FW: Our Weekly Highlights
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail92.atl91.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, March 05, 2016 7:08 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Andrew Cohen |
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Story of the Week Donald Trump has never held public office, never cast a vote on the floor of a legislature, never authored a law review article, and so far has failed to offer for public consumption any specific platform on criminal justice. What little we know about his views on the subject journalists have gleaned from brief comments he's made over the years. From those remarks it’s hard to avoid this conclusion: a Trump administration isn't just going to halt the bipartisan reform movement that has gained momentum over the past five years, it's going to try to reverse it. Trump says he's not just in favor of the death penalty, for example, but that lethal injection is too "comfortable." He's not just in favor of the harsh prison sentences that exist today, he thinks they should be harsher. The "war on drugs" hasn't been a costly failure that should end, it needs instead to be amped up. The police are victims, not too-frequent perpetrators of injustice. And so on. It's true, as many observers noted this week, that a president can only do so much to affect state criminal justice systems. But it is also true a president gets to appoint an attorney general and otherwise shape the Justice Department, direct money (or not) toward state justice programs, and nominate federal judges who share his or her worldview. Poll after poll tell us that Americans want to reduce mass incarceration. Trump seems to be telling us he wants to expand it. — Andrew Cohen
Anatomy of doubt. The award-winning piece we published with ProPublica in December, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” told the horrifying story of one woman’s rape allegation, recantation, and subsequent ordeal at the hands of both police and loved ones. Now there’s a powerful retelling of the story by This American Life. TMP’s Ken Armstrong joins with This American Life’s Ira Glass and Robyn Semien for a tightly-woven podcast. Rodney King, 25 years later. What have we learned since Rodney King was beaten by police in California? Not nearly enough, says Jill Leovy, the author of “Ghettoside,” the revelatory book about homicide in Los Angeles. Some perspective? “Rodney King is in the lineage of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Trayvon Martin — that lineage of violation,” The Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. told us this week. What prison guards really think about their jobs. They think they are underpaid, disrespected, and underappreciated for the dangerous work they do. They are often ferocious in their comments about the inmates they are entrusted with. And they’ve taken to social media and online forums to communicate with (and complain to) one another about the trials and tribulations of their jobs behind bars. TMP’s Alysia Santo brought us the story. Five things you need to know about the 80 “youth prisons” still operating in America. The number of children held in confinement has been cut in half over the past 15 years, but 36,000 or so teenagers remain incarcerated in dangerous facilities often isolated from the home communities of the young offenders. But alternatives are expensive and some officials say the prisons should be kept open and full to ensure public safety. TMP’s Eli Hager dug into a report issued earlier this week. Welcome to “The Shithouse,” where inmates throw feces at guards. When convicted murderer Jeremy Busby entered the “administrative segregation” (read: solitary confinement) unit of an East Texas jail, he had no idea that the combination of mental illness and isolated detention would cause men to systematically use their own feces as both an expression of their frustration and as a weapon against guards. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series.
