FW: Our Weekly Highlights
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2018 7:07 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by 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. |
The check is in the mail. Officials in Contra Costa County, Calif., are issuing refunds to parents who were wrongfully billed for the incarceration of their children even after those teenagers were found not guilty. A Marshall Project report last March on the widespread practice helped prompt several jurisdictions to reconsider the practice. A total of $136,000 will be paid back to about 500 low-income families who were charged. Another $8.5 million in debt will be erased. Eli Hager and Yolanda Martinez have our story. A Justice Department move that could mean thousands more deportations. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced plans to review, and limit, the instances in which immigration judges impose “administrative closures” in cases involving undocumented immigrants, writes our Christie Thompson. Those judges, appointed by the attorney general, now are able to effectively halt deportation proceedings for people waiting to resolve other legal issues, including children who have applied for green cards or immigrants who may have intellectual disabilities. Twelve minutes of chaos and three forbidden Cokes. Sterling Cunio, convicted of a double murder and serving hard time in Oregon, was trying to make a phone call to his wife when he witnessed a three-act play of sorts on his cell block that he relates in the latest in our “Life Inside” series with Vice. There were the two fellow inmates up to no good. There was the tutor who had a seizure. And there was the frenetic reaction of prison guards and staff as they responded to the emergency.
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. “When I am found dead,” she told him, “it will be on your conscience.” Those were the last words that a 22-year-old woman named Laura S. told a Border Patrol agent as he dropped her off at the Mexican border. In an incredible story, The New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman takes readers into the lives of immigrants who sought refuge in the United States and for whom deportation meant death. The story is even more poignant because of the Trump Administration’s announcement on Monday that it would end Temporary Protected Status for about 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the United States since at least 2001. Stillman, who directs the Global Migration Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, worked with a team of students for a year and a half to build a database of deaths by deportation. — Abbie VanSickle Over the last five years, the biggest drug lab scandal in the nation’s history unfolded in two separate corners of Massachusetts. Two chemists, one in Boston and one in Amherst, had been falsifying lab results for years. One was pathologically eager to please, the other hopelessly addicted to the substances she was supposed to be testing. Tens of thousands of drug convictions were ultimately tossed out, and, as this new Rolling Stone deep-dive lays bare, many defendants’ lives were ruined. Ultimately the chemists went to jail and their supervisors were disgraced, but — perhaps most galling of all — prosecutors routinely tried to cover for them, choosing over and over to bury the emerging truth rather than use it to set things right. — Beth Schwartzapfel Puerto Rico’s police force is roughly the size of Chicago’s, and it remains in turmoil months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island territory. Hundreds of officers retired at the end of 2017, murders are on the rise, and the remaining cops are participating in a mass sick-out. Officials have had to temporarily close station-houses around the island. On Monday, Puerto Rico’s governor fired the police chief — the first woman to hold the position — while officers continue to skip work part of a protest over unpaid overtime. Reuters reported that on some days, up to 20 percent of the force has called out sick, which has crippled Puerto Rico’s policing efforts. — Simone Weichselbaum It’s been a dizzying week in immigration news. The Trump administration ended Temporary Protection Status for 200,000 Salvadorans. Trump himself backed a comprehensive immigration package and showed “love” for dreamers, then he didn’t, and shared his opinion of “shithole” countries. The confusing and contradictory verbiage sends me in search of stories that reveal what the Trump administration does, as opposed to what it says or tweets. Consider this analysis in the New York Review of Books from Madeleine Schwartz that opens with this: “At the core of the anti-abortion movement is the tenet that a fetus is a person whose rights need to be protected. This is how anti-abortion activists justify “heartbeat bills” restricting when women can terminate pregnancies and picketing clinics. The fetus, they argue, deserves the legal consideration due to any human being. Now, the Trump administration is taking this argument to an absurd and cruel extreme. A fetus in the United States requires the full protection and support of American law. As for its undocumented, adolescent mother—well, if she wants her rights, she should leave the country.” — Joseph Neff |
— Our reader, Joy Marielle, on New York's new prisoner care package restrictions |
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2018 7:07 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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Demolition Derby. In the year since Donald Trump took the oath of office, his administration has all but obliterated the justice reform legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Our Justin George counted the nine ways in which the so-called “law-and-order” presidency has altered federal policy and practice. Meet the man who wants Nevada to kill him. It’s been more than a year since Scott Dozier gave up his appeals and asked state officials to execute him. Like other condemned men who have chosen this path, he sees it as a way to exercise some control over his fate and to avoid more time in a solitary cell. But the state so far has been unable to accomplish what prison officials and Dozier seek. “They spent millions of dollars giving me a death sentence, and then millions of dollars not killing me. It doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense,” he says. In collaboration with Mother Jones, TMP’s Maurice Chammah has our story. A visit inside Trump’s immigration bedlam. In its zeal to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible, the administration last year dispatched more than 100 immigration judges to efficiently process a backlog of pending cases. That isn’t happening. What’s happening instead is chaos, especially in places like Laredo, Texas, which our Julia Preston visited with This American Life. She found detainees lingering in limbo, case files lost, and rights ignored. Related: In the latest in our “Frame” series, photographer Kirsten Luce captures striking images of the migrants seeking relief at our southern border. How social media companies take sides in criminal cases. Companies like Twitter and Facebook cooperate with police and prosecutors when asked for access to accounts. But these companies say privacy laws prevent them from sharing similar information with defense attorneys who subpoena records aimed to helping their clients. In our latest “Case in Point” with WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” Andrew Cohen examines a California case interpreting the outdated Stored Communications Act of 1986 that may change that. Turns out New York “cares” about inmates after all. Under fire from advocates, politicians, and others New York prison officials quickly canceled a new program that would force friends and family to send care packages to their incarcerated loved ones only through private vendors who charged higher prices and offered fewer choices. State policy makers said they would search for other ways to reduce the amount of contraband entering facilities. Taylor Elizabeth Eldridge continues her coverage. More: Our initial story about the new program, a boon for private prison profiteers. When your prison becomes your paycheck. Some states prohibit ex-offenders from returning to work in prisons after they have served their sentences. But a growing number of former inmates have found steady work behind bars, despite red tape, their own uneasiness about their working conditions and complaints by crime victims and corrections officers. In collaboration with The Daily Beast, TMP’s Maurice Chammah and Joseph Neff have our story. Related: In our latest “Life Inside” series, with Vice, David Van Horn tells our Maurice Chammah that he’s proud of what he achieved when he became the first ex-inmate to return to his prison as an employee. No shoes, no shirt, no justice. By providing courthouse staff with broad discretion and few guidelines, courtroom dress codes can violate constitutional rights. One solution: getting more judges involved in deciding what’s appropriate and not. Here is original commentary from Jeff Campbell, a third-year Harvard law student. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
