| | |
Today In Criminal Justice
In Search of Profits: The Outsourced Prosecutor
Could Release of Michael Brown Photos Provoke Violence?
Body Cameras Reduce Police Use of Force in Tampa
Federal Agencies Disagree on Sexual Assault Definition
CO Sheriff Jailed on Charge of Sexually Assaulting Suspect
Critics Complain of 'Astounding' Baltimore Air Surveillance
NYPD Decides to Keep Officer Discipline Info Secret
Trump ‘Softening’ Immigration Stance? Backers Don’t Care
Are Brain Problems a Common Denominator in Mass Murders?
Fentanyl Suspected in 75 Indiana, Ohio Drug Overdoses
Missouri Court Rules Most Stealing No Longer a Felony
National Exoneration Registry Becomes a Joint Project
Top Story
In Search of Profits: The Outsourced ProsecutorA month after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, MO police officer, the Department of Justice launched an investigation that exposed the Ferguson Police Department's questionable efforts to generate revenue for the city. But an equally serious issue was overlooked---the role of local prosecutor Stephanie Karr, who was hired through a competitive bidding system aimed also at maximizing revenue. A study by Maybell Romero of J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University says these "profit-based" practices of outsourcing prosecutions increasingly threaten the fair administration of justice in many jurisdictions around the U.S. The Crime Report Could Release of Michael Brown Photos Provoke Violence?Attorneys for the police and prosecutor that oversaw the investigation of Michael Brown's 2014 death in Ferguson asked a judge to consider blocking the release of "grisly" photographs of the black 18-year-old's body to his family's attorneys, worried they could prompt violence if leaked, says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The St. Louis County counselor's office filed that request Tuesday with a federal judge presiding over the wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Brown's parents. U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber had rejected a separate request by Brown's mother to broaden who can see sensitive grand jury details related to her son's death.
An attorney for the county's prosecutor and police department said the photographs of Brown's corpse on the street, during his autopsy and in the morgue could rekindle the violence that accompanied protests of Brown's death. "These particular grisly images evoke a visceral reaction which may provoke unbridled violence," Linda Wasserman wrote, asking Webber to vet the photos privately. Webber had agreed to let no more than two attorneys for each of Brown's parents and for the defense see testimony and the names of witnesses from the secret St. Louis County proceedings involving Brown's death. St. Louis Post-Dispatch Body Cameras Reduce Police Use of Force in TampaTampa police officers who wear body cameras are less likely to use force than their counterparts who do not wear them, a University of South Florida study suggests. Results of the two-year study that examined the effect of the cameras on police behavior were released yesterday, a day before the Tampa City Council is scheduled to discuss the department's use of them, the Tampa Bay Times reports. The Tampa Police Department outfitted 60 of its patrol officers with the devices early last year. The study compared them with another group of 60 who did not wear cameras.
The frequency with which officers who wore cameras used force decreased by 8.4 percent in the year after the cameras were introduced. At the same time, officers who did not wear the cameras showed a 3.4 percent increase in use of force incidents." "Ultimately, the results from this study contribute to the growing body of evidence in support of the utility of body-worn cameras to reduce police response-to-resistance," the study's authors wrote. The reduction among the 60 officers who wore cameras amounts to about 20 fewer incidents of physical force per year. While the study suggests body cameras may help reduce bad encounters between police and citizens, it cautions that community policing strategies and better officer training are also essential to preventing such encounters. The authors were criminologists Wesley Jennings and Lorie Fridell, and Mathew Lynch of the Urban Institute. Tampa Bay Times Federal Agencies Disagree on Sexual Assault DefinitionFederal agencies don't agree on a uniform definition of sexual assault, and that has led to dramatically different estimates on the frequency of sexual violence in the U.S., says a new report from the Government Accountability Office quoted by Mother Jones. With different definitions of rape, government estimates can vary widely. In 2011, different federal agency estimates ranged from 244,190 cases of rape or sexual-assault victimizations to 1.92 million victims of rape or attempted rape. The agencies do not make it clear to the public how they define sexual assault. That's a problem, the report notes, because data are "critical" for both policymakers and the public to understand and address these crimes. "The bottom line is that this can all lead to confusion," said Gretta Goodwin, acting GAO director. "We are just asking that there be more transparency about the data and what it means."
The Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Defense manage at least 10 efforts to collect data. The problems begin in how sexual violence is described and categorized. Four of six data collection efforts that measured rape considered whether actual physical force was used, but the other two did not. This in part explains why yearly estimates of the number of rapes have ranged so widely. Differences in data collection are partly due to the priorities each agency has in analyzing their data, says criminologist Janet Lauritsen of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The Department of Health and Human Services emphasizes the number of victims of sexual violence in order to assess the health impact on victims, but DOJ is more concerned with identifying the number of incidents of sexual violence so it can respond to cases of sexual violence more effectively. Mother Jones CO Sheriff Jailed on Charge of Sexually Assaulting SuspectA judge set a $250,000 bond for Sedgwick County, Co., Sheriff Tom Hanna after he was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a "developmentally delayed" woman in his home while he was supposed to be transporting her to jail, reports the Denver Post. According to an arrest affidavit, the female inmate said the sheriff took her to his home and asked her if she wanted to make $60, saying, “I just want sex.” Hanna, 43, appeared in court yesterday wearing orange jail clothing and ankle and wrist chains.
A judge assigned District Attorney George Brauchler of the 18th Judicial District as special prosecutor in the case after the local prosecutor, Brittny Lewton, requested it because her office often had worked with the sheriff. “To say that this was awkward or uncomfortable would certainly be an understatement,” Lewton said. Hanna was arrested Tuesday at his office while dressed in “full duty gear” and surrendered peacefully. Hanna said he is in the middle of a divorce and has two foster children with his soon-to-be ex-wife. The Denver Post Critics Complain of 'Astounding' Baltimore Air SurveillanceThe revelation that a private company has been conducting secret aerial surveillance on behalf of the Baltimore Police Department — collecting and storing footage from city neighborhoods — is causing confusion, concern, and outrage among elected officials and civil liberties advocates, reports the Baltimore Sun. Some demanded an immediate stop to the program pending a full, public accounting of its capabilities and its use in the city to date, including in the prosecution of crimes. Some called it "astounding" in its ability to intrude on individual privacy rights, and legally questionable in terms of constitutional law. Others did not fault the program but said it should have been disclosed publicly before it began in January. The program — in which Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems has for months been testing sophisticated surveillance cameras aboard a small Cessna airplane flying high above the city — was disclosed Tuesday by Bloomberg Businessweek, which was given exclusive access to the company's testing.
The arrangement was kept secret in part because it never appeared before the city's spending board, paid for instead through private donations handled by the nonprofit Baltimore Community Foundation. T.J. Smith, a police spokesman, confirmed that the company had conducted 100 hours of surveillance in January and February and 200 hours of surveillance between June and this month. It will continue conducting surveillance for another several weeks before the Police Department evaluates its effectiveness and decides whether to continue the program, he said. He took issue with calling the program "secret surveillance," suggesting there was no need for the department to make it public. He likened the program to an expansion of the city's existing CitiWatch system of street-level cameras. The Baltimore Sun NYPD Decides to Keep Officer Discipline Info SecretCiting a clause in a 40-year-old law, the New York Police Department has decided to keep records regarding the discipline of officers under lock and key and will no longer release the information to the public, reports the New York Daily News. Critics say the policy change flies in the face of openness claims by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio. It raises concerns that the outcomes of department trials could be cloaked in secrecy, even proceedings in headline-grabbing cases like the chokehold death of Eric Garner. “I think it’s part of a larger pattern of secrecy by the NYPD,” said Adam Marshall of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “It’s hard to imagine information more in the public interest, and the public interest in determining what has happened in these types of adjudications is incredibly important.”
For decades, reporters have had access to a “Personnel Orders” clipboard hanging in the department’s public information office. It listed administrative cases closed out either by a plea deal or by an internal trial. It also listed promotions and retirements. The clipboard has not been updated since April, when an order dated March 31 was posted. At the time, the NYPD told the News it was saving paper. This week, the NYPD changed the story, saying a cop’s disciplinary record was protected by section 50-a of the 1976 state Civil Rights Law. Asked what prompted the shift, Deputy Chief Edward Mullen, a police spokesman, said “somebody” in the police department’s Legal Bureau realized that, for years, it had been giving out information it should not have. New York Daily News Trump ‘Softening’ Immigration Stance? Backers Don’t CareAs prominent Republicans try to determine whether Donald Trump has changed his mind about mass deportations, Babs Buffington is confident that the GOP presidential nominee hasn’t shifted, but it’s not a big deal if he has, as long as he builds a wall along the southern border, the Washington Post reports. “He’s calmed it down, a little bit, but he’s still going,” said Buffington, 75, who attended a Trump campaign rally in Tampa yesterday. “He’s still going to build the wall.”