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. In a prickly rebuke to what’s become dogma, Counterpunch challenges everything we thought we knew about the Boston priest sex abuse scandal. In the wake of “Spotlight”’s win at the Oscars, JoAnn Wypijewski raises serious questions about the cases against Father Paul Shanley and Father Gordon MacRae, both serving prison terms for child molestation as a result of the Boston Globe’s reporting, which Wypijewski suggests sparked a witch hunt. “By their nature, moral panics are hysterical,” she writes. — Beth Schwartzapfel This week, Jezebel noticed that some promoters were advertising a triathlon held on the grounds of Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison. A few hours after the website published a scathing rundown of all the scandals that have plagued the prison in recent years, the promoters cancelled the race and took down their website. Jezebel’s Anna Merlan chronicled the public backtrack (she called it a “delayed bout of common sense”) in real time. — Maurice Chammah Deborah Shelton provides smart background at the Chicago Reporter on Cook County prosecutor Anita Alvarez and the grassroots movement to unseat her in an election on March 15th. Activists claim Alvarez, who prides herself on being tough on gun violence, has failed to effectively prosecute cops involved in controversial shootings, like the ones that took the lives of Laquan McDonald and Rekia Boyd. Is concern over police accountability enough to make voters participate in a notoriously low-turnout election? And will those who do vote press to kick Alvarez out of office? — Christie Thompson Both NPR and Mother Jones this week covered an intriguing new study about how Black Lives Matter has effectively steered the politics of race and policing. By poring through more than 40 million tweets, the researchers concluded that a band of social-media activists have turned essentially local incidents into national stories; broken from the 1960’s model of building a movement through old media; and made explicit what so often is ignored — that there are an awful lot of black voices in this country. — Eli Hager For protesters at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies, exercises in free speech are often challenged, sometimes violently. This week, The Intercept reminded us that the suppression of dissenting voices at political rallies typically is legal. Thanks to a 2012 amendment to federal law, “knowingly” disrupting government functions guarded by the Secret Service is punishable by up to a year in prison, meaning Trump protesters can be removed and charged even though they are arguably exercising First Amendment rights. — Alysia Santo |
— Kaonashi Bellard, on the story of Purple Heart honoree Manuel Babbitt, executed for murder in 1999. His life was turned into an Oscar-nominated short documentary. |
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail4.suw15.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
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The report out this week that chronicles the costs of wrongful convictions in California reminds me of the strident defense of America's criminal justice system written for The Marshall Project in 2014 by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The system, he argued, was a series of "sensible trade offs" worthy of respect. If that's true, the "trade off" surely is more expensive than most of us realize. In California alone taxpayers paid at least an extra $282 million from 1989 to 2012 on flawed criminal cases, 692 of them. The economic tally doesn't count the thousands of years the wrongfully convicted can never get back. It doesn’t account for men like Tim Atkins, who spent 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit but who has been refused compensation by California officials. Nor does the figure account for the human costs of wrongful convictions in other states; for men like Han Tak Lee, age 81, who was wrongly imprisoned for 24 years and how is asking New York officials for help to live in subsidized housing. And it surely doesn't account for the perpetual struggle of people like Dan and Fran Keller, who cannot convince Texas officials to officially "exonerate" them so they can more easily find jobs and housing. For these people, and countless others across the country, the "trade off" Judge Wilkinson heralded in our flawed justice system is something they surely never bargained for. – Andrew Cohen |
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The first time Texas killed one of my clients. “Reading Marvin’s story was like sifting through a pile of broken ceramic. I wanted to piece the splintered bits together, to reconstruct Marvin’s human image from the fragments,” writes Burke Butler, a young capital defense attorney in Texas. Through candid conversations with his friends and family, the young lawyer un-peels the layers of the doomed life of her client both before and after Texas executed him for murder. Re-arrested Development: seven things to know about repeat offenders. Nearly half of the federal offenders released from prison or placed on probation in 2005 were re-arrested within eight years, a U.S. Sentencing Commission report reveals. Older federal inmates were far less likely to get back in trouble and recidivism rates at the state level continue to be higher than they are for federal prisoners. TMP’s editor-in-chief Bill Keller analyzed the numbers and what they might portend for the next round of debate over federal sentencing