A special report published this week by the Chicago Tribune revealed that 75 women have been found strangled or smothered in Chicago since 2001. Their bodies were discovered in abandoned buildings, alleys, dumpsters, snow banks on the city’s South and West sides. To date, arrests have been made in only one-third of the cases, according to an analysis by the Tribune. “While there are clusters of unsolved strangulations on the South and West sides, police say they’ve uncovered no evidence of a serial killer at work. If they are right, 51 murderers have gotten away with their crime,” the report reads. “Fifty-one people who used belts, bras, ropes, packing tape or their bare hands to kill these women. Fifty-one families still looking for justice for a mother, a sister, a daughter.” — Donovan X. Ramsey Sociologist Patrick Sharkey wrote in the New York Times about his research on the great crime decline of the last two decades. First, he found that even amidst the uptick in violence of the last few years, “the poorest Americans today are victimized at about the same rate as the richest Americans were at the start of the 1990s.” How did that happen? Sharkey looked past the skyrocketing role of police and prisons and instead found tremendous credit was due to nonprofit organizations: in a typical city, each additional nonprofit targeted at reducing violence led to about a 1 percent drop in the city’s murder rate. (For another great example of data undermining conventional wisdom, see this week’s New York piece undercutting the narrative that the opioid crisis was born of rural white despair.) — Beth Schwartzapfel People with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate more than seven times higher than people without disabilities. That disturbing statistics was unearthed in a series for NPR by my friend Joe Shapiro, who dives deep into why this community is so vulnerable to sexual violence and why their attackers are so rarely brought to justice. This week, we meet the prosecutors that are changing how they interact with such delicate witnesses and working to bring more of their cases to court. “These are individuals who tend not to come forward," one prosecutor told NPR. "Sometimes they don't even understand that they've been abused." — Christie Thompson |
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— Our reader, Jim Padgett, on Scott Dozier, a man on death row who's asking to be executed |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2018 7:07 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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How “Cops” became the most polarizing reality TV show in America. You’ve seen it, or at least clips of it, and you probably would recognize the theme music if you heard it. Truth is, the show that highlights a relentless stream of street-level crime and police work means different things to different people and always has. It fuels racist attitudes about policing, say critics. It’s just a reflection of the reality of law-and-order, say its supporters. In partnership with Longreads Tim Stelloh talks with the show’s creator about what he was trying to accomplish nearly three decades ago. Nine years without sunshine. Brandon Hewitt is caught between two conflicting forces in North Carolina. One is a recent push to reduce the prison population. The other is a law that toughened sentences for drunk drivers. The result is that Hewitt is serving hard time in a jail, not a prison, a facility not equipped to constitutionally handle long-term incarceration. Hewitt is not alone. Hundreds of others with long sentences also are serving in jails in the state. TMP’s Joseph Neff has our story. Taking police reform to Trump country. Meet Michael Chitwood, perhaps the most unlikely sheriff ever to serve in Volusia County, Florida. He’s from south Philadelphia, a justice reformer, a defender of undocumented immigrants who earned the endorsement of both the NRA and the NAACP. And now he’s the leading lawman in one of the last jurisdictions in the South to end segregation. How’s it going so far since he was elected in 2016? It’s…complicated. In collaboration with PBS NewsHour, TMP’s Simone Weichselbaum, John Carlos Frey, and Manuel Villa have our story. Life is short. Art is forever. Six Tennessee death row inmates. Three earnest art teachers. Meeting regularly near the state’s death row to create works of art designed to express the creativity of men who say they have changed since the crimes for which they stand condemned. All seem to realize many who see their completed work — especially families of the victims — will never be able to separate it from the murderers who made it. For TMP, Jeremy Olds has our story. How post-prison reentry programs fail queer women. Too many are “penalized for pursuing lives post-incarceration that supervisors deemed ‘risky’ simply because they did not fit gendered or heteronormative ideas of success.” Here is original TMP commentary from Erin Kerrison, an assistant professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. The misery of the “medical chain.” When a trip to the hospital means hours on a bus chained to another inmate. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
This week, the New York Post reported that New York City’s police union is reducing the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards dispensed to members because too many people were selling them on eBay. These small plastic cards, often handed out to family and friends, supposedly help people avoid traffic tickets when slipped to an officer under a driver’s license. New York City police will now only get 20 cards per year, rather than 30. But do they actually work? Yes, according to some, including this eBay customer who bought a New Jersey State Police card and wrote a review about his experience: “He closed his ticket book and walked away. Already paid off!” — Alysia Santo What happens when a city on the rise tries a “grand experiment” in public housing, and what does it mean for a neighborhood and its residents? Those are the questions at the heart of The Promise: Life, Death and Change in the Projects, a new podcast from Nashville Public Radio. Reporter Meribah Knight gives listeners a thoughtful, empathetic glimpse into the lives of residents in Nashville’s James A. Cayce Homes as they grapple with a plan to redevelop their neighborhood. I couldn’t stop listening to the first episode, “A Change is Gonna Come,” when it aired this week. The storytelling, which lets listeners follow residents as they decide how to handle change, reminded me of Alex Kotlowitz’s “There Are No Children Here.” I can’t wait for episode two. — Abbie VanSickle New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press released an impressive 19-part series this week examining the state’s corrupt cop culture. Some of the the key findings in the investigative project, which was two years in the making, include: municipalities have paid “at least $42.7 million this decade to cover-up deaths, physical abuses and sexual misconduct at the hands of bad cops”; “the abuses have left a staggering toll: at least 19 dead; 131 injured; 7 sexual transgressions; towns have paid out six and seven-figure settlements to “whistleblower” cops who were punished for speaking up. — Simone Weichselbaum |
