FW: Our Weekly Highlights
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail207.atl21.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, January 07, 2017 7:06 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. |
“There is nothing worse than our system wrongfully convicting a person and sending him away to serve a long sentence while the real rapist or murderer roams free.” Best-selling author John Grisham spent 10 years practicing criminal law and never had a client he thought had been wrongly convicted. Now he’s convinced thousands of men and women are behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. TMP’s editor-in-chief Bill Keller interviewed Grisham about the state of criminal justice as we begin a new year and new administration. The restoration of history, one lynching victim at a time. At Northeastern University School of Law, students and faculty are creating an archive of thousands of unsolved lynchings of African-Americans. Many of the deaths have never been investigated, let alone prosecuted. “The work of the archive is to prevent closure, to lift them up out of the silence,” says the program’s associate director. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel has our story. What a difference a decade makes. Judith Clark made news last week when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo commuted the lengthy sentence she received for her role in the infamous and fatal Brinks robbery of 1981. She now is eligible for parole. Contrast the political support Clark received from Cuomo with the scorn former Gov. George Pataki expressed toward parole officials in 2003 when they granted relief to her co-defendant, Kathy Boudin. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel filed this piece, too. "Who killed my mom?” Lisa Marino is a grandmother who is raising her murdered daughter’s son, a boy whose father was the killer. In the latest edition of our “Life Inside” series with Vice, she recounts what it’s been like to raise a boy who essentially is an orphan and the reaction her grandson had when he was told that his father had taken the life of his mother. “This destroyed my family,” she writes. “It has definitely destroyed me.”
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. Several cities in Texas saw a rise in murders last year, but what lesson should we take from that? That “tough on crime” policies don’t work? That police need to crack down? Are these spikes just a blip amid larger trends? And is murder — a relatively rare crime — a good barometer for policy choices? At his blog Grits for Breakfast, Scott Henson has this quick and informative guide to how to think about murder numbers, and all of the unknowns that don’t tend to get addressed in initial reports. It’s a helpful companion to our own effort, Crime in Context. — Maurice Chammah In Florida, three out of four inmates has at least one tattoo. This could be a meaningless statistic, but a recent story in The Economist dug deep into Florida’s inmate database to reveal some interesting findings about the relationship between a prisoner’s tattoos and crimes committed. For example, sex offenders, particularly those convicted of pedophilia, tend to have the fewest tattoos, and people with tattoos on their heads or faces are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated for murder. Some use body art to reflect remorse; at least 117 inmates had marked themselves with variations of the phrase “Mother tried.” — Alysia Santo I missed this NPR report late last month, but it’s worth reading, especially in the days before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Even though it’s illegal for immigration officials to detain U.S. citizens, a review of documents shows that hundreds of Americans each year find themselves wrongly facing deportation. And for many, it’s tough to dig up paperwork and prove citizenship while stuck in detention without a lawyer. NPR details the journey of one Texan who was held in detention for nearly two years before an attorney could prove he’d been a citizen all along. — Christie Thompson The Justice Department this week gifted police reform enthusiasts with a nifty interactive tool that allows users to quickly research federal investigations into problematic police departments. The guide, among other things, features a state-by-state list of law enforcement agencies that have been subjected to federal scrutiny. Why is this a big deal? Until now, policing nerds had no official public tally of Justice Department investigations into local police departments. — Simone Weichselbaum In light of our piece this week about unsolved Jim Crow–era lynchings, I want to call attention to this remarkable decade-old New York Times magazine story about the jurors who voted to acquit the men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till. Immediately after their acquittal — protected by double jeopardy — the killers boasted about the murder to Look magazine. Yet these four jurors, all of whom have since died, continued to believe all the way up to 2005 that the mutilated body pulled from the Tallahatchie River was an NAACP plant; Till, one man believed, was alive and well and hiding out somewhere, perhaps in Chicago. It’s a haunting reflection on the pervasive harm that racism can cause, both prompting, and then excusing, violence. —Beth Schwartzapfel |
— Our reader, Debbie Pendry, on the longterm costs of fining juvenile offenders. |
|
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail43.wdc01.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2017 7:09 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. |
|
Jeff Sessions, criminal justice, and the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Attorney General-nominee breezed through his confirmation hearing earlier this week. And there was plenty of talk about crime and punishment, law and order. Sessions reaffirmed his skepticism of police consent decrees, refused to commit to any particular policy about the enforcement of federal marijuana laws, and lamented what he called the “corrosion of respect” for police officers which he said had led to increased shootings of cops. Here’s our summary. The punishing price of freedom. Few noted the death of Alabama prisoner Phillip Chance last November, but his story is a sad blend of missed opportunities and political infighting. Convicted of murder at age 15, a fugitive years later, he was the subject of an intense fight between Alabama, which wanted him returned to prison, and Michigan, which gave him exile. Then, when he finally was forced back to Alabama he promptly was awarded parole, which quickly was overruled by three politicians who now have national stature. In collaboration with WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series. My best friends in prison are frogs, turtles, and raccoons. Joseph Dole is serving a life-without-parole sentence in Illinois for murder and kidnapping. In three prisons he has managed to find and nurture, if only for a brief time, some of the wildlife he’s come across. “It’s nice to be around other living things that are not instinctively terrified of us,” he says. And he marvels at the groundhogs who ignore inmates when they are walking into dinner but surround the men when they are walking out. In collaboration with Vice, the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Last year, Ethan Brown published ‘Murder in the Bayou,’ a book detailing how law enforcement in a remote part of Louisiana failed in the investigation of the murders of eight sex workers. The case was widely seen as a real-life analogue to the television serial True Detective. He was then sued by a Senate candidate — who some sources told Brown was a client of some of the victims — and watched as a local newspaper appeared to side with the powers-that-be rather than a fellow reporter. Pacific Standard brings this bizarre saga up to date, and picks out haunting behind-the-scenes details of Brown’s reporting. — Maurice Chammah Much of America’s gun policy debate is driven by seemingly random mass shootings but the reality about gun homicides are that they are quite predictable. A detailed geographic analysis of firearm deaths published by The Guardian this week shows that these crimes occur in patterns, often in neighborhoods already struggling with poverty and unemployment. Yet still, even in these areas of concentrated gun violence, the majority of residents have nothing to do with the crimes being committed. Instead, “violence itself may spread from person to person like a virus, meaning that particular networks of people, not whole neighborhoods or demographic groups, are most at risk.” Understanding this clustering is an important step towards saving people’s lives. — Alysia Santo When I first heard that Albert Woodfox was going to be freed from prison after 40 years in solitary confinement — longer than any other U.S. prisoner — all I could think was, how does one move through the world after four decades in a box? This moving profile by Rachel Aviv tries to answer that, along with filling in the details of his tragic life story. As a free man, Woodfox grapples with his new role as a social justice icon, agonizes over the men he left behind at Angola, and tries to adjust to life beyond a cement cell. As he tells Aviv, “I have to submit to the process of developing a new technique to fill the hours...I’m trying to strike the right balance with being free.” — Christie Thompson New Jersey — no stranger to law enforcement scandals and muddy politics — had two strange policing hires this week. A pair of small-town police departments along the Jersey Shore lost their shared police chief to retirement, which prompted the county prosecutor to intervene. Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato brought two of his senior investigators in to take helm of the leaderless departments. Coronato’s spokesman told the Asbury Park Press that there were no other qualified candidates to serve as police chief. — Simone Weichselbaum You might have seen it on crime shows: cops swabbing a suspect’s mouth, preserving a sample of his DNA (even if he is later found innocent). It’s routine practice. Proponents say that collecting and inputting every suspect’s genetic material into a national database helps solve unrelated cases and prevents crime by catching repeat offenders before they strike again. But is it fair to automatically treat a suspect in one crime as a suspect in all crimes? Is it fair to preserve their DNA in perpetuity, with no way to get it “expunged”? And is it all a violation of their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination? An analysis from The Pew Charitable Trusts grapples with the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. — Eli Hager |
|
— Our reader, Gina Ross-Boon, on the voter fraud case Jeff Sessions lost and can't escape |
stephe...@comcast.net
To: stephe...@comcast.net
Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2017 7:06:13 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
 |
| Closing Argument The Week in Justice |
Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
|
|
Are Donald Trump’s early budget cuts really going to target cops and victims? Using a blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation, Trump officials are said to be planning to dramatically cut the Justice Department budget as part of an overall push to reduce federal spending. Among the targets are grants that help female victims of domestic violence and those that help hire and equip cops. Here’s a TMP guide to what may be on the block for a president who ran on what he called a law-and-order campaign. When are you too stoned to drive? Science, and the law, have not kept up with the frenetic pace of marijuana legalization over the past few years. The result is a hodgepodge of standards for determining when a motorist is impaired as a result of pot use. Some states employ blood tests to measure for THC. Others states have more ambiguous rules that prohibit driving while “under the influence” of marijuana. Researchers are working on a breathalyzer-type device that can accurately gauge how much THC was ingested, but it’s years away. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel caught us up on the latest. When a tainted drug test results in deportation. Massachusetts’ highest court Wednesday paved the way for new trials (or the outright dismissal of cases) for tens of thousands of defendants whose convictions were tainted by the false work of a single crime lab technician, Annie Dookhan. One of those affected is Jose Aguasvivas, a legal permanent resident who was deported in 2009 because of a flawed 2005 drug conviction. Aguasvivas now hopes he can rejoin his family here in the States. TMP’s Christie Thompson filed this report on one “Dookhan defendant” who is hoping for some help. How Barack Obama disappointed opponents of capital punishment. Before he left office the president commuted two federal death sentences this week. But Obama stopped short of otherwise acting on what he recently called the nation’s “deeply troubling” use of the death penalty. A federal review of capital procedures he ordered years ago will not be completed before he leaves office, and two new federal death sentences — for Dylann Roof and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — suggest the federal death penalty is here to stay, especially with an ardent supporter of capital punishment now in the White House. TMP’s Maurice Chammah has our story. The conservative case for justice reform in the coming age of Trump. Don’t think that the election of a so-called “law and order” president has stymied the push for justice reform among his political allies. There is still a broad consensus for sentencing reform, for improving conditions of confinement and re-entry programs for prisoners, and for mens rea reform. We asked three notable conservative advocates this Inauguration week to share with us their agendas for change now that the transition to a new administration has come. From Pat Nolan, here is Part I. From Vikrant Reddy, here is Part II. From Marc Levin, here is Part III.
