upside but squeezing revenue from a source (drivers who can't afford insurance) who already cannot pay for their basic obligations as a driver.

None of that's the Comptroller's fault, of course. She's just the messenger. It's just a bit of a Grinch-ish message to deliver every biennium, much less during a recession, that "fines and fees are going up."

Death Penalty Given Less Often

2009-12-18T08:06:00.000-08:00

A New York Times article reveals that fewer

defendants are receiving a death sentence

across the country. The numbers in Texas

were quite dramatic: 9 sentenced as opposed

to an average of 34 in the 1990s.

Two thoughts to consider:

1) As exonerations rise, fewer are willing to

sentence to death someone who may in fact

not be guilty

2) Life without parole is safer than death in

situations where the defendant might be innocent.

Does the lower number mean that the end of

the death penalty in the United States is

arriving?

Only time will tell. For many, the

idea of spending decades in a small cement

box knowing that you will not leave prison

until death is worse than actually being

sentenced to die with a known date of execution.

For now when the crime is heinous, capital

punishment remains a favored choice.

This is needed everywhere

2009-12-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

http://tinyurl.com/yln8j37

Crime and Justice News today:

How Home Visitation Programs Can Reduce Aggression, Violence

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Children raised in violent homes are more likely to be violent themselves.

A growing body of science suggests there are critical stages

when intervention can interrupt the cycle, reports the Los Angeles Times.

New findings in brain development, human behavior, and

economics suggest that early childhood is the most critical

and cost-effective time. "Children model what they see. If

they see the parents using physical aggression, then the child

will learn that when they meet life's frustrations, the right thing

to do is use physical aggression," said Seth Scholer,

a professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University.

A program called Parents Too Soon sends "educators" into

homes to teach young mothers about the social, emotional,

and brain development of children. In the last 20 years,

research has shown that these programs can improve parenting

skills, boost children's cognitive, and emotional development,

keep mothers on track academically and lower the risk of

child abuse and neglect, said Neil Guterman, a professor

at the University of Chicago and an expert on home visiting.

"There's strong evidence to show these programs, if implemented

properly, can improve the life course of the mother and the child," he said.

Truly Disturbing

2009-12-14T08:34:00.000-08:00

Often, much too often, native American tribal living

conditions were ignored and now they have become

breeding grounds for gangs. Recently a bill was signed

to deal with money that belonged to the tribes but

was never given to them. Using those funds to build

new homes and infrastructures on tribal lands would

provide work for the inhabitants and improved

conditions. But that is easier written than accomplished

since tribal leaders must agree and assure that fraud

and other problems are not allowed to tarnish a vision of

a brighter future. Breaking the hold that these gangs

have on tribal youth will be a difficult task. Only the

tribal councils and tribal police have the authority to

deal with enforcement problems on tribal lands; let us

hope they can succeed.

This was copied from: http://tinyurl.com/ya9hgr2

THE NEW YORK TIMES

December 14, 2009

Gang Violence Grows on an Indian Reservation

By ERIK ECKHOLM

PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Richard Wilson has been a pallbearer for at least five of his “homeboys” in the North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips, a Sioux imitation of a notorious Denver gang.

One 15-year-old member was mauled by rivals. A 17-year-old shot himself; another, on a cocaine binge and firing wildly, was shot by the police. One died in a drunken car wreck, and another, a founder of the gang named Gaylord, was stabbed to death at 27.

“We all got drunk after Gaylord’s burial, and I started rapping,” said Mr. Wilson, who, at 24, is practically a gang elder. “But I teared up and couldn’t finish.”

Mr. Wilson is one of 5,000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe involved with at least 39 gangs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft, violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in other parts of American Indian territory.

This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look.

Groups like Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads and Indian Mafia draw children from broken, alcohol-ravaged homes, like Mr. Wilson’s, offering brotherhood, an identity drawn from urban gangsta rap and self-protection.

Some groups have more than a hundred members, others just a couple of dozen. Compared with their urban models, they are more likely to fight rivals, usually over some minor slight, with fists or clubs than with semiautomatic pistols.

Mr. Wilson, an unemployed school dropout who lives with assorted siblings and partners in his mother’s ramshackle house, without running water, displayed a scar on his nose and one over his eye. “It’s just like living in a ghetto,” he said. “Someone’s getting beat up every other night.”

The Justice Department distinguishes the home-grown gangs on reservations from the organized drug gangs of urban areas, calling them part of an overall juvenile crime problem in Indian country that is abetted by eroding law enforcement, a paucity of juvenile programs and a suicide rate for Indian youth that is more than three times the national average.

If they lack the reach of the larger gangs after which they style themselves, the Indian gangs have emerged as one more destructive force in some of the country’s poorest and most neglected places.

While many crimes go unreported, the police on the Pine Ridge reservation have documented thousands of gang-related thefts, assaults — including sexual assaults — and rising property crime over the last three years, along with four murders. Residents are increasingly fearful that their homes will be burglarized or vandalized. Car windows are routinely smashed out.

“Tenants are calling in and saying ‘I’m scared,’ ” Paul Iron Cloud, executive officer of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Housing Authority, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in July at a special hearing on the increase of gang activity.

“It seems that every day we’re getting more violence,” Mr. Iron Cloud said.

Perhaps unique to reservations, rivals sometimes pelt one other with cans of food from the federal commodity program, a practice called “commod-squadding.”

As federal grants to Pine Ridge have declined over the last decade, the tribal police force has shrunk by more than half, with only 12 to 20 officers per shift patrolling an area the size of Rhode Island, said John Mousseau, chairman of the tribe’s judiciary committee.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has proposed large increases in money for the police, courts and juvenile programs, and for fighting rampant domestic and sexual violence on reservations.

Christopher M. Grant, who used to head a police antigang unit in Rapid City, S.D., and is now a consultant on gangs to several tribes and federal agencies, has noted the “marked increase in gang activity, particularly on reservations in the Midwest, the Northwest and the Southwest” over the last five to seven years.

The Navajo Nation in Arizona, for example, has identified 225 gang units, up from 75 in 1997.

One group that reaches across reservations in Minnesota, called the Native Mob, is more like the street gangs seen in cities, with hierarchical leadership and involvement in drug and weapons trafficking, Mr. Grant said.

Many of the gangs in Pine Ridge, like the Tre Tre Crips, were started by tribal members who encountered them in prison or while living off the reservation; others have taken their names and colors from movies and records.

Even as they seek to bolster policing, Pine Ridge leaders see their best long-term hope for fighting gangs in cultural revival.

“We’re trying to give an identity back to our youth,” said Melvyn Young Bear, the tribe’s appointed cultural liaison. “They’re into the subculture of African-Americans and Latinos. But they are Lakota, and they have a lot to be proud of.”

Mr. Young Bear, 42, is charged with promoting Lakota rituals, including drumming, chanting and sun dances. He noted that some Head Start programs were now conducted entirely in Lakota.

Michael Little Boy Jr., 30, of the village of Evergreen, said he had initially been tempted by gang life, but with rituals and purifying sweat lodges, “I was able to turn myself around.” He is emerging as a tribal spiritual leader, working with youth groups to promote native traditions.

Mr. Grant said a survey of young men in South Dakota reservations found that the approach might be helping.

Mr. Wilson, the 24-year-old gang member, said he regretted not learning the Sioux language when he was young and now wondered about his own future.

“I still get drunk and hang with my homeboys, but not like I used to,” he said.

His car, its windows shattered, sits outside his house, so he cannot get to the G.E.D. class he says he would like to attend. His goal is to run a recording studio where his younger half-brother, Richard Lame, 18, could make rap songs. Mr. Lame is finishing high school and says he wants to go to college.

But he admits that he still joined 30 or so homeboys in town to party any chance he got — “for the rush, the thrill.” As he spoke, he was dressed in the dark colors of his set, the Black Wall Street Boyz; his tiny bedroom was decorated with movie posters of Al Pacino as the megalomaniacal drug dealer Tony Montana in “Scarface,” and he wore a black bandanna.

He pulled out a thick sheaf of his rap lyrics and gave an impromptu performance.

Ever since birth

I been waitin’ for death ...

Should a murderer ever get parole?

2009-12-13T14:26:00.000-08:00

An article in the LA Times raises the issue of

whether parole can be denied solely on the

basis of the crime itself. If the Parole Board

says a prisoner has been rehabilitated and

should be paroled, should the governor simply

say I do not let murderers out and that ends

the situation.

Parole is a privilege and not a right, but if we

let sex offenders who probably pose a greater

threat of re-offending out, why is the door

closed when it is murder? Interesting issue

that deserves debate.

False Confessions

2009-12-13T11:07:00.000-08:00

The Psychology and Power of False Confessions

in the newest issue of the Association for Psychological

Sciences is well worth your time. Click here to read it

Sheriff Joe defies government and its order

2009-12-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

Copied from URL below:

latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-joe-arpaio12-2009dec12,0,2123666.story

latimes.com

Arizona sheriff ups the ante against his foes

Joe Arpaio has escalated his tactics, not only defying the federal government on immigration but launching repeated investigations of those who criticize him.

By Nicholas Riccardi

December 12, 2009

Reporting from Phoenix

The day after the federal government told Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio that he could no longer use his deputies to round up suspected illegal immigrants on the street, the combative Arizona sheriff did just that.

He launched one of his notorious "sweeps," in which his officers descend on heavily Latino neighborhoods, arrest hundreds of people for violations as minor as a busted headlight and ask them whether they are in the country legally.

"I wanted to show everybody it didn't make a difference," Arpaio said of the Obama administration's order.

Arpaio calls himself "America's toughest sheriff" and remains widely popular across the state. For two decades, he has basked in publicity over his colorful tactics, such as dressing jail inmates in pink underwear and housing them in outdoor tents during the brutal Phoenix summers.

But he has escalated his tactics in recent months, not only defying the federal government but launching repeated investigations of those who criticize him. He recently filed a racketeering lawsuit against the entire Maricopa County power structure. On Thursday night, the Arizona Court of Appeals issued an emergency order forbidding the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office from searching the home or chambers of a Superior Court judge who was named in the racketeering case.

Last year, when Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called for a federal investigation of Arpaio's immigration enforcement, the Sheriff's Office demanded to see Gordon's e-mails, phone logs and appointment calendars.

When the police chief in one suburb complained about the sweeps, Arpaio's deputies raided that town's City Hall.

A local television station, KPHO, in a 10-minute-long segment last month, documented two dozen instances of the sheriff launching investigations of critics, none of which led to convictions.

The most notorious case involves county Supervisor Don Stapley, a Republican who has sometimes disagreed with Arpaio's immigration tactics. Last December, deputies arrested Stapley on charges of failing to disclose business interests properly on his statement of economic interest.

