State lawmakers and advocates pushing to legalize marijuana aren’t just promoting legalization as a way to raise tax revenue and regulate an underground pot market. They’re also talking about fixing a broken criminal justice system and reinvesting in poor and minority communities that have been battered by decades of government wars on drugs, Stateline reports. The focus on justice and equity has sharpened over time, longtime pot advocates say, as it’s become clear that such issues should be addressed and that doing so won’t alienate voters, most of whom support legal marijuana. Civil rights groups have raised their voices in legalization discussions. Social justice provisions can be found in legalization proposals in both blue and red states, including several of the states where voters will face ballot measures on the issue in November. Social justice also is a talking point for opponents, who argue that allowing weed sales would hurt — not help — low-income and minority people. “We don’t want either extreme. We don’t want incarceration, and we don’t want legalization and commercialization,” said Kevin Sabet of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a Virginia-based coalition that is opposing legalization efforts in multiple states. Many state legislators say they back legalization because, first and foremost, it can be an opportunity to make changes to the criminal justice system and repair the harm done to groups disproportionately arrested for using the drug. “For me, the social justice piece of it is much larger than, I think, the taxing and regulating — although that is important,” said New York Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes, a Buffalo Democrat who proposed a bill to legalize weed. Nine states and the District of Columbia allow recreational adult use of small amounts of marijuana, and 23 others allow certain patients to use the drug medicinally. Miami Beach police charged a man Monday with attempted arson after he threatened to burn down a condominium and “kill all the Jews” inside. On July 12, a Los Angeles woman beat a Hispanic man with a brick and told him to go back to his country. In June, a man harassed a woman in Chicago in a public park for wearing a shirt with the Puerto Rico flag on it. Hate crimes are increasing in many cities, USA Today reports. The total number of hate crimes reported in the 10 largest U.S. cities jumped in 2017, marking four straight years for an uptick in such incidents. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University found a 12.5 percent increase in incidents reported by police in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and San Jose, Ca. The number of hate crimes reported in those cities totaled 1,038, up from 923 in 2016. In New York, nearly half of hate crimes last year were committed against Jewish people. In Los Angeles, gay men were targeted most. In Boston the largest demographic hit by hate crimes were African Americans. Brian Levin, co-author of the report, attributed the increases to greater “incivility” in politics, citing policies such as President Trump’s travel ban from several majority-Muslim countries. National events can also encourage these types of crimes, says Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, crimes against Muslims were rampant, she said. The FBI reported 8,063 hate crimes in 2000 and 9,730 in 2001. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism forecasts a decline in hate crimes for the first half of 2018 from last year. “You didn’t have the kind of conflicting election that you had in 2016 or a big terrorist attack,” Levin said. Amid a barrage of headlines about President Trump and Russian meddling in the 2016 election, FBI director Christopher Wray told NBC that Russia “continues to engage in malign influence efforts to this day,” USA Today reports. Trump’s response to a similar question was criticized Wednesday after he appeared to say that Russia was no longer targeting the U.S. Wray dismissed two ideas from Russian President Vladimir Putin, which Trump called “interesting.” The first was to have American investigators go to Russia to observe interviews of wanted suspects, including those indicted in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian meddling in the election. “I never want to say never, but it’s certainly not high on our list of investigative techniques,” Wray said. He said Putin’s other idea, to have Russians come to the U.S. to observe questioning of suspects wanted there, was “even lower on our list of investigative techniques.” Wray also took on the blistering Inspector General’s report on the bureau’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, calling it “fair” and explaining the biggest lesson he learned was that no matter how big or small an investigation is, the bureau always has to stick to the same policies. He is “unwilling to budge” on protecting the FBI’s sources and methods in its investigations, even with mounting pressure from Congress to delve into details of the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling. Wray called Mueller a “straight shooter” and said the Russia investigation he’s leading is “not a witch hunt,” a term Trump uses frequently. A team of federal prosecutors charged with promoting “consistency and fairness” in death penalty cases has been hurling on-the-record accusations against one another — from neglecting boxes of evidence to destroying interview notes — and defense attorneys want to know why this is the first they’re hearing about the alleged misconduct, The Intercept reports. A recent internal dispute and civil lawsuit prompted some members of the Capital Case Section to speak up about serious misconduct in some death penalty