FW: Our Weekly Highlights
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail226.atl61.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2016 7:05 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
|
Closing Argument |
Edited by Andrew Cohen |
|
Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
Louisiana’s public defense crisis. Welcome to the world of Rhonda Covington, the only public defender in the entire 20th Judicial District of Louisiana. She cannot possibly provide the essential representation her clients have a constitutional right to receive. TMP’s Eli Hager brings us Part 3 of our series on the astounding shortage of defenders in Louisiana. Here is Part I of the series, which focuses on the realities of a system crashing under budget constraints. And here is Part II, which raises the question: would you want a real estate attorney handling your criminal case? Attica’s ghosts. On September 9, 1971, prisoners seized control of the Attica prison in upstate New York and took dozens of staff hostage. The ensuing stand-off lasted for days, eventually leaving 43 men dead and 89 more wounded. At that time, the riot and the retaking of the prison marked the deadliest single encounter between Americans – Indian massacres aside – since the Civil War. Over the next few days, we'll be live-tweeting, in real-time, the events at Attica 45 years ago. Follow @AtticasGhosts to witness how it all went down. Attica: a name that still registers dread and sorrow 45 years later. Tom Robbins, whose coverage of New York prisons has won a slew of awards, reviews Heather Ann Thompson’s “wrenching and minutely detailed” new book about the most infamous prison siege in American history. He also places the new work in context with previously published accounts of the episode and its political and legal aftermath. “The night I took a life.” Jason Rodriguez is serving 37 years in a New York prison for a murder he committed when he was 18 years old. He thinks constantly about the person he killed, still hears the sound of the gun he fired ending a life, and says he cannot help but hate himself for becoming a “monster.” It’s a nightmare that never ends, he says, as he reflects on the events that ruined two lives, two families. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series.
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. This saga of a corrupt court clerk chronicled by The Los Angeles Times exposes the vulnerability of an overwhelmed, county-level, criminal justice system. The main character is 36-year-old Juan Lopez Jr., a data entry clerk at the Orange County Superior Court. Lopez attracted the attention of the FBI, the story explains, after allegedly spending years collecting a series of bribes — ranging from under $500 to $8,000 — to manipulate court records of the recently arrested. “In all, 1,034 cases were fixed,” the Times notes, “the majority of them traffic infractions.” Lopez and nine others who allegedly helped him market his illegal services were federally charged this week. — Simone Weichselbaum In an old IRS building in a tiny town in West Virginia, a warren of corridors and microfilm machines and boxes upon boxes (millions of boxes!) of paper records comprise our National Tracing Center, the place police call when they find a gun at a crime scene. It would be feasible for the feds to build a system where the cops plug that gun’s serial number into an app and find out, instantly, the identity of its last owner. Thanks to the gun lobby, that type of database is illegal. In this fun (yes, really) GQ profile, we meet the Center’s brilliant, quirky leader, Charlie Houser, who explains how he and his team work within the constraints of their political straitjacket. — Beth Schwartzapfel Some of the most shocking revelations from the Department of Justice’s recent report on the Baltimore City Police Department were about how they treated sexual assault victims. This week, Buzzfeed dove deep into how the Baltimore County Police Department handles rape, and found many of the same issues. Numerous cases were closed with little or no investigation at all, and many were dismissed because officers decided the victim “did not fight back hard enough.” In one case, “it was not enough for the suspect to threaten, ‘If you scream, I will kill you,’ ....because there was no evidence the attacker ‘really intended physical harm.’” — Christie Thompson For months, I’ve been puzzled by a counterintuitive trend: the racial disparity in incarceration, though still gaping, has been significantly narrowing since 2000. But why? Is it because of the changing geography of addiction, in which the prosecution of opiate and meth-related crimes — often among whites — has surged? My question was largely answered by this week’s New York Times analysis of incarceration rates at the county level. In most urban areas, the courts are embracing alternatives to incarceration for drug users, while in rural counties, where judges and prosecutors aren’t as influenced by national shifts, incarceration has actually been on the rise. — Eli Hager |
— Our reader Stephenie Steitzer Hoelscher, on how many police departments across the country dismiss rape reports before investigating. |
|
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail220.atl101.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2016 7:07 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
|
Closing Argument |
Edited by Andrew Cohen |
|
Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
|