Stapley's alarmed supervisor colleagues had their offices swept for listening devices. Arpaio contended the search was illegal and sent investigators to the homes of dozens of county staffers to grill them about the sweep.

A judge in September dismissed several of the allegations against Stapley, and prosecutors dropped the case. Three days later, Arpaio's deputies arrested Stapley again after he parked his car in a downtown parking structure near his office.

No charges were filed until County Atty. Andrew Thomas -- Arpaio's ally in his fights with the supervisor -- charged Stapley this week with misusing money he raised to run for president of the National Assn. of Counties.

"It's just extraordinary, the kind of thing that takes place in Third World dictatorships," said Paul Charlton, a former U.S. attorney who is representing Stapley. He predicted the latest charges would also be dismissed. "So many people are of one mind on a single issue -- illegal immigration -- that they are willing to ignore these misdeeds."

Arpaio brushes off suggestions that he's used his office to go after critics. Many of the complaints, as in the Stapley case, come from targets of anti-corruption probes that started with tips rather than the sheriff's personal intercession.

"We don't abuse our power," Arpaio said in an interview. "We do what we have to do."

Arpaio, a Republican, is highly popular in Arizona. He won reelection last year with 55% of the vote in the state's most populous county. Though he has said he's not interested in running for governor, a recent poll showed him crushing the presumptive Democratic nominee, state Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard, 51% to 39%.

The sheriff was not always at war with much of the region's political establishment. A former official with the Drug Enforcement Administration who was first elected sheriff in 1992, Arpaio had support from the majority-Republican county Board of Supervisors and from local Latino leaders.

"He had a very good relationship with the Hispanic community," said Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, the lone Democrat and lone Latina on the board.

But by 2005, central Arizona was seething over illegal immigration. Crime was rising in Phoenix, a key smuggling hub that was becoming the kidnapping capital of the country.

Arpaio received a federal waiver, known as a 287(g), that allowed his deputies to enforce federal immigration laws. He said he had identified more than 30,000 illegal immigrants through his sweeps and interrogations in the county jail.

In October, the federal Department of Homeland Security revoked the 287(g) for Arpaio's street operations, though he could continue to question jail inmates about their immigration status.

Arpaio, however, said state law permitted him to continue his street operations and is awaiting a legal opinion from Thomas, the county attorney.

Latino community leaders say Arpaio has become more aggressive since he was stripped of some authority in the 287(g) program.

"It's actually gotten worse rather than better," said Salvador Reza, an activist who added that some immigrants don't dare turn the lights on in their homes at night for fear that Arpaio's deputies would knock at their doors.

A Homeland Security spokesman declined to comment, referring a reporter to statements Secretary Janet Napolitano gave to a liberal advocacy group in Washington.

Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, said Arpaio "was unwilling to accept that there were standards that needed to be met. He wanted to go off on his own. And so that's where we had a parting of ways." She acknowledged, however, that state law would allow him to continue making his arrests.

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a civil rights investigation into Arpaio's tactics. The sheriff has refused to cooperate and has called for an investigation of the investigators.

As Arpaio has fenced with the Obama administration, he has become embroiled in a sometimes-surreal battle with the five county supervisors who oversee his budget. Amid the recession, they have cut the sheriff's budget by 12.2%.

Arpaio and Thomas filed a federal racketeering lawsuit against the county supervisors, administrators and several judges who have ruled against the two in prior cases.

Arpaio and Thomas contended there was a conspiracy to assign the Stapley prosecution to an anti-Thomas judge, part of an effort to cover up what they call a wasteful county effort to build a new courthouse.

County officials noted that Arpaio and Thomas have sued them six times in efforts to regain power over their budgets -- and they lost every time.

Tensions escalated this week when the county attorney filed criminal charges against the presiding judge of the county's criminal courts, alleging bribery and obstruction of justice for ruling against Arpaio and prosecutors in some of those previous legal battles.

Wilcox, whom Thomas charged this week with violating state laws by voting on government contracts for a charitable organization that gave one of her businesses a loan, said she had been stunned by the sheriff's conduct.

"They have made life hell on everybody," she said of Arpaio and Thomas."Every time you speak out, they investigate you."

"Racketeering? That's just crazy," she added. "We're becoming the laughingstock of America."

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com

100 Year Old Dangerous Sex Offender

2009-12-11T11:21:00.000-08:00

At age 90, he molested little girls. Why he

was sentenced to any term that would allow

him to walk out of prison is hard to understand.

Buffalo is now facing a dangerous 100-year old

sex offender who looks like a harmless old gent.

If there ever was a situation where community

policing could help by personally telling all

neighbors about this newly arrived resident,

this is it. One must hope all in the area are

aware of who he is and what he looks like.

This Oct. 15, 2009 photo obtained from the New York State Sex Offenders registry web site shows Theodore Sypnier. Sypnier, 100, New York state's oldest registered sex offender, could be released from a halfway house soon, much to the dismay of a prosecutor who says he remains a threat to children."

AP Photo

Western NY frets as 100-year-old molester is freed

By CAROLYN THOMPSON

Associated Press Writer

Updated: December 10, 2009, 5:20 PM /

Everything that pedophile Theodore Sypnier has to show for his

100 years on Earth is packed in a single duffel bag as he prepares

to begin a new chapter in life: freedom.

It's a chapter that prosecutors, judges and others who know

him never wanted - or expected - to see written.

New York's oldest registered sex offender is scheduled to move

by week's end out of a Buffalo halfway house for released inmates

and into a place of his own, after completing his latest term in

state prison for molesting little girls.

The judge who sentenced him said at the time that she expected him

to die behind bars.

But 10 years after his last arrest, as Sypnier prepared to shed the closely

monitored lifestyle of the halfway house, its director warned that

the spry and active Sypnier has not changed from the manipulator

who used his grandfatherly charm to snare and rape victims as young as 4.

"Whether he's 100 or 101 or 105, the same person that was committing

these crimes 10, 25, 30 years ago still exists today and has an unrepentant

heart," said the Rev. Terry King, director of Grace House, which has twice

taken Sypnier in from prison. "He is someone that we as parents, as members

of the community, any community, really need to fear."

Six months after marking his 100th birthday in the Groveland Correctional

Facility - becoming the first New York inmate to reach the milestone

while incarcerated- the retired telephone company worker now says

he wants to get to know the youngest members of a family that has disowned him.

"I'll tell them I never harmed any children," the father, grandfather and

great-grandfather told his hometown newspaper, The Buffalo News.

A former daughter-in-law said he is not likely to get the chance.

"No one from the family plans to have any contact with him," Diane Sypnier

said before ending a brief phone interview.

Being grandfatherly was how the 5-foot-5, 150-pound Sypnier found his

victims, authorities say. After his most recent arrest at age 90 on charges of

raping and sodomizing a 4-year-old girl and her 7-year-old sister,

his neighbors in the suburb of Tonawanda recalled what appeared

to be a kindly Sypnier offering rides to adults, handing out money

to children so they could buy candy, and baby-sitting.

The victimized sisters called him "Grandpa," their mother said at the

time, adding that it "was a total shock" when police showed her

sexually explicit pictures of her girls found in Sypnier's apartment.

Sypnier's convictions date to 1987, when he was given three years' probation

for sex abuse. He spent a year in prison for sexually abusing a minor in 1994.

His neighbors in Tonawanda never knew of Sypnier's background

because he was convicted before the adoption of laws requiring sex offenders to register with police.

A relative once came forward and said Sypnier had molested her

while she was growing up, former Erie County prosecutor Frank

Clark told the News. Authorities wonder what else might lie in Sypnier's past.

"People don't start to become pedophiles at 78," Erie County District Attorney

Frank Sedita told the AP. "I call them vampires. ... This is something that's

deep inside of them, and they won't want to stop doing this until they're dead."

But Sypnier says he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice, despite twice

pleading guilty in the case involving the sisters.

"Those children crawled into bed with me because they were frightened,

but there was never any sexual hanky-panky," Sypnier told the News.

Sypnier initially pleaded guilty in 2000 to two counts of rape,

15 counts of sodomy and endangering the welfare of a child for

molesting the Tonawanda girls, as well as three in Buffalo.

An appeals court threw out the conviction in 2002 after Sypnier

claimed he was confused at the time, leading to another plea the

following year to a lesser charge.

In sentencing Sypnier to as many as 10 years in prison,

state Supreme Court Justice Penny Wolfgang told him

she expected he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.

"The sheer notion of him wandering the streets unattended or

unsupervised is a scary proposition," King said.

Sypnier was released on parole in 2007, only to be returned to prison

in 2008 after failing to attend sex-offender counseling. He completed

his term in November and will be on parole through 2012.

Until then, he's forbidden from using e-mail, chat rooms or

social networking sites, hanging around playgrounds or schools,

or spending time in bars.

Instead, he spends his days watching television, cooking,

socializing in the halfway house and attending programming, King said.

Sypnier's new address has not been disclosed, but the law requires

him to enter it in the state's sex offender registry.

Although his age makes him New York's oldest

registered sex offender, there is at least one older

offender elsewhere. Bert Jackson of Utah is 103 and living under home confinement.

http://www.buffalonews.com/nationalworld/national/story/889828.html

Elect or Appoint is One Really Superior

2009-12-11T11:05:00.000-08:00

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra

Day O'Connor is leading an effort to change

the way in which judges are selected in our

country. The article copied below was

featured on the Crime and Justice News

If you consider a voting ballot in Texas,

the names of judges are lower down in

a ballot with many choices. Only a tiny

number of voters know anything about

the judges.

How does one decide who is

a "good judge"? Is it more important for

the judge to apply the law scrupulously

and toss tainted evidence that allows

a heinous offender to go free or be so

generous with "good faith" exceptions

that offender stays behind bars?

This is an important issue that is rarely

given consideration. Maybe that will

change LOL:)

TheNewsTribune.com
Section: - NEWS UPDATES

Justices making new push to abolish elected judges

By KRISTEN WYATT
An old debate about whether judges should be elected or appointed is heating up again.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and several state Supreme Court justices are planning a nationwide push during next year's state legislative sessions to end the practice of electing judges. Nevada already has such a proposal before voters on the 2010 ballot.

Many judges and the American Bar Association argue the legal system is tainted by judges seeking campaign donations.

"It doesn't support the fundamental principle of judges acting fairly and impartially," Ohio Chief Justice Tom Moyer told The Associated Press.

A judicial think tank at the University of Denver has assembled a group of prominent judges, including O'Connor, to push for the abolition of directly elected judges in the 33 states that have them.

They want state commissions made up mostly of non-lawyers to pick judges. Governors would appoint judges the commissions select, and voters would decide in future elections whether the judges keep their jobs.