|
|
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Political trends often take a little while to show up in popular culture, and they do so in oblique, complicated ways. This rich New York Times essay explores how movies and television shows present rape, citing a handful — MTV’s “Sweet/Vicious,” HBO’s “Westworld,” Mad Max and Ex Machina — that play with the old fictional theme of the rape victim seeking violent revenge. Citing the campus-rape debate and the prosecution of Brock Turner, writer Amanda Hess explores how some stories “exploit sexual violence, follow it up with murder, and still claim the moral high ground” while others present “complex and intriguing examinations of rape’s psychological consequences.” — Maurice Chammah This week BuzzFeed took a deep, instructive dive into a relatively new phenomenon: the ubiquity of video revealing how often police officers lie. Until recently, “police officers were considered, by most judges and jurors, to be the most reliable narrators in a courtroom.” Body cameras, cell phones, and security cameras have upended that dogma. The story looked at fewer than 100 of the tens of thousands of filmed police/civilian interactions each year. Yet the small subset was deeply disturbing, and revealed an unsettling reality: of the 62 videos revealing police lied — and sometimes perjured themselves on the stand — only 22 led to charges being filed. Nine have resulted in convictions. — Beth Schwartzapfel I remember the haunting picture: a short and slender 12-year-old flanked by Texas cops after being arrested for murder. Edwin Debrow, back in the early 1990s, was America’s most recognized child murderer — sentenced to a decades-long prison stay. Writer Skip Hollandsworth checked in on Debrow for this riveting Texas Monthly piece. We learn, or are reminded, that Debrow was born into poverty and resorted to robbery out of desperation. The writer lets the prisoner ask the question: Should the justice system show mercy for a boy, now a man, who was just trying to survive? — Simone Weichselbaum Ricky Gray brutally murdered the Harvey family in 2006 and was put to death this week in Virginia. In a haunting article in The Virginian-Pilot, Gray’s early life, and the lives of the Harveys, are explored in tandem. At the same time that the Harveys were having their first child, Gray was having his first interactions with the criminal justice system after a life full of sexual and physical abuse. The story gives space to both a killer and his victims in a way that highlights the cycle of violence and how it can come to destroy innocent and guilty people alike. — Alysia Santo |
"As a public defender, I was always fearful when a person was extradited and a "contractor " was going to pick up the defendant. I would put a time limit for review cause private drivers would be more prone to be late so the state might send deputies instead." — Our reader, Mary Polenz, on the deadly world of prisoner transport |
|
|
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail99.atl161.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2017 7:06 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. |
|
|
Away from Washington, and President Trump, a new breed of prosecutors take their first few steps toward justice reform. A handful of newly-elected district attorneys, some of whom defeated entrenched incumbents, are changing the way their offices operate and the way their subordinates are looking at criminal cases. One said her office would no longer seek the death penalty. Another hired defense attorneys to key management positions. A third announced she will create a “conviction integrity unit” to evaluate dubious cases. TMP’s Eli Hager has our story. A senseless death in custody. For years the sheriff’s officials who run the Tulsa County (Oklahoma) jail knew their facility was deadly, a place where untrained employees, indifferent management practices, and poor medical care have contributed to deaths and sexual assaults — and civil rights lawsuits. Now county taxpayers are paying — big time — for these transgressions. Here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series focusing on the death of an Army veteran whose mental illness was scoffed at in the days before he died. Chris Hansen is back, and so is his memorable show in which adults pretend to be children to “sting” would-be sexual predators. A decade after “To Catch a Predator” last aired, the reboot is titled “Hansen v. Predator.” Hansen says he understands the criticism of the “gotcha” theme he’s embraced, but as long as he’s right with police, prosecutors, and viewers he’s not bothered if “some retired reporter from the Houston Chronicle with his glasses down his nose wants to take me to task.” TMP’s Maurice Chammah talked to Hansen. Trying to kill yourself on death row. George Wilkerson is awaiting execution in North Carolina for two murders he committed over a decade ago. Here he recounts an episode in which one of his fellow death row inmates tries to commit suicide, an act of desperation in a small, intertwined community where desperation doesn’t mix well with confinement and the specter of a lethal injection. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. What we can learn from the inspiring drop in juvenile incarceration. And what we’ll continue to gain if we remember that children are “different” when it comes to their brains and their culpability. One immediate takeaway: some of the smartest justice policies are the ones that aren’t implemented in moments of national passion or panic. Here is original TMP commentary from Ashley Nellis and Marc Mauer. |
|
|
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
What does a private prison mean to a small Mississippi town with 500 residents? For the people of Walnut Grove, Miss., it meant new sidewalks, a new library and 24-hour police service. A recent episode of the excellent Criminal podcast examines what went wrong at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility and how the rampant physical and sexual abuse of the children inside was a mirror image of the prosperity it symbolized for many of the people on the outside. — Tom Meagher Conservative writer Heather Mac Donald is known for her controversial arguments about the existence of a “War on Cops.” Now, at The National Review, she is defending Trump’s vision of “American Carnage” with a polemic about Chicago. No matter what you think of her work, this is worth reading, because she is poised to be Trump’s scholarly sidekick on crime and punishment. She’s laying out how the new president’s tough-on-crime approach will be marketed as a better deal for black communities than the Black Lives Matter movement. Remember: many black leaders supported the 1990s push for tougher enforcement. — Maurice Chammah In a week in which the new president has focused the nation’s attention on “foreign-born aliens,” Wired’s deep dive, “Can you turn a terrorist back into a citizen?” seems especially apropos. The story focuses on a group of teenagers from Minnesota’s Somali community who were intercepted en route to Syria to fight for ISIS. The judge hearing their case saw not hardened terrorists but vulnerable young men “ensnared by sly recruiting tactics.” Together with a German de-radicalization expert, the judge created the Terrorism Disengagement and Deradicalization Program as an alternative to draconian prison terms. The story is a heartening antidote to the current push to paint entire communities as inherently dangerous. —Beth Schwartzapfel A small-town Louisiana police chief’s controversial interpretation of the state’s new “Blue Lives Matter” law provided a good reminder that criminal justice reform is very much still a local issue. First, St. Martinville Police Chief Calder Hebert said the new law — which makes an assault of a police officer a hate crime — applies to the more common charge of resisting arrest. Anti-police brutality activists took to social media to say so. Louisiana's governor then declared on Facebook: “State law clearly defines a hate crime. Resisting arrest is not included.” Chief Hebert has since recanted. — Simone Weichselbaum In a week of division came a small story of healing out of LaGrange, Georgia. On September 8, 1940, a teenager named Austin Callaway, charged with trying to assault a white woman, was dragged from his jail cell and murdered by six white men. Seventy-seven years later, LaGrange’s white police chief stood in front of a predominately black church and apologized for his department’s role in the lynching. The move was more than a single apology — it was also an acknowledgement of the “deepest roots of mistrust” between cops and communities of color. (The story is also timely amid debates over media euphemisms. Local papers first reported the lynching as “Negro Succumbs to Shot Wounds.”) — Christie Thompson |
|
— Our reader, Cyndi Hurtt, on how a Kentucky rape case is testing the integrity of the criminal justice system |
|
|
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail75.suw11.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2017 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. |
|
Decoding Trump’s immigration orders. While the White House scrambled to contain the widening furor over his ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, the administration was laying the groundwork for a vast expansion of the nation’s deportation system. How vast? TMP contributing writer Julia Preston gives a close reading of Trump’s orders. Related: Who is stranded by the seven-country travel ban? We made a series of maps to show where the Trump order hits hardest. Scalia without the scowl. Neil Gorsuch, at 49, is the youngest Supreme Court nominee in a quarter century. A Colorado native, the federal appeals court judge idolized the man he would replace, Antonin Scalia, and shares the late justice’s ardent conservative ideology. On criminal justice, Gorsuch believes in a broad view of the Second Amendment, a narrow view of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and has been a consistent vote for police and prosecutors over criminal defendants. You think your job is hard? Try being a prison guard and a mom. Cary Johnson, a corrections officer in Michigan, is keenly aware of the dichotomy of the two worlds she toggles between each day. At home she strives to be a compassionate mother willing to allow her child to exercise independence. At work she knows she cannot show too much compassion or empathy. An old corrections saying best captures her internal struggle: “You’re not shit to the department until five years in, and after five years you’re not shit to everyone else.” Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. Coming soon, a “sentiment meter” to measure trust between police and the communities they serve. John Linden, a consultant with the New York Police Department, is working on a computer algorithm that would give police officials a real-time assessment of attitudes toward policing, neighborhood by neighborhood. The idea is to make policing more nimble and cops more responsive to the needs of the communities they serve. TMP’s Simone Weichselbaum talked to Linden. Art, race, and justice. Titus Kaphar is a portraitist of criminal justice whose recent work chronicles the faces of those whose lives are intertwined with crime and punishment. He sees his art as a way to “meditate on the hope” for reform. His big worry? “The art world is often about just what's novel. I don't want this to just become one of those issues that's in fashion right now, and therefore we're making art about it.” TMP editor-in-chief Bill Keller interviewed Kaphar (and saw some of his art). #PressOn and help the Marshall Project cover criminal justice and immigration from the nation’s capital. We're thrilled to see the hashtag #PressOn inspiring so many to subscribe and donate to media organizations. You can do the same for us. We will use your #PressOn donations to help underwrite a reporter in Washington, D.C. who will cover criminal justice and immigration. Two of our board members have agreed to match all donations up to $37,500. Please give what you can, and accept our thanks. Start here at our donation page. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
As President Trump rolls out his new immigration program, it’s worth keeping in mind what policies preceded his administration. Last year, BuzzFeed revealed how the FBI threatens Muslim immigrants with deportation if they don’t cooperate as confidential informants. This week, The Intercept pushed the story forward by obtaining an FBI training manual that lays out how agents are instructed to work closely with immigration officials as they present undocumented immigrants with a choice: spy for us, or be deported. Oh, and the documents obtained by reporters also reveal how worried the feds are about racism within the ranks of local law enforcement. — Maurice Chammah The 2015 video of a young girl being assaulted by a cop in a classroom opened eyes about how school policing can go wrong. Who are these officers with our children and how are they vetted? Through some diligent document-gathering, the Chicago Reader found many cops working in Chicago schools have numerous misconduct complaints against them, some as serious as beating or shooting minors. And none of the officers are trained specifically on how to work in schools, or screened for their ability to interact with kids. As one “school resource officer” put it, "If we were detectives, they'd send us to detective school… We're the only unit that doesn't get that specialized training." — Christie Thompson This week, The New York Times Magazine profiled John Edgar Wideman, a novelist whose work is consistently as elegant as it is challenging. One of the enduring presences in Wideman’s life and work is the criminal justice system. Both his brother and his son were, decades apart, sentenced to life in prison for murder. His newest book, “Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File,” focuses on a man history has forgotten, the father of the lynched 14-year-old boy Emmett Till. While stationed in Italy, on the basis of circumstantial and contradictory evidence, Till was executed by the Army for the rape of two Italian women and the murder of another. — Beth Schwartzapfel Wisconsin officials backpedaled away from claims they had sent hundreds of old rape kits for DNA testing. Sixteen months ago, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, state officials received $4 million in grants from the Justice Department and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to clear the state’s rape-kit backlog, totaling more than 6,000 kits. In December, a state spokesman old reporters that testing had begun on 250 rape kits. This week the state attorney general’s office said only nine rape kits had been analyzed so far. — Simone Weichselbaum |
|
— Our reader, Shawn Vee, on how the woman at the center of the Emmett Till case admitted she fabricated testimony. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail40.wdc01.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2017 7:11 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 wrongful conviction with a dark twist. Jules Letemp, a Haitian man, spent 27 years in an American prison for a rape he did not commit, but when the courts finally acknowledged the mistake Letempt wasn’t set free. Instead, he was placed into federal detention to await deportation because of a non-violent drug conviction three decades ago. In collaboration with WNYC’s “The Takeaway” here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series, this one guest-written by TMP’s Christie Thompson. Everything you know about mass incarceration is wrong. In his new book, “Locked In,” the economist and law professor John Pfaff challenges many popular assumptions about how America became the most incarcerated nation on Earth. The war on drugs did not generate the wave of incarceration, punitive sentencing and private prisons are not mainly to blame, and if we want to dig our way out we have to start with curbing the vast discretion prosecutors have to charge defendants in the first place. TMP’s Bill Keller and Eli Hager culled the highlights. Who needs the Justice Department for police consent decrees? Attorney General Jeff Sessions has consistently voiced his opposition to the use of federal settlements to spur local police reform. But a California law gives that state’s attorney general the same power that federal law gives the Justice Department to identify “patterns and practices” of police misconduct or discrimination. Some expect the state law will be replicated in other jurisdictions. And some wonder why it hasn’t been used more often in California. TMP’s Simone Weichselbaum and Tom Meagher have the story. “If someone is bringing drugs into Mar-a-Lago police could try to seize it.” President Trump’s off-the-cuff comment Tuesday about “destroying” the career of a Texas lawmaker over civil asset forfeiture may have drawn laughs from sheriffs and scorn online. But it also highlighted a divide between the police, who want to go on seizing property from those accused of crimes, and conservatives and libertarians, who want to curtail the practice. TMP’s Maurice Chammah has our story. What it’s like being best man in a prison wedding. James King, serving a 30-to-life sentence at San Quentin State Prison in California, was surprised when a fellow prisoner he barely knew asked him to stand up with him. What he learned in the brief ceremony, as he mingled with the family of the groom, and as he absorbed the kindness of the retired military chaplain who performed the ceremony, was that humanity can invade even the most inhumane places. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. We won a National Magazine Award this week! For “general excellence” in the Literature, Science, and Politics Category. “We’ll take this honor as a rebuke to the cynicism of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’” said TMP editor-in-chief Bill Keller. “The criminal justice system — and the country — have never been so in need of real facts and honest news.” Thank you, dear readers and donors, for your support and feedback. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