cases. In 2016, federal prosecutor Jacabed Rodriguez-Coss sued the Justice Department, alleging supervisors in the Capital Case Section discriminated against her and retaliated when she filed a complaint. A judge tossed out her lawsuit in June, but she intends to appeal. Defense attorneys are questioning the capital case unit’s overall integrity. “It is safe to assume that if Ms. Rodriguez-Coss had never filed her gender-discrimination suit, the government never would have disclosed even the limited information it has now provided,” defense attorneys wrote to a judge. James Peterson, who still works on the death penalty team, allegedly destroyed interview notes he took as part of an ongoing murder case in Indiana. The defendant’s attorney would have never known that the interviews happened in the first place — much less about the possibility of destroyed evidence — if it weren’t for Amanda Haines, who retired from the team in 2017 and submitted a sworn statement in support of Rodriguez-Coss’s lawsuit. In an affidavit, Haines, who worked for the Justice Department for about two decades, said she brought concerns to her supervisors about the way some of her male colleagues handled cases, but they did nothing. The Trump administration faces the same challenge as its predecessors: how to ensure the tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrant families who are apprehended each year show up for their hearings. President Trump wants to lock more of them up. Immigrant advocates want him to expand alternatives to detention, which are widely in use, reports NPR. Some 84,000 undocumented migrants are enrolled in electronic monitoring, either an ankle bracelet or a smartphone check-in that uses voice recognition. The administration is paying for 40,000 private contracted detention beds this year, a 3 percent increase over last year. A mammoth immigrant jail is under construction near Houston. “Certainly, confinement sends a very, very strong message,” said Tracey Valerio, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. “But the agency has had extremely good results in terms of percentage of compliance with the alternatives to detention.” Detention is expensive. The government pays a private contractor $320 dollars per night — as much as a five-star hotel — to detain a mother and her children in what ICE calls a family residential center. An electronic ankle monitor costs $4.12 a day. The ankle monitor program is managed by GEO Care, a subsidiary of the corrections contractor GEO Group that detains thousands of immigrants for ICE. ICE cancelled Family Case Management, which used case workers in five cities to help migrants navigate the immigration court system. The program cost less than $10 a day and had a 99 percent success rate with court appearances. Alternatives to detention have a 99.8 percent success rate in getting people to show up for hearings. If the migrant loses their asylum request and is ordered deported, ankle monitors are not so successful in final removals. Four of ten non-detained immigrants do not show up for their removal. The Trump administration has summoned at least 70 infants to immigration court for their own deportation proceedings since Oct. 1, Kaiser Health News reports. These are children who need frequent touching and bonding with a parent and naps every few hours, and some were of breastfeeding age. They’re unable to speak and still learning when it’s day versus night. “For babies, the basics are really important. It’s the holding, the proper feeding, proper nurturing,” said Shadi Houshyar of the advocacy group Families USA. The number of infants involved who are under age 1 has been rising, up threefold from 24 infants in the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30, and 46 infants the year before. A a total of 1,500 “unaccompanied” children, from newborns to age three, have been called in to immigration court since Oct. 1, 2015. About three-fourths of the children are represented by a lawyer. They must make their case that they should stay in the United States. “This is to some extent a … crisis of the creation of the government,” said Robert Carey, who previously headed the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which takes custody of unaccompanied minors. “It’s a tragic and ironic turn of events.” The government argues that separation and its consequences are unfortunate but unavoidable under the law. The number of unaccompanied children called in to court since Oct. 1, 2015 swells to 2,900 if kids up to 5 are included. The total will rise between now and Sept. 30, when the fiscal year ends, noted Susan Long of Syracuse University, director of TRAC, a repository of immigration and federal court data. For victims of crime on U.S. soil who are living here illegally, a special visa program encourages them to help solve their cases and catch criminals, and may provide their only clear path to citizenship. As the Trump administration has taken a harder line on immigration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears to be stepping up the detention and deportation of people who have applied for the so-called “U visa,” the Associated Press reports. Cecelia Friedman Levin of ASISTA, a group that works with advocates and attorneys helping immigrant survivors of violence, says, “What that does, to my mind, is undermine the spirit of the protection to begin with.” Through the program, petitioners may get a visa, and then a green card, before applying for citizenship. Because of a long process and apparent policy shifts — something ICE denies — immigrants are being swept up before they have a chance to legalize. Applications are still active even after deportations, and applicants can be separated from