Current judicial elections give a false impression that voters have much invested in court picks, O'Connor said.

"A voter goes into the voting booth on Election Day, and they have a long list of races to vote for," O'Connor told the AP. "When they come to the judges, they don't typically know any of them. How are they supposed to decide?"

Open judicial races lead to pricey television campaigns in some states. That requires fundraising, often from trial lawyers or businesses interested in who decides cases that affect them.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly ruled that elected judges must step aside if campaign donations are likely to create the perception of bias. That ruling was sparked by a 2004 West Virginia case in which a state Supreme Court judge ruled on a dispute that affected a company whose owner spent $3 million to help get the judge elected.

"It really highlights the need for a change," said former Arizona state Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor. Arizona has long used the appointment and retention-vote system backed by the Denver-based initiative.

McGregor said the rising expense of judicial races, topping $1 million in some states, could lead more states to follow Arizona.

"Contributions have gotten so enormous that it causes voters to step back and say, 'Isn't there better way?'" McGregor said.

But history suggests the appointed-judge initiative faces long odds.

Even O'Connor concedes only two states - Ohio and Minnesota - are likely to put the question before voters in the near future along with Nevada.

One of the nation's most prominent backers of appointed judges, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, concedes his state has little appetite to forgo partisan judicial races.

"You have to be realistic. We've been trying to change this for 30 years," said Jefferson, who has been on Texas' highest court since 2001.

In Ohio, voters have rejected appointment schemes as far back as 1938. In 1987, Ohio voters again declined to change the state constitution to do away with elected judges.

"It has sort of an elitist tinge to say that voters aren't sophisticated enough to make this determination," said Jeff Patch, a spokesman for the Alexandria, Va.-based Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes campaign finance limits.

Patch said voters don't buy the argument that appointed judges, even those who face retention elections and performance reviews, are somehow insulated from accusations of bias. He pointed out the possibility of a governor appointing a donor to the bench, or a commission choosing a popular lawyer.

"To say that merit selection is going to be more ethical is pretty misguided," he said.

Rebecca Love Kourlis, executive director of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System and a former Colorado Supreme Court justice, said a pending decision from the U.S. Supreme Court could boost interest in the elected-judge debate.

The high court is expected to issue a ruling on campaign finance that could lead to fewer restrictions on how much businesses and unions can spend on favored candidates. If that happens, states could see more expensive judicial races.

"We think the timing is right" for a national debate on elected judges, Kourlis said. "Judicial elections have become so expensive, and so unseemly, that this is something ripe for action."

Unusual solution

2009-12-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

There is an article in today's Findlaw's

blotter about a community in Florida

that is made-up of sex offender

housing. There is a church whose

membership is also made up of

sex offenders primarily.

This is an unusual approach but has

the underlying philosophy of trying

to assist these "outcasts" to have

housing and employment in addition

to other types of counseling and help.

All against a background of keeping

society's children safe from known

predators who are not in prison.

This seems like a good idea if it is

limited to truly low level offenders:

Teen who has willing sex with another

teen who is underage; touching incidents

and others where no children or rape

is involved.

Basic problem is that we apply the same

label to a multitude of different offenses.

Can you think of a better approach to

assisting these offenders?

It Works and Needs Replication

2009-12-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Copied from CrimProf BLog (http://tinyurl.com/yhg9njd)

"A Cincinnati experiment has changed the way police deal with gang violence"

The Crime Report has this interesting story here. In part:

The Cincinnati study provides a detailed account of how the city’s police force implemented the anti-violence strategy, which is based essentially on identifying gang members and then calling them in for a meeting, or a series of meetings, attended by both law enforcement and community representatives. There, they are told that they have two choices: they can continue their lawbreaking activities and face severe punishment; or they can agree to accept counseling or other services aimed at dealing with the problems that contributed to their gang participation.
The deep involvement of community leaders , parents and pastors, whose moral authority carries a powerful impact, combined with the threat of punishment acts as a form of focused deterrence, say adherents of the model. Similar strategies directed at gang members or drug dealers in cities like High Point, NC, Providence, RI and Hempstead, NY have resulted in a marked falloff in gang violence and the disappearance of open-air narcotics markets.

Is the law too broadly interpreted

2009-12-07T08:47:00.000-08:00

The Constitution never defined due process, but

the Courts created a meaningful measurement.

A criminal statute, which leaves "honest-service"

fraud undefined, has been used in so many different

situations that the Supreme Court will hear cases

involving its application.

When you begin to read the article and the specific

charges against the named individuals, you think,

or I suspect you do, of wondering what the fuss is

about. The problem is that without specific parameters

written in the statute itself, by definition, the law can

easily be abused by prosecutors: this is not to say that

it has been, only that it could be.

It is important to the well being of our nation that elected

officials and those involved with companies whose

stockholders' interests are at stake be required to act

within the law. But one must know what is prohibited.

There is a major difference between a moral wrong and something

statutorily illegal. Legislators must clearly state the illegal and

not leave it up to executive branch of government to draw the

parameters of a statute. The Constitution requires that laws not

be vague for just this reason.

The following article was copied from the New York

Times web site on December 7, 2009 to allow you

to consider the need for Congress and other legislative

bodies to define any criminal action clearly.

Justices to Weigh Honest-Services Law

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

An unusual coalition of groups has come together to

criticize the federal government’s increasing reliance

on a statute that is commonly used but little understood:

honest-services fraud.

The honest-services law, on the federal books since 1988,

broadly requires that public and corporate officials

act in the best interests of their constituents or employers.

It has become an important tool for federal prosecutors,

who used it successfully against the lobbyist Jack Abramoff

and many of his associates. It is an element of the cases

against former Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois;

the former New York State Senate majority leader,

Joseph L. Bruno; and former Gov. Donald E. Siegelman of Alabama.

Prosecutors have described the law as a valuable instrument

against corruption at a time when officials have become

increasingly sophisticated at covering their tracks.

But critics say it is used too broadly, is applied inconsistently,

and too often criminalizes behavior that fails to merit the

full weight of federal prosecution. The Supreme Court

will hear three cases concerning the honest-services law

in this term, with two coming up for oral argument on Tuesday.

Opposition to use of the law has emerged from across the

political spectrum, from the United States Chamber of Commerce

and the Washington Legal Foundation on the right,

to the more left-leaning National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“Could an insincere sermon at Sunday religious services come

within the statute?” asked the chamber, half sarcastically,

in a brief to the Supreme Court.

Justice Antonin Scalia has been harshly critical of the

honest-services law, writing in a recent dissent that it has

been applied to “a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.”

He said that it “invites abuse by headline-grabbing prosecutors

in pursuit of local officials, state legislators, and corporate

C.E.O.s who engage in any manner of unappealing or

ethically questionable conduct.”

One of the two cases coming before the court next week

involves Conrad M. Black, the newspaper executive

who was convicted of defrauding his media company,

Hollinger International. He is arguing that the law

should not be applied to him because he did not

contemplate “economic harm” to Hollinger.

In the second, Bruce Weyhrauch, a former Alaska state

legislator, was convicted of failing to disclose a conflict

of interest. He had not violated state law, however,

and argues that the federal prosecution on honest-services

charges violates important principles of federalism.

The third case, to be argued later in the term, involves

Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron.

He is arguing that the honest-services law is unconstitutionally vague.

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility

and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog group,

scoffed at the idea that the law is so vague that people

do not know when they have crossed the line, especially

in the three cases before the Supreme Court.

“If you go to those cases — Black, Skilling and Weyhrauch —

and look at what they did, a kindergartner knows

that they were wrong,” she said. “It’s not credible

that those guys really had no idea that what they

were doing would get them into trouble. What they

thought was that they wouldn’t get caught.”

The watchdog group’s brief to the Supreme Court called

the law “an indispensable weapon in the prosecutorial

arsenal for fighting government corruption” since it offers

“a much easier evidentiary burden” than bribery law.

Critics of the law, however, say that its vagueness is used

to bolster corruption cases in which the evidence

might be weak or the offense, while perhaps distasteful, is minor.

That is the argument of Larry Remer, a political consultant in

San Diego who faced multiple felony charges after

successfully running a bond campaign for a community college.

After the campaign was over, and the campaign fund depleted,

a video production company sent in a bill for $5,800.

The college president proposed paying the bill with

public money, ostensibly by buying outtakes from

the video company, though it is illegal to use public money

for such a campaign.

Federal prosecutors indicted Mr. Remer and the college president

in 2004 on a range of charges related to the improper

use of taxpayer money, including honest-services charges.

Mr. Remer said he was baffled by the case.

“I do understand the need to get the sleazebags,” said Mr. Remer,

whose case ended in a mistrial and a plea of guilty, along with

the college president, to misdemeanor charges of improperly

using public money, not honest-services charges. “But let’s

get them with real laws. Let’s not just say we need to get

this guy, so we’ll use this law because it can be

melted to meet our needs.”

The United States attorneys office in San Diego

declined to comment on the case.

The honest-services statute grew out of the Supreme

Court’s earlier attempts to rein in the widening use by

prosecutors of mail and wire fraud laws, said John C. Coffee,

a professor at Columbia Law School.

In a landmark 1987 decision, the Supreme Court

limited mail and wire fraud prosecutions to cases

involving tangible goods like money and property,

and not the “intangible right” of the people to good government.

Within a year, however, Congress restored the prosecutors’

flexible tool by passing the current law.

Since then, critics argue, chaos has resulted, with significant

differences across the country in the ways that the statute is interpreted.

Bennett L. Gershman, a professor at Pace University Law School,

said the power of prosecutors to overreach by focusing on a person

to prosecute and then finding a law to apply “is not only subject

to abuse under the honest-services theory, but has been abused”

in cases like those involving Mr. Siegelman, the former Alabama governor.

The charges against Mr. Siegelman, including honest-services fraud,

concerned a contribution from a businessman, Richard M. Scrushy,

to an issue campaign advocated by the governor, who

later reappointed Mr. Scrushy to a state hospital board.

The Department of Justice has conducted an investigation

of the case and found no misconduct in the prosecution;

Mr. Siegelman’s supporters say the investigation was

poorly conducted. Mr. Siegelman has appealed to the

Supreme Court, which has not decided whether to take

up the case.

Ms. Sloan, of the watchdog group, said that if prosecutors

abused the statute, “it doesn’t mean the whole statute is at fault.”

“It means the prosecutors made some bad decisions,” she said.

Richard L. Thornburgh, who was attorney general when the

honest-services law was passed, said he expected the

Supreme Court to issue “something fairly sweeping”

since it had taken on so many honest-services cases.

But, he added, “I think they can do it without doing

violence to proper law enforcement.”