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— Our reader, Joy Marielle, on Florida Sheriff Michael Chitwood, a progressive in Trump country |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2018 7:08 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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Defrauded in prison? Call this guy. Peter Borenstein didn’t start his law career figuring that he’d specialize in helping inmates track down those who have defrauded them. But that was before he realized how common the problem was and how helpless prisoners felt being victimized by those they trusted. TMP’s Eli Hager has the story of a man with a mission to help those who cannot help themselves. God and man and pepper spray in federal prisons. The Bureau of Prisons relented this month to end a dispute between federal officials and a prison chaplain who refused to carry pepper spray with him as he tended to his flock. TMP’s Justin George continues his coverage of the case here. TMP Context: Our original reporting, in September, that first publicized the conflict. The luck of the draw. Renard Marcel Daniel has lived a miserable life. He was in his home, at age three, when his mother killed his father. Her next husband beat and sexually abused him. His intellectual disabilities precluded him from advancing in school. And then he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Alabama following a troubling trial. In 2016, however, thanks to a random draw that got his case assigned to three federal judges, he’s on the verge of being rescued from execution. In collaboration with WNYC’s “The Takeaway” here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series. Justice for one. TMP’s Joseph Neff continues his coverage of a North Carolina man, Brandon Hewett, who was serving a nine-year DWI sentence in a local jail, a facility not equipped for long-term confinement. He was transferred over the weekend to a state penitentiary after our report highlighted a glitch in the state’s sentencing laws. A local judge read the story and reached out to the sheriff, who was able to transfer Hewett. The first-ever Marshall Project Guide to the Super Bowl. We don’t have a dog in the fight. Our founder, Neil Barsky, is a Jets fan, bless his heart. But there are some criminal justice-related themes leading up to the big game and some players you may, or may not, want to root for Sunday evening. TMP’s Justin George (a stoic Broncos’ fan) has our matchup. The day ICE agents knocked on my door. Khalil Cumberbatch was preparing to wake his two daughters and get them ready for school when immigration agents showed up at his door in Queens one morning in 2014. Thus began a months-long ordeal within the nation’s immigration detention system for a man who had long since served his time for an old crime. Cumberbatch was lucky. He was freed and pardoned. He worries today for all those rounded up, parents and children both, who are not so fortunate. In collaboration with Vice here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
For the policing nerds out there: Philadelphia has become a case study in a wonky theory called problem-oriented policing as the city braces for post Super Bowl chaos. Instead of gearing up for mass arrests, city cops have been greasing street poles with motor oil to keep football fans from climbing, and swinging, from the structures. (Problem-oriented policing is progressive policing jargon for finding alternatives to arresting people). Will the motor oil keep arrest rates down during Super Bowl Sunday? Hard to predict. Philadelphia “Crisco Cops” slathered cooking grease on street poles before the Eagles won the NFC championship last month in order to deter destructive behavior. About a half-dozen arrests were made. — Simone Weichselbaum Call it “the migration-to-school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline.” This piece by the Huffington Post’s Kimberly Yam draws attention to a group of immigrants who aren’t often the focus of national debate: Southeast Asians. Many came to the United States as children, fleeing the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge and other turmoil. Some were born in refugee camps and have never been to their home countries. Yam writes that Southeast Asians are three to four times more likely to be deported for previous criminal convictions than other immigrants. The story came out a few days after a California judge temporarily blocked the government from deporting 92 Cambodians, finding the Trump administration had denied them due process. — Abbie VanSickle On Monday, The Charleston News-Gazette declared bankruptcy. The same day, the West Virginia paper published another scoop about pharmaceutical distributors shipping millions of tablets of opioids to small towns in West Virginia, a state hammered by the opioid crisis. Eric Eyre has been dogging this story for years. The 780 million pills shipped over six years — 433 pills for each citizen of West Virginia. How the Drug Enforcement Agency dodged requests on these shipments — from Congress. The rise of the dead body transport industry. The volunteer fire chief who watched his brother die because the department had no naxolone. There's also good news because of his reporting. Last year there were 31 million fewer opioids dispensed in West Virginia. The newspaper’s bankruptcy highlights the decline of local news reporting, and the prospect of fewer reporters exposing how powerful entities put profit over people. #SupportYourLocalNewspaper. — Joseph Neff The Dallas Morning News published a multimedia presentation documenting how the Dallas SWAT team cornered and killed the July 7 police shooter. In 2016, Micah Johnson killed five officers because he was upset by the shooting deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. The special report by Jamie Thompson follows the officers who tracked Johnson, engaged in a gun battle with him, and sent a remote-controlled robot with a bomb to kill him. The presentation tells the story minute-by-minute, through illustrations, a video that recreates the path of the gunman, photos, diagrams and maps. — Celina Fang Near housing projects in New York City — and perhaps other cities too, I suspect — there are these loudly humming power generators, hooked up to searingly bright lights. They were supposed to reduce crime, but they are also unpleasant, and contribute to a subtle sense among residents that they’re being watched. “Safety, surveillance: It’s hard to tell the difference,” writes Ann Neumann in this lyrical little exploration, at the Virginia Quarterly Review, of how people in her neighborhood of Red Hook view the lights, and by extension the police. Accompanied by gorgeous, eerie photos, her musings point at the ambivalence that can accompany so many small public policy ideas. — Maurice Chammah |
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— Our reader, Mary Price, on our guide to the Super Bowl through the lens of criminal justice |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2018 7:07 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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Reentry: A Triptych. Here is original poetry from Reginald Dwayne Betts, who spent eight years in prison and who now has a law license and three books to his credit. Moonlighting in Mississippi. Michael P. Guest, a district attorney in two white and relatively affluent counties in the state, has a lucrative side job as president of a company that collects delinquent court fees and fines. Now Guest is running for Congress at a time when officials in many jurisdictions, including Mississippi, are rethinking the wisdom and fairness of financial penalties that consign the poor to cycles of debt and jail. In collaboration with the The Clarion-Ledger, TMP’s Nicole Lewis has our story. Speedy trials and sentencing reform. There is a connection between egregious pretrial delays and mandatory minimum sentences. Reform the latter and you’ll reduce the former. Here is original TMP commentary from Jeffrey Bellin, a professor at William & Mary Law School. The grotesque life of a female jail guard. TaLisa J. Carter worked as a deputy corrections officer in Savannah, Georgia until she left to go to graduate school four years ago. Her reasons for leaving aren’t hard to understand. “I was a female corrections officer who had to figure out how to do my job while inmates masturbated to my presence, my voice, even my scent. That was the job,” she writes in graphic detail. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