their families for years while they wait. Advocates argue some applicants came to the U.S. after fleeing violence or threats in their home countries and face danger if they return home, even temporarily. Most important, they say, an undermined U visa program discourages the reporting of crimes committed here because immigrants are less likely to come forward as victims. That leaves perpetrators on the street to offend again. There is no official count of how many immigrants are being affected, but several attorneys nationwide see a pattern. As investigators build their case against a man they have accused of cutting off his ankle monitor and killing three people, law officials say the tragedy raises questions about the oversight and tracking of parole violators in Houston, the Houston Chronicle reports. This week, police arrested Jose Gilberto Rodriguez, 46, who has been charged with two counts of capital murder. Police say he cut off his ankle monitor and went into hiding from parole officers. Documents from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice give details about when officials learned Rodriguez had absconded from supervision and raise troubling questions about the effectiveness of the system used to monitor parolees convicted of violent offenses. The Houston police chief and the Harris County sheriff both pressed to improve the electronic tracking system by cutting the time it takes to notify local authorities when a parolee tampers with their electronic monitoring system or otherwise violates parole conditions. The triple slaying was the second time this month a dangerous parolee fitted with an ankle monitor violated the terms of his release but was not arrested for several days. Some 4,954 parolees across Texas are tracked by GPS or electronic monitoring. Rodriguez, 46, was paroled from state prison on Sept. 29, 2017. He was required to wear an ankle monitor. He registered as a sex offender, submitted to a polygraph examination and had reported to his parole officer. He cut off his ankle monitor on July 5, but a warrant for his arrest would not come for several days. Rodriguez was one of 84,000 parolees living in Texas. At the time of Rodriguez’ alleged crime spree, the state listed 2,500 parolees with active warrants for their arrest. Five hundred of them were classified as offenders with a history of violence. Jordan Brown, who was convicted nine years ago in Pennsylvania as an 11-year-old for the shotgun murder of his father’s fiancee and her unborn child, has been set free by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The court determined that evidence in the case pointing to Brown could just as easily have implicated an unknown assailant and, as a result, was insufficient to find him culpable beyond a reasonable doubt. That means that he has been cleared of killing Kenzie Marie Houk, who was 26 and nine months pregnant when she was shot in the back of her neck as she slept in the farmhouse near New Castle that she shared with Brown, his father, and her two young daughters. Kenzie Houk’s father, Jack, said Brown remains the culprit. “This is crazy,” Houk said. Houk said he and his wife, Debbie, have been raising their daughter’s two girls, who are now in their teens. “We’re going through hell,” Houk said. “The system is very, very wrong, sir.” He dismissed the possibility that evidence from the crime scene might point to a different suspect — a theory supported by Mr. Brown’s defense team. “There is another person that we believe is responsible,” said Brown’s attorney, Stephen Colafella, “That person was never arrested.” Prosecutors speculated that Brown killed Kenzie Houk because he was angered by the disruption posed by the pending birth of a new sibling and grew jealous about the attention Houk’s daughters received, a theory that the Supreme Court called “wholly speculative.” There was no DNA or fingerprint evidence linking Brown to the murder, the Supreme Court said. The court found that the evidence did not prove that a shotgun retrieved from the home was the murder weapon, much less that Brown pulled the trigger. Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh is impressed by acting Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle but is collecting resumes from “across the country” from candidates to be the city’s top cop, the Baltimore Sun reports. Tuggle has been acting commissioner since May. He took over for Commissioner Darryl De Sousa, who stepped down after he was charged with failing to file federal tax documents. Tuggle wants the job permanently. “I’m confident in what he’s doing at this point. Absolutely,” Pugh said. Homicides have declined 20 percent this year and violent crime is down 16 percent. Still, the mayor posted a job listing for a new police commissioner Tuesday, and she said applications are starting to come in. Last month, the mayor said she was planning to name a seven-member panel to help search for a new police chief. She pledged to conduct a “national search.” Pugh said she was still setting up the panel. “There’ll be a reviewing process,” she said. “I would hope within the next 60 to 90 days that we would know who the next police commissioner is.” The city is seeking a “can-do, reform minded and proven leader with exceptional management, interpersonal, and communication skills and demonstrated experience in developing and maintaining effective working relationships with community and civic groups (including private-sector partners), police department employees and government leaders.” The job listing comes as the judge overseeing the federally mandated reform of the police department is expressing doubt that the agency has the leadership ability or resources to implement needed changes. |