Warped Sense of Humor

2009-12-06T09:14:00.000-08:00

December 6, 2009

4 American Teenagers Arrested in Japan

By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — Four teenagers from an American military

base in Japan were arrested on charges of attempted

murder on Saturday for allegedly toppling a woman

riding her motorbike, causing her to suffer a serious

head injury.

In the August episode, which has received national

coverage in Japan, a 23-year-old motorbike rider

suffered a fractured skull when she hit rope that

the authorities say had been strung across a road

by the four teenagers near the Yokota Air Base in Tokyo.

The suspects are three boys and a girl, ages 15 to 18,

who all are children of United States military personnel.

Local police officers arrested them after surveillance

videotapes showed them near the site of the crash.

One of the teenagers sought help from a passer-by

for the injured woman, according to news reports.

The police said that American officials were cooperating

in the investigation.

Base-related crime is a delicate issue in Japan, where

about 47,000 American troops are stationed under a

mutual security pact. The United States and Japan are

still negotiating the relocation of another United States

military base, the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma

in Okinawa, in the aftermath of a public outcry over

the rape of a local schoolgirl by three American

servicemen in 1995.

Is 29 years on Death Row Cruel and Unusual Punishment

2009-12-03T12:41:00.000-08:00

A recently executed prisoner was on Death Row for 29 years
in Tennessee. The issue of the 8th Amendment's violation
came up in an opinion by Justice Stevens that was joined
by Justice Breyer. Both Justices believe that the issue
of being held for many years prior to execution is one the
Supreme Court should consider. Justice Thomas opposes
doing this.

To read a fuller discussion and have links to the opinion
itself click here.

Study says Capital Punishment Does NOT Deter

2009-12-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

The Journal itself is well worth reading and there is a link at
the bottom of the article to the issue that has the report

From Crime and Justice Newsletter

Capital Punishment Not Likely A Murder Deterrent: Study
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Contrary to the common belief that capital punishment deters
murderers, a study by Tomislav Kovandzic, Lynne Vieraitis,
and Denise Paquette Boots of the University of Texas at Dallas
concludes that most offenders do not likely weigh the costs
and benefits of crime and are not likely to be deterred by
the existence of the death penalty. Many homicides are
committed when offenders are under extreme emotional
duress and are unlikely to be thinking of the legal sanctions.
The study, in the November 2009 issue of the journal Criminology
and Public Policy, edited at Florida State University, says
that for the death penalty to serve as a deterrent, the
probability of getting caught and punished must be
greater than any benefit the offender could achieve
from committing the crime. Commenting on the study,
Paul Rubin of Emory University contends that the mere
probability of execution is likely to deter at least some
potential murderers. Rubin finds studies of capital punishment
problematic because only convicted criminals are
examined-not those who have been deterred-and
because the death penalty is imposed too infrequently
and erratically to measure its deterrent effects well.
The journal is sent to members of the American Society of Criminology.

Criminology & Public Policy journal

First Amendment and Lawyers

2009-12-02T09:58:00.000-08:00

Sometimes even the best lawyers find the law
difficult to follow if it conflicts with their
fiduciary duty to the client. This case is before
the Supreme Court, and while it involves bankruptcy,
it clearly shows how laws can have unintended
consequences.

December 2, 2009
Federal Law Limiting Legal Advice Draws Particular Interest at the Supreme Court

By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — Several justices seemed convinced on Tuesday that a federal law restricting the advice bankruptcy lawyers may offer was a bad idea. But they had differing ideas about what the Supreme Court should do about it.

“It’s a stupid law,” Justice Antonin Scalia said. “Where is the prohibition of stupid laws in the Constitution?”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., on the other hand, appeared receptive to the argument that the law violated the First Amendment by intruding into the relationship between lawyers and clients.

The justices, all of whom are lawyers, seemed to take particular interest in the case, presumably because it concerns lawyers’ free speech rights.

“Congress often forgets about the First Amendment,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said, “but lawyers don’t.”

The law forbids advising clients “to incur more debt in contemplation of” a bankruptcy filing. Piling on debt just before filing for bankruptcy in the hope that it will not have to be repaid is, all concerned agreed, an abuse of the system and may amount to fraud. But state ethics rules already forbid lawyers to advise their clients to break the law.

On the other hand, some new debt is both legal and prudent. It may be a good idea to refinance a mortgage to pay down credit card debt or to take out a loan to buy a car to get to work. The 2005 law seems to forbid lawyers to give advice about that second sort of action.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked about medical expenses. Suppose, she said, that a woman was “just told by her doctor that she has a serious cancer that needs operation and radiation and she is at the end of the line on resources.” Could the woman’s lawyer advise her to take on more debt to treat the cancer?

It depends, said William M. Jay, a lawyer for the government. Lawyers may not advise clients to add debt in two situations, he said: in an effort to abuse the bankruptcy system or to defraud creditors.

That answer did not satisfy Chief Justice Roberts. “Under your construction,” he told Mr. Jay, “it seems to me that a lawyer trying to give correct, legal, ethical advice has got to pause before every sentence” and worry about whether the advice will later be seen as a violation of the law.

The case, Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz v. United States, No. 08-1119, was brought by a Minnesota law firm that objected to three parts of the law. In addition to the core First Amendment challenge, the firm argued that Congress had not meant to cover lawyers in the first place. That argument did not seem to gain much traction with the justices.

The firm also objected to a requirement in the law that its advertising include this statement or something like it: “We are a debt relief agency. We help people file for bankruptcy relief under the Bankruptcy Code.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he was troubled by that requirement. “A prospective client looks at that,” he said, “and they say, ‘Well, I don’t want a debt relief agency, I want a lawyer.’ “

Mr. Jay said the firm was free to add to and clarify the statement. “There is no restriction on what content goes in the ad,” he said, “only that it include this disclaimer.”

As for the part of the law restricting legal advice, Mr. Jay said it should be narrowed rather than struck down.

The law, the government said in a brief, should be read to bar “only advice to take on debt with an intent to abuse the bankruptcy laws, such as advice to charge a vacation, concert tickets or some similar purchase to a credit card, knowing that the purchaser will enjoy the full benefit of the purchase and then shed most or all of the debt in bankruptcy.”

But G. Eric Brunstad Jr., a lawyer for the Minnesota law firm, said the law “whipsaws the attorneys who are trying to apply it.” State ethics rules “say you have to give unfettered, candid advice to your client,” he said, while the federal law says “you must give truncated advice.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Over-Punishment? Texas schools?

2009-11-30T14:08:00.000-08:00

This article relates to New York, but the
same issue could be raised about Texas
schools. The bottom line is whether our
obsession with zero tolerance is creating
mountains out of mole hills and forgetting
that there are other ways to correct poor
behavior that doesn't relate to juvenile
delinquency or arrests or other actions
even expulsion when not truly justified.

Read the article and decide for yourself
whether we are over-punishing. There
have been no articles that I have read
which complain about students' being
harassed by security officers in Texas.

The question I am posing is whether
zero tolerance needs to be re-considered.
We do not want students using drugs, but
one Advil or Tylenol to relieve cramps or
pain from an injury is far different from
drug use. A kindergärtner who brings a
Grandparent's Swiss Army knife for show and
tell should not be expelled. The principal and
the parents could deal with this issue easily.

Bullying needs swift reprisal and maybe a few
weeks in an alternative school might be
justified. But expulsion usually results in a
student just getting into more trouble
because no one is monitoring him/her in
the average two-parents working or
single-parent home.

November 29, 2009
EDITORIAL
Over-Punishment in Schools

New York City joined a national trend in 1998 when it put
the police in charge of school security. The consensus is
that public schools are now safe. But juvenile justice
advocates across the country are rightly worried about
policies under which children are sometimes arrested and
criminalized for behavior that once was dealt with by
principals or guidance counselors working with a student’s parents.

Children who are singled out for arrest and suspension are
at greater risk of dropping out and becoming permanently
entangled with the criminal justice system. It is especially
troubling that these children tend to be disproportionately
black and Hispanic, and often have emotional problems or
learning disabilities.

School officials in several cities have identified overpolicing
as a problem in itself. The New York City Council has taken
a first cut at the problem by drafting a bill, the Student
Safety Act, that would bring badly needed accountability
and transparency to the issue.

The draft bill would require police and education officials
to file regular reports that would show how suspensions
and other sanctions affect minority children, children
with disabilities and other vulnerable groups. Detailed
reports from the Police Department would show which
students were arrested or issued summonses and why,
so that lawmakers could get a sense of where
overpolicing might be a problem.

Most important, the bill would create an easily navigable
system under which parents, students and teachers
could file complaints against school security officers.
This provision comes in response to a 2007 report by
the New York Civil Liberties Union, which said students
were being roughed up for minor infractions like talking
back or walking the halls without a pass.

The Police Department and the Department of Education
are sometimes stingy with data. But the City Council is on
the right track when it says that the disciplinary system
could benefit from greater transparency. Lawmakers who
are negotiating with the city over the language of the
bill should keep this basic point in mind.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Just words on a Piece of Paper

2009-11-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

In the United States, the First Amendment's Rights of
Freedom of speech and the Right to Petition the
Government for grievances are taken very seriously
by branches of government. In China, the constitution
also grants many rights, but that is sometimes where
the rights end according to the following article from
the New York Times

______________________________________
November 27, 2009
A Rare Chinese Look at Secret Detentions
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — In a rare dose of candor that contradicts past
official statements, a state-run magazine has published an
article that details a secret network of detention centers
used to prevent aggrieved citizens from lodging complaints
against the Chinese government.

Liaowang, or Outlook, a dependably stodgy publication
aimed at Communist Party bureaucrats and policy makers,
ran an exposé on Tuesday laying out the Byzantine network
of interceptors, guards and holding pens used to put off
the petitioners who flock to Beijing in the hope that the
authorities will resolve longstanding grievances, many of
them involving official corruption in their hometowns.

According to the report, which was also published online
by the official Xinhua news agency, those grabbed off the
street often have their cellphones and identification
confiscated before being locked away in guesthouses
or dank basements. After being held for days or weeks,
inadequately fed and sometimes beaten, they are shipped
back to their home provinces with the admonition that
they stay away from the capital.

At peak times, the article said, as many as 10,000 retrievers
— those paid by local officials to keep petitioners from
successfully filing their complaints — roam Beijing in search
of quarry. The report counted 73 secret detention centers,
many of them run by regional governments, and laid out in
detail the lucrative business of retrieving, detaining and
sending home petitioners. The magazine described it as a
“chain of gray industry.”

Such a system of extralegal detention, sometimes called black jails,
“damages the legitimate rights of petitioners and seriously damages
the government’s image,” the article said.