reform. Remembering Robert Knott. The severely mentally ill man hanged himself in his prison cell at the “Supermax” facility in Colorado in September 2013 after years of inadequate care and treatment by federal prison officials. When his estate sued the feds for damages it took the Justice Department just two weeks to cut a deal. If you read the complaint you’ll understand why. Here is original TMP commentary on a case the federal government wanted to make sure never got close to trial. Regrets from a juror who helped send a man to death row. Sven Berger sat on a Texas jury that convicted a man of murder and decided he should die for his crime. But Berger now says he has doubts about that capital sentence, especially after seeing evidence about the defendant that was never presented at trial. Here is the latest installment of our “Life Inside” series chronicling the criminal justice system from the perspective of those inside it. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
A lot has been written about the damage done by junk science in our criminal courts. But this week Science Magazine looked at the work ahead – at what must happen to replace preposterous, sweeping claims (only one shoe in the whole world could have left that print) with hard, defensible numbers. It’s going to take the creation of massive, sophisticated databases and the teaching of statistical literacy to judges, among other steps. So a lot of work, a lot of will, a lot of money. We’ll see. — Ken Armstrong A damning Washington Post investigation this week revealed that D.C. police routinely cite their “training and experience” — rather than specific evidence of a crime — as justification for conducting drug raids. They find no contraband whatsoever in almost half of these searches, about 99 percent of which take place in black neighborhoods. The piece is a reminder that the most zealous tactics of the war on drugs are hardly behind us — and that black Americans are rightfully angry about everyday policing. — Eli Hager The five teenagers accused of raping an 18-year-old woman in Brownsville, New York, park turned out to be innocent but the fact that they were even charged with a sex crime will likely stigmatize the boys for the rest of their lives, wrote Debora Silberman, a public defender who represented one of the teens. Her client was rejected from an after-school program and forced to leave his home to escape the media following his arrest, and Google searches of his name are sure to haunt him without end. — Alysia Santo In this riveting hour of audio at Transom, Samantha Broun recounts a brutal attack her mother suffered at the hands of a stranger in 1994. The attacker’s life sentence had been commuted just weeks before the attack and Broun dramatically testified in Harrisburg in support of a drastic tightening of the state’s sentencing, parole, and commutation policies. The piece traces her personal journey as she discovers decades laters she’s not yet ready to forgive the assailant but does regret the political fallout from his crimes. — Beth Schwartzapfel |
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— Thomas Andrews, on kids being accused of sex crimes. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail34.us4.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2016 7:06 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Pedro Burgos and Tom Meagher |
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Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
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A centrist former prosecutor is Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Merrick Garland was chosen on Wednesday to replace Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. As chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, his most important cases involved terrorism and on the role of money in politics. He’s described as having a “moderate, case-by-case approach.” He also supervised the prosecution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, calling his work “the most important thing I have ever done in my life,” in a case that showed his skepticism about the presumption of innocence. And in his relatively few criminal justice cases, “Judge Garland rarely votes in favor of criminal defendants’ appeals of their convictions.” All of this is why, for some critics, he’s considered “to the right of Scalia” on criminal justice, especially on detainee rights, and why they might not be disappointed if Senate Republicans make good on their promise to deny him a hearing. Watch the full nomination announcement here. — Pedro Burgos |
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Should hard-line prosecutors be nervous? Incumbents tend to be shoo-ins in primary elections, but after two prosecutors in cities with high-profile police shootings lost in this week’s primaries, some wonder if there are more upsets to come. More importantly, do the losses of Anita Alvarez and Tim McGinty signal that it’s becoming less politically wise to campaign solely on a record of being tough on criminals? The radio show that reunited inmates and families. “Calls From Home,” a weekly radio show hosted by a small Kentucky station, allows the families of incarcerated men and women to record brief audio greetings so that inmates can hear their loved ones. TMP’s Lisa Iaboni brings us the story of “restorative radio,” which has generated a series of prison visits that reunite families, even if just for a few hours. My memories of being in prison with Whitey Bulger. In the latest installment of our “Life Inside” series with VICE, a former prisoner who lived on the same unit as the notorious leader of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang remembers the “pale, white-haired geezer in a wheelchair.” |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