An investigation in the Austin American-Statesman of inappropriate teacher-student relationships revealed how easily Texas could do a better job of protecting its children. Reporter Julie Chang found that 686 teachers have lost licenses since 2010 after being investigated for improper relationships with students, but more than half were never charged with a crime. One of the problems is that often school officials are the first to look into allegations, blunting subsequent police investigations. And the state education agency doesn’t track which teachers are charged or convicted of a sex crime against a student. — Alysia Santo Little noticed in the furor over the travel ban and other controversies, the Trump administration quietly made a decision that will affect hundreds of thousands of people. The Federal Communications Commission, under new leadership, has informed a court that it will no longer defend an Obama-era effort to cap the costs of phone calls between prisoners and their families. Companies like Securus Technologies, Global Tel Link and CenturyLink may be pleased, but parents and siblings will now go back to paying hundreds of dollars a month to speak with their loved ones. — Eli Hager Well, it’s happening. The “deportation force” that Trump talked about for so long on the campaign trail seems to be gearing up. The Intercept continued its coverage of the internal mayhem at the Department of Homeland Security, accessing a memo that shows more asylum officers are being deployed to detention centers to quickly screen detainees. And The New York Times had an emotional profile of Guadalupe García de Rayos, a 35-year-old mother who was deported to Mexico on Thursday after eight years of dutifully checking in with immigration officials. Her only crime was using a fake social security number in order to work. But Trump’s definition of “criminal aliens” that are a threat to national security seems to include almost every immigrant here without proper papers. — Christie Thompson We know that people of color are more likely to be arrested, sentenced to longer prison terms, and held back from parole. Can any of this be fixed? Are the problems of racial bias insurmountable? Lawmakers in Oregon are considering these questions, and Investigate West examined how difficult it was for their predecessors, back in the early 1990s, to make any headway even when their goals were modest. “We don’t recognize racism when it’s baked into our system,” says one judge. “It’s enacted by well-meaning people who can’t see they’re enacting it.” — Maurice Chammah Two disclosures: 1) the writer of this piece, Robert Kolker, is married to The Marshall Project’s managing editor, so, yeah, call me a brown-noser; and 2) the hero of this piece is a newspaper reporter, which, as a reporter, I’m all for. That said, this Bloomberg-Businessweek story is a fascinating look at the failure of police departments to take advantage of the vast data available on unsolved cases and to see potential connections across jurisdictional lines. Into the breach steps number-crunching, algorithm-developing journalist Thomas Hargrove — “the Billy Beane of murder.” — Ken Armstrong |
|
— Our reader, John Wesley White, on the practice of civil asset forfeiture |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail119.atl71.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2017 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. |
|
Is prison the answer to violence? The victims’ rights movement in America is decades old and has usually been linked to calls for longer sentences for criminal defendants. But not all victims find satisfaction in seeing their assailants imprisoned. The restorative justice movement offers alternative routes to safety and accountability. Danielle Sered makes that case in a new report published by the Vera Institute for Justice. “He felt strongly that this was a gift, and the gift had to be earned.” President Obama took a remarkably hands-on approach to the thousands of clemency applications that came to his desk during the final years of his administration. Here, W. Neil Eggleston, Obama’s White House counsel, explains how his boss approached each case, questioning his lawyers and aides about who merited mercy and who did not. A mother visits her son on death row, months before his scheduled execution. Marilyn Shankle-Grant’s son, Paul Storey, has an April execution date in Texas and as the date grows near she feels as though a piece of her is dying as well. She cannot comfort him during their visits, and she won’t be able to get near him when he’s strapped to a gurney prior to lethal injection, so she realizes the only time she’ll be able to touch him is when he is dead. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. If kids ran Juvie. California prison officials had a bright idea this year. To help them update conditions of confinement for young offenders they would ask ex-offenders themselves for feedback. The responses in many instances were so insightful a state committee will meet next month to consider implementing some of the ideas: more dental care, better educational opportunities, less mood-altering medication, and more programs about the perils of drugs and alcohol. Donald Trump’s wall won’t keep out heroin, Because it is so easy to smuggle in small batches and so lucrative. In collaboration with The New York Times, here is original TMP commentary from Sam Quinones, author of “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.” |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association once said “the one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun.” At The Trace, Harvard professor Caroline Light presents evidence that LaPierre is wrong. She shows how the proliferation of guns and Stand Your Ground laws have done little to help women confront those most likely to pose a threat to them: men they know. And when prosecutors and judges decide how to handle cases of women who have actually shot their attackers, the results fall along troubling racial lines. — Maurice Chammah In a powerful video documentary published on Valentine’s Day with The New York Times, filmmaker Garrett Bradley tells the story of Aloné Watts, a young woman in New Orleans who’s engaged to an incarcerated man. The short film, “Alone,” explores themes of love and loneliness and asks what it takes to be in a relationship with someone behind bars. — Donovan X. Ramsey Murder rates in our nation’s big cities are a continued national preoccupation. But a less- frequently-explored phenomenon is the fate of non-fatal shooting cases. A story in this month’s Boston Magazine explores the abysmal rate at which cops there are solving these shootings: of 618 non-fatal shootings in a two-year period, Boston police cleared fewer than 4%. The cops blame uncooperative witnesses, but the reality is that better police work could ensure that “shooters who have injured many people, even murdered on multiple occasion" don’t walk free with impunity.— Beth Schwartzapfel In criminal law few cases have had a bigger impact than Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires prosecutors to disclose evidence favorable to the defense. Baltimore attorney E. Clinton Bamberger Jr. argued and won that case. (Hear his oral argument here.) Bamberger died Sunday at age 90. This Baltimore Sun obituary details how the Brady rule was but part of Bamberger’s legacy. He also championed civil legal aid for the poor and fought to protect children from lead-paint poisoning, among other causes. “He was the kind of lawyer that every law school student should aspire to be,” one friend said. — Ken Armstrong In this goofy report from NPR’s Planet Money team, Charlie Shrem describes himself as “Bitcoin’s first felon.” He went to prison for aiding and abetting the unlicensed transmission of currency — helping customers swap dollars for digital currency that could then be used to buy drugs on line. Behind bars he retained his fascination with how people buy things. “The guy who fixes headphones only accepts protein bars. The guy who cuts your hair wants jars of peanut butter.” He devised a plan to “digitize” prisoner commerce, to reduce theft and spoilage, but was released before he could try it out. — Bill Keller |
|
— Our reader, Maria Lamb, on what it means to marry someone behind bars. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail16.sea21.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2017 7:08 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. |
|
Trump’s first roundup. Obama-era immigration officials were aggressive in deporting undocumented immigrants. But the first month of the new regime is not just a continuation of the previous order. A closer look at the hundreds of arrests so far show a new normal, with immigration agents given greater discretion and anyone without papers a potential target, not just “bad hombres” with serious criminal records. Contributor Julia Preston has our story. The Opposite of Sanctuary. Largely lost in the tumult of the Trump administration’s travel ban was its decision to prioritize the use of local law enforcement officers to engage in immigration policing. The program, titled 287(g) after its provision of a federal statute, had been in declining use during the last years of the Obama administration. Now the White House is signaling an expansion. Our Anna Flagg maps the places most affected. “Praise be to God. WOW. Thanks Jesus.” Lester Packingham was so happy his traffic ticket had been dismissed he went on Facebook to share the news. Bad idea. As a registered sex offender in North Carolina he wasn’t allowed “access” to social media. So he was arrested and charged with a crime. Now his case is before the U.S. Supreme Court and has broadened into a challenge about criminal intent, free speech, and “collateral consequences.” Here is the latest installment in our “Case in Point” series. Are you wondering what the Unabomber is doing in prison these days? Wonder no more. Ted Kaczynski is behaving himself at the “Supermax” facility in Florence, Colo., where he reads long fantasy novels and participates in inmate quizzes about books. He’s still unfailingly polite, too. We know all this thanks to the latest in our weekly “Life Inside” series from Blake Williams, an inmate who worked in the “recreation department” at the infamous prison. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
This week saw the passing of Gary Cartwright, a Texas Monthly writer and lesser-known peer of 1970s magazine innovators like Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. What he had, maybe more than any of them, was a sense of injustice. Many of his best stories were about the wrongfully convicted, or, like Jack Ruby, the guilty who deserve our attention. In April 1994, he laid out the tale of Fran and Dan Keller, sent to prison for alleged — and unbelievable — “Satanic” crimes against children. In memoriam, writer Mike Hall recalls how a 79-year-old Cartwright got to see the Kellers finally walk out of prison in 2013. “One big lesson was that I could be passionate about a story but even-handed in how I write it,” Hall writes. “Tell the whole story and let the reader decide what happened: who’s the villain, who’s the hero.” — Maurice Chammah Keishan Ross is 17 years old, but reads at a first-grade level. At least 13 times, psychologists have declared him too intellectually disabled to be incarcerated. Yet he remains locked up in a steel-doored cell at the Broward County juvenile detention center in Florida, screaming and pounding the walls at all hours out of sheer confusion and frustration. This is what happens routinely, the Miami Herald shows us. In a state in which 65 percent of the young people in the justice system are developmentally disabled, policymakers provide so little funding that only 350 out of 2,078 beds in the system are equipped to help them. — Eli Hager In Northampton, Mass., an elementary school moved to end a program in which local police officers lined the entrance to the school once a week to give high-fives to students as they entered the building. After launching in December, High Five Fridays became embroiled in controversy after a number of parents of color reported that the well-intentioned program actually made their children uncomfortable. The school district’s superintendent scrapped the program when complaints started rolling in, but not without pushback from other parents who went as far as to launch a petition to reinstate it. The New York Times reported the story on the community policing tug of war. — Donovan X. Ramsey In the annals of heartbreaking failures of the criminal justice system, the life and death of 22-year-old Lonnie Hamilton III is sadly familiar: an impressionable young man gets caught up in the wrong crowd, participates in some robberies, arrives in state prison to serve two-to-six years, begins grappling with mental illness, spends time in both solitary confinement and on suicide watch, and ultimately ends his own short life. But the particulars of any one human life are always haunting. In Jennifer Gonnerman’s telling for The New Yorker, we watch Hamilton’s father’s relentless search for information unfold after he looked his son up in the state’s online system, planning to send him a care package, and was shocked to see the following entry: “03/18/16 DECEASED.” — Beth Schwartzapfel Brock Hunter is a defense attorney who focuses on defending psychologically injured veterans in criminal court, and his work is the subject of an article this week in the ABA Journal. Hunter, a veteran himself, has helped draft laws that have taken hold across the United States that allow judges to consider combat-related disorders when assessing defendants in their courtrooms. The idea that some veterans charged with crimes should be treated differently because of the brain injuries they’ve suffered is expressed in this story through the experiences of Kris Parson, an Iraq war veteran who suffered a traumatic brain injury and was arrested on felony domestic violence charges soon after he returned home. — Alysia Santo |
|
— Our reader, Laura Lake, on a mother’s experiences with her son on death row |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail201.atl81.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2017 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. |
|