Although the right to petition the authorities is enshrined
in the Constitution, that right is frequently swallowed up
by the reality of contemporary China’s system of governance:
local officials, facing pressure to maintain social stability,
are penalized for allowing too many complainants to
find their way to the offices of the central government.

The article in Outlook comes less than two weeks after
Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting China’s
network of secret jails — a report that prompted a Foreign
Ministry spokesman to deny their existence. “There are no
black jails in China,” Qin Gang, the spokesman, said when
asked about the report. “If citizens have complaints and
suggestions about government work, they can convey
them to the relevant authorities through legitimate and
normal channels.”

Given the government’s tight control of the media,
human rights advocates expressed guarded optimism
that the article might signal a shift away from official
tolerance for the jails, which are thought to have
existed since 2005.

“The fact that the report focuses on the issue in a
substantive and detailed way gives us hope that the
Chinese government might end its longtime denial of
the existence of black jails and move toward closing
them down, liberating the detainees and bringing
the perpetrators to justice,” said Phelim Kine, a
Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

•
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Community Policing is Paying Off with Positive Results in Boston

2009-11-25T11:22:00.000-08:00

Copied from this site:http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/11/25/reports_of_violent_crime_dip_in_boston/

This is a good example of how community policing can produce laudable results

Violent crime down in Boston
Steady decline since ’06 credited to police work, neighborhood groups
By Maria Cramer, Globe Staff | November 25, 2009

Violent crime has dipped dramatically in Boston, with homicides on a pace to decrease by 20 percent by year’s end - an encouraging trend that law enforcement officials and community activists are working to preserve during the often volatile holiday season.

The drop - 44 homicides through Sunday compared with 56 by the same date last year - is a continuation of the steady decline that began after 2006, when the number of killings reached 75.

Police and city activists who work with youth on the streets say the decrease is a result of several factors: better communication between law enforcement officials and community groups, growing weariness of violence from people in the city’s historically troubled neighborhoods, and a return to crime-fighting initiatives that were successful in the 1990s, when the city experienced a sharp fall in the number of homicides.

“I’m very happy with the way things are going,’’ Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said in an interview yesterday. “The community has been happy with the progress that’s been made and they want to see it continue, and it’s my plan to deliver that to them.’’

Federal statistics show homicides decreased slightly nationwide - about 5 percent - between 2006 and 2008, the most recent years available.

Despite the progress in Boston, community leaders and police said they do not want to take the quiet for granted, especially around Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays, when alcohol-fueled parties can lead to violence.

On Friday, leaders of the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a nonprofit organization that works closely with police to prevent crime, will launch the “Season of Peace,’’ an annual campaign that asks young people to refrain from committing acts of violence during the holidays.

Davis said he will place more patrol officers and detectives on city streets on the nights of the long holiday weekend. “We’re always cautious at this time of year,’’ he said.

The decrease in violent crime in Boston extends over recent years.

In 2005, when the number of homicides spiked to a 10-year high, 64 had been committed by Thanksgiving and 75 by the end of the year. The following year, there were 68 by the November holiday and 75 for the year. But in 2007, the number began to decline slightly with 63 homicides by Thanksgiving and 66 by year’s end.

Since then, the number of violent crimes - with the exception of rapes - has fallen steadily, a drop Davis said is in large part the result of a reinvestment in strategies that target gangs. Earlier this year, police attributed the rise in rapes to more reporting, rather than an actual increase in assaults. They also noted that the year before had seen far fewer rapes reported, which made the increase seem even more dramatic.

A key factor in the decline of other violent crimes, Davis said, is the department’s increasingly aggressive use of Operation Ceasefire, a collaboration of law enforcement and community groups that offers gang members social services like counseling, job training, and school help in exchange for an end to violence. Police and prosecutors threaten long-term federal imprisonment if gang members continue to be violent.

Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley’s office attributed the drop in part to the arrests and convictions of so-called violent “impact players’’ and gang members for nonfatal shootings and gun possession cases.

’’The message is getting out that there’s going to be accountability if you use violence on the streets of Boston,’’ Conley said in a prepared statement.

Another reason, according to law enforcement officials, is the presence of more street workers, who are hired to form relationships with gang members and keep them away from crime. The Boston Foundation has added 13 more street workers to collaborate with those already working for the city.

Nature might have also lent a hand.

In June, an onslaught of rainy weather hit Boston. At the time, the commissioner welcomed the rain because he said violence is tamped down when people are inside. But yesterday, Davis dismissed its role in the overall drop, saying that when good weather returned, violence remained low.

“I think there is really good work going on out there,’’ he said.

Davis said he has assigned more officers to work in Operation Homefront, a program in which police visit high-risk minors at home to build relationships with their families. Davis said the officers have been focusing their visits on known gang members who are likely to use guns.

The department’s gang intelligence has also improved, Davis said, as more officers show up at events organized by youth groups, like the Boys and Girls Club, and district captains attend neighborhood meetings. That kind of presence engenders trust, which leads to more tips, he said.

The department’s intelligence unit, which gathers information about gang activity and crime patterns around the city, has been sharing more information with community groups that work closely with police and other law enforcement agencies.

The Rev. Jeffrey Brown, executive director of the TenPoint Coalition, said youths and adult residents deserve some of the credit for Boston’s decrease in violence. After years of tolerating shootings near their homes, many are joining or forming small neighborhood watch groups and even mediating between feuding groups in their own communities.

“It really is the beginning of an antiviolence movement,’’ Brown said, “and it’s about time.’’

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.

© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Liberals AND Conservatives Join FIght Against Overcriminalism

2009-11-24T13:07:00.000-08:00

Hard to imagine this happening, but the point has finally arrived where
there is consensus that we have gone way too far in making acts a federal crime.

Where do you think the line should be drawn in what constitutes a crime?

Copied from the online edition of the New York TImes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 24, 2009
Right and Left Join Forces on Criminal Justice By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — In the next several months, the Supreme Court will decide at least a half-dozen cases about the rights of people accused of crimes involving drugs, sex and corruption. Civil liberties groups and associations of defense lawyers have lined up on the side of the accused.

But so have conservative, libertarian and business groups. Their briefs and public statements are signs of an emerging consensus on the right that the criminal justice system is an aspect of big government that must be contained.

The development represents a sharp break with tough-on-crime policies associated with the Republican Party since the Nixon administration.

“It’s a remarkable phenomenon,” said Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “The left and the right have bent to the point where they are now in agreement on many issues. In the area of criminal justice, the whole idea of less government, less intrusion, less regulation has taken hold.”

Edwin Meese III, who was known as a fervent supporter of law and order as attorney general in the Reagan administration, now spends much of his time criticizing what he calls the astounding number and vagueness of federal criminal laws.

Mr. Meese once referred to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the “criminals’ lobby.” These days, he said, “in terms of working with the A.C.L.U., if they want to join us, we’re happy to have them.”

Dick Thornburgh, who succeeded Mr. Meese as attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and stayed on under President George Bush, echoed that sentiment in Congressional testimony in July.

“The problem of overcriminalization is truly one of those issues upon which a wide variety of constituencies can agree,” Mr. Thornburgh said. “Witness the broad and strong support from such varied groups as the Heritage Foundation, the Washington Legal Foundation, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the A.B.A., the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society and the A.C.L.U.”

In an interview at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group where he is a fellow, Mr. Meese said the “liberal ideas of extending the power of the state” were to blame for an out-of-control criminal justice system. “Our tradition has always been,” he said, “to construe criminal laws narrowly to protect people from the power of the state.”

There are, the foundation says, more than 4,400 criminal offenses in the federal code, many of them lacking a requirement that prosecutors prove traditional kinds of criminal intent.

“It’s a violation of federal law to give a false weather report,” Mr. Meese said. “People get put in jail for importing lobsters.”

Such so-called overcriminalization is at the heart of the conservative critique of crime policy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce made the point in a recent friend-of-the-court brief about a federal law often used to prosecute corporate executives and politicians. The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of “honest services,” is, the brief said, both “unintelligible” and “used to target a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.”

The Supreme Court will hear three cases concerning the honest-services law this term, indicating an exceptional interest in the topic.

Harvey A. Silverglate, a left-wing civil liberties lawyer in Boston, says he has been surprised and delighted by the reception that his new book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” has gotten in conservative circles. (A Heritage Foundation official offered this reporter a copy.)

The book argues that federal criminal law is so comprehensive and vague that all Americans violate it every day, meaning prosecutors can indict anyone at all.

“Libertarians and the civil liberties left have always had some common ground on these issues,” said Radley Balko, a senior editor at Reason, a libertarian magazine. “The more vocal presence of conservatives on overcriminalization issues is really what’s new.”

Several strands of conservatism have merged in objecting to aspects of the criminal justice system. Some conservatives are suspicious of all government power, while others insist that the federal government has been intruding into matters the Constitution reserves to the states.

In January, for instance, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in United States v. Comstock, about whether Congress has the constitutional power to authorize the continued confinement of people convicted of sex crimes after they have completed their criminal sentences.

Then there are conservatives who worry about government seizure of private property said to have been used to facilitate crimes, an issue raised in Alvarez v. Smith, which was argued in October.

“A joint on a yacht, and the whole thing is forfeited,” said Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush.

Some religious groups object to prison policies that appear to ignore the possibility of rehabilitation and redemption, and fiscal conservatives are concerned about the cost of maintaining the world’s largest prison population.

“Conservatives now recognize the economic consequences of a criminal justice leviathan,” said Erik Luna, a law professor at Washington and Lee University.

The roots of the conservative re-examination of crime policy might also be found in the jurisprudence of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The two justices, joined by liberal colleagues, have said the original meaning of the Constitution required them to rule against the government in, among other areas, the rights of criminal defendants to confront witnesses.

“Scalia and Thomas are vanguards of an understanding by the modern right that its distrust of government extends all the way to the criminal justice system,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University.

The court will hear another confrontation clause case, Briscoe v. Virginia, in January. It is a sequel to a decision in June that prosecutors may not use crime lab reports without live testimony from the analysts who prepared them.

The conservative re-evaluation of crime policy is not universal, of course. Two notable exceptions to the trend, said Timothy Lynch, director of the Cato Institute’s criminal justice project, are Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

“Roberts and Alito are coming down consistently on the side of the government in these criminal justice cases,” Mr. Lynch said.

Some scholars are skeptical about conservatives’ timing and motives, noting that their voices are rising during a Democratic administration and amid demands for accountability for the economic crisis.

“The Justice Department now acts as a kind of counterweight to corporate power,” said Frank O. Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri. “On the other side is an alliance between two strands of conservative thinking, the libertarian point of view and the corporate wing of the Republican Party.”