We often read stories of sexual harassment and assault in the military. But what goes on in America’s national parks is not as well covered. That’s just one reason I found this longread on the “dangerous culture” of male entitlement, sexual harassment, and retaliation within the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture so gripping. — Blair Hickman In an era of historically low crime, The New York Times is reporting on killings in one precinct of the Bronx in order to shed light on why such violence persists in certain pockets of the city. Those reasons, which include a lack of trust in law enforcement and a social system of street justice, become clear through the story of the murder of 20-year-old Freddy Collazo, who spent years witnessing others in his community die violently before he met the same fate this February. — Alysia Santo Yes, shows like “CSI” have given the public an unrealistic notion of forensic science’s capabilities. But what of other shows — for example, “Castle” — that depict police misconduct in ways that make it justifiable, or even funny? Robin Barton, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, writes in The Crime Report about the danger of TV dramas shaping real-life perceptions, leaving the public to condone the kinds of measures that can lead to wrongful convictions, such as coercing a confession. (And long before “Castle,” long before “Law & Order,” there was “Dragnet,” which, as The Atlantic pointed out, portrayed the LAPD in a way that bore little resemblance to the real department of that era.) — Ken Armstrong At a moment when the left is ever-skeptical of the criminal justice system’s excesses, the FBI’s secretive “terrorist watch list” seems to have gotten a free pass. When Republicans in Congress voted down a recent bill that aimed to “close the terror loophole,” for example — the law would have prevented those on the watch list from passing the federal background check to buy a gun — it was a defeat for Democrats specifically and for the left generally. Yet as the Intercept points out, the criteria that the FBI uses to flag someone as a potential terrorist are “shoddy and based on an elastic standard of ‘reasonable suspicion.’” — Beth Schwartzapfel |
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— Sherry King, on Black Lives Matter having an impact on district attorney elections in Ohio and Illinois |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail96.suw15.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2016 7:06 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
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In the beginning there was Julie Stewart. Frustrated that her brother was given a mandatory five-year prison sentence for growing marijuana, astounded to learn how much discretion had been taken away from sentencing judges by tough-on-crime politicians, she left her job at the Cato Institute and founded Families Against Mandatory Minimums. That was 25 years ago this week. Since then, the men and women of FAMM have persistently pressed for sentencing reform in Congress and at the state level, advocating legislation that has helped ease unduly harsh prison terms for hundreds of thousands of Americans. What makes the advocacy group unusual is the broad support it has enjoyed across the political spectrum, from the Koch brothers to the ACLU. In March, 1991, Stewart often recalls, few understood what the rush toward mandatory minimum sentences meant for non-violent drug offenders. Today, millions of Americans appreciate the toll those sentences have taken on their fellow citizens. The folks at FAMM would be the first to tell you their work is not nearly done (they are today pushing Congress to break its logjam over modest new sentencing bills). And the men and women who are free today because of FAMM's work would be the first to proclaim their joy in celebrating the silver jubilee. — Andrew Cohen |
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Double solitary. What’s worse than spending almost 24 hours a day in a tiny cell without any meaningful human contact? Spending almost 24 hours a day in that same tiny cell with a “roommate,” often a violent offender, who is just as unhappy to be squeezed in with you as you are to be squeezed in with him. TMP’s Christie Thompson brings us the story of “double” isolation cells, a persistent byproduct of overcrowded prisons and harsh administrative measures. The tricky business of measuring crime and punishment. When it comes to incarceration, every state became “more punitive” from 1983 to 2013, a new data report asserts. But the research highlights the difficulty of measuring whether the corrections system is keeping us safer. TMP’s Tom Meagher crunched the new numbers and delivers his verdict: there are no magic metrics here. How I survived “ninja shakedown” cell searches. Wayne Snitzky, who is serving a 15-to-life sentence in an Ohio prison for a murder he committed when he was 18, describes in detail what it’s like to be an inmate during the periodic cell searches guards undertake to find contraband. His main concern? What those guards would do with the small television he had in his cell. Here is the latest installment in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Reveal