Your kid goes to jail. You get the bill. In a classic case of adding insult to injury, 19 states bill parents for the costs of their child’s incarceration. Counties in another 28 states do the same. In some cases, the costs can be crippling to families already struggling with having a child in detention. Slowly, however, reformers are chipping away at laws and regulations that require these payments. TMP’s Eli Hager has our story with an important update: just hours after we published the story, officials in Philadelphia declared they would stop the practice. A “radical departure” on immigration. Pay little attention to President Donald Trump’s softened stand on immigration policy this week. As the pace of roundups increase, the truth is that administration officials are altering “basic operating principles, accelerating deportations and sharply curtailing access to lawyers and immigration courts.” And bearing the brunt of the harsh new directives are children. TMP contributor Julia Preston has our story. A better way to treat addiction in jail. The president this week promised again to provide better care and treatment for Americans addicted to drugs. He could do worse than look to how corrections officials in Rhode Island are handling their “medication-assisted treatment program,” which allows inmates to get their regular doses of Suboxone or methadone. The idea is to reduce the risk of drug abuse, overdose, or recidivism upon the prisoner’s release. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel has our story. They told me I was going to die in prison. Shavonne Robbins is serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania for a second-degree murder she committed at the age of 17. For decades she was told she would die in confinement. Then came a Supreme Court ruling that gave hope to juvenile lifers like her. And then, three years ago, came cancer. Now she hopes the courts will grant her some relief before the illness gives her a death sentence that cannot be appealed. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. Immigrants make communities safer. Which is why the Trump administration is making a terrible mistake by implementing policies designed to disrupt immigrant communities. Here is original TMP commentary from Chiraag Bains, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School's Criminal Justice Policy Program and former Justice Department official. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
The biggest story in hip-hop has a criminal justice element: gun violence and women in prison. For those of you not in the know, here’s a quick recap: Bronx rapper Remy Ma, who served a six-year prison sentence for shooting a female friend in the stomach, recently released a rap song critiquing the career of rival lyricist Nicki Minaj. The rap battle, at this point, is one-sided. Minaj has not responded in song. Ma has been vocal about her time at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women and recently gave a lengthy interview to Fader magazine about how incarceration impacts women differently than men. — Simone Weichselbaum Emily Bazelon at the New York Times magazine has a sweeping story about the Department of Justice this week, from its inception in the 1870s to its future under Attorney General Jeff Sessions (note: the story came out before his meetings with a Russian envoy were revealed). Bazelon lays out how the broad authority of the DOJ makes it the essential agency in enacting Trump’s (and advisor Steve Bannon’s) goals: “to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, [and] promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage.” — Christie Thompson After a Georgia couple was sentenced to a combined 35 years in prison for waving guns and making racist threats at a black child’s birthday party, I saw a swift and unequivocal set of comments on my Facebook feed. “Yay! Fuck ‘em” is the one that sticks in my mind. Then I read this blog post by California public defender Sajid A. Khan, who is bothered by the gleeful response to long prison sentences, from people who profess to be against such sentences in other contexts. “Being against mass incarceration has the most meaning when we call for decarceration in the least sympathetic cases,” he writes. Whether you agree or not, it is a valuable insight. — Maurice Chammah An impressive report from the Tampa Bay Times revealed that in Florida, a child is shot every 17 hours. Obtaining that figure was no small feat; reporters reviewed more than 60 million emergency-room and inpatient discharge records and found nearly 3,200 kids were killed or injured by firearms between 2010 and 2015. These numbers, and the stories behind some of those who died, were presented alongside research that shows not only are gun sale exploding in Florida, but the motivation behind their purchase has changed. A couple of decades ago, guns were purchased primarily for hunting, but now it’s mostly for self defense. This desire for protection means people want their guns easily accessible, raising the risk level for children in the home. — Alysia Santo Undocumented immigrants face an emboldened and newly aggressive enforcement machine, not to mention heated rhetoric from President Donald Trump. But one small town in “Trump Country” has struggled as the rhetoric meets reality: A Mexican immigrant — a pillar of this rural Illinois community, a father of three who raised money for local causes, hosted charity events and Law Enforcement Appreciation Day at his Mexican restaurant — was recently rounded up by ICE. This wonderful New York Times story looks at how the friendship of a single person unexpectedly forced a community to think more deeply about its views on immigration. As one neighbor said, “It’s hard to be black and white on this because there may be people like Carlos.” (In a late-breaking update, one immigration judge seems to agree: Carlos Hernandez was released on bond this week) —Beth Schwartzapfel |
|
— Our reader, Elizabeth Buchanan, on what happens when heroin hits the white suburbs. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail118.suw15.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2017 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. |
|
California’s pay-to-stay jail system allows wealthier defendants to “upgrade” to cleaner, safer city jails. The municipalities love the extra revenue they receive. The inmates love the perks, even at $100 a day. But some victims and others aren’t happy about a two-tiered justice system. In collaboration with the Los Angeles Times here is our story, written by TMP’s Alysia Santo and Anna Flagg and the Times’ Victoria Kim. More: Here is how we crunched California’s pay-to-stay data. A seismic shift in police interrogations. Acknowledging the risk of false confessions caused by its famously confrontational tone, a leading police consultant group says it will no longer teach the widely-used “Reid technique” to police officers and recruits. First introduced as a reform in the 1940s, when police regularly beat confessions out of suspects, the familiar technique has slowly fallen into disfavor thanks to DNA testing and other evidence. TMP’s Eli Hager has our story. Death by mismanagement. Nicholas Glisson was a cancer survivor and disabled when he arrived at an Indiana prison. He needed constant medical care. What he got instead, just weeks into his sentence, was death by starvation and renal failure. Natural causes, said prison officials. Deliberate indifference, says his family. Now the case turns on whether a private prison health care provider deliberately chose not to manage inmate care using best practices. Here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series. Facing her daughter’s killer, at last. Jeannette Popp’s daughter was raped and murdered in Texas in 1998. One man confessed to the murder. Another was convicted of rape. Both turned out to be innocent. She reached out to both men and then met the true killer, who had confessed to the crime while in prison. He said he was sorry. Popp isn’t sure he meant it. But she is sure she did not want him executed, didn’t want another mother to lose a child. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. If you care about civil rights you should care about class-action legislation now pending in Congress. A Republican move to restrict group lawsuits will directly impair the ability of advocates to help those seeking criminal justice. Here is original TMP commentary from Jenn Rolnick Borchetta of The Bronx Defenders. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Immigrants who were detained by U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement and held at a private detention center in Aurora, Colo. have filed a class action lawsuit claiming that they were forced to clean the facility for $1 per day under threat of solitary confinement, The Washington Post reported. The lawsuit, which could include as many as 60,000 plaintiffs, was filed against GEO Group, the private company that runs ICE’s Denver Contract Detention Facility, and accuses it of violating federal anti-slavery laws.— Donovan X. Ramsey More and more sociologists are treating violence as a public health problem: it’s contagious, and its spread is preventable. That makes New Jersey’s mishandling of tens of millions of dollars in federal victims’ services grants so vexing, as an editorial on NJ.com pointed out this week. The money could be used to set up a "violence interruption program" to provide victims of violence and their family members counseling and other support. Instead, of the $59 million the state received last year, only $21 million went directly to community groups to help victims.— Beth Schwartzapfel Last week, as the Supreme Court weighed whether sex offenders should be restricted from social media, a state lawyer argued that such offenders are particularly prone to repeat their crimes. The Supreme Court itself noted in a 2003 decision that the rate of recidivism among sex offenders is “frightening and high.” But this isn’t true. The false claim began as a guess by a counselor, was then quoted in a magazine, embraced in police training, and then repeated in hundreds of lower court opinions justifying onerous registration laws. The New York Times’ Adam Liptak revisits the strange biography of an “alternative fact.” And if you want more, here’s reporter Joshua Vaughn’s interview with the man who made that claim-- and now regrets it. — Maurice Chammah Even if you think you’ve read all there is to read about solitary confinement, take the time for this GQ compilation of the words of men and women who have spent years or even decades in “the box.” Their descriptions are haunting and visceral. They are also a reminder that for all the movement away from segregation, thousands remain locked down for 24 hours a day. As one man put it, “the worst thing that's ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens every day. It's when I wake up.” — Christie Thompson This week I learned about the existence of a treasure trove of police datasets culled from dozens of local law enforcement agencies from across the country. The Police Foundation is hosting the data collection efforts of President Obama’s White House Police Data Initiative — a program in which local police departments were asked to share numbers with the public. Visitors to the Police Foundation’s website can check out files that include: Officer-involved shootings in Atlanta, calls for service in Orlando, and citizen complaints filed against police in Cincinnati. — Simone Weichselbaum |
— Our reader, Shannon Freed, on how pay-to-stay jails create a two-tiered justice system |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail84.atl31.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2017 7:06 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. |
|
Will Evan Miller benefit from the Supreme Court ruling that bears his name? He’s the namesake of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenders. He’s also the man who committed a horrible murder when he was a teenager. This week he appeared before an Alabama judge for a resentencing hearing at which he apologized to the daughter of his victim. Will he one day be given the chance to leave prison? TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel has our story. The tale of two California brothers. Their mother was addicted to crack; their grandmother beat them. So Terrick and Joseph Bakhit wound up in foster care, separated from one another. Terrick stole a car, got sentenced to juvenile detention, and then became an addict himself. Joseph, meanwhile, benefited from a state law that gave a small monthly stipend to foster children. He became a college graduate. In the latest installment of our photo essay, “The Frame,” we show you what happened next to the brothers. It’s not just federal prosecutors who can bring terrorism charges. And the pending state case of Abdurrahman Qadan, charged to the hilt in New York for “making a terrorist threat,” shows how aggressive local district attorneys can be in exercising their discretion. There is no evidence that Qadan prepared for any attack, and Qadan says he under the influence of drugs when he said “something stupid” about ISIS. Now he’s facing serious prison time in a case the feds wouldn’t touch. TMP’s Maurice Chammah has our story. Crime “hotspots” need more than policing. They need infusions of services and investment. “Looking at the micro-places within neighborhoods where violent crimes cluster demands that we look at the people caught up in those webs of violence. When we do, what we find are human beings who want to live lives of safety and dignity the way everyone does.” Here is original TMP commentary from Maurice Jones and Julia Ryan of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Life in a death row basketball league. Lyle May is awaiting execution in North Carolina for killing a 4-year-old girl and her mother. Here he describes his experience on an unlikely team in an unlikely place. A team where the coach gets sent to solitary confinement, where a member learns of his execution date and where the rest of the players hope they’ll be around for another season. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Many prosecutors, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, are fans of mandatory minimum sentences. A common argument for setting a harsh minimum sentence for a particular crime is that it will deter potential criminals. “Deterrence” can be hard to prove — since people who are deterred don’t necessarily tell anyone — but this week PennLive published a sharp little essay by Amasa Miller, who spent nine years in a state prison for selling drugs and says most potential drug-sellers have never heard of mandatory minimums, so they’re not deterring anyone. “It's crazy to think we would be deterred by something we didn't even know existed,” Miller writes — Maurice Chammah The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart wants you to know that he still believes “hands up, don’t shoot” was “built on a lie.” Footage released Monday of Michael Brown inside a Ferguson, Missouri, convenience store the morning he was killed may cause others to doubt official accounts of the police shooting but the columnist says it doesn’t change his assessment of what happened that day in August 2014. In his column, Capehart examined recent statements (under oath) from the shooter, police officer Darren Wilson, compared with what Wilson said immediately after the shooting. Capehart’s conclusion: “Please read the DOJ report.”— Donovan X. Ramsey The year Taylor Wilson died she overdosed four times. Between the third and fourth were 41 days, a stretch marked by a mad scramble to get her the treatment she so badly needed. Taylor and her parents put her on a waitlist for suboxone, and for nearly 3 dozen treatment facilities, all of which were full. “Most of the people on that list will die before they get the chance for treatment,” Taylor presciently wrote to a reporter. Her home state of West Virginia had 818 drug overdose deaths last year, and as Taylor’s story in Stat so tragically demonstrates, the state’s inability to get ahead of the epidemic will cost many more lives. — Beth Schwartzapfel Here’s an energizing news item from the usually heartbreaking criminal police beat. Los Angeles County now counts seven female police chiefs out of the 45 law enforcement agencies within the southern California jurisdiction. It’s still rare for a city to have a woman at the helm of its police department. Fox News recently reported that only five major metropolises have a female police executive. The Los Angeles County seven, however, all run small to medium-sized agencies. “Won't it be great that one day we won't be the anomaly?" Manhattan Beach police Chief Eve Irvine told a local reporter. — Simone Weichselbaum In less than a month, Arkansas plans to kick off a series of executions at a breathtaking pace, attempting to put eight condemned men to death by lethal injection in 10 days. This week, The New York Times’ podcast “The Daily” explored the case of Don Davis, one of two men scheduled to be executed on April 17. Why is Arkansas in such a hurry to carry out its first executions in more than 11 years? Its supply of the sedative midazolam is set to expire at the end of the month. Amid controversy over midazolam’s effectiveness in lethal injections, pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to sell any more to states to use for executions. If Arkansas doesn’t execute these men before the drugs expire, it might not get another chance anytime soon. Through this case, “The Daily” deftly explains not only Arkansas’ conundrum, but also a larger debate over capital punishment in America. — Tom Meagher |