A vast number of long, narrative articles have been published on wrongful convictions caused by shoddy forensic science, but I learned a great deal from The Nation’s deep dive into the case of Jimmy Genrich. He was convicted of murder in a Colorado bombing and the crux of the evidence against him was the interpretation of small marks on tools he owned that analysts said matched marks on the bombs. The story includes an impressive amount of history and legal analysis, while taking you through one of the stranger cases in recent times. — Maurice Chammah Critics of President Trump often emphasize the excess of his actions: the Muslim ban, the ICE raids, the firing of the FBI director. But his administration’s decisive inaction can be just as consequential.As the New York Times recently noticed, the Trump DOJ has “effectively shuttered” an agency dedicated to making legal aid accessible to poor people — without actually ordering it closed, which would require Congressional approval. By simply allowing a set of third-floor offices to sit dark for months, the Trump administration has denied legal assistance to thousands of indigent plaintiffs and defendants. — Eli Hager Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick delivered two slash-and-burn columns taking Republicans to task. Thursday’s lays bare the lengths to which the Trump administration went to protect staff secretary Rob Porter despite three different women independently telling multiple high-ranking people that he had physically and emotionally abused them. (“Apparently ‘I didn’t see it with my own eyes in the workplace,’ is the new ‘thoughts and prayers.’”) Tuesday’s skewers South Carolina House Republican Trey Gowdy’s announcement that he plans to retire from politics to return to the judiciary — because “law is about ‘fairness’ while politics is ‘just about winning.’” Lithwick argues that kind of thinking both belittles good lawmaking, and sullies the courts: “The off-ramp from politics...should not come via the courts. The off-ramp from corrosive and defeatist politics should be better politics.” — Beth Schwartzapfel |
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— Our reader, Lea Hunter, on the sexual harassment female corrections officers face |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2018 7:05 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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Doesn’t anyone want to know who killed Louise Cicelsky? Renay Lynch was convicted of being involved in the murder 20 years ago. Proclaiming her innocence, she’s asking New York officials for a new round of DNA testing on old forensic evidence. Prosecutors are balking, even though the person they claimed actually killed Cicelsky was reportedly in Florida at the time of the crime. In collaboration with WNYC’s The Takeaway, here is the latest in our “Case in Point” series. Using jail to market a schizophrenia drug. Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson has received a go-ahead from federal regulators to promote a drug called Invega Sustenna, an antipsychotic medicine the FDA says may potentially keep schizophrenics out of prison or jail. That conclusion is based on a study where patients who received a monthly dose of the drug ended up incarcerated less often than those who took a daily pill for their illness. In collaboration with The Daily Beast, TMP’s Taylor Elizabeth Eldridge has our story. Jeff Sessions was right about the “Anglo-American” heritage of law enforcement, in more ways than one. Maybe the attorney general diverted from his script because he saw so many white faces among the nation’s sheriffs? Here is original TMP commentary from Robin Washington. Too sick for jail but not for solitary confinement. Tennessee officials still enforce a 160-year-old law that allows judges to send ailing pretrial detainees from local jails to prison, and to isolated detention, for no reason other than what the law calls “safekeeping.” Here’s the sad story of Regenia Bowman, who spent 189 days locked in a cell because she had a skin infection that cleared up long before she was released from confinement. In collaboration with USA Today, Allen Arthur has our piece. “The importance of being subservient.” Meredith Walker is a mother and a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit in Missouri alleging discriminatory policing practices. Here she offers her version of “the talk” — her advice to her son for staying alive and free as a black teenager growing up in a community where the police are quick to arrest kids like him. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
As the #metoo movement — and the debate over Title IX before it — draws attention to the problem of sexual assault, especially on college campuses, the conversation often focuses on individual bad acts or bad actors, as if the choice to cross a line from consent into coercion were made in a vacuum. Enter two Columbia University researchers, who are in the midst of an exhaustive study of every aspect of the lives of students on campus. The New Yorker explores their project, called SHIFT, which has this radical premise: everyday details as mundane as “sleep, exercise, eating habits, mental health, where they get alcohol, what sort of dorm room they live in, where they party and how” — the very texture of their lives on campus — might provide clues to preventing campus sexual assault. — Beth Schwartzapfel In Oklahoma, the opioid epidemic is driving the spread of hepatitis C, and now that problem has reached prisons. The department of corrections reports that 10 percent of Oklahoma prisoners are diagnosed with hepatitis C, up from 6 percent only four years ago. Of all of those diagnosed though, only five people have been treated with life-saving antiviral drugs, Oklahoma Watch reports. Other states like, Missouri, Tennessee and Florida have been sued for not treating hepatitis C in prisoners. What prevents treatment? Prisoners need to show evidence of progressive liver damage. But the problem is also financial, with the department of corrections asking for $79.4 million in 2019 to treat prisoners, compared to the paltry $86,000 it has spent this fiscal year. — Yolanda Martinez Because school shootings have become so routine, and because our elected representatives’ response to them is so routinely lacking, a feeling of “nothing ever changes” inevitably sets in. But after the most recent tragedy in Parkland, Florida, this week, something was different. Students were tweeting about and filming live-streamed video of the massacre — before news outlets even knew of it. In the days since, the same students have offered a moral testimony “without exact precedent,” as this New Yorker piece points out, rejecting politicians’ “thoughts and prayers” and demanding gun control instead. Perhaps these responses can do for the gun control movement what cell phone video did for Black Lives Matter: take an American crisis mired in inertia and, using new first-person technologies, make it something too present and too visceral to continue to ignore. —Eli Hager Before we all grew obsessed with parsing whether Steven Avery or Adnan Syed were really murderers, pop culture often encountered the justice system through men who left no room for doubt about what they’d done, men like Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz, and John Wayne Gacy. The Believer has a long essay exploring the central role of Ted Bundy in shaping our views of psychopaths, serial killers, and the nature of evil. Is psychopathy a true condition, writer Sarah Marshall asks, or just a word we use for mental illness we still don’t understand? What begins as a distanced retelling of a famous case eventually cascades into a searching, manic letter to Bundy himself. “I am tired of being told that there is something in the abyss that will glower back at me, and make me want to stop looking,” she writes. “I have grasped for your demon core, Ted, and I have found nothing, again and again.” — Maurice Chammah |