Trump has been signaling for days that he might be open to a “softening” of one of his most extreme immigration positions and no longer call for the deportation of an estimated 11 million immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally. He and his aides seemed to be testing the waters, setting off alarm bells among some conservatives who have rallied around his hard-line immigration stance. Judging from many rally-goers in Tampa and at an event Tuesday in Austin, many rank-and-file voters will give Trump broad latitude to alter the parameters of his immigration policies. “He always said that as he got closer to November he’d get into more details. Now we’re seeing that,” said Ahava Van Camp, who attended the Tampa rally. "It’s not a pivot. He’s on second base and getting closer to home.” Another attendee mentioned Trump's appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News Channel Monday night, when Trump said that he would do “the same thing” that President Obama has done when it comes to illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes. The Washington Post Are Brain Problems a Common Denominator in Mass Murders?The modern era of mass shootings began 50 years ago this month when 25-year-old Charles Whitman opened fire atop the University of Texas Tower in Austin, killing 14 people and wounding 32 others before he was shot dead by police. Later analysis found that a brain tumor "could have contributed to his inability to control his actions and emotions," writes columnist Brian Dickerson in the Detroit Free Press. Dickerson asked neuroscientist David Eagleman, who wrote about the Whitman case, if brain deficits or deformities might not be the common denominator in mass murders popularly attributed to terrorist organizations or the proliferation of assault weapons.
“It is probably the case, more often than not, that there is something really wrong with these people’s brains,” Eagleman said. “We just don’t have the data.” Of the 129 individuals (all but three were male) responsible for mass shootings on U.S. soil since Whitman’s 1966 attack, 73 (or well over half) died at or near the scene, usually by their own hand. In many cases, the perpetrators had complained of delusions, disembodied voices or other phenomena associated with psychotic illness. Dickerson asks, "Is it a coincidence that so many shooters who took their own lives did so by obliterating the same organ — the brain — to which they traced whatever urgent impulse compelled them?" The columnist concludes: If some neurological conditions are like time bombs waiting to go off, shouldn't we be searching for them as zealously as we search for actual explosives? Detroit Free Press Fentanyl Suspected in 75 Indiana, Ohio Drug OverdosesAuthorities in Indiana and Ohio are on alert after a supercharged form of heroin is suspected of causing 50 overdoses since Tuesday and more than 75 total since Friday, USA Today reports. Cincinnati saw a spike in overdoses over the weekend when the Hamilton County Heroin Coalition reported more than 30 overdoses Monday. Since Tuesday, 33 more people have overdosed in Cincinnati, including one fatal overdose.
In Jennings County, In., officials responded to 14 overdoses late Tuesday and early Wednesday, according to the Jennings County Sheriff's Department and Seymour Police. One was fatal. Authorities are investigating to see if a specific source of heroin was tainted or cut with something that caused the users to overdose. Law enforcement officials suspect the heroin was laced with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid painkiller used to treat patients recovering after surgery. Fentanyl is 50 times more powerful than heroin. A similar cluster of overdoses occurred Aug. 15 in Huntington, W. Va., where 27 people overdosed within five hours, one fatally. USA Today Missouri Court Rules Most Stealing No Longer a FelonyThe Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling that had the effect of making most stealing offenses no longer felonies, thanks to an apparently inadvertent change to state law in 2002. The far-reaching decision sent criminal defense attorneys across the state scrambling, Talking Points Memo reports. The case, State v. Bazell, was brought by a woman who had been convicted of several felonies for stealing firearms in a burglary case. The court said the firearm felonies should be knocked down to misdemeanors because a portion of the state's criminal code designating certain types of offenses as felonies is written in a way that doesn’t make it applicable to the state’s definition of stealing.
“If the words are clear, the Court must apply the plain meaning of the law,” the opinion said. “When the meaning of a statute is clear, the Court should not employ canons of construction to achieve a desired result.” Because of the ruling, Missourians who have been charged with felonies for a number of types of stealing offenses stand to have their convictions knocked down to misdemeanors, according to Bazell's attorney, Ellen Flottman of the Missouri State Public Defender System. Flottman said the opinion was “very broad” and applies not just to firearm charges involved in the case, but to an assortment of stealing crimes previously treated as felonies in the criminal code. “Those are going to be misdemeanors as well,” she said. Talking Points Memo National Exoneration Registry Becomes a Joint ProjectThe National Registry of Exonerations, which has been a project of the University of Michigan Law School since 2012, next month will become a joint project of that school with the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California at Irvine and the Michigan State University College of Law. The registry provides detailed information about every known U.S. exoneration since 1989, which it defines as cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and was later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. The registry has documented 1,868 cases so far.
Simon Cole, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and director of the Newkirk Center at Irvine, will become the registry director. Barbara O'Brien, Professor of Law at Michigan State University, will become editor, and Catherine Grosso, also a law professor at Michigan State, will be an associate editor. Law Prof. Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan, who has directed the registry and was its co-founder, will become Senior Editor. Senior Researcher Maurice Possley and Research Fellow Klara Stephens will retain their roles. The National Registry of Exonerations | |
| | 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 Adam Wisnieski. Please send comments or questions to alice@thecrimereport.org. | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| |
|
|