|
*— Our reader, Andrea Dechenne Bergman, on our investigation of pay-to-stay jails. * |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail91.atl71.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2017 7:12 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. |
|
“I watched that man beg for his life.” Yet another prisoner has died while being shuttled by Prisoner Transportation Services, the nation’s largest for-profit inmate extraction company. The death occurred earlier this month in Georgia, toward the end of a marathon trip from Wisconsin in filthy, dangerous conditions. It was at least the fifth death on a PTS vehicle in five years and it came about nine months after federal officials pledged to look into the treatment of prisoners by transport companies. TMP’s Alysia Santo and Eli Hager continue their coverage of this story. TMP Context: A deadly world. “Harmless Errors.” The Supreme Court next week hears oral argument in a case that raises a fundamental question about the “Brady Rule,” the constitutional requirement that prosecutors turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense before trial. The case the justices will hear centers around a brutal, high-profile 1984 murder in Washington, D.C., that resulted in the convictions of eight young men. Police and prosecutors knew about compelling evidence that supported an alternative story of the case, but they never shared it. By Thomas L. Dybdahl, a former staff attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. Baltimore police win another round in fight with the prosecutor who once charged them. A federal judge this week ordered Marilyn Mosby, who unsuccessfully pressed the Freddie Gray case, to turn over her emails and be deposed in a “malicious prosecution” case brought by the cops she prosecuted. The ruling was the latest setback for Mosby, who has argued that she has “absolute immunity” from civil lawsuits based on decisions she makes in the course of her official duties. TMP’s Eli Hager has our story. When “no” doesn’t mean “no.” We all have the right to remain silent. But we also have to invoke that right, lest cops may continue to interrogate us and then use what we say against us in court. The New Jersey Supreme Court now is considering the case of a father accused of molesting his young daughter. Three times he told his interrogators that he had nothing more to say. They persisted. He cracked. What happens now? Here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series. Who owns the trial transcript? One main reason why trial transcripts are so expensive-- often thousands of dollars a pop-- is that court reporters often need the income derived from selling copies because the justice systems in which they work don’t otherwise compensate them fairly. It’s an economic model that undermines fair trial rights and access to public records. Here is original TMP commentary from journalist Emma Copley Eisenberg. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Tampa Bay Times reporter Ben Montgomery painstakingly assembled documents for every occasion when a Florida police officer fired a weapon at someone from 2009 to 2014. He catalogued 828 people dead or injured. Seeing the numbers, the folks at the podcast Radiolab wanted to know: who were these people and what were their stories? This episode takes us inside a network of heartache — wives, mothers, girlfriends who are part of a club none of them wanted to join, but who nevertheless find solace there. — Beth Schwartzapfel A strange story emerged last year from the small town of Tyler, Texas: Kerry Max Cook, a man wrongfully convicted of a brutal murder and famously freed from death row, was demanding that his conviction be reinstated. At Texas Monthly, Michael Hall offers a portrait that tries to understand Cook’s motivations, showing just how psychologically devastating a wrongful conviction can be. “We want exonerees to be like the Tim Robbins character in The Shawshank Redemption: a model of righteousness, an exemplary man whose calm demeanor and determination underscores just how badly he was wronged, and how right it is for him to go free,” Hall writes. “The reality, of course, is much darker.” – Maurice Chammah “I knew that I had to fix it,” says William Varnado, whose testimony 17 years ago sent a New Orleans man away for murder. Varnado says he lied back then. He wants to tell the truth now. But the Orleans Parish District Attorney, Leon Cannizzaro, is charging Varnado with perjury, making him the third recanting witness in two years to be so charged by the office. “At a time when prosecutors across the country are acknowledging and reviewing the mistakes wrought by policies born in the ’80s and ’90s,” BuzzFeed writes, “Cannizzaro’s decision to go after recanting witnesses reflects the lingering resistance to rethinking the past.” – Ken Armstrong “This isn’t a literary trend. This is an issue of our time,” said novelist Jason Reynolds, co-author of 2015’s “All American Boys,” a novel about a black teen who is assaulted by a cop after being mistaken for a shoplifter. Reynolds’ book is one of many young-adult novels released in recent years that examines race in America through the lens of police brutality. “For me, specifically for black teenagers, it’s a reflection of what we’re all facing right now,” added Jay Coles, author of “Tyler Johnson Was Here” in this story from The New York Times on the uptick in social justice-themed kid lit. – Donovan X. Ramsey What seems like a minute policy turn could damage some Los Angeles deputies’ credibility in the courtroom forever — at least in criminal cases. As is common in several other California counties, Sheriff Jim McDonnell wants to turn over the names of about 300 L.A. County deputies with records of misconduct including “domestic violence, theft, bribery and brutality” to local prosecutors, who could then decide whether to supply juries with the records in the event of a deputy’s testimony at trial. An appeals court blocked the proposal in February, but the Los Angeles Times reports that a civilian oversight commission voted 5-2 to back Sheriff McDonnell, hinging on the 1963 Supreme Court ruling in Brady vs. Maryland that defendants must be privy to any evidence that could aid their case — even if it outs police misconduct in the process. – Alex Tatusian |
|
— Our reader, Melanie Wetzel, on the deadly conditions on for-profit extradition vehicles |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail117.sea21.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2017 7:10 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. |
|
When warriors put on a badge. The debate over militarization of the police has focused on war-grade hardware and SWAT-team tactics. Less attention is paid to the migration of military veterans into law enforcement. Veterans who work as cops bring valued skills and discipline, but they are more prone to self-destructive behavior, they aren’t subject to the type of rigorous mental health screening that would benefit both them and the civilians they serve, and there is some reason to believe they are quicker to use force. TMP’s Simone Weichselbaum, Beth Schwartzapfel, and Tom Meagher brought us the story. The one that got away. Ryan Quirk, a staff psychologist at a Washington prison, shares the story of a mentally ill prisoner he could not save from suicide. Back and forth the inmate went between hope and self-harm, until one day the hope ran out. “I later looked at a picture in his file. It must have been from long before, because his face looked very young, free of the scars it would later contain. I wondered what would have happened had I met him, and started working with him, at that moment,” Quirk told TMP’s Maurice Chammah. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. Where’s a good Phaser when you need one? The quest for a nonlethal alternative to the police officer’s standard-issue service revolver goes on even as more cops use Tasers. One problem with the technology is that it cannot account for the medical condition of the person at whom it is directed. Another problem is user error, an officer who uses his “nonlethal” weapon in the wrong place at the wrong time. In collaboration with Wired, here from Robin Washington is the latest in our “Justice Lab” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast caught up this week with Mandi Hauwert, a transgender correctional officer at San Quentin State Prison in California, whom The Marshall Project profiled in 2015. In a deeply intimate interview, host Anna Sale talked with Hauwert about what it was like to transition on the job and about Hauwert’s plans for her future in corrections. “At 15 years I'll get locked in medical, but—I can't think of doing that much more. But who knows? I say that now maybe I'll be there another 15 years,” Hauwert said. “I could be the first transgender warden.” — Donovan X. Ramsey Baltimore Police are recovering more guns loaded with high-capacity magazines, despite a ban on sales. Brian Freskos at The Trace found that a 2013 Maryland law banning the sales of guns with capacities of more than 10 bullets has not had an effect on criminals in Baltimore. Police have seized an increasing percentage of high-capacity weapons each year since the law’s passage. Baltimore is struggling with a 40 percent increase in shootings and homicides this year, and police tell the Trace they’re “dealing with absolute criminals who want as much weaponry as possible when they’re going after their targets.” — Justin George Alabama prisons operate at about 172 percent capacity, with staffing levels dangerously low and dropping. But “even by the standards of one of the nation’s most dysfunctional prison systems, St. Clair stood out for its violence.” St. Clair Correctional Facility, one of six maximum security state prisons, emerges in this disturbing NY Times piece as an anarchic place where stabbings are commonplace, contraband is traded freely, and staff is nowhere to be found (and when they are found, too often dispense vigilante violence of their own). In one dorm, “some inmates put up a sign — ‘No Officers Beyond This Point’ — that, over a nightmarish few weeks, was generally heeded.” — Beth Schwartzapfel Sometimes, a single number says just about everything—and in the case of Yellowstone County, Montana, that number is zero. That’s how many rape charges Montana’s most populous county filed in 2016 — despite 60 cases being reported to police, and despite the police forwarding 18 cases to prosecutors. The Billings Police Department doesn’t have a dedicated unit for investigating adult sex crimes; nor policies in place for handling these cases; nor mechanisms for statistically tracking the cases’ outcomes, according to the Billings Gazette. So the newspaper did its own tracking and discovered that over five years, from 2012 to 2016, police in Yellowstone County referred 112 adult rape cases for prosecution: Only 17 were charged. — Ken Armstrong |
|
— Our reader, Janelle Lawrence, on our investigation of veterans who are cops |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail121.suw17.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2017 7:10 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. |
|
My execution, 20 days away. Kenneth Williams, responsible for three murders, is one of seven Arkansas prisoners scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection later this month in an 11-day sprint. He’s already been measured for the clothes in which he expects to die and he says he’s already apologized to the families of his victims. He’s at the point now in the process where his fellow death row inmates, who are not scheduled to die this month, are calling dibs on his belongings. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. What I learned about justice reporting from inside prison: There is a level of complicity between journalists and the “criminal justice apparatus” that perpetuates bad policy. Here is original commentary from Kerry Myers, former editor of The Angolite newspaper at the Louisiana State prison, published in partnership with the Columbia Journalism Review. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
For prisoners struggling with a mental illness, it’s easy for a short sentence to spiral into a much longer ordeal. That’s what happened to New York state inmate Adam Hall, as reported by the Village Voice. After an initial jailing for a low-level offense, his battle with bipolar disorder and severe depression led to probation violations and, ultimately, in-prison disciplinary problems that added years to his sentence. Spending years in solitary confinement has also pushed him to attempt suicide multiple times — attempts that have only dug him deeper into trouble. The most disturbing part of Hall’s story may be how unexceptional it is. How many Adam Halls are there sitting alone in a cell in our prisons today? — Christie Thompson New Yorker Lisa Davis began accumulating traffic tickets and misdemeanor violations that weren’t hers. Driving with a busted headlight (she didn’t own a car), disorderly conduct, trespassing. At first suspecting identity theft, she soon discovered a series of other Lisa Davises whose bureaucratic lives were entangled with hers. This Lisa Davis, who was white, lived in a rapidly-gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood where people didn’t get citations for open containers. In this lovely essay in the Guardian, the stories of the other Lisa Davises, who were black, provide an unexpected window into broken windows–style policing and its consequences for everyday people. —Beth Schwartzapfel Why cops shoot. In Florida, a police officer shoots someone every two and a half days. Unarmed African-Americans are nearly eight times as likely to be shot as whites. Only once in six years and 827 shootings was an officer charged criminally. These were among the many findings in an all-encompassing Tampa Bay Times two-year investigation into police shootings in Florida. The Times examined every police shooting that took place over the six-year period and created a database that breaks down each incident in detail. Equally impressive was staff writer Ben Montgomery’s ability to weave the investigation’s findings into an engrossing narrative that scrutinized police procedures, as well as normal human responses. — Justin George California legal-aid experts say that reports of landlords coercing immigrant tenants with threats of deportation are pouring in from across the state in the wake of President Trump’s new anti-immigration policies. CityLab reported on the trend Wednesday. “The scale at which it’s happening has increased dramatically since the November election,” one expert told CityLab. “We have somewhere between two-and-a-half million and three million undocumented individuals living in California, most of whom are renters. Unscrupulous landlords are taking advantage of their knowledge of that fact to deprive tenants of their legal rights.”— Donovan X. Ramsey The promise that police body cameras would lead to more transparency and accountability is increasingly being called into question, as the The Washington Post pointed out this week. A 15-year-old boy in Greensboro, North Carolina says he was attacked by the police last summer without provocation. The police say he was resisting arrest, fighting, and spitting at officers. There is body camera footage of the incident, which the boy and his mother have seen and want publicly released, but so far the government, citing a new state law, has refused public access. — Alysia Santo |
|
— Our reader, Jay Gonzo, on why solving old murders can help prevent new ones |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail36.sea21.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2017 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. |
|