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— Our reader, Susan Lee, on the antipsychotic injection that a pharmaceutical giant is marketing as a way to stay out of jail |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2018 7:05 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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Take it from a gun owner: It’s not mental illness. It’s guns. “If even I, given my history of depression, know my gun is the most dangerous item available to me, you can damn well bet that those planning maximum carnage know that too.” Here is original TMP commentary from Daniel “D.J.” Schuette, an author who lives in Iowa. I sent an innocent man to prison. D’Shean Kennedy sat on a jury in a murder case in Louisiana in 2009 and voted to condemn the defendant to death after a quick trial in which she found neither side particularly impressive. Five years later a knock on the door led to her discovery that she may have contributed to a wrongful conviction. Now she wants to sit down with the man she sent away, a newly-freed man, and tell him she’s sorry. In collaboration with Vice here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. A “Death Spiral” for Police Unions? On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a case about “fair share fees” for public employees who opt out of union membership. Police unions have sided with organized labor and against the vocally cop-friendly Trump administration on the fight to keep fees which fund union bargaining and lobbying activities. The Supreme Court is widely expected to side against unions. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Lt. Patrick Harris of the Virginia Beach Police Department faced a dilemma: in 2017 the state had enacted new laws that compelled police departments to test their backlog of rape kits, but with 344 kits now back from the lab, Harris had no plan for what to do next. Should he notify all the survivors? Or should he only get in touch with survivors in the cases in which the test yielded a match in a national DNA database? Washington Post reporter, Jessica Contrera, explores the department’s complicated process of figuring who to notify, and how. “Everyone wanted to do the right thing for victims; there was just no way to know what that was,” wrote Contrera. Ultimately, a critical miscommunication with Virginia’s attorney general and several stakeholders helped design a new notification law. — Nicole Lewis "Like many of liberalism’s guarantees, privacy is not a universal right but a class right: guaranteed to those who can buy it." That's one of the underlying themes in two provocative new books Sam Adler-Bell reviewed for The New Inquiry. Many Americans, especially the poor and the marginalized, exist in a "privacy-free rights environment," where their movements can be tracked, their lives scrutinized, and their life chances dictated by powerful algorithms. Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality illuminates this last development; access to social services or the likelihood of arrest are increasingly determined by data-mining computers. And in The Poverty of Privacy Rights, legal scholar Khiara Bridges focuses on women who are subject to coercive and invasive inspection when accessing welfare and health services. Together, these authors show that inequality of wealth often means inequality of rights. — Andrew Epstein “It was pure terror.” That’s how Pat Suzuki remembers feeling as a child growing up in California when the FBI began raiding the homes of Japanese Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack. She remembers her mother burning the photos of loved ones in Japan, trying to erase anything that might make them suspect. “Order 9066,” a new podcast out this week from APM Reports and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, tells the story of the incarceration of Japanese Americans, mostly through their own voices. It’s an important reminder that the order, which allowed for the detention of more than 120,000 people, was upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States and has never been overturned. — Abbie VanSickle The NRA’s reach extends across the country but the source of its power may actually lie in Florida, where former organization president and longtime NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer has influenced the state to pass several gun-friendly laws over four decades, many of which have been replicated in other states. “If you’re the governor, and you’ve won by a handful of votes, and you’ve got great political ambitions, you’re going to take Marion’s call in the middle of the night,” former state senator Don Gaetz told Mike Spies of The Trace. Hammer was key to Florida passing its “Stand Your Ground” law, and she has helped lay a groundwork of laws and policies that handcuffs how elected officials can respond to the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School today. — Justin George |
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— Our reader, Kenneth Dall, on this week’s commentary about mental illness and access to guns |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2018 7:10 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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Castaways on an island. The terror-law detainee system at Guantanamo Bay is now laboring through its third administration. President Bush helped populate it in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. President Obama tried to depopulate it. And now President Trump has signaled he intends to keep it open even as the tribunal process grinds to a halt. Here, in collaboration with Longreads, Amos Barshad tells the story of one prisoner named Haroon Gul who doesn’t figure to be going anywhere anytime soon. The Kerner Omission. Fifty years after the so-called Kerner Commission, a landmark federal report on race, poverty, and violence, the missed opportunities are plain to see. Despite the commission’s focus on economic and racial inequality, Nicole Lewis writes, the Johnson and Nixon administrations turned the so-called “War on Poverty” into a “War on Crime,” the destructive vestiges of which are with us today. For Henry Montgomery, a Catch-22 from Louisiana and the courts. His “meaningful opportunity” for release from a juvenile life-without-parole sentence came with impossible conditions, argues Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project, in this original commentary. “Prison is the very absence of normal.” Jerry Metcalf is serving 40-to-60 years in Michigan for second-degree murder and a weapons charge. Here, in the latest in our “Life Inside” series with Vice, he describes in vivid detail the daily indignities he and his fellow inmates suffer, as well as the culture of fear and violence that permeates his prison. He just doesn’t understand, he writes, why prisons do such a lousy job of preparing prisoners to re-enter society when their terms are done. About the FBI, affidavits, and search warrants. The so-called Nunes memo has drawn attention to the way federal law enforcement officials draft affidavits to get judicial approval for searches and surveillance. Here’s the story of a white-collar case in New York in which the feds relied on a flawed affidavit even after they arguably knew it was flawed and yet evidently never faced any consequences, in our latest “Case in Point” with WNYC’s The Takeaway. Keeping prosecutors on their toes by sitting in their courtrooms. When it comes to tracking racial disparities in criminal justice sometimes the only way is to “sit there” in courtrooms and watch how prosecutors handle the cases that come before them. That’s the idea behind CourtWatch NYC, a new group that plans to clock the work of Manhattan prosecutors to see how they implement a new policy not to ask judges to set bail in low-level misdemeanor cases. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Last week, in the wake of the Lakeland mass shooting, we highlighted Mike Spies’ New Yorker profile showing how NRA lobbyist Marian Hammer has played the Florida legislature like a puppet. Spies also wrote an earlier piece for the Tampa Bay Times revealing how Hammer beat a Florida environmental agency like a drum. For 50 years a gun range shot tons of lead pellets into a public wetlands. In 2004 the range agreed to build a wall but never followed through. Ten years later, the agency sued to enforce the agreement. Enter Hammer, who attacked the agency and then drafted a document dismissing the lawsuit. A powerful lawmaker passed Hammer’s document to the agency unchanged. Inside the agency, the communications director was aghast as she forwarded the NRA document to the executive director —“I have no words … But now high blood pressure” — and the chief of staff —“don’t wet yourself.” The agency abruptly dropped the lawsuit with no explanation. — Joseph Neff It’s a mistake to think that police body cameras are a panacea and equipping police departments with the devices will automatically lead to transparency. The police union in New York City is engrossed in a legal battle with news outlets and city officials arguing that New York Police Department body camera footage is part of an officer’s personnel records. New York state civil law defines police records “used to evaluate performance toward continued employment” as confidential. Union officials say body camera footage is protected from public consumption via this law. Across the river in New Jersey, the state’s new left-leaning attorney general issued a directive this week instructing that police body camera recordings be shared publicly soon after a fatal incident. — Simone Weichselbaum This coming Tuesday will feature two local primary races, both in Texas, that are becoming the focus of national battles over the direction of the criminal justice system. In Dallas, two Democrats are competing for the ‘reformer’ slot in the general election, as the ACLU enlists former prisoners to talk the race up to voters. KERA News published a detailed, explanatory story about the stakes. In San Antonio, bail has been at the center of the debates, but coverage has focused more on personality than policy. A PAC associated with billionaire George Soros has spent nearly a million dollars supporting a defense lawyer’s campaign to unseat the incumbent, provoking the ire of Gov. Greg Abbott and conservative media, while others point to the incumbent’s public statements on vaccines and Islam. If Soros’s gamble doesn’t pay off, it will be a sign of the challenges ahead for the national reform movement. — Maurice Chammah A flurry of 50th anniversary coverage of the Kerner Commission has reminded us how far we have not come in addressing racism in America. This brief piece from Bill Moyers Journal spotlights an often overlooked section of the Kerner report: how the news media made things worse. First, the report says, they inaccurately reported the riots, inflating the damage and using inflammatory headlines. More importantly, the report took aim at the lack of diversity in American newsrooms, urging that “The news media must publish newspapers and produce programs that recognize the existence and activities of the Negro.” On the occasion of Kerner’s 40th anniversary 10 years ago, one commentator lamented, “[W]e continue to confront a reality in which news stories are routinely told 'from the standpoint of a white man's world.'" It’s something The Marshall Project has acknowledged about our own performance. — Carroll Bogert Each year, the lawn of St. Columba Catholic Church in Oakland, Calif., fills with white crosses. The church adds a cross for each homicide victim in the city. At the end of the year, each cross is pulled from the ground and the name is read. This week, WNYC’s Snap Judgment published “Counted: An Oakland Story.” Reporters looked at every murder in Oakland during 2017, telling the stories of each person. But it’s also the story of families and communities. One of the most powerful parts is the story of the people who are working in the community, like Shareena Thomas, who helps run the People’s Community Medics, training community members how to treat gunshot and knife wounds until paramedics arrive. It’s a powerful, nuanced listen. — Abbie VanSickle |
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— Our reader, Kumar Rao, on how the Kerner Report fell short on police reform |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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Policing a city in crisis. In “Flint Town,” an eight-part Netflix mini-series, documentarians take us on an epic tour of police work in Flint, Michigan, a violent, impoverished city where many residents have fallen through the safety net. We see how the relationship between cops and the communities they serve ebbs and flows from one dramatic incident to another. As part of our feature “The Frame,” TMP’s Celina Fang has our review. Old, sick, and dying in shackles. Despite persistent urging by officials at the Justice Department to release from custody more elderly and ailing federal prisoners, the Bureau of Prisons has done little to implement its “compassionate release” program. From 2013 to 2017, the BOP approved 6 percent of the 5,400 applications received, while 266 inmates who requested compassionate release died in custody. All this while the costs of housing ill inmates strained the department’s budget. In collaboration with The New York Times, TMP’s Christie Thompson has our feature story. Where having a drug conviction lands you on the sex offender registry. Kansas is a good example of the sort of mission creep occurring in states that nurture sex offender registries. You don’t have to be a sex offender to make it onto Kansas’s online, searchable database. You don’t even have to be a big-time drug dealer or trafficker. A decade after lawmakers expanded the categories, they are considering restricting them. In collaboration with the Wichita Eagle, TMP’s Maurice Chammah has our story. How a loving wife behind bars tries to care for her ailing husband. Connie Farris, 73, is serving a 12-year sentence for mail fraud in California. Her husband of 53 years is wasting away from a form of muscular dystrophy. “It tears your heart out when you can’t help somebody and you know, if you were there, you could,” she says as she applies again for compassionate release. In collaboration with Vice here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Cops often talk about the fear of ending up on a “Giglio list.” The term refers to a 1970s U.S. Supreme Court case which set the grounds for modern day prosecutors having to share the past misdeeds of a police officer who is about to testify in court. Now comes the recent news out of Philadelphia, where reporters exposed a “do not call list” made up of cops, and compiled by district attorney’s office. What type of police officers are in this group? “Officers disciplined by the Police Department and essentially neutered by prosecutors, yet still on the job and collecting a taxpayer-funded salary,” reported the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. — Simone Weichselbaum We posted an excerpt from a new Netflix documentary series called ‘Flint Town’ this week, but I’d like to recommend the whole first episode, a beautifully-shot, emotionally riveting snapshot of a handful of officers trying to police in one the country’s most poverty-stricken and under-resourced cities. The show is a thoughtful counter to the adrenaline binges of ‘Cops’ and ‘Live PD,’ exuding empathy for everyone on-screen, even when tension — especially racial tension — is high. The Detroit Free Press also has a nice write-up featuring interviews with the filmmakers. — Maurice Chammah “This is basically going to war against the state of California, the engine of the American economy. It’s not wise, it’s not right, and it will not stand.” That’s what California Gov. Jerry Brown said in response to the Department of Justice’s lawsuit filed this week. It’s the latest twist in the ever-worsening relationship between the Trump administration and California’s leaders. On a trip to Sacramento, Attorney General Jeff Sessions accused the state of trying to secede. It’s also a battle between the current attorney general and the former one, Eric H. Holder Jr. Holder, who has been advising California’s Senate, pushed back on comparisons between the lawsuit and an Obama administration challenge to an Arizona law that sought to crack down on people in the country illegally, saying the legal issues involved are like “comparing apples and oranges.” Local elected leaders are jumping in, too. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf caused a controversy when she warned residents of upcoming ICE raids, faced criticism from Sessions and then doubled-down. —Abbie VanSickle The police beating of Johnnie Rush, arrested after jaywalking through an empty parking lot, had been quietly simmering for months in Asheville, the craft brew and arts mecca in western North Carolina. The case recently blew up after the Citizen-Times posted body-cam video of the beating. The police chief and district attorney responded by calling for an investigation of the leaker, a move they probably now regret. The video ignited a furor, outraged the mayor and spurred the FBI to open an investigation. State agents twice declined to investigate because the Asheville PD waited five months to request outside scrutiny, and now the police chief says she’ll quit if asked. North Carolina probably has the nation’s most restrictive law on access to police body-cam video, a law now being called into question. — Joseph Neff |