Mr. Meese acknowledged that the current climate was not the ideal one for his point of view. “We picked by accident a time,” he said, “when it was not a very popular topic in light of corporate frauds.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Technology and Sex Offenders

2009-11-23T08:37:00.000-08:00

Interesting way that law officers and helped and hindered by technology

Tracking sex-crime offenders gets trickier
Violator registry is growing as tech-savvy predators put a greater burden on officers

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 23, 2009

The pursuit of Lee Shelton began the moment the convicted sex offender was released from prison.

It ended months later with a U.S. Marshals Service helicopter hovering near a D.C. junior high school as Shelton kissed a 14-year-old boy. In between, authorities used two Global Positioning System devices to help track him, learned he was online at the library and seized a secret laptop with a power source in the trunk of his car. His parole was revoked, and he is back in jail.

Shelton, who originally was convicted of molesting boys at the National Air and Space Museum and on the grounds of the Washington Monument, is one of thousands of sex offenders accused of similar crimes after their release from prison or while on probation. His parole violation illustrates the challenges of monitoring hundreds of thousands of offenders.

The nationwide crackdown on child pornography and other sex offenses has created severe manpower shortages and technology challenges for probation officers, police and federal agents struggling to track offenders who are jumping online with cellphones and portable game systems and flocking to social networking and other sites, where children or pornography can easily be found.

There are more than 716,000 registered sex offenders nationwide, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a 78 percent increase since 2001, and that does not include all offenders because some crimes do not require registration. Sex-offender registries have grown even faster in the Washington area, with more than 24,000 people listed. Not all receive the scrutiny given to such offenders as Shelton.

The focus on crimes against children that began in the Bush administration shows no sign of abating under President Obama. Federal child sexual exploitation prosecutions are up 147 percent since 2002, and the Justice Department is hiring 81 more prosecutors for these cases. Funding for task forces that bring charges in state courts rose this year from $16 million to $75 million.

But many of those offenders are now leaving prison, even as revenue-strapped states are cutting the budgets of probation departments. In Virginia, probation and parole cuts this year totaled nearly $10 million, including $500,000 for electronic monitoring of sexually violent predators. Maryland also has cut its budget.

"The burden on probation and parole officers is going to explode," said Ernie Allen, the national center's president.

The monitoring of virtually all sex offenders is required by law when they are on probation or parole.

The problem has gained national attention with the discovery of 10 bodies and a skull at a registered sex offender's home in Cleveland and revelations that Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped at age 11 in 1991 and allegedly held captive at a California sex offender's house until her reappearance in August. Officers had visited both homes and noticed nothing wrong.

Those cases underscore a troubled registry system that has been the public face of sex-offender monitoring. An estimated 100,000 offenders do not comply with registration requirements. Law enforcement doesn't know where many of them are.

But the most alarming development for officers is proliferating electronic gadgets and the temptations they pose to sex offenders. A man on probation in Iowa for molesting a 9-year-old girl, for example, was recently caught downloading pornographic images of a young girl on his PlayStation Portable -- while walking to his probation appointment.

Sometimes, offenders cannot be monitored even while in custody. David L. Franklin, a church deacon, pleaded guilty in federal court to sending child pornography to an undercover D.C. police detective. While awaiting sentencing, Franklin struck up another online conversation with the same detective, who traced the defendant to an unusual address -- the D.C. Correctional Treatment Facility.

Franklin had smuggled a cellphone into his jail cell and was on his bunk, online, when guards grabbed it, sources familiar with the case said. He was sentenced last month to 135 months in prison. Franklin's attorney, Dani Jahn, declined to comment.

"When a sex offender has access to hundreds of tools, how we can possibly keep up with this explosion is beyond me," said Leonard Sipes, spokesman for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency in the District, which helped capture Shelton and supervises about 650 other sex offenders convicted in D.C. Superior Court. An attorney for Shelton could not be located.

Sipes said officers are especially worried about social networking sites frequented by children, such as MySpace, which this year said it banned 90,000 registered sex offenders. Facebook has said it is also actively trying to prevent sex offenders from joining its site.

One example: A Virginia man on probation in the District for having sex with a 16-year-old girl as two younger girls watched told officers that he kissed a 15-year-old female runaway he had picked up. Because he was prohibited from contact with minors, authorities searched his computer, which revealed that he was chatting extensively with teen girls on MySpace and stalking a 17-year-old girl in person, law enforcement officials said. His probation was revoked.

Probation and parole officers use GPS devices, polygraph tests, home visits and treatment to track sex offenders, but those tools can be used only during periods of supervision, which often end after three to five years. Parole is post-prison, while probation is generally a sentence in lieu of prison, but the terms are often used interchangeably.

The newest trend in sex-offender management is computer monitoring, which experts said is being done by a majority of state agencies. Maryland began using monitoring software for sex offenders last month; Virginia is researching it. Most federal districts monitor computers in some form.

A monitoring program installed on an offender's computer is designed to capture every keystroke, Internet site and program, including chat and e-mail. Officials can monitor the computer remotely by logging onto a Web site or getting an e-mail if the offender does anything troublesome.

"Anything they shouldn't be doing is going to leap off the page at you," said Jim Tanner, a former probation officer in Colorado and a leading proponent of monitoring. Violations are punished with warnings, harsher parole or probation conditions, parole or probation revocation or new charges if the action constitutes a crime.

Yet even this new tool is flawed. The software won't stop an offender from sneaking a laptop, using a family member's computer or logging on at the library. There is virtually no monitoring equipment for cellphones, BlackBerries or children's gaming devices, which require a time-consuming and expensive forensic analysis.

The monitoring equipment is expensive, so many agencies can't afford it or use a free program that can't retrieve deleted files.

Despite the limitations, proponents say computer monitoring is catching increasing numbers of violations and new crimes. But in the cat-and-mouse game officers play with offenders, old-fashioned police work often wins out.

D.C. probation officers learned, by questioning a man on probation for trying to rape a 9-year-old boy, that he was viewing child pornography on the computer at his mother's home, court records said. Federal agents and police searched his home.

An analysis showed the man, John Anthony, had deleted nearly 3,000 files of what the government called "sadistic and masochistic" child pornography up to an hour before the search, and officials said he was chatting on Yahoo as agents entered the house. Anthony pleaded guilty in D.C. federal court to possessing child pornography and was sentenced last year to 10 years in prison.

Aprille Cole, a nine-year veteran of the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, relies on home visits, hard work and instinct in tracking sex offenders. "They're very smart and manipulative," said Cole. "We get to know their family members, friends and co-workers. We know their girlfriends and whether they have children."

On a recent visit to the Southeast D.C. apartment of a man on parole for molesting his 10-year-old daughter, Cole began firing questions the moment she and her partner, Kevin Jones, walked through the door.

"What's in that box?" she asked as she looked in the closet.

"Who is Sean?" she said as she spotted an unfamiliar name on the kitchen calendar.

"What's up with your girlfriend?"

"I'm not into girlfriends right now," the man answered.

"Then why is there a ponytail holder in your bathroom?" Cole said.

"I know he's lying about the girlfriend," she later told a reporter.

Officers would not disclose the man's name, citing privacy laws. He is not on computer monitoring because he says he doesn't have a computer.

In the man's bedroom, more than 30 stuffed animals were lined up on a table, including an oversize Elmo doll.

He said they belong to a former girlfriend.

The World is Different for a Released Prisoner

2009-11-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

Adjusting to the changes in the world after nearly two decades in prison is hard enough, but think of the agony when you were committed for a crime you did not commit.

November 21, 2009
After 18 Years, Freed to a World With Cellphones
By JOHN ELIGON
Moments after he walked out of Sing Sing prison on Friday after serving 18 years for a crime that a judge ruled he did not commit, Fernando Bermudez Jr. was handed a cellphone so he could speak with one of his lawyers. It was the first time he had held one.
“It almost seemed like a little baby,” Mr. Bermudez said. “It was so delicate. I didn’t want to break it. I have to become more technologically advanced. I’m an anachronism, almost.”
Mr. Bermudez was accompanied by his wife, Crystal, and a husband-and-wife lawyer team, Michael and Lesley Risinger, who worked on his case. He spoke with reporters waiting for him outside the prison before getting in a car to go to the federal courthouse in White Plains to take care of paperwork.
“I’m feeling great on this glorious day of justice,” Mr. Bermudez, 40, said in a telephone interview from the car on his way to White Plains. “I greet you in the name of hope and redemption.”
He then talked about the emotions he felt as he stepped out of the prison. “What was going through my body was an exorbitant amount of palpitations,” he said, “joy and happiness to a level that I’ve never known before in my life.”
After signing documents in White Plains, Mr. Bermudez was driven to Danbury, Conn., where his wife lives, to reunite with his three children — ages 18, 8 and 3 — and her parents. There they went to a McDonald’s for a snack. Mr. Bermudez said earlier that they would head to his parents’ home in Manhattan on Friday night to eat — he was looking forward to ice cream and seafood, or “some Red Lobster type of fare.”
Mr. Bermudez was convicted in 1992 of killing Raymond Blount, 16, a year earlier after a dispute at a Greenwich Village nightclub. After his conviction, five witnesses who at trial had identified him as the killer recanted, saying in sworn affidavits that they had been coerced or manipulated by the police and prosecutors to identify Mr. Bermudez as the killer.
Those recantations were part of what led Justice John Cataldo of State Supreme Court in Manhattan to vacate Mr. Bermudez’s conviction last week.
Mr. Bermudez was not immediately released after Justice Cataldo announced his decision because he still had a 27-month federal sentence for a drug charge that he had pleaded guilty to after being arrested in the murder. A federal judge granted Mr. Bermudez bail on that charge, and his lawyers plan to argue for that sentence to be thrown out.
Mr. Bermudez said he hoped to earn the college degree he had been working toward in prison; he was five credits short of a bachelor’s in social and behavioral sciences from Mercy College. But for now, he said, he has some practical adjusting to do.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Gang Intervention Program Delayed Because of Approach Agreement or Lack thereof

2009-11-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

latimes.com/news/local/la-me-southla-academy19-2009nov19,0,2183555.story

latimes.com

PROMISE AND PERIL IN SOUTH L.A.

Philosophies clash in plans for gang intervention academy

Two schools, led by strong personalities, were supposed to collaborate on a curriculum. When the process collapsed, one of them won a bid to run the program and the other plans to appeal.

By Scott Gold

November 19, 2009

A city-sponsored training academy for gang intervention workers will open at least a year later than Los Angeles officials had hoped after a collision of philosophies and egos -- a hitch in the city's effort to modernize its campaign against street violence.

Officials said this week that an independent panel has selected the Advancement Project, the legal advocacy, civil rights and public policy group, as the winner of a bidding process to run the academy.

