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Today In Criminal Justice
U.S. Death Penalty Numbers the Lowest in Decades
Indianapolis Chief Quits After Mayor's Justice Plan
Walmart Removes ‘Bulletproof’ Shirts, Not ‘Black Lives Matter’
High Officials Face Criminal Charges Over Flint Water
Promoting LGBTI Tolerance in Prison: The Hardest Challenge
Who Exactly is Eligible for Deportation Under Trump?
Soros Backed Winners in a ‘Handful’ of Prosecutors’ Races
Clinton Allies Blast FBI Email Probe: 'A Whole Lot of Nothing'
Obama Seeks to Lower Child Support Payments by Inmates
Girls in MD Juvenile System Get Long Terms for Minor Crimes
MA Probation Cause Sets Higher Bar for Federal Prosecutions
How ‘Arizona Border Recon’ Volunteers Patrol the Border
Top Story
U.S. Death Penalty Numbers the Lowest in DecadesThis year, 30 people were sentenced to death in the U.S., and 20 people were executed. Those numbers are the lowest in decades, says the Death Penalty Information Center, which advocates against capital punishment, NPR reports. The 2016 numbers fit with a multi-decade trend. Death sentences and executions have been declining steadily since the mid-1990s. This year generated seemingly contradictory information about how the public views capital punishment. Even as jurors have increasingly voted for life in prison instead of execution, voters in three states rejected propositions that would have eliminated the death penalty.
In California, Nebraska, and Oklahoma — states with widely varying electorates – people voted by large margins to retain the death penalty. Another trend is clearer than ever: For years, just a handful of states have accounted for most of the death sentences in America. In 2015 and 2016, Texas, Georgia and Missouri carried out 85 percent of executions. The geographical isolation of capital punishment goes down to the county level. This year, just 27 of the more than 3,000 U.S. counties were responsible for every death sentence this year. Even in states that impose the most death sentences, the overall trend away from capital punishment holds true. “Texas juries imposed only four new death sentences in 2016, and juries in Georgia and Missouri did not impose any [new death sentences] in 2015 or 2016,” the report notes. Overall, the number of people on death row – who are waiting to be executed after being sentenced to die – decreased this year, because the number of prisoners either dying in custody or having their sentences reversed outpaced the number of new death sentences. NPR Indianapolis Chief Quits After Mayor's Justice PlanOnly a year after his appointment was announced, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Chief Troy Riggs will resign this month to “pursue other opportunities,” said Mayor Joseph Hogsett, the Indianapolis Star reports. The resignation was a surprise, coming just days after Hogsett outlined a proposal for massive criminal justice reform, including a new jail and a more progressive approach for treating suspected criminals with issues of mental health and substance abuse. The proposed reform seemed to align with Riggs’ vision. The chief has sought to address the root problems of crime, betting that such solutions would turn back the tide of escalating violence in Indianapolis while improving the quality of life.
Perhaps Riggs’ most ambitious plans were first unveiled in 2014, when he worked as public safety director in the Mayor Greg Ballard administration. Riggs and Ballard poured more resources into six focus areas that produced a disproportionate amount of violent crime. This year, Riggs introduced smaller coverage areas for officers in some parts of the city, including the focus areas. The goal was to enhance the community’s trust with their officers while combatting violence. By placing a larger emphasis on warrant sweeps, the police department beefed up efforts to address drug and gun crime, reversing what Riggs called a community of drug dealers who had grown more powerful and emboldened. The city’s violence problem, which is most visibly shown in the number of killings, hasn’t receded. There have been 144 criminal homicides for the year, tied with last year’s count. Indianapolis Star Walmart Removes ‘Bulletproof’ Shirts, Not ‘Black Lives Matter’The president of the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest U.S. police organization, has asked Walmart to stop selling t-shirts and sweatshirts saying “Black Lives Matter” and “Bulletproof” on the store’s website. Walmart said it would remove the shirts which say “Bulletproof,” but not the “Black Lives Matter” shirts, reports the Washington Post. “Black Lives Matter,” the slogan and protest movement that emerged after the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and police-involved slayings in 2014, is seen as offensive by many in law enforcement. Breitbart.com said last week that Walmart was “selling Black Lives Matter clothing and other items,” though the merchandise is actually being sold through Walmart’s website by Old Glory Merchandise, a music and entertainment apparel dealer out of Connecticut.