this week dug into a largely hidden but growing element of local law enforcement: gang databases. The CalGang system in California has information on over 150,000 people — 85 percent of whom are black or Latino and some of whom are as young as nine years old. Police and prosecutors claim they’re an invaluable tool to monitor gang activity, while activists and community members say they infringe on civil liberties and operate with little oversight or transparency. — Christie Thompson Much of the current policy debate on ‘nonviolent crimes’ has been about drugs. But there are numerous other crimes that may be ready for a closer look. This New York Magazine story on prostitution is a great place to start, refusing easy answers as it clarifies the divisions between those who want to see it legalized, those who don’t, and those who see room for possible compromises. Portraits of individual sex workers are woven in, giving the policy questions a human dimension and undermining the assumptions many of us have likely made about why people choose this kind of work. — Maurice Chammah Utah is home to the nation’s first registry for white-collar criminals, which includes those convicted of insurance fraud, theft, and cheating investors. The Wall Street Journal’s story notes that the number of Americans on various registries is approaching one million people. As such policies have expanded from sex offender registries there’s growing concern. Utah’s criminal index “plunges the state into a broader debate about using name-and-shame tactics to punish convicts who have already served their time.” — Alysia Santo Because 86 percent of all U.S. prisoners are state prisoners, skeptics have argued that there is little the federal government can do to reduce mass incarceration. But as this op-ed at The Hill points out, the federal government has historically been able to compel reform from states through the power of the purse. Congress, through the 1994 crime bill, got states to build prisons by offering funding. Why can’t Congress now give or withhold funding to states that do or don’t reform their criminal justice systems? — Eli Hager Ted Cruz’s calls for surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods have been met with resistance from President Obama and NYPD chief Bill Bratton. But both Sen. Cruz and Bratton could learn from the experience in Dearborn, Michigan, where the police chief and one-third of the population are Muslim and where close ties between the community and the police have led to successful counterterrorism efforts. This Politico story raises important questions about whether we can trust the FBI to scale up this successful model without going in the direction Sen. Cruz proposes. — Beth Schwartzapfel |
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— Bridget K Nevi'Linger, on how to regulate prostitution. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail9.suw13.rsgsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2016 7:06 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Andrew Cohen |
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Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
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It was a big week for the politics of mercy. President Obama on Wednesday commuted the sentences of 61 federal drug offenders, bringing to 248 the total number of men and women who have been granted such relief during his presidency. That’s more than his seven immediate predecessors combined, the White House quickly pointed out. But Obama still lags behind every president since John Adams in the number of pardons he has granted. (A pardon is granted to clear the record of someone who has done time and been released; a commutation shortens the sentence of someone still serving time). If you believe Deborah Leff, the former U.S. Pardons Attorney, that surprising gap exists because the administration has prioritized the Justice Department’s clemency initiative at the expense of traditional pardon applications, a choice that looks increasingly dubious given the failure of the DOJ initiative to efficiently process the thousands of applications it has received. For a president who has made criminal justice reform a priority in his second term, and who frequently talks about a “reinvigorated” clemency process, this bureaucratic morass is an embarrassment. Taken together, the number of commutations and pardons is far below what the president led us to expect — and still would be even if he were to pardon or commute the sentences of 61 more federal prisoners every week until his term ends next January 20th. — Andrew Cohen |
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The “grand compromise” on capital punishment that failed. This past week marked the 40th anniversary of oral argument in Gregg v. Georgia, the landmark Supreme Court case in which a fractured court restored the death penalty after a four-year hiatus. The justices rationalized their ruling on the notion that capital sentencing would and should become less arbitrary, but four decades of experience tells us that hasn’t happened. Here is original commentary from death penalty scholar Evan Mandery. Requiem for a prosecutor. Donald Myers is a legend in South Carolina for his theatrical courtroom performances, especially in capital cases. And he’s clearly been successful, sending 28 men to death row. One of those was Johnny O’Landis Bennett, whose 2000 death sentence was overturned last month by a federal judge, who called out Myers for calling the defendant a “beast of burden” and comparing him to King Kong. Myers has announced his retirement after four decades of public service. Another call for safety for transgender inmates. The feds reiterate their concern about conditions of confinement for vulnerable inmates, but it’s unclear what impact the new DOJ memo will have on recalcitrant corrections officials who are failing to comply with existing rules. The vast majority of transgender inmates continue to be housed based on their gender at birth, despite rules that require a case-by-case evaluation and inmate safety as a priority. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel updates us. What it’s like to come within minutes of being executed. Kevin Cooper, sentenced to death in 1983 for a quadruple murder in California, was waiting in a cage near the execution chamber when he learned that he would not in fact be executed that night in 2004. He describes in clinical terms the hours leading up to that moment, the search for usable veins in his arm by prison staffers, and the other bureaucratic protocols leading up to his lethal injection. Here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. Some prisoners with HIV get better treatment than others in Louisiana. The state has such a bad prison overcrowding problem that 40 percent of those sentenced to prison spend their time in parish jails instead. Especially for those who are HIV-positive, that difference can be critical, given the state’s two-tiered system of inmate health care, which grants only sporadic treatment to ill inmates. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel examines a new report that chronicles this unequal and unsafe protection. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Especially since the death of Sandra Bland in Texas, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the deaths of young suspects held in county jails. Most of the coverage has focused on suicides, but with increasing frequency we are learning about another common cause of jailhouse deaths — drug withdrawal. This round-up of cases from The Influence alerts us to the fact that many jail officials are simply unprepared, or unwilling, to ensure the safety of inmates withdrawing from opioids in their first days of confinement. — Maurice Chammah In Tampa, a refuge for domestic-violence victims — a place designed for the very purpose of providing shelter and safety — turned into something else entirely for a 36-year-old mother whose young daughter reported being abused by another resident. In devastating detail, the Tampa Bay Times reveals how the shelter’s misguided policies on secrecy served to protect the suspected abuser (who had an alarming criminal history) and how the police responded with an investigation that was, to put it charitably, lackadaisical. — Ken Armstrong A brouhaha erupted in Miami after a police officer surreptitiously turned on his new body camera and recorded a hallway interview he had with a public defender. The lawyer said it was an invasion of her privacy; the cop said he was making sure his own words wouldn’t be misconstrued. The story offers a fascinating example of how the much-lauded new technology can cut both ways, as a sword for capturing police misconduct but also as a shield for police who want to create their own “record,” on which they can later rely. — Eli Hager Texas Monthly writer Pam Colloff delivers another deeply human and nuanced feature, this time about Claire Wilson, a victim of the often-forgotten 1966 school shooting at the University of Texas-Austin, in which a sniper, a former Marine sharpshooter, murdered pedestrians from the top of the school’s famed tower. Wilson spent decades trying to move on from that bloody day, which took the lives of her boyfriend and unborn son, until the current series of on-campus shootings brought it rushing back. — Christie Thompson The Obama administration now views opioid addiction, which has ravaged white communities, as a public health crisis, rather than a law enforcement problem. But Cardozo Law School Professor Ekow Yankah appeared on PBS this week to remind viewers of the federal response to crack addiction in black neighborhoods, when addicts and low-level dealers were incarcerated rather than treated as patients. — Simone Weichselbaum |
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— Sarah Thompson, who worked as a researcher at Rikers, on solitary confinement |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:info=themarshall...@mail9.suw15.mcsv.net] On Behalf Of The Marshall Project
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2016 7:06 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Andrew Cohen |
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Closing Argument features highlights from the past week in criminal justice. To change how often you hear from us, update your preferences. |