An old law that makes it hard to fix a troubled jail. There are countless reasons — legal, political and financial — why it is so difficult to reform dangerous jails. One is a Reagan-era law that hinders the ability of the Justice Department to swiftly pressure local officials toward reform. The law was revised under President Clinton, making it even easier for recalcitrant jailers, like those in Harris County, Texas, to reject change. TMP’s Alysia Santo brought us the story. Can you commit a crime while you are having a brain hemorrhage? William Palmer was arrested and charged with assault in Alaska a few years back. It was a slam-dunk case except for one small fact: Palmer was suffering from a brain hemorrhage at the time of the alleged crime. But not only did prosecutors press charges, they fought to ensure Palmer’s jury would never know he was suffering from brain damage. The case, now on appeal, raises the question of when a medical condition ought to rule out criminal intent. Here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series. One less question for students to answer. The State University of New York, comprising 64 colleges with 442,000 students, will no longer ask applicants if they have a felony conviction on their record, a move designed to give thousands of potential students a greater chance of admission. But students will still have to disclose any such criminal past, post-admission, if they seek campus housing or apply for other school-related programs. Supporters hailed the move as a “historic moment” in the history of higher education. TMP’s Simone Weichselbaum updates her coverage here. Attica, 45 years later: The riot and the retaking. Re-live the infamous New York prison revolt, siege, and bloody fight in real time via social media. Over the past few days, we’ve tweeted descriptions of the events from that September, and now, we’ve compiled them all here, so that you can run through them for a sense of the twists and turns that changed the course of criminal justice in America nearly half a century ago. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
The most commonly cited estimate of how much it costs to maintain the country's prisons and jails is $80 billion a year. But that's the cost that shows up in state and federal budgets (and, as a new study notes in passing, if you throw in things like health and pension benefits for prison staff, the cost to governments is more like $91 billion.) But the report, out of Washington University in St. Louis, focuses not on corrections budgets but on "social costs," a toll that includes: lost wages, the cost of visitation, the higher mortality rates of both former inmates and their infant children, child welfare payments, evictions and relocations, divorces, diminished property values and the increased criminality of children with incarcerated parents. The bottom line — one trillion dollars a year, nearly 6 percent of GDP — may jolt you into thinking afresh about the social damage of mass incarceration. — Bill Keller We know that sex offenders have a tough go of it when they leave prison, but this account from Milwaukee’s Fox 6 is the most compelling one I’ve seen. A camera follows Matthew Schechter, who committed a series of rapes in the 1980s and 1990s, on his first hours of freedom after two decades in prison. He sets up a tent because he can’t find a place to live, and navigates byzantine laws without the Internet, which he is barred from using. Researchers have argued that current sex offender laws ostracize people like Schechter so completely that they are more likely to give up and reoffend. This segment brings that argument to life. — Maurice Chammah Diamond Reynolds will forever be remembered as the woman who live-streamed the death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, at the hands of the police in a St. Paul suburb. But in this tender and elegiac portrait, the Washington Post’s Eli Saslow introduces us to a woman who is so much more than those 10 minutes: a mother struggling to get her 4-year-old daughter out of their poverty- and violence-stricken neighborhood, a woman grieving the man she loved and the life they planned together, a realist for whom all the saccharine messages of support she received in the wake of Castile’s death did not add up to much. “The shared assumption behind all of their advice was that her trauma would lead to something more. Here came healing, here came justice, and as nice as all of that sounded...It had never been her experience that suffering or inequity led to anything.” — Beth Schwartzapfel This week, the Post and Courier dove into how police departments across the country are morphing into “miniature versions of the National Security Agency” by stockpiling huge amounts of data on the communities they serve. Cops build up the databases by filing “field contact” forms on people they encounter, including “suspicious activity” and suspected gang affiliation. In the Post and Courier’s hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, roughly a quarter of the city’s residents have been so documented. — Christie Thompson The four-decade history of “mass incarceration” in America — and what caused it — is difficult to summarize neatly. One theory, popularized by Michelle Alexander’s oft-cited “The New Jim Crow,” is that our boom in imprisonment has largely been the result of a war on drugs waged against men of color. But the statistics don’t necessarily bear that out, given that, as The Marshall Project has reported, far more people are in prison for violent crimes than for drug-related ones. In a new video, Shawn Carter (whose voice you might recognize as Jay-Z’s) and Molly Crabapple (providing incredibly eye-catching illustrations), mostly hew to the drug-war narrative, but with more insight — and vivid detail — than usual. — Eli Hager |