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— Our reader, Justin Barbour, on "compassionate release," a rarely used provision for very sick or elderly people in federal prison |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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Testimony from 7,000 miles away. Hamid Hayat, an American accused of being part of a terrorist “sleeper cell,” had an alibi for the time he was supposedly at a Pakistan training camp, but the jury didn’t hear it. The family, friends, and neighbors who vouched for him lived in a small Pakistani village. On appeal, a judge arranged for many of those witnesses to testify via teleconference. Prosecutors objected and the case is not yet resolved, but already it raises new questions about the intersection of law and technology. In collaboration with WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” TMP’s Abbie VanSickle has the latest in our Case in Point series. Time to put an end to prosecutorial immunity. There has to be more accountability for prosecutors who engage in misconduct. The toll on taxpayers in compensation for wrongful convictions is high and rising. Here is original TMP commentary from U.S. District Judge Frederic Block, of the Eastern District of New York. If you can’t kill it, join it. For years William Otis, a conservative law professor and advocate, has been an outspoken critic of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the independent panel that sets sentencing guidelines for federal judges. Now he’s one of the newest nominees to the commission, courtesy of President Trump. Justice reformers are furious with the choice and it’s uncertain whether Otis will get the votes he needs for Senate confirmation. TMP’s Justin George has our story. Oklahoma knows shockingly little about what it will take to execute people with nitrogen gas. Corrections officials there want to move forward with a death protocol that avoids the costs and uncertainty of lethal injection. TMP’s Eli Hager reports that they are traveling down an even more troublesome path using gas, an idea, by the way, that came originally from a BBC show titled: How to kill a human being.” The conspiracy theories you hear in prison. Mary Rayme is a retired prison librarian who worked for years in penitentiaries in Maryland and West Virginia. Her job made her the point person for countless reference questions from inmates essentially cut off from contact with the outside world. Like: “Is Michelle Obama a Freemason?” In collaboration with Vice here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Here’s another way Jeff Sessions could change immigration courts: by making it harder for domestic violence victims to win asylum. Huffington Post and Slate have good breakdowns of the case, which hinges on whether women fleeing domestic violence make up a specific “social group” that can be protected under the law. The Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that they did in 2014, but Sessions has announced he will reconsider that standard. He’s already decided to review two other Board of Immigration Appeals decisions that ruled in favor of immigrants — an uncommon move for an attorney general. As one immigration attorney put it to the Huffington Post, “Are they sitting around the Justice Department looking at every pro-immigrant [Board of Immigration Appeals] decision and trying to figure out a way to gut it?” — Christie Thompson Three cheers for AL.com reporter Connor Sheets, who demonstrated this week for AL.com how a county sheriff pocketed money that was supposed to be used to feed men and women in his jail. And it’s technically legal. Alabama has long allowed sheriffs to keep “excess” funds for themselves, and this sheriff, Todd Entrekin, has used the money to purchase properties along with his wife worth more than $1.7 million. Entrekin is facing a challenger in an upcoming election, who makes a pretty basic campaign promise: that he’ll use “excess funds” for “things that benefit the taxpayer.” Meanwhile, Entrekin is raising funds for his own campaign from companies with county contracts. Again: all legal. — Maurice Chammah “The system we’ve built accommodates only guilt and innocence—there’s nothing in between. No space for the reality that a lot of people are both things at once.” That’s how Kai Wright, the host of "Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice," explains it. The new podcast tells the story of Z, a boy who is in the system for armed robbery, and his mother, who desperately wants him to come home. It’s worth a listen, especially for the interviews with Z’s mom. You can hear the heartbreak in her voice. Unlike a lot of other reporting I’ve seen about young people in the system, this one focuses on their first interactions with law enforcement, and how that shapes their lives for years to come. —Abbie VanSickle The massacre at Parkland sparked renewed debate about regulating guns. In a timely essay, Adam Hochschild walks us through three recent books on the history and role of guns in America: two on the history of gun rights and one on the movement to seize federal land in the west. Hochschild is particularly keen on Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, which digs into the origins of that necessary and well-regulated militia. "Of course the amendment was written with militias in mind, she says, but, during and after the colonial era, just what were those militias? They were not merely upstanding citizens protecting themselves against foreign tyrants like King George III. They also searched for runaway slaves and seized land from Native Americans, often by slaughter." — Joseph Neff |
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— Our reader, Erin Kuller, on an incarcerated woman's attempts to care for her sick husband from prison |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2018 7:05 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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Rightfully convicted, wrongfully sentenced. You may know about the “conviction integrity units” that have popped up in district attorneys’ offices around the country to ferret out wrongful convictions. Now a new Philadelphia prosecutor has proposed “sentencing review units” to tackle a different problem: cases where the guilty have been given excessive sentences. In collaboration with The Nation, Eli Hager has our story. When the innocent go to prison, how many guilty go free? Wrongful convictions don’t just ruin the lives of those who are imprisoned and their families. They also mean that the “true” criminal is not held accountable. Jennifer Thompson and Frank Baumgartner, a wife-and-husband team with personal and professional experiences that make them suited for the job, have studied this new perspective about the costs of wrongful convictions. Our Maurice Chammah interviewed them. A death row “talent show.” George Wilkerson is on death row in North Carolina, convicted of double murder in 2006. Here he describes what it was like when a group of condemned men came together in 2016 to express their creativity before an audience of mostly murderers, all under the gaze of the unit’s head psychologist. There isn’t much talent, but by the end it’s clear why the doctor wanted to put on a show. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “LIfe Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