But that bid was never supposed to occur. The city's original plan -- to meld the best practices of two gang intervention programs into an "official" curriculum -- collapsed, according to interviews with city officials and City Hall advisors.

Now, the academy isn't expected to open until at least the spring of 2010 -- a year later than originally envisioned. And it's not over yet: The head of a group that lost the bid called the selection process flawed and pledged to appeal the decision into next year, when the City Council will be asked to sign off on the contract.

The dispute might seem like insider politics, considering that the contract is worth just $200,000 the first year, with a possibility of $800,000 over four years. But it means the continuation of the status quo: scores of interventionists fanned out across the city, some skilled and relied upon by law enforcement, but many unregulated, untrained and operating off the books amid dangerous crosscurrents of street politics.

The delay is seen as a particularly acute problem in South L.A., where marked declines in violence have created a rare window of possibility -- one that could close if fragile understandings between rival neighborhoods begin to fray, officials said.

"South Los Angeles is in purgatory," said Jorja Leap, a UCLA Department of Social Welfare adjunct professor, a gang specialist for 30 years and a key City Hall advisor. "There could be life-threatening consequences down the line."

Gang interventionists act as liaisons between law enforcement and their communities and between rival gangs. They have existed for decades in various forms including missionaries and civil rights advocates.

Among rank-and-file officers, collaboration with interventionists remains controversial; most intervention workers were once gang members. However, senior LAPD officers, particularly in South L.A. -- including Charlie Beck, appointed police chief Tuesday by the City Council -- have come to view intervention as a messy but vital tool. Many police officials rely on interventionists to do what they cannot: control street gossip, prevent retaliation shootings or contain gang skirmishes before they become full-fledged wars.

Last year, then-City Controller Laura Chick delivered an indictment of the city's scattershot gang outreach programs. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa consolidated the programs; his Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development now oversees $20 million in annual intervention and prevention contracts.

The city also launched an effort to transform intervention into a professional field. Many interventionists are now subjected to financial audits and drug testing. The opening of the academy, where gang intervention workers would be trained and licensed, is seen as a critical step.

The city's efforts are being watched closely; federal law enforcement and military officials -- the latter wondering if similar tactics might be used in Iraq and Afghanistan -- have visited. "There is national interest in this," said Connie Rice, the prominent civil rights attorney and a leader of the Advancement Project.

The city's original plan was to combine the best practices of two intervention "schools," one run by the Advancement Project, the other, the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute, run by Aquil Basheer, a fixture in gang intervention for more than 30 years in South L.A.

From the start of discussions, it was evident there was a philosophical divide.

Rice's school focused largely on a theoretical and historical understanding of gangs. It was tied closely to the establishment; City Hall had paid the group to deliver a critique of the city's anti-gang efforts. Students were instructed to make a quiet impact by developing relationships in the community -- and not to defuse or even be near violent situations.

Basheer's school focused on hard-core, practical drills. Operating out of an old fire station, Basheer taught his students how to stage a candlelight vigil without exposing people to gunfire, how to extricate someone from an angry crowd. He demanded that his students devise on-the-spot strategies -- what to do, for instance, if a gunman is on the loose in a school cafeteria.

Neither side could agree on how to proceed -- or on what portions of the curriculum each group might oversee. Rice declined to comment about the dispute.

"It became extremely clear that there were dramatic differences," Basheer said. "We all needed to stay in our own lanes. . . . I got tired of talking. I got tired of explaining." Asked how much of the process was derailed not just by competing visions but by strong egos, Basheer chuckled and said: "Eighty or 85%."

The city retreated, opening the project up to bidding -- "the fairest, most above-board way," said Guillermo Cespedes, the mayor's new gang czar.

An advisory panel was assembled, including gang outreach workers from Chicago and the Bay Area. On Friday, the panel delivered its verdict, ranking the Advancement Project's bid in first place, ahead of Basheer's organization and a third bidder.

Susan K. Lee, the Advancement Project's director of urban peace, said the group's program would begin with a "Basic 101" course for entry-level interventionists. That would be followed with a series of advanced, 20-hour courses; one, for instance, would teach them how to proceed in a hospital after a shooting, a notoriously tricky environment.

"It's a high-risk enterprise," Rice said. "You're working with people whose backgrounds create a lot of problems -- but that's why you are working with them."

Basheer said he would appeal to the City Council. He will argue, he said, that the selection process was incomplete because panelists never visited his program -- and, he said, he'll argue that the political aplomb of the Advancement Project can never match his organization's street smarts.

"We have tested strategies, tools and tactics. We can show you an end-line product," he said. "If you're going to put together something this critical, you'd better have a thorough understanding of the culture. . . . We're taking it all the way."

scott.gold@latimes.com

Learn How Texas Has Become Model of CJ Reform

2009-11-19T15:07:00.000-08:00

Copied from: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/floridas-prison-problem-could-find-a-solution-in-texas/1052448

Legislators look west for prison solution

By Jamal Thalji, Times Staff Writer

Published Tuesday, November 17, 2009

If only Florida's economy could grow like its prisons.

The state has more than 100,000 prisoners for the first time in its history. It's expected to add 14,000 in the next five years, according to the Department of Corrections. Every 1,500 new inmates need a new prison. It costs $100 million to build one and $20 million a year to run. How can a state in a perpetual budget crisis pay for all that?

"It's currently unsustainable given our fiscal situation," said Florida Tax Watch general counsel Robert Weissert.

Florida is staring at a Texas-sized problem.

Fortunately, Texas might also have the solution.

Two years ago that state faced its own prison crisis: house 17,000 new inmates by 2012 at a cost of half a billion dollars.

But Texas never built any new prisons. Instead, for half that amount, it revamped its criminal justice system, reduced its prison population and became a national model for reform.

"We hit the perfect storm at the right time," Texas legislator Jerry Madden said at the Collins Center for Public Policy's Justice Summit this week in Tampa. "We were able to say we can do this for less and, oh, by the way, our results will be better."

Here's how Texas did it.

• • •

Madden, 65, was elected to the Texas House in 1992. An engineer by trade, he started his own insurance company. In 2005, the speaker of the house made Rep. Madden chairman of the committee overseeing Texas' prisons. He did so with this order:

"The boss said I can't build anymore," Madden said.

The state already had 150,000 prison beds, but anticipated the need for thousands more. Without more prisons, where would all those inmates go?

"In Texas it's not very popular to open the door and let them out," Madden said. "I don't think it works in Florida either."

Support for reform was already building with local criminal justice groups. Think tanks lent expertise and brought data analysis to Texas' prison problem. Madden joined with a Democrat, Sen. John Whitmire, to make reform bipartisan.

It wasn't a growing population or crime rate driving all those incarcerations. Except for a slight bump in 2007, Texas' index crime rate has fallen every year since 2002.

The problem, instead, was the state's policies and programs.

The Council of State Governments Justice Center identified three factors keeping prisons full: an 18 percent increase in probation revocations from 1997 to 2006; cuts in substance abuse and mental health programs; and fewer prisoners were being paroled, or released early from prison, than state rules allowed.

• • •

The solution: add substance abuse and mental health treatment beds; add short-term residential and outpatient treatment programs; add programs that would reduce probation violations and combat recidivism; and parole more eligible prisoners (Florida abolished parole for crimes committed after 1983).

In 2007, the Texas Legislature approved $241 million to do just that. The state added more than 10,000 slots for substance abuse and mental health treatment. Funding went to new residential facilities, halfway houses and outpatient programs. But the state actually saved tens of millions because it could scrap a new prison that no longer needed to be built.

Texas still has its problems. Not every proposed program is in place yet. Some communities opposed housing the new programs.

But the state's prison population has remained steady, and now a slight decrease is projected until 2012. The average number of probationers in 2008 was 168,788 — nearly 11,000 more than two years before. But revoked probations are only up slightly.

"It's incredibly impressive what was accomplished there," Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project for the Pew Center on States, told the summit audience. "It's a really strong example of what could happen in Florida."

• • •

Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil said the data suggests Texas' reforms could work in Florida. But his agency is already straining to pay for its own reforms aimed at reducing recidivism and improving treatment.

"It's difficult to ask for more money," McNeil said, "when we're trying to hold onto what we have."

Momentum for reform in Florida, though, seems to be building. Today, Sen. Victor Crist will hold a legislative workshop in Tampa focused solely on criminal justice issues. The Republican favors "early and effective" substance abuse and mental health treatment and wants to expand work-release programs.

But the political risk of reform can be great. Madden won a tight re-election race after his opponent labeled him soft on crime — and he's a conservative Republican.

Former Florida Gov. Buddy MacKay, a Democrat, told the audience that reform can only happen if both sides lay off the other.

"The leadership of both political parties is going to have to say that everybody's fingerprints are going to be on this," MacKay said.

But change could still come if only because it has to. As Crist put it: "This session, money is going to be tight, tempers are going to be hot, and ideas are going to be needed."

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

Truth or Fiction: Teacher Puts Hit Out on Student

2009-11-18T13:19:00.000-08:00

At first appearance, the headline looked

like a satire about a tabloid sold near

grocery store cashiers "Teacher Charged

with Terroristic Threats Against Student."

But this is a true tale and the teacher is

on leave pending the outcome of the

police investigation and its subsequent

outcome.

To read more about this, you can

visit the Findlaw Blotter which has

interesting crime and criminal news.

Truth can definitely be stranger than fiction.

Now we must wait to see what is declared as

the truth in this case.

Chance to hear about oral arguments for juvenile life without parole

2009-11-18T12:49:00.000-08:00

C-Span has put its On America and the Courts on the web.

It begins with a summary of what the oral arguments were

for Terrance Graham who was 16 when he committed his

non-violent crime and was sentenced to life without parole.

The other case also involving life without parole was Sullivan v.

Florida and involved a 13-year old.

Then there was a portion where reporters ask questions

of the attorneys who represented the youth.

The next portion is a group which represents victims of

juveniles and the group opposes parole because it puts

the victim in the position of having to relive the event

You can see and hear the video here

over and over again.

Lock 'em Up Philosophy has Reprecussions

2009-11-16T15:20:00.000-08:00

An article by Stuart Taylor demonstrates how

damaging the mandatory minimum sentencing

and other "lock 'em up" statutes have been to

segments of American society.

While the pending Supreme Court case on life-without-

parole terms for juveniles gets lots of attention, "the

damage done by America's prison binge over the past

30 to 40 years dwarfs the importance of all of the Court's

pending criminal cases," says National Journal columnist

Stuart Taylor. Blacks are imprisoned at a rate eight times

as high as whites, and nearly 60 percent of black male

high school dropouts, and nearly 30 percent of all black men

(if current trends continue), will spend time behind bars --

far more than in the worst days of segregation, he says.