Probation for profit just got less profitable, in Georgia, anyway. A modest change to the state’s law in 2015 has caused Sentinel Offender Services, the state’s largest private probation company, to abandon the once-lucrative business of charging people for their own court-ordered supervision. But 29 other private probation companies still operate in Georgia and in the first three quarters of 2016 they collected almost $18 million in fees. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel has our story. The not-so-magnificent seven. The cases of the seven condemned men scheduled to be executed in the next two weeks in Arkansas track many of the most contentious issues in the debate today over capital punishment. The storylines are familiar. The families of the victims want the executions to proceed at last. So do prosecutors and state officials. Defense attorneys say the men have not received fair trials, or full and fair appeals, and they question the drugs to be used. TMP’s Maurice Chammah sets the scene. “Half a loaf.” New York’s newly-enacted “raise-the-age” reform, like most hard-fought legislative compromises, has left some advocates wanting more. They note that thousands of juveniles accused of felonies still will be funnelled into adult courts even though thousands more now will be channeled into a juvenile-specific system designed to better protect the most vulnerable defendants. TMP’s Eli Hager has our story. Bluegrass justice. Susan King was wrongfully convicted of murder in Kentucky in a case that cries out for a Hollywood treatment. Now she is going after the police detective who went to extraordinary lengths to incriminate her, even when the evidence said otherwise. A federal appeals court last month sided with King, at least enough to allow her malicious prosecution case to proceed toward trial. Here is the latest “Case in Point.” Uneasy riders, from Jim Crow to the Not-so-friendly skies. After this week’s ugly incident involving a passenger, and the police, and airline rules aboard a United flight, here is a look at the long, ugly legacy of excessive force in transportation. Original TMP commentary from Robin Washington. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
In Alabama jails, the less sheriffs spend on food for inmates the more money they make. That’s because a law there allows sheriffs to pocket leftover food fund money. The practice is being criticized amidst news that Morgan County Sheriff Ana Franklin withdrew $160,000 from the inmate food account, which she then loaned to a now bankrupt used car dealership. Inmates say the meals they are receiving leave them starving. Her predecessor, dubbed “Sheriff Corn dog,” was prohibited from pocketing savings after taking more than $200,000 while inmates ate corn dogs twice a day. — Alysia Santo NPR Tuesday reported on the uptick of “hate incidents” in schools across the country following the election of President Trump — slurs spewn, threats of violence, assaults on Muslim students. But with the line between bullying and crime still fuzzy, communities are struggling to respond. "There is speech that may be ugly, that may be hateful, that may be harmful, but that may nevertheless be protected in certain instances," Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey told NPR. "So schools have reached out to our office for assistance, and we are here to help them." — Donovan X. Ramsey Chicago’s police reform movement took another hit this week. Rank-and-file cops voted Wednesday to oust their sitting union president, Dean Angelo Sr., who had cooperated with President Obama’s Justice Department as it investigated the police force for widespread abuse. Angelo — elected president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police in 2014 — lost to Police Officer Kevin Graham. Graham’s campaign attacked Angelo, and vowed to fight “the anti-police movement in the city.” Graham, an unapologetic President Trump enthusiast, blamed the Obama administration for putting “handcuffs on the police.” — Simone Weichselbaum “The gentleman arrested Thursday and tried before Pontius Pilate had a troubled background. Born (possibly out of wedlock?) in a stable, this jobless thirty-something of Middle Eastern origin had had previous run-ins with local authorities for disturbing the peace, and had become increasingly associated with the members of a fringe religious group. He spent the majority of his time in the company of sex workers and criminals.” Just ahead of Easter, the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri satirized how the media might have covered Jesus’ crucifixion. — Donovan X. Ramsey Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week abruptly halted forensic science reforms that have taken hold since the National Academy of Science concluded in 2009 that many of the techniques used to convict people have no scientific basis. Then, in 2015, the FBI admitted that examiners in its elite microscopic hair comparison unit had given incorrect or misleading testimony. Sessions said he would not renew the independent, nonpartisan National Commission on Forensic Science born of these unsettling revelations and he suspended an ongoing review of whether similar misstatements and overstatements were made about other techniques besides hair comparison. This New York Times op-ed by Erin Murphy makes the case that Sessions’s moves are dangerous, yet predictable. — Beth Schwartzapfel |
|
— Our reader, Ginger Lyons, on revisiting our Pulitzer Award-winning story, An Unbelievable Story of Rape |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail214.atl61.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, April 22, 2017 8:53 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. |
|
Something’s gotta give. For the Justice Department under the Trump administration, the border is everywhere, far beyond the Rio Grande and Arizona, and almost any undocumented immigrant is considered a law enforcement priority. The only thing that’s limited is the federal money for the new detention and deportation sweeps, and the ability of federal prosecutors and judges to process the wave of defendants. TMP’s Julia Preston looked at an already-crowded federal docket that’s about to get heavier. Can’t we all just get along? When you are a prosecutor and your wife is a defense attorney, conversations about justice aren’t just idle chat. They are essential. And they can serve as a model for more understanding among those who disagree about the nature of crime and punishment. Here is original TMP Commentary from Jesse Weinstein, an assistant district attorney in New York. I paid for a fancy jail. The alternative was terrifying. The family of Luicci Nader, age 18, paid more than $18,000 so he could serve six months on a felony vehicular manslaughter rap in a southern California “pay-to-stay” jail. Nader describes conditions of confinement that most inmates would treasure, but he says if he had the choice again he’d rather stay at another local jail he hears is even more lenient than the Seal Beach jail where he served his time. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Here’s another way Chicago police are trying to crack down on gun violence: throwing thousands more in jail for minor parole and probation violations. One of the most common offenses, uncovered by the Chicago Sun-Times, is simply being near an alleged* *member of a gang, even if he or she is your sibling or next-door neighbor. In 2011, there were only 17 convictions for “street gang contact” in Chicago — in 2015, there were 1,033. As one man, who had been arrested six times on such charges, told police, “I live here. I cannot avoid these dudes.” — Christie Thompson For those who haven’t been following the Trump’s administration’s criminal justice policy changes, the Brennan Center for Justice released a digestible primer on what’s been done since President Trump took over the White House. The 47-page report is divided into five sections that include policing, private prisons and “crime rhetoric.” The most helpful portions of the analysis are tagged under the title “What to Expect.” Possible trends to look out for? More marijuana prosecutions, warnings about a “nonexistent crime wave” and increased use of private prisons. — Simone Weichselbaum A recent study by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund reveals ethnic and generational splits on perceptions of the police within the Asian-American community. Overall, half the study’s participants did not think that racial and ethnic groups are treated equally by police. Korean, multi-ethnic and Indo-Caribbean participants endorsed that belief in highest numbers. Asian-Americans aged 60 and older reported the highest levels of faith in the police. NPR reported Tuesday on the survey, which polled 13,846 Asian-American voters from 14 states and Washington, D.C. — Donovan X. Ramsey On the morning of April 13, Joshua Lee Miles, an inmate at the South Central Regional Jail in West Virginia, was found dead in his cell from an apparent suicide. But Miles wasn’t even supposed to be in custody, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail. The day before, a magistrate had signed an order for Miles’ release — but the order was faxed and didn’t go through. The case served as further evidence of the fax machine’s peculiar foothold in the realm of law enforcement, something Fast Company noted back in 2014. When the West Virginia story circulated on social media, one person wrote on Twitter: “Fax? Carrier pigeon wasn’t available?” — Ken Armstrong The Duke lacrosse rape case, still notorious a decade later, is remembered as a story of egregious prosecutor malfeasance. Yet every day in America, less-privileged defendants face equally aggressive and questionable prosecutorial tactics. As it turns out, says this fascinating piece this week in New York magazine, the durability of the Duke narrative is owed in large part to the media-advocacy efforts of the earliest rumblings of the alt-right movement. In fact, both Stephen Miller, now a top Trump adviser, and Richard Spencer, who has become the nation’s most famous white nationalist, got their start railing against the criminal justice system’s failures at Duke. — Eli Hager |
|
— Our reader, Brandon Bledsoe, on how Georgia's probation-for-profit just got less profitable |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail6.suw15.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2017 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. |
|
Another call for a federal investigation into deadly private prisoner transport. Rep. Ted. Deutsch (D-Fla.) used a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday to press the Justice Department and Congress to probe an industry that has gone largely unregulated despite a series of deaths and injuries to men and women transported to and from prisons around the country. TMP’s Alysia Santo and Eli Hager, who broke the story last year, continue their coverage. Just another week in Hell (our local jails). At The Marshall Project, we regularly check in with newspapers around the country, collecting stories and links for Opening Statement, our daily email, and for The Record, our “searchable encyclopedia for criminal justice journalism.” This week we couldn’t help but be taken aback by the litany of horrors in county jails and juvenile detention centers, most of them inflicted on the mentally ill and minors. TMP’s Ken Armstrong rounds up the bad news. Is it murder if there’s no homicide? Jessie McKim is sitting in a Missouri prison serving a life sentence for murder. The only problem is no doctor alive today says his “victim” was murdered. Instead, the evidence points to her dying as a result of an overdose of methamphetamine after a weekend drug binge. No state or federal court will grant him relief, so he and his supporters are seeking mercy from the governor. Here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series. Ledell Lee never had a chance. Jurors at his Arkansas capital murder trial never heard about his horrendous upbringing when they convicted him and recommended the death penalty. But appellate judges did. And they still did nothing to stop his death. Here is original TMP commentary from Elizabeth Vartkessian, a mitigation specialist who worked on Lee’s case before he was executed earlier this month. I escaped my manic demons. Many of my clients have not. Kristen Anderson is a social worker at the Bronx Defenders who helps those with mental illness maneuver through New York’s criminal justice system. She came to her calling, in a poignant and direct way. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the year she graduated from college. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
What’s up with prosecutors in New Orleans? For the second time this month there are reports of odd, unethical, and possibly illegal practices by district attorneys. The latest scandal was uncovered by The Lens, a local non-profit investigative journalism outlet. Reporter Charles Maldonado explained how prosecutors sent material witnesses fake subpoenas that threatened jail time for failing to show up for court. The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office subsequently said it would stop the practice. Earlier this month, the advocacy group Court Watch NOLA had found that more than a dozen arrest warrants were sent to sex assault victims who didn’t want to testify. — Simone Weichselbaum The newly-renamed HuffPost published a useful history on treating immigration as a criminal — not civil — offense and how the crime of illegal entry and re-entry became the majority of federal prosecutions. The writers take us inside a courtroom on the border, where up to 70 immigrants each day are swiftly prosecuted and each defendant’s unique backstory is largely irrelevant in the eyes of prosecutors and judges. We wrote about this in December as well. And as Julia Preston detailed more recently, the border-based enforcement is spreading inland under President Trump. — Christie Thompson In Chicago, trauma nurses and doctors are front-line witnesses to the city’s unremitting gun violence. They’re faced with telling mothers their sons are dead and with treating wounded children who will never fully recover, to the point where they are “emotionally saturated with grief.” In this moving Chicago Tribune story, we meet those grappling with “compassion fatigue,” which comes from caring too much for too long. “That's the worst thing I've seen,” reflected one trauma surgeon forced to take a leave to reconnect with her family and her emotions. “We lost the ability to see them as children who've been injured and are in pain." —Beth Schwartzapfel Journalists learn, over time, the states and agencies that tend to release public records, and those that do not. Florida is among the best (even if its Sunshine law is under constant assault by lawmakers). California is among the worst. On Tuesday the American Civil Liberties Union, joined by a journalist, professor and activist, sued the Los Angeles Police Department, alleging a “systemic violation” of its obligation to comply with the public records law. In a story about the lawsuit, the Los Angeles Times noted how journalist-plaintiff Ali Winston had requested records in early 2014 from the LAPD “about facial recognition cameras as well as software the department used to target potential criminals.” Three years later, she’s still waiting to hear back. — Ken Armstrong |
|
— Our reader, Skie Avvi, on the 61,000 people in prison for minor parole violations |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail162.atl171.mcdlv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2017 7:04 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. |
|