FOP president Chuck Canterbury advised Walmart CEO C. Douglas McMillon that the Walmart website was selling “offensive shirts and sweatshirts,” and “I urge you to prohibit the use of the Walmart name and website for the retail sale of these products.” The Walmart site and Old Glory’s site also sell “Blue Lives Matter” shirts. Canterbury said he understood that a third party was selling the merchandise, but “I am concerned that allowing these articles to be sold in this way will damage your company’s good name amongst FOP members and other active and retired law enforcement officers.” Canterbury added, “Commercializing our differences will not help our local police and communities to build greater trust and respect for one another.” FOP director Jim Pasco said the issue was raised by union members who felt Walmart was selling anti-police items. “There are a lot of people who feel too many guns are sold,” he said. “Why not speak out against things that might be seen as fomenting violence, rather than things that commit violence?” The Washington Post High Officials Face Criminal Charges Over Flint WaterTwo former emergency financial managers, empowered by state law and appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration to run Flint, Michigan, face criminal charges for actions taken during their tenures that prosecutors say contributed to the city’s water crisis, reports the Detroit News. A yearlong Michigan Attorney General investigation into Flint’s water contamination issues has targeted the highest-ranking officials thus far. Yesterday, investigators announced charges against former emergency managers Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose, as well as a pair of former city officials. That brings the number of government officials charged in the crisis to 13. The probe also focused the harshest spotlight to date on Michigan’s emergency manager law and Snyder’s use of it.
Attorney General Bill Schuette aired harsh criticisms of the emergency manager system, which empowered Earley and Ambrose with broad authority over Flint to address the city’s crumbling finances, Schuette faulted what he called its “fixation” on financial figures over people as a main factor in creating the city’s long-running water issues. “This fixation has cost lives,” he said. “This fixation came at the expense of protecting the health and safety of Flint. … It’s all about numbers over people.” Earley and Ambrose face felony charges of false pretenses and conspiracy to commit false pretenses, as well as misconduct in office, a five-year felony. In addition, they face one-year misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty while in office. Detroit News Promoting LGBTI Tolerance in Prison: The Hardest ChallengeFor lesbian, gay. bisexual, transgender and intersex (LBGTI) inmates, prison authorities are the most important allies, writes Jeremiah Bourgeois, an inmate at a Washington State facility, in a commentary for TCR. At his prison, he writes, zero-tolerance policies towards harassment are making significant inroads against the culture of “hyper-masculinity” behind bars. The Crime Report Who Exactly is Eligible for Deportation Under Trump?A variety of crimes can get immigrants detained and deported, even after they have served a jail or prison sentence for the crime, and even if they are in the country legally, Stateline reports. While the federal government says it targets noncitizens who are serious or repeat offenders, immigrants with minor offenses often are deported. Immigrants with criminal records may soon come under increased scrutiny. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to immediately deport “the people that are criminal and have criminal records.” There are, he said, “a lot of these people, probably two million, it could even be three million, we are getting them out of our country.” Immigration advocates say those numbers are inflated, and point to figures that indicate most immigrants are being deported for minor crimes or for no crime at all.
First-generation immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than do U.S. citizens.
But for those who do commit crimes, it’s hard to get a clear picture of whether they are serious or misdemeanors, violent or nonviolent. Since 2014, the Department of Homeland Security has prioritized deporting noncitizens who pose a serious threat to public safety or national security — and from October 2014 through September 2015, of the 235,413 people who were deported, 59 percent had criminal convictions. Federal data on criminal deportees does not specify the crimes they’ve committed, or how many of them are undocumented. Technically, if someone is undocumented and entered the country after January 2014, they are considered a high priority for criminal deportation, even if they have committed no other offense. Further complicating matters: “Criminal alien” is not defined in U.S. immigration law or regulations, and the term is used broadly, says a September report by the Congressional Research Service. A criminal alien may be someone who is undocumented or an authorized immigrant who may or may not be deportable, depending on the crime he or she has committed. Stateline Soros Backed Winners in a ‘Handful’ of Prosecutors’ RacesAs part of his quest to overhaul the U.S. justice system, billionaire George Soros is targeting local prosecutor races like the one in Houston’s Harris County. Morris Overstreet, a former judge who was the first African American elected to statewide office in Texas since Reconstruction, was one of the beneficiaries. Overstreet received $100,000 from Soros in the race for Harris County district attorney. In a rare lost bet for Soros, Overstreet was defeated easily in the Democratic primary in March by Kim Ogg, a white woman from a prominent political family who has practiced law in Harris County for 30 years, reports the Daily Signal.