Fear of appearing "soft on crime" prevents legislators from

amending laws so that the vicious predators are kept in

prison and the non-violent offenders get the opportunity

to turn their lives around.

Facebook Entry Proves Innocence

2009-11-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

You read the actual article and discover that

these social networks can be used against

one in prosecutions.

This is copied from Crime and Justice News:

NY Robbery Suspect Says He's Innocent, And Facebook Proves It

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, New Yorker Rodney Bradford, 19,

sat in his father's apartment in Harlem and typed a Facebook

status update- a slang version of "where's my pancakes?"

At that same moment, a young man was committing a robbery

in the Brooklyn housing project where Bradford lived. Bradford

was charged with the crime, but the charges were dropped

when prosecutors confirmed that he was on Facebook, says

the New York Times. A legal expert said it is the first known

case of a Facebook update as alibi evidence-but probably

not the last.

John G. Browning, a Dallas lawyer who studies social networking

and the law, said, "We are going to see more of that because

of how prevalent social networking has become." With more

people revealing the details of their lives online, sites like Facebook,

MySpace and Twitter are providing evidence in legal battles.

New York Times

More homicides and more incarcerations

2009-11-12T10:45:00.000-08:00

America leads the western world in the number of homicides

and the number of people incarcerated. This article is not

only a review of a new book that investigates why American

has such a high rate of homicide but looks back at our history.

Included is the statement by Beccaria that laws should be

agreements between members of a society but usually

arise from public anger over a specific event.

"Long ago, Beccaria pointed out the meaningfulness of the

correspondence, over time, between crime and punishment,

between one kind of violence and another. If the history of

murder contains a lesson, Beccaria believed, it was this: 'The

countries and times most notorious for severity of

punishment have always been those in which the

bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed.'”

While it is possible to speculate on what aspects of American

society cause or appear to cause us to be a more violent

society than Western European nations, a definitive answer

does not appear likely.

The message that resonates involves the question of whether

incarceration for long periods of time accomplishes more

than getting a specific individual removed from society.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/09/091109crat_atlarge_lepore#ixzz0WfmKQSTI

California Houses Death Row Prisoners but rarely Executes Them

2009-11-11T08:29:00.000-08:00

Living on Death Row in California offers some perks not

found in other maximum security prisons: one person to

a cell and more private visits with family. Odds of dying a

natural death are pretty high

latimes.com/news/local/la-me-deathrow11-2009nov11,0,597884.story

latimes.com

Death penalty is considered a boon by some California inmates

Given the state moratorium on executions and

an appeals process that can last for decades,

inmates can expect to live a long time, and with

privileges other prisoners lack.

By Carol J. Williams

November 11, 2009

White supremacist gang hit man Billy Joe Johnson got what he asked for from the Orange County jury that convicted him of first-degree murder last month: a death sentence.

It wasn't remorse for his crimes or a desire for atonement that drove him to ask for execution; it was the expectation that conditions on death row would be more comfortable than in other maximum-security prisons and that any date with the executioner would be decades away if it came at all.

Although executions are carried out with comparative speed in states such as Virginia, where Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad was put to death Tuesday night,

capital punishment in California has become so bogged

down by legal challenges as to be a nearly empty threat,

say experts on both sides of the issue.

"This is a dramatic reaffirmation of what we've already

known for some time, that capital punishment in California

takes way too long," Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the l

aw-and-order Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento,

said of Johnson's bet that he will live a long life on death row.

"This guy certainly feels like it's worth the risk."

Statistics suggest that Johnson may be correct in his calculations.

California has the nation's largest death row population, with 685 sentenced

to die by lethal injection. Yet only 13 executions have been carried out since

capital punishment resumed in 1977 and none of the condemned have been

put to death since a moratorium was imposed nearly four years ago.

Five times as many death row inmates -- 71 -- have died over that

same period of natural causes, suicide or inside violence.

Though death row inmates at San Quentin State Prison are far from coddled,

they live in single cells that are slightly larger than the two-bunk, maximum-security

confines elsewhere, they have better access to telephones and they have

"contact visits" in plexiglass booths by themselves rather than in communal

halls as in other institutions. They have about the only private accommodations

in the state's 33-prison network, which is crammed with 160,000-plus convicts.

Death row prisoners are served breakfast and dinner in their cells, can

usually mingle with others in the outdoor exercise yards while eating

their sack lunches, and have exclusive control over the television,

CD player or other diversions in their cells.

"Death row inmates probably have the most liberal telephone privileges

of anyone in state custody," said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, explaining that

they need ready access to their attorneys and can often make calls from

their cells over a phone that can be rolled along the cellblock.

The condemned wear the same jeans and chambray-shirt prison garb,

eat the same food as prepared in other prisons and enjoy the same access

to mail-order and canteen goods paid for by their families, as long as

they maintain good behavior, Thornton said.

Those on death row are also allowed more personal property

inside their cells, to accommodate their voluminous legal documents

without infringing on the 6 cubic feet of snacks and entertainment

devices allowed each prisoner, said Lt. Sam Robinson, spokesman for San Quentin.

"It's not that he thinks conditions will be better; they are better,"

Johnson's attorney, Michael Molfetta, said of his client's request for

death row. Johnson, 46, figures that he will be close to 70 by the time

his appeals are exhausted, Molfetta said, "and he says he doesn't care to live beyond that."

Johnson was convicted last month of first-degree murder with

special circumstances in the March 2002 killing of former gang associate

Scott Miller. Johnson, a "shot caller" in the white supremacist Public Enemy

Number One gang, was found guilty of orchestrating Miller's execution-style

murder for having revealed gang secrets in a television interview.

On Oct. 29, Johnson's jury decided that he should be sentenced to death.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Frank F. Fasel is expected to

impose the execution order when he formally sentences Johnson on Nov. 23.

As an "L-WOPP," a prisoner sentenced to life without the possibility of parole,

Johnson could have been sent to any maximum-security facility in the state,

where other Level IV offenders share an 8-foot-by-10-foot cell, a sink and a

toilet. Gang leaders are often sent to the special housing unit at Pelican Bay

State Prison, where they live in isolation with few of the comforts allowed elsewhere.

It costs the state about $49,000 a year to house each prisoner, according to

corrections department statistics. Thornton said her department has never

put a figure on the cost for "more staff-intensive" death row housing, but a

state commission of experts last year estimated that the additional security

and legal spending for capital inmates costs taxpayers $138,000 per

death row prisoner each year.

Legal analysts say Johnson's request for a death sentence highlights how

delays in executions could undermine any deterrent effect of California's death penalty.

"If you accept the premise that the death penalty is about retribution,

about punishing someone for intolerable acts, you might argue that it is

completely inappropriate to grant someone's request to have a death penalty

imposed because it is more suitable or convenient for him," said Kara Dansky,

executive director of the Criminal Justice Center at Stanford University.

"It does seem to weaken the position of those who say the death penalty

is a justified mode of punishment."

Laurie Levenson, a former prosecutor now teaching criminal law

at Loyola Law School, said Johnson is probably correct in gauging

that he'll be better off on death row.

"We have a perverse system, given that we have a death row but we

don't really have executions," she said. Convicts seeking death sentences

"don't really feel like they are making life-and-death decisions."

Executions have been on hold in California for almost four years,

following a federal judge's orders for review and reform of lethal injection

procedures. Those orders came after concerns were raised that some

of those executed by the three-shot sequence might not have been

rendered unconscious by the first injection. That could expose the

condemned inmate to pain from the final shot that would be

unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment, U.S. District Judge

Jeremy Fogel ruled in 2006, when he ordered the state to correct

the alleged deficiencies.

New protocols were proposed earlier this year but are pending

approval by corrections officials still sorting through thousands of

comments and challenges, and are facing at least another year

of procedural hurdles ahead of Fogel's review.

carol.williams@latimes.com

Can You Measure Justice

Cheating

Solitary on Death Row

Budget Cuts Have High Criminal Justice Impact

Criminalize or Legalize

Prosecutorial Misconduct

Assisted Suicide

Don't take Presumption as a given

Budget cuts and Effect on Death Penalty Defendants

Privacy carried too far

Connecting Prisoners and their children

Supreme Court has a new Miranda decision

Good News - crime is going down

Court rules on juveniles and life without parole

Trusting Police is hard in some areas

Linked to Police Misconduct, 185 Drug Cases Are Dropped

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Horrific Doesn'Even Begin to Discribe this

Horrifying acts' common thread: troubled kids

Related Content

By JAMES H. BURNETT III

jburnett@MiamiHerald.com

Update related to New Postings

Sexting

Prison Populations Getting Smaller

Report Finds States Holding Fewer Prisoners

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Indigents not getting best defense says article

Key New York Suit Calls Public Defender Programs Inadequate

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Should Iraqi and Afghanistan vets get reduced sentences

Defendants Fresh From War Find Service Counts in Court

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Was this a California Abberation?

Review Set Over Case of Molester

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 12, 2010

Pool photo by John Gibbins, via Associated Press

Gangs are problems in suburbs and rural areas

Paying off Huge Benefits at Low Cost

Hard to Believe but True

What is Proper Punishment

Shackling Juveniles No Longer Allowed in New York

Child Abuse reported to be down; but is it?

New Series about Juvenile Justice System

Sea of stability is proof of theories

Technology Tried to Keep Youngsters Away from Meth

$10 BILLION in tax dollars could and should be saved

Small Steps but True Success

DO NOT CLICK LINK

Will names on Twitter Deter DUI?

Transfer to Adult System is not granted automatically

Facebook is bringing Prosecution to the Foolish

When jurors and the Internet connect-mistrials may result

Hawaii proves deterence theory works

More Prosecutorial Misconduct

Police and Fire Departments And Budget Crunch

Limited Immunity Yes; Total Immunity Absolutely Not

Judges and Warden Say Man Scheduled for Execution is not Guilty

Supreme Court had a light load

The Positive Side of a Poor Economy

Willing to give up some privacy to fly safer?

Experts say anyone who's determined to smuggle bomb components onto a flight can do so

Security rules in flux

Police in LA Oppose Financial Disclosure Rules

A Prison In One's Home

Kill Your Husband and face execution or freedom

Court Fees Go Up

Monday, December 21, 2009

I know, you're shocked: Texas fines, fees, court costs went up in 2009

Death Penalty Given Less Often

This is needed everywhere

Truly Disturbing

Should a murderer ever get parole?

False Confessions

Sheriff Joe defies government and its order

latimes.com

Arizona sheriff ups the ante against his foes

Joe Arpaio has escalated his tactics, not only defying the federal government on immigration but launching repeated investigations of those who criticize him.

100 Year Old Dangerous Sex Offender