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You probably know by now that we launched The Record this week. It's an online compilation of some of the best online written (and audio and video) work about criminal justice we have found since we started The Marshall Project in 2014. There are many reasons why we did this; my favorite is that by making it easier for journalists, lawyers, academics, and others to find criminal justice stories we improve the chances that those engaged in the countless debates to come will be armed with more historical context and perspective, not to mention good, old-fashioned facts. That point was emphatically made on Thursday— the very day we launched, right on cue — by Bill Clinton, whose sharp retort to "Black Lives Matter" protesters begged for a look back at the conditions and consequences of the 1994 Crime Bill (a category included in The Record). The story of that law, like every other contentious criminal justice policy, is complicated, more complicated than either the protestors or the former president have made it out to be. If the stories contained in The Record help illustrate the contours of those complications, the nuances that get lost in the heat of the moment, the background that helps explain why some themes suddenly rush to the foreground, our work will have succeeded. — Andrew Cohen |
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Introducing The Record, the online library TMP staff has curated over the past two years of some of the best criminal justice reporting on the internet. Here is a 14,000-entry collection of reporting about topics, including “sentencing reform” and “death penalty”; events like the “Charleston Church shooting,” and people, including “Kalief Browder” and our namesake, “Thurgood Marshall.” Check it out and please send us your feedback. A prosecutor’s regret: How I got someone life in prison for drugs. John Lovell was a true-believer when he helped convict a man named Lewis Clay on drug-trafficking charges. Clay was given a life sentence, despite the relatively small amount of crack cocaine involved in his case, and was still in prison last month when President Obama commuted his sentence. In the latest installment of our “Life Inside” series, Lovell talks about the regret he has carried about the Clay case. When the Republicans descend on Cleveland this summer. The Ohio city has the dubious honor of having the first police force ever to be under federal oversight while hosting a presidential convention. It’s anyone’s guess whether that means chaos in the streets or police acting on their best behavior if and when protests hit. TMP’s Simone Weichselbaum and Tom Meagher brought us a story that won’t have a conclusion until this summer. Oops, we took 20 years of your life by mistake. Have a nice day. The lesson of exoneree Darryl Hunt’s tragic life and death? That society owes a debt to the wrongly convicted. The least officials can do for those men and women upon release is compensate them fairly and provide adequate reentry programs. Here is original TMP commentary from Jarrett Adams, who is now clerking for a federal trial judge after earning his law degree upon leaving prison. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
In simulated footage of police body camera images, what appears to be a man violently attacking an officer is revealed by another camera angle merely to be two people dancing. Other common police interactions, including a foot pursuit and a traffic stop, were simulated and compared with different camera angles by the The New York Times. This interactive reminds us — amid nationwide calls for more body cameras for officers — that the images they will bring us can mislead as well as illuminate. — Alysia Santo When it comes to spying on suspects in national security cases, the feds have wide latitude to act with extraordinary secrecy. They can obtain a search warrant in secret; the person whose property was searched can’t challenge it, since the warrant and application are sealed. Now The Washington Post has identified a disturbing trend: increasingly the feds are using these powers to fuel ordinary criminal investigations, where additional Constitutional protections should apply — and prosecutors are using threats of jail time for these more run-of-the-mill crimes to force cooperation in their intelligence efforts. — Beth Schwartzapfel As Texas lawmakers continue to deal with the fallout from the death of Sandra Bland at a county jail last year, the Texas Jail Project has been quietly assembling a database of anecdotes that illuminate the varied types of abuses that go on in county jails there, from overuse of solitary confinement to medical neglect to long pre-trial stays. It is powerful to see these testimonials, often from the perspective of a loved one, in such an intimate and unfiltered format. — Maurice Chammah Country music frequently mentions the imprisoned. But Johnny Cash was one of the few musicians who sang about prisoners to prisoners from within prisons. During a week in which former inmate and fellow country legend Merle Haggard died, this fascinating two-part podcast by US Prison Culture explores Johnny Cash’s voice as a prisoner reformer and what his message means today, when the number of incarcerated citizens is over seven times what it was in 1972 when Cash appeared before Congress to talk about his craft. — Anna Flagg Grace Meng of Human Rights Watch lays out in Politico Magazine how noncitizens have been left behind in the rollback of the War on Drugs. Even legal immigrants may still face deportation for decades-old drug crimes that may not have even landed them in jail: a permanent resident from Jamaica has a removal order for the attempted sale of $5 of crack; a green-card holder from Chile was swept up in an ICE raid for marijuana possession. As Meng argues: “the numbers seem to fly directly in the face of Obama’s clarion call to focus less on punishment and more on treatment when it comes to the drug war.” — Christie Thompson |
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—Kendra Hovey, on our Facebook conversation on how German prisons compare to those in the United States. |