Soros pledged allegiance to Ogg, but she insists she doesn’t have a mandate from Soros. In fact, she says she’s never spoken to or met with him. In most of the dozen prosecutor races he helped finance, Soros did not coordinate at all with the candidate he supported, they said. Instead, he operated independently by giving money to various state-level political action committees (PACs) and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each identified by a variation on “Safety and Justice.” David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University professor and former federal prosecutor, said that only a “handful” of races for the 2,500 district attorneys’ offices nationwide included candidates with “reform-oriented” agendas, and of those that did, most did not involve contributions from Soros. Daily Signal Clinton Allies Blast FBI Email Probe: 'A Whole Lot of Nothing'Hillary Clinton’s allies blasted the FBI after court filings were unsealed showing more details about the bureau’s basis for renewing its probe into Clinton’s private email setup and roiling the presidential race shortly before Election Day, Politico reports. Clinton’s camp says the FBI had remarkably little evidence to go on when it sought a search warrant on Oct. 30 to look for classified emails on a Dell laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The FBI says it discovered Clinton-related emails on the computer after seizing it during a probe over Weiner’s alleged sexually explicit online exchanges with a minor.
The FBI said in an affidavit that the laptop was likely to contain evidence of illegal possession of classified information, apparently by Weiner or Abedin, although neither has been charged. Clinton lawyer David Kendall said the FBI affidavit release “highlights the extraordinary impropriety of [FBI] Director [James] Comey’s October 28 letter … which produced devastating but predictable damage politically and which was both legally unauthorized and factually unnecessary.” Said ex-Clinton aide Brian Fallon, “It is salt in the wound to see (the) FBI rationale was this flimsy.” Randol Schoenberg, a California lawyer who went to court to get the records unsealed, said, “This was a whole lot of nothing. I was shocked. When they said they got a search warrant, I expected there to be more than nothing. No evidence at all they would find any evidence of a crime … There was no indication they would find anything, and they didn’t find anything.” Politico Obama Seeks to Lower Child Support Payments by InmatesThe Obama administration has issued a new federal regulation that will allow incarcerated parents to lower their child-support payments while they are in prison, the Marshall Project reports. The rule, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, requires states to notify parents incarcerated for more than six months of their right to ask child support agencies for a temporary reduction in payments. Many states have considered incarceration a form of “voluntary” impoverishment and not a valid excuse for missing child-support payments. State prison jobs pay a median wage of about 20 cents an hour, meaning that most incarcerated parents cannot feasibly pay the full amount of their child-support obligation, and end up tens of thousands of dollars in debt by the time they get out.
The new rule is intended to keep these mostly poor fathers out of severe debt so they are less tempted back into crime after they are released. Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), introduced legislation in 2015 to block Obama’s new regulation, arguing that it would lead to more single mothers on welfare, which would be a greater burden on taxpayers. The Trump administration could resume efforts to undo the regulation. The Marshall Project Girls in MD Juvenile System Get Long Terms for Minor CrimesYoung women are disproportionately locked up for misdemeanors, which are low-level offenses, in Maryland’s juvenile justice system. They are more likely than boys to be taken before a judge for probation offenses such as running away, breaking curfew and defying their parents, the Baltimore Sun reports. Once in the system, they are often detained longer. At the state’s most secure facilities, they are committed 25 percent longer, on average, than boys, even though girls are less likely to be there for felonies or violent offenses. There are racial disparities as well. African-American girls in Maryland are nearly five times more likely to be referred to the juvenile justice system than white girls. That’s twice the national disparity.
