Budget cuts and Effect on Death Penalty Defendants

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

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

This topic is mentioned in the text.

Prisons Work To Reconnect Inmate Fathers With Their Children

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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

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

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

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

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.”