What you miss when you miss the news in Spanish. It’s all immigration, all the time, on Univision and Telemundo, the two vast broadcast networks that cater to the 56.6 million Hispanics in America. Our new immigration reporter, Juan Carlos Frey, watched the Spanish-language giants alongside the English-language networks and logged the news in two parallel Americas. When justice gets personal. Federal judge Mark Bennett, who works in a small Iowa community, often runs into people he has sentenced. He is prepared to explain to each of the over 4,000 defendants why he made the decisions he did. That includes explaining to many that he was forced to hand down mandatory minimum sentences he finds “unjustly harsh.” In collaboration with Vice, our latest “Life Inside.” There are criminal justice actors more powerful than prosecutors. Legislators. Judges. Governors. They can impose sweeping reforms that district attorneys simply can’t. Here is original Marshall Project commentary from Jeffrey Bellin, a professor and former prosecutor. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Days into his presidency, Donald Trump sat down with Darrell Scott, a Cleveland-area pastor, who promised to connect the president with Chicago’s “top gang thugs” to work on a plan to curtail violence in the city. Talk of the peculiar plan faded from the news in the days that followed their televised meeting, but VICE News Tonight tracked down Scott to follow up on his promise. Vice also met up with members of Chicago’s Gangster Disciples to get their thoughts on Trump and Scott’s supposed gang summit. “How is somebody like us gon’ get invited to somewhere like that?” one of them asked. “Who they gon’ send? How we gon’ get an invitation?” — Donovan X. Ramsey Largely thanks to a highly publicized cluster of executions in Arkansas, America tussles over the death penalty once again. Jaweed Kaleem of the Los Angeles Times unpacks the growing opposition to the practice, proposing that execution itself is in a death spiral. Kaleem lays out a quick but thorough summary, illuminating broad changes in public and government opinion, long-term decline in state support, and granular problems with the acquisition of execution drugs. — Alex Tatusian A community theater in Colorado recently staged “Do You Know Who I Am?," a series of monologues written and performed by undocumented teenagers about their experiences immigrating from Latin America and living in the shadows of the United States. The teenagers reading their own words on the stage is moving in its own right, but the monologues got an extra layer of nuance when they were performed this weekend by local law enforcement leaders, including Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett and Sheriff Joe Pelle. On this NPR interview, listen to Garnett’s voice break with emotion as he reads the words of a young woman whose brother was deported. — Beth Schwartzapfel All too often, journalists peer into the problems that plague urban law enforcement agencies and pay less attention to the misdeeds of rural police. St. Louis-based police reporter Doyle Murphy ventured into the Missouri bootheel, and examined the newly elected, 33-year-old Sheriff Cory Hutcheson. Hutcheson, who beat out the 12-year incumbent by fewer than 300 votes last year, promised constituents that he would root out drug dealers and other nefarious activity. That didn’t happen. Instead, the state attorney general charged Hutcheson with 18 counts of various crimes, which include attacking a 77-year-old hairdresser. Murphy points out that despite the arrest, Hutcheson is still popular and employed. “Supporters suspect there's a conspiracy behind the charges. The campaign was so nasty, it only makes sense that the old sheriff wanted revenge,” Murphy writes. — Simone Weichselbaum |
|
— Our reader Kathy Jo Carlin, on the hellish conditions in local lockups across the country. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail20.atl111.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, May 13, 2017 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. |
|
Cancer treated with ibuprofen. Schizophrenia treated with Benadryl. Mentally ill inmates locked in a segregation cell in handcuffs and a helmet. That’s according to two new reports issued by nonprofit organizations reviewing immigrant detention facilities. Human Rights Watch and Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement had outside medical experts review 18 detainee deaths. Their joint report released this week showed that alleged medical neglect contributed to seven. That report follows a survey of 83 detainees in two for-profit detention centers in Georgia that showed requests for medical care often being ignored. TMP’s Christie Thompson had our story. A plan to end the jail-to-street cycle. New York City is trying something new to stop the movement of “frequent fliers,” those who cycle in and out of jails at great cost to taxpayers. The city has offered a small group of people permanent housing and support services. The “housing first” approach also is being tried in other cities, all in an effort to reduce the costs of incarceration, which are more than the costs of the housing offered to these residents. The $9 million for the pilot New York program is being paid for by money garnished from penalties against banks. TMP’s Christie Thompson took a look at the initiative. Jury clears prosecutor who sent Cameron Todd Willingham to his death by execution. State attorney John Jackson did not make false statements, conceal evidence, or obstruct justice, a jury concluded this week following a rare ethics trial pressed by the State Bar of Texas. The allegations centered around Jackson’s use of an informant who recanted his testimony 10 years after Willingham was executed for setting a fire that killed his daughters. Maurice Possley continued his TMP coverage of the case. Here is “The Prosecutor and the Snitch,” our initial report on the case and controversy. And here is “Doubts from Death Row,” more TMP coverage of this remarkable case. Fighting hopelessness for a generation worried about its future — and its safety. What to say to your black high school students when a kid like Jordan Edwards is gunned down by a cop. On National Teacher’s Day, we posted this haunting, original commentary from Frederick Scott Salyers, a high school teacher in Brooklyn. Marathon Man. Jonathan Chiu, 34, is serving a 50-to-life sentence for murder in California. He proudly belongs to the San Quentin 1,000 Club, a group of prisoners who meet as often as they can in the yard inside the wire to run around a makeshift track. Here, Chiu tells the story of a marathon, one he completed in four hours after a 30-minute interlude for an alarm sounded elsewhere at the prison. Chiu says he’s not running away from anything, just toward a chance to reclaim a part of his life. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
An Oklahoma prison supervisor was suspended this week after video surfaced of him talking about child molesters and telling his fellow officers to “let them die.” A former employee who recently quit posted that video, and two others, on YouTube. The videos are disturbing, and sometimes strangely edited (one features a Guns N’ Roses song in the background). But the rare opportunity to hear some very unfiltered discussions among corrections officers, a typically cloistered group, makes the footage worth watching. Employees can be seen complaining that they “can’t get a f------ door fixed,” or how awful it is to cut down the dead body of someone who just hung themselves, or yet another clip that shows an officer explaining how he pinches inmates to prove they are faking seizures. — Alysia Santo Police departments are often scrutinized for the number, and circumstances, of officer-involved shootings. What is seldom studied, however, are the details of non-shooting deaths that occur after a person is detained by cops. Investigative reporters with the Austin American-Statesman published a multi-part series which tallied more than than 250 police in-custody death incidents in Texas from 2005 to mid-2016. “In 21 cases, records show the only crime the dead person would have been charged with was resisting or evading arrest,” note the reporters. Other installments in the series include a piece chronicling how families of the deceased battle police agencies to release documents about the fatality, and a deep-dive into deaths of mentally ill people who are restrained by cops. — Simone Weichselbaum The New York Times this week profiled the couple behind Don Diva magazine, the choice periodical of our nation’s prison population. You may not be reading Don Diva, but it's been on newsstands now for nearly two decades. Even more, its following and credibility are huge behind bars. “When I was locked up, I used to get copies and have like 20 dudes outside my door just waiting to see it. Everyone in there was pretty much reading it cover to cover,” one formerly-incarcerated writer told The Times. — Donovan X. Ramsey In Madison County, Mississippi, black citizens literally can’t walk home from school or across their own property without being stopped and searched — and often beaten — at roadblocks and checkpoints set up by the sheriff’s office, according to a horrifying new lawsuit from the ACLU. The practices harken to those reported in Ferguson, Mo., where police constantly hassle black motorists and pedestrians. Another similarity between the two places? Both are historically white suburbs surrounding largely black urban centers, where fear of the encroaching “inner city” begets racist policing at its worst. — Eli Hager |
|
— Our reader, Sandra P. Cole, on a jury clearing the prosecutor that sent Cameron Todd Willingham to death row |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail247.atl61.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2017 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. |
|
Sixty-eight years later, apologies to the “Groveland Boys.” Florida lawmakers last month finally said sorry to the families of the four young black men for the “gross injustice” police, prosecutors, judges, and juries inflicted on them generations ago in a case made famous by Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove.” But descendants of the falsely accused men recall another, private apology. Here King updates us on a classic story of race and justice. The Resistance, Prosecutors Edition. “Progressive” district attorneys across the country are coming up with creative new ways to try to protect undocumented immigrants from the federal detention and deportation consequences of low-level convictions. The prosecutors say they are making sensible decisions designed to foster community trust while protecting public safety. Trump administration critics say the leniency is dangerous and contrary to the legal and ethical principles. TMP’s Christie Thompson has our story. Who else loses if Obamacare ends? Crime victims, that’s who. The expansion of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act has taken pressure off state crime victim compensation programs, which typically are subject to budget constraints. The savings over the past few years have been used to pay off other state obligations. That now is in jeopardy depending on what comes next in the political battle over the fate of federal health care. TMP’s Alysia Santo filed this report. My son was murdered on Mother’s Day. He’s now a statistic. So am I. Cheri Burks’ son was murdered four years ago in Camden, New Jersey, and the killer has never been captured. For Burks, the sudden loss of Rayshine, “my light, my love,” has transformed her understanding of the loss all around her. Each year she joins with other mothers who have lost children so they can reassure one another that they are not alone in grief. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. Still so much work to be done. Fifty years after a landmark Supreme Court ruling designed to protect them, juveniles still don’t get the due process to which they are entitled. Here is original TMP commentary from Prya Murad, an assistant public defender in Palm Beach County, Florida. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
The police chief who led his department through the deadliest event in U.S. law enforcement since 9/11 is not particularly introspective. But what a Texas Monthly profile of retired Dallas Police Chief David Brown reveals is a life marked by personal loss through violence that prepared him to handle the fatal shootings of five officers and the wounding of nine other cops last summer. In news conferences after the shooting, Brown became a voice for officers across the country struggling during a tense climate. “Have you ever been in a relationship where you love someone and they didn’t love you back?” he asks. “That’s how you feel in this profession. But after July 7, they finally love me back.” — Justin George Start with a ticket for running a red light. That costs $100. Add on fees, and the cost climbs to $490. Fail to pay on time, and the cost becomes $815. Fail to pay that, and your driver’s license — often your means to work and to pay the fine in the first place — may be suspended. Maura Ewing (a former intern at The Marshall Project) writes in The Atlantic about proposed legislation in California — one of 29 states that threaten to suspend driver’s licenses for unpaid fines — that would ease this mounting traffic-ticket debt, which Gov. Jerry Brown has labeled a “hellhole of desperation.” — Ken Armstrong When a Mississippi man was sentenced to 49 years in prison Monday for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, a transgender woman, it was the first time the murder of a transgender person was prosecuted as a federal hate crime. Joshua Vallum, 29, pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in the murder of 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson. “Today’s sentencing reflects the importance of holding individuals accountable when they commit violent acts against transgender individuals,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a statement. The New York Times had more of the story. — Donovan X. Ramsey Earlier this month, Florida lawmakers passed a bill that expands the state’s stand-your-ground law, which was intended to protect from prosecution those who shoot others in self-defense. Initially, the burden of proving that defense rested with the defendant. But if Gov. Rick Scott signs a new measure into law that burden would shift to prosecutors, who would have to prove that a defendant was not acting in self-defense. As The Trace documented this week, prosecutors and other legal experts are sounding the alarm about the bill’s potential ramifications. “It’s essentially stacking the deck repeatedly in favor of people shooting other people,” said one legal expert. — Alysia Santo What do cops want in 2017? For starters, modern jails and federal money to hire more officers. A group of law enforcement executives, and the leader of the nation’s largest police union, took a trip to Capitol Hill this week and presented a wish-list to the House Judiciary Committee. Speakers who shared their thoughts during the hearing on “Challenges Facing Law Enforcement in the 21st Century” included the Los Angeles County Sheriff and Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo. Acevedo used his time on The Hill to plug the importance of federal grants, and to speak about the importance of keeping local cops away from immigration enforcement. — Simone Weichselbaum |
|
— Our reader, Nancy Johnston, on controversial sheriff David Clarke being tapped for a position in the Department of Homeland Security |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail9.sea21.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2017 7:08 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. |
|
“So much hurt for all concerned.” As children, they successfully accused their father of sexual assault and saw him go away to prison. But as they grew older the son and daughter of Ray Spencer realized not just that they had made a terrible mistake but that they had it in their power to rectify it. Some fathers never get a second chance with their kids. Spencer did, after decades in prison, and now a broken family finally is starting to heal. TMP’s Maurice Chammah reported and wrote this wrenching story. Lawyers, guns, and money. A murder conviction in Tennessee, ratified again last week by a judge, highlights the self-defeating nature of the state’s appellate procedures. The system there pays post-conviction attorneys a paltry hourly rate, does not guarantee them reimbursement for experts, and caps out fees at $2,000 or less. It helps explain why even the Tennessee Supreme Court says significant reform is needed to better ensure the constitutional rights of convicted defendants. Here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series. “You can’t change what you can’t see.” A new nonprofit, “Measures for Justice,” is gathering data from around the country to allow citizens to compare and contrast their local justice systems with those of other jurisdictions. This sort of national data has been largely missing from policy debates over justice reform. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel filed this report about what she calls a “video game for criminal justice nerds.” What Jeff Sessions can learn from “Shots Fired." Fox’s new cop show reminds us that good policing emphasizes collaboration and trust between cops and the communities they service. Here is original TMP commentary from Ronald Davis, former director of the DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing. The heart wants what the heart wants, even in prison. Arthur Longworth, a Marshall Project contributing writer, is serving a life sentence without parole in Washington for a murder he committed three decades ago. Here he shares the details of a visit from his girlfriend, who says she wants to date other men who can offer her a traditional relationship. “She stands up when she sees me, but looks uncertain. Or maybe even uncomfortable, for the first time since we’ve known each other,” he writes. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