Juvenile advocates and public defenders say facilities for girls are dilapidated or unsafe. They offer fewer vocational and treatment options, compared with the facilities for young men, even though the young women are more likely to have come from fractured families, experienced abuse or neglect, suffered from mental illness, or been victims of sex trafficking. “It’s a disgrace,” said Debbie St. Jean, director of the Juvenile Protection Division in the state public defender’s office, a specialized unit that monitors the conditions of confinement. “Girls don’t have anywhere near the same resources that boys do.” Advocates and attorneys say they are not only concerned about conditions in state-run facilities but in treatment programs and group homes that contract with the Department of Juvenile Services to house and rehabilitate young offenders. The department has stopped sending young women to one residential treatment center and one group home for failing to comply with departmental polices and standards, officials said. The juveniles have been diverted to other facilities. Baltimore Sun MA Probation Cause Sets Higher Bar for Federal ProsecutionsThe federal appeals court decision this week overturning the high-profile convictions of former Massachusetts Probation Department officials helped carve a new landscape for prosecutors, one that may make U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz a bit more selective in indicting public officials as she finishes out her term, reports the Boston Globe. “The [appeals court] has set the same cautionary tone the U.S. Supreme Court has recently offered, that federal prosecutors should not be trying to make a determination of what is good government or bad government,” said former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan, a Republican.
This week’s decision, as well as a June Supreme Court ruling involving influence-peddling in Virginia, lambasted prosecutors for attempting to stretch federal laws to criminalize local politics, setting a higher bar for federal prosecutions of actions that are typically regulated at the state level. The two decisions send up cautions to federal prosecutors taking aim at public officials. Ortiz’s office has been investigating whether a state senator used his office for personal gain, and separately has been pursuing wrongdoing by local labor leaders. Ortiz had declared that the probation convictions would put an end to a pay-to-play culture in state government. Monday’s decision overturning those convictions found that federal prosecutors overstepped their authority by trying to use federal laws to criminalize state political affairs, which ought to be regulated at the state level. Tom Kiley, a Boston lawyer, said, “What happens every few years is the U.S. Supreme Court takes a case and says ‘No, you are pushing the envelope too far,’ and what is clear is the [appeals court] in the [probation] case said ‘No, you’re going too far.’ ” Boston Globe How ‘Arizona Border Recon’ Volunteers Patrol the BorderTim Foley, 57, lost his construction job and his home, and moved to Sasabe, Az., on the U.S.-Mexico border, to start his own citizens’ border patrol. Foley calls his group, Arizona Border Recon, a nongovernmental organization, but others label it a militia and scoff at the notion of private individuals, many of them armed, patrolling the border, the New York Times reports. Foley argues that there is a war going on at the southern border, even though the number of apprehensions has declined precipitously to about 409,000 in the year that ended Sept. 30 from 1.2 million in the 2005 fiscal year. He served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division before he went to work in construction, where he came away believing that the rules of employment and immigration were broken.
The U.S. Border Patrol operates under a “shift mentality,” their responsibilities limited by time and distance, he said. Many agents are assigned to the station in Tucson, more than an hour away. “When they’re coming down,” Foley said, “they’re being reactive” to an image on a video camera or an alert from a ground sensor. Foley runs background checks on volunteers and verifies their military records, but there is no government or public oversight over who joins his group or any of the militia organizations operating on the southern border. Most of the group’s members are either veterans or retired law enforcement officers. They are volunteers who have been trained to read the signs that migrants leave in the wild — a snapped twig, for instance, or the characteristic print of a piece of carpet glued to the bottom of a migrant’s shoe to complicate tracking efforts. New York Times | |
| | On every business day, The Crime Report (TCR) and Criminal Justice Journalists (CJJ) provide a summary of the nation's top crime and justice news stories with Internet links commentary, and New & Notable research in the field. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the Langeloth Foundation and the Urban Institute. Today's report was prepared by Ted Gest and Alice Popovici. Please send comments or questions to alice@thecrimereport.org. | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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