|
— our reader Duane A. Webb on how some police departments are moving from stop-and-frisk to stop-and-spit. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail136.suw14.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2016 7:05 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
|
Closing Argument |
Edited by Andrew Cohen |
|
Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
|
A criminal justice reform measure that could actually reach the President’s desk. The House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would withhold federal funding from states that hold juveniles in adult jails; the legislation would also ban states from locking up minors for so-called “status” offenses. One looming obstacle in the Senate? Objections from Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a state that still locks away minors at a disproportionately high rate. TMP’s Eli Hager has been following the bill. How Mexico tries to save its citizens from America’s death penalty. Mexico and the United States rarely see eye-to-eye when it comes to capital punishment. So, since 2000, Mexican officials have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to assist their nationals who face execution here. Often, this help comes in the form of investigative work that sheds light on the background, education, and mental health of the condemned. Many of these defendants have received far better legal representation than have their American counterparts. TMP’s Maurice Chammah filed this piece. “I didn’t know how to help her.” Deanna Paul, a prosecutor in New York, had plenty of experience handling domestic-violence cases. She knew all the signs to look for, all the explanations victims would give her for why they were abused, all the tactics she would employ to present the strongest case in court. But she was wholly unprepared when she realized her own sister had been the victim of an attack. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. Do prison strikes work? As a multi-state prison strike entered its third week, there has been little clarity about the extent of the protest and (thanks to prison secrecy) little national media attention. Participating inmates say they are sick of “slave-like” labor conditions. Prison officials say they are acting within the law. The current strike was timed to coincide with the 45th anniversary of the deadly Attica uprising. Here, TMP’s Christie Thompson looks at the history of U.S. prison strikes and their (few) successes. The rookies. Putting the least experienced police officers into the most dangerous neighborhoods is a time-honored practice that can have tragic consequences, both for the young cops and the people they are sworn to protect. In Chicago, where the problem is particularly acute, veterans with seniority rights move to the relative safety of the suburbs while their newer counterparts face the brunt of battle. City Bureau showed how this dynamic plays out on the street. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Michael Leatherwood, a prisoner in Oklahoma, sued the private facility holding him over the high prices and unavailability of commissary items. Fusion reporter Casey Tolan unearthed the surprising turn that the case has taken: Leatherwood got to depose the warden, questioning him directly over how the facility is run. The prisoner’s research on the prices of “Cactus Annie’s Sliced Jalapenos” and “Thai Palace Noodles Chili” sheds new light on daily life in these prisons. — Maurice Chammah No death of a young man is truly more tragic than another, but Terence Crutcher’s struck a particular note of sorrow with many Americans this week. His SUV broke down; he needed help; he was deemed a “bad dude” by his appearance only; and he, a twin brother and a father of four, was shot dead, with his arms raised, in the middle of a Tulsa, Oklahoma highway. To Jenée Desmond-Harris, writing for Vox, if you don’t understand the Black Lives Matter movement after watching Crutcher’s sister voice her pain and rage — if you don’t understand that an unjustified police shooting is not “controversial,” it’s a crime — then you likely never will. — Eli Hager The belief that America’s prisons are filled with mostly nonviolent drug offenders is widespread, and false. This week, TakePart featured the voices of five criminal justice experts, including a district attorney and a public defender, talking about how to address the issue of those convicted of violent crimes in our prison system. It’s an important piece, especially since misunderstandings about who is in prison, and why, make tackling mass incarceration more difficult. Last year, The Marshall Project explored this issue by inviting readers to choose who should be released from prison based on what crime they were convicted of. — Alysia Santo This week, The New Yorker reporter Sarah Stillman was named a MacArthur “genius” — a life- and career-changing recognition of her work. Stillman’s reporting has explored some of the most crucial and under-reported criminal justice issues of our time, including the overlooked lives of black victims of violence, the extortionate practices of the for-profit probation industry, and corruption in the civil asset-forfeiture system. Four years after reading her expose on teenaged undercover drug informants, I’m still haunted by the image of 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman, coerced into wearing a wire after she was threatened with felony drug charges — a fatal decision made over five ounces of pot. — Beth Schwartzapfel |
|
— Our reader Daniël Melters, on how forensic science is being increasingly questioned by scientists |