A good way to spend some free time this holiday weekend is to binge-listen to WBEZ’s “Every Other Hour” podcast. It’s a new multi-part series that features the voices behind Chicago’s gun crisis and their very raw life experiences. One episode, “When Shooting Feels ‘Like a Drug,’” invites a self-proclaimed gunman to explain why he’s so addicted to violence. Another installment titled “In Chicago, Gun Violence Hits African Americans Most—And It’s Getting Worse” introduces a 29-year-old, clearly frustrated, anti-gun activist who poses the question: “These parents that I am helping, their kids got killed, how do I know that your kid ain’t kill my people? How do I know?” — Simone Weichselbaum This week, the Shreveport Times in Louisiana released a five-part investigation into the proliferation of child pornography and the ways law enforcement is trying to fight it. Reporter Lex Talamo started her reporting for the series last August, interviewing 74 people, including law enforcement, victims, parents, and men convicted of sex crimes involving children. Among her many findings was the discovery that those who possess child pornography often face harsher penalties than people who physically assault children. She also explains how those who seek and share these images are often more savvy with technology than law enforcement, making them difficult to catch. — Alysia Santo There’s something poignant about this week’s The New York Times profile of Joe Arpaio, finally booted from office by Maricopa County voters last fall. The klieg lights he constantly trained on himself during his quarter century as America’s most notorious sheriff made his legal troubles — stemming, most recently, from ignoring a judge’s order to stop profiling Latino constituents — seem to his supporters like one more battle in the epic war between the hard-line America-first crowd and the soft-on-crime left. Now that his politics are ascendant as the Trump administration takes a hard line on immigration, those supporters are conspicuously absent. The fact that “His flip phone hardly rings. He has no driver to shuttle him around or assistants to cater to him,” and the prospect of him serving six months in jail on a criminal contempt of court charge — which might have been the source of great Schadenfreude on the left — now seems just, well, sad. — Beth Schwartzapfel Remember the language of the Second Amendment that reads: “unless they commit a crime punishable by more than a year in prison”? Neither do two men in Pennsylvania seeking to reclaim their gun rights after being convicted of nonviolent offenses 20 years ago. The Los Angeles Times relates how the Justice Department under President Trump is enforcing a federal gun ban just as its predecessors did. Meanwhile, Daniel Binderup and Julio Suarez, the men challenging the law, have formidable representation; Alan Gura, the lawyer who argued District of Columbia vs. Heller, the Supreme Court case that first recognized a personal right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. — Alex Tatusian Is there a worse punishment for a parent than the death of their child? Prosecutors across the country must decide whether to also bring criminal charges against gun-owning parents whose kids die in accidental shootings. A USA Today and Associated Press investigation found 152 cases between 2014 and 2015 in which children under 12 “either killed themselves or were mistakenly shot and killed by another child,” roughly half of which resulted in criminal consequences for the parents. Whether charges were brought was somewhat arbitrary. And according to some parents, it didn’t really matter — “It was already as bad as it was going to get.” — Christie Thompson |
|
— Our reader, Michelle Wolert, on our story about how Ray Spencer spent two decades in prison after he was falsely accused of molestation |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail126.suw13.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2017 7:08 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. |
|
When autism, child pornography, and the courts collide. It is unclear whether people with autism are over-represented among those prosecuted for downloading child pornography. But autism experts and the parents of men with autism are increasingly convinced that the disorder makes those who have it both naive about the evils of exploiting children online and less likely to ever become predators in the real world. Some courts are beginning to accept this defense. “The line between legal and illegal in the world of online pornography may be especially blurry for someone without an inherent understanding of social mores and taboos,” writes Anat Rubin, who reported for months for us on this sensitive topic. The “school” where no one ever fails a class and no one is truly prepared to graduate. A new survey of 2,000 federal inmates reveals a craving for educational opportunities that is unmet, even for inmates who are about to be released from the Bureau of Prisons. Inmates learn to crochet, for example, or to embrace geology by watching episodes of BBC’s “Planet Earth.” But getting skills or training that will translate into jobs on the outside? Not so much, and if the administration’s new proposed budget is adopted the problem is likely to get worse. TMP’s Justin George has our story. The problem with the Justice Department... is that it’s full of prosecutors. So that even when a president wants to implement reforms designed to level the playing field on criminal justice, institutional forces push back. Just ask Barack Obama. Here is original TMP commentary from Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. Meet Chris Blaylock, a bail bondsman tired of being demonized. He built a family business in New Jersey and then saw the bail industry there “reformed” to the point of extinction. Now he is fighting back. His argument is simple: “It’s not a crime if someone has the money to bail out their son and someone else doesn’t. And people are making that a crime. They are making defendants into victims,” Blaylock tells TMP’s Alysia Santo. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
As the price of nuts increases, millions of dollars of almonds, walnuts, and pistachios are being stolen. An article in this month’s edition of Outside magazine, by Peter Vigneron, recounts the confusion this has caused for farmers, the efforts of police, and the confluence of factors that make this nut thievery difficult to resolve. Companies and law enforcement recently held an “Emergency Nut Theft Summit,” and many believe the crimes are the work of a highly organized group. The FBI is now involved, yet theft remains a low priority for federal prosecutors, who prefer conspiracy or racketeering charges. “One might say that they prefer to crack the organization first, nuts second,” writes Vigneron. — Alysia Santo At the age of 19, Marlon Peterson was arrested for his role in a deadly robbery. After a decade behind bars, he went on graduate from New York University with a degree in organizational behavior and found The Precedential Group, a social justice consulting firm. In a TED Talk published Wednesday, Peterson makes an impassioned plea for society to rethink who among formerly incarcerated is worthy of investment. “...why is it that so many believe that only those who have been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses merit empathy and recognized humanity?” he asks the TED Talks crowd. “Criminal justice reform is human justice. Am I not human?” — Donovan X. Ramsey Two recent stories highlight the insidious practice of “body brokers” who earn a commission by funnelling desperate addicts to unlicensed treatment centers out of state. Both stories — an OC Register piece that focuses on California, and this Stat piece that looks at the practice in Florida — identify the Affordable Care Act as an unlikely cause. By making insurance more accessible, and by mandating that addiction care be covered, the law “has created a pot of money that’s being exploited by unscrupulous treatment centers,” Stat writes. When the drug users arrive for a “fresh start” in a new state, they discover the scheme is “nothing more than a puppy mill for insurance billing.” Too often they relapse, and — in two sad instances identified by Stat — die of an overdose, far from home. — Beth Schwartzapfel When people in Washington talk about criminal justice “reform,” chances are they are talking about mandatory minimum sentences. Of all the issues of policing, courts, prisons and probation, the congressional penchant for mandating rigid prison terms for whole categories of crime has become the litmus test that separates the proudly “tough on crime” from those who call themselves “smart on crime.” In a series of probing interviews over three days, NPR laid out the arguments pro and con: on Tuesday a law professor described how mandates led to racial disparities. On Wednesday an ex-prosecutor insisted that strict sentencing was more “uniform” and had helped bring down the crime rate. On Thursday another law professor poked holes in those claims. The series is more than the sum of its parts. — Bill Keller What would happen to urban law enforcement if more women ran big city police departments? Atlanta, under its new female police chief Erika Shields, is taking a crack at developing a more empathetic approach towards violent juvenile offenders. Atlanta Magazine profiles Shields and her ambitions to spread the gospel of compassion throughout the 1,850-officer force. “If we’re not getting the results that we need, then we have to do something differently,” she tells the magazine. Shields wants cops to identify young lawbreakers — under the age of 15 — to find ways to provide assistance versus just making an arrest. — Simone Weichselbaum |
|
— Our reader, Jeff Sexton, on our story about what happens when autism, child pornography, and the courts collide. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail123.suw17.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2017 7:06 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
|
|
Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
|
Mugged! When you combine old-fashioned American capitalism with a tolerance for prejudicial pretrial publicity you get the nation’s mugshot industry. It’s a tiny corner of the criminal justice-related economy that thrives on monetizing shame and prurient curiosity. Here’s how what started as a legitimate law enforcement tool — think “Most Wanted” posters at post offices — has become a legal headache in the digital world. In collaboration with The New York Times Sunday Review, Tim Stelloh filed this story for us. Left and right came together on criminal justice reform. Then Trump happened. When it comes to federal criminal justice reform legislation there seems to be much more pessimism than optimism on Capitol Hill these days. Everyone seems to agree that the bipartisan spirit of the recent past has waned. Everyone seems to disagree about who is to blame. And no one is sure whether Jeff Sessions’ presence at the Justice Department, as opposed to the Senate, is a good thing or a bad thing for the reform movement. In collaboration with The New Yorker, our Justin George has the story. Justice Department opens probe of private prison transport. Officials in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division are said to be investigating at least one man’s allegations of abuse by employees of the Tennessee-based company, Prisoner Transportation Services. Last week, the operator of another extradition company was charged with sexually assaulting three female prisoners and a DOJ email account has been set up to aid a federal probe into that incident. TMP’s Alysia Santo and Eli Hager continue our coverage of this virtually unregulated industry. The secret garden. Matt Helm was serving time in Folsom prison in California when he began to smuggle contraband. Sometimes it was a jalapeno pepper. Sometimes it was a green onion. And he wasn’t alone. Other prisoners smuggled other vegetables and fruits from the garden there. But they weren’t supposed to be gardening in the first place. They were supposed to be “landscaping.” Here’s the story of a little patch of freedom, of normalcy, within the confines of a brutal culture, all thanks to a guard who was willing to let the men nurture something under the open sky. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
A new investigation from the San Francisco Chronicle found that in the state’s shelters, child-like offenses are often treated as serious crimes. A cake fight becomes “inciting a riot,” poking someone with a candy cane turns into “assault with a deadly weapon.” In 2015 and 2016, over 370 foster kids were booked into juvenile detention after California shelters called the cops. For a system that’s supposed to support the state’s most traumatized kids, the reliance on law enforcement is especially concerning. — Christie Thompson In a frank conversation for The New York Times, innovative documentarian Erroll Morris probes attorney Christina Swarns about the role of “future dangerousness” — the often racially-tinged assessment that a defendant will remain a violent threat to society — in administering the death penalty. Swarns is best known for her defense of Duane Buck, whose late-90s death sentence the Supreme Court strongly rebuked in a stay this year. Powered by Morris’ infectious curiosity, the conversation ranges from Buck’s legal wranglings to portraits of major actors in the saga to philosophical musings on Trump’s immigration policy. But ultimately the conversation asks why the courts — and by extension, the public — are “perfectly willing to accept weak statistical arguments involving future dangerousness but … reject strong statistical arguments involving race and sentencing.” — Alex Tatusian Pegged to the anniversary of 1921’s Tulsa Race Riot, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wrote a fascinating column connecting spikes in “political racism” to acts of racial violence in American history. He also argued that a series of recent high-profile hate crimes are connected to the ascendence of Donald Trump in American politics. “Embedded in racism is an eliminationist impulse that grows out of the explicit call for exclusion,” Bouie wrote. “In the right environment, under the right conditions, the call to remove ‘others’ can become a drive to destroy them.” — Donovan X. Ramsey At a time not too long ago, a salacious sex assault trial that features a once beloved television icon would consume the news cycle well into the summer. In case you missed it, Bill Cosby has spent the last week inside a Pennsylvania courtroom listening to former Temple University basketball official Andrea Constand detail how he drugged and sexually abused her during the early 2000s. Constand is one of dozens of womenwho’ve publicly accused Cosby of abuse, and is the first person to stare him down at a criminal trial. Cosby is facing three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Constand. Need a recap? People Magazine’s crime vertical has in-depth coverage of the trial and its backstory. — Simone Weichselbaum Two employees of the Missouri parole board thought it would be fun to “lighten the mood and change it up” at board hearings by playing a little game amongst themselves, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. One of them would pick a word or song title of the day — armadillo, hootenanny, and “Hound Dog” were a few — and then earn “points” for working them into a hearing: one if they said it, two if they could prompt the prisoner to say it. The state DOC inspector general conducted an investigation into the practice last year, which the MacArthur Justice Center obtained through a records request. The report finds that “most times, it seemed the offender was being made fun of by the use of such words and song titles during the process,” but the board chair, who led the games, has so far retained his $85,204 per year position. — Beth Schwartzapfel |
|
— Our readers, Bill & Jen Foster-Walsh, on the evolution of mugshots. |