What’s the collateral damage of school shootings? This week, the Washington Post published the results of a year-long analysis that puts some concrete figures to this uniquely American crime. The numbers are staggering: more than 187,000 students from at least 193 schools have experienced shootings on campus during school hours. Children of color are more likely to experience gun violence at school, even though shootings at mostly white schools draw the most attention. The Post also delved into other issues related to school shootings, including statistics about resource officers, mental illness, the source of the firearms used, and characteristics of the shooters, offering an important set of facts on a subject completely lacking in government-produced data. — Alysia Santo Among the quirks of the internet hot-take machine is a tendency to take individual crimes and read as much as possible into them, as quickly as possible. The Texas Observer’s Gus Bova examined just how unhinged this impulse to generalize became as law enforcement sought and captured the man responsible for a string of bombings in Austin, Texas, over the last month. Tweeters accused the media of ignoring the bombings because the first two victims were black, although the tweeters relied on information from well-circulated media reports. National outlets picked up a storyline about race even as subsequent victims broke the pattern. Then reporters tied the bombings to everything from Austin’s “weirdness” to its “special love of home delivery service.” Bova’s round-up is useful for anyone who covers crime; we should be careful before drawing big lessons from complicated tragedies. — Maurice Chammah “Black men raised in the top 1 percent — by millionaires — were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.” That’s just one of the key findings from a vast study of census data — following life outcomes for millions of American kids — visualized and explained by The Upshot this week. The analysis shows and confirms that a higher income and socioeconomic status are no protection against racism for black boys in the U.S. As Boston University law professor Khiara Bridges explained, “Simply because you’re in an area that is more affluent, it’s still hard for black boys to present themselves as independent from the stereotype of black criminality.” — Christie Thompson One month after 9/11, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Wales was murdered at his home in Seattle, the first assassination of an AUSA. The U. S. Department of Justice launched a massive investigation, one of the biggest in its history. Sixteen years later, no arrest has been made. What gives? Two former CNN producers (one a former federal prosecutor) take a deep, deep dive in a podcast titled Somebody, Somewhere. No spoilers here, except to say the case is tragic, the story-telling is gripping and the investigation took some wrong turns, some understandable, one with deadly consequences. — Joseph Neff |
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— Our reader, Katherine Edwards, on this commentary about prosecutorial immunity |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2018 7:03 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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These New York jails still isolate teens. The jail complex on Rikers Island banned solitary confinement for juveniles after the suicide of Kalief Browder, but in some jails outside of New York City, it’s still a common practice. A review of the ten counties outside of the city that detain the largest numbers of juveniles reveals that at least seven still allow for teens to be held in isolation, despite numerous studies documenting its detrimental effects on young people. And it’s not just for punishment: Lacking separate facilities for minors, many jails rely on solitary to keep kids away from adults. “It made me feel like nothing, like an animal,” said one teen of her 32 days in solitary upstate. In partnership with Caught, a new podcast on juvenile justice from WNYC Studios, and The Root, TMP’s Taylor Eldridge has our story. GOP could end “Second Chance” Pell Grants for prisoners. For all their talk of rehabilitation and expanding employment opportunities for ex-offenders, GOP lawmakers and administration officials have shown no support for extending an Obama-era program that provides college courses for 4,000 inmates. “We had an administration that embraced reform,” says one advocate. “Now they don't return my calls.” In collaboration with The Hechinger Report, TMP’s Nicole Lewis has our story. The lingering myth of the immigrant criminal. A Gallup poll last year revealed that nearly half of those Americans surveyed believe that immigrants make crime rates worse. The Trump administration campaigned on that premise and has governed on it. But the evidence from 200 cities and towns says otherwise. “Data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two,” reports TMP’s Anna Flagg, who filed this piece for us in collaboration with The New York Times. When you are 16 and it’s your first time in solitary. Young Jordan was arrested on burglary charges and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Syracuse, New York. He soon found himself in the jail’s special housing unit where, he says, “you have nothing to do but think. You think about everything in your life — and they aren’t very pleasant things. All I thought about was negatives: my ongoing case, my troubles at home, and my family.” In collaboration with Vice, he tells his story here to TMP’s Taylor Elizabeth Eldridge for the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Regular readers of The Marshall Project know that we’re big fans of Ear Hustle, the extraordinary podcast from inside San Quentin prison. This week’s episode — the second of the second season — is a painful, intimate, revelatory conversation about sex trafficking, between an inmate serving a life term for crimes committed as a career trafficker (we learn to avoid “pimp,” as a term that glamorizes) and a prison volunteer who served 19 years for killing her trafficker. We hear their brutally candid accounts, and then they sit down to talk to each other, restorative-justice style. I know, I know, not what you had in mind for Easter weekend. But it’s 38 minutes and 26 seconds you won’t regret — or forget. — Bill Keller This week, public outrage continued to build over the death of 22-year-old Stephon Clark, an unarmed man shot by police in his grandmother’s yard as they searched for a burglary suspect. Protesters shut down a freeway,blocked entry to an NBA game and confronted city officials, expressing their grief and anger at the latest police shooting. “Everybody knows that we’re getting killed regularly out here; that’s the buildup to this,” Tanya Faison, who founded the local chapter of Black Lives Matter,told The New York Times. One key part of this story, though, remains untold. What’s the history of the officers who shot him? Had they been involved in any similar incidents? We may never know. That’s because of a California law, the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act, that keeps law enforcement personnel files confidential, even instances of previous misconduct, restricting public access to complaints and disciplinary histories. Will Clark’s death force a reexamination of this law? It remains to be seen. —Abbie VanSickle Bloomberg Businessweek had a fascinating, unexpected story about the rise of elderly women in Japanese prisons, many of whom purposefully shoplifted in order to be sent to jail. An increasing number of seniors in Japan are poor and alone (either literally or emotionally) and turning to prison as a last resort for care or community. “When I shoplifted, I had money in my wallet. Then I thought about my life,” one 80-year-old prisoner told reporters. “I didn’t want to go home, and I had nowhere else to go. Asking for help in prison was the only way.” Another woman told them, “I enjoy my life in prison more. There are always people around, and I don’t feel lonely here.” — Christie Thompson Since the 2016 election we have learned more and more about Robert Mercer, the reclusive hedge fund tycoon and political kingmaker who bankrolled Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon’s political rise. Mercer, a pal of President Trump and the owner of a 203-foot yacht, is also