FW: Our Weekend Highlights

[Dianne Tramutola-Lawson]

 

 

From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2015 7:07 AM
Subject: Our Weekend Highlights

 

 

Closing Argument The Week in Justice November 21, 2015

 

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.

 

STORY OF THE WEEK This week brought dollops of fresh evidence, and even some clarity, to the world of criminal justice. • The national crime wave that so many politicians have cited on the campaign trail? It doesn't exist. Violent crime is up in some places and down in others — and even in the jurisdictions where it's up, it's essentially back to the levels we saw five years ago. • The growing consensus that America locks up too many people? Here’s another data point to ponder. The United States incarcerates women at exceptional rates: The top 25 jurisdictions in the world — and 42 of the top 44 — are U.S. states. • Racial disparities in prison? Turns out the divide is narrowing among adults but widening among juveniles. • Hate crimes? Down overall last year — unless you are Muslim — and Lord only knows what this year's figures will bring. • The "war on police"? No data to support it, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told a House committee this week, even as the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled "The War on Police." • In favor of holding police accountable for misconduct? Don't put your faith in civilian review boards — an investigation this week reveals them to be mostly feckless. — Andrew Cohen THE BEST OF THE MARSHALL PROJECT Prisons in black and white. The good news from the latest national data is that racial disparities are narrowing among adult inmates in the nation’s prisons and jails. The bad news is that those disparities are getting worse in juvenile justice. And federal sentencing reforms aimed at opening alternatives to incarceration appear likely to help whites more than blacks. TMP’s Eli Hager crunched the numbers in the latest installment of our “Justice Lab.” The campaign to save capital punishment. Seven states since 2007 have repealed the death penalty, and executions in America in 2015 are at their lowest rate in a generation. But the political and legal movement isn’t all in one direction. Meet the people who want to save capital punishment in their states, by, among other things, speeding up capital appeals and making death rows more humane. By TMP’s Maurice Chammah. The Meaning of the Georgia Five. The last five executions in Georgia — including one on Thursday — have highlighted major problems with the state’s death penalty. From the misuse of DNA results to ineffective assistance of counsel to the execution of veterans with PTSD, these cases raise questions of fundamental fairness. Here is original TMP commentary from Sara Totonchi of the Southern Center for Human Rights. “This is all total speculation.” A veteran of the last great Supreme Court battle over capital punishment says it’s unwise to compare legal and political conditions today with the conditions that led to that 1972 decision, Furman v. Georgia, which briefly ended the death penalty in America. TMP’s Maurice Chammah interviewed Michael Meltsner, one of the few remaining lawyers responsible for bringing Furman to the justices. THE BEST OF THE REST Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. In the decades since state mental hospitals were emptied, jails have become the primary public institutions for dealing with mentally-ill Americans. The grim story of the care and treatment of these people is well documented, but an ongoing investigation by Mark Walker of the Argus Leader in South Dakota offers a uniquely thorough and granular look at what this means for mentally ill people in confinement today, from psychiatrist shortages to overwhelmed budgets to moments when the mentally ill have “no option but to plead guilty.” — Maurice Chammah When it comes to guns, race, and criminal justice, the Democratic presidential hopefuls are saying what their base loves to hear. “Black lives matter,” they’ve learned to say. We’ll pass gun-control legislation, they’ve promised at the debates. Yet as these pieces in The New Republic and The Daily Beast point out, saying “black lives matter” isn’t the same as having specific, nuanced proposals for grappling with race and criminal justice in America, nor having the will to fight if the current political moment fades. — Eli Hager Amid the ongoing debate about whether “the Ferguson Effect” is real, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams adds his important historical perspective in The New York Times. Adams was a New York City cop during the era when police routinely dispensed their own rough street justice with no oversight or consequences. (Their methods — called “shaking the tree” — were actually included in police academy training.) But “the era of darkness is over,” he says. “Police departments have no choice but to embrace the notion not only that scrutiny is inevitable, but also that it will lead to better policing.” — Beth Schwartzapfel President Barack Obama this week promised compassion for those fleeing ISIS, particularly the women and children seeking to emigrate here from Syria. The President also, remember, promised compassion for women and children who have come to America fleeing poverty and violence in Central America. But this Politico piece, fueled by statistics obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, reminds us that Obama’s pledge has been undermined by the deportation of thousands of immigrant children under age 16. All were ordered to leave the nation after a single immigration hearing held without the aid of a lawyer; at least 392 of them were under 14 years old. — Alysia Santo The 2011 murder of Mississippi dad Craig Anderson by a group of racist teenagers garnered national headlines as a modern-day lynching, the disturbing legacy of a history of hate. This Buzzfeed piece by Albert Samaha recounts the crime and its fallout in a tight narrative. But it also goes a step deeper, telling the story from the perspective of Anderson’s partner of 18 years and co-parent, James Bradfield. Bradfield describes in beautiful and terrible detail the grief and anger that disabled him from the moment he heard about the “accident” to the end of the last trial. The crime may have spoken volumes about Mississippi and entrenched racism, but it also tore apart the everyday life of one regular man. — Kirsten Danis

 

VERBATIM “Since December 2014, Georgia has executed a man whose drunk lawyer bungled the case, a man with intellectual disabilities, a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, and a woman who planned but did not actually commit murder.” — Executive Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights Sara J. Totonchi, on what’s wrong with Georgia’s death penalty Join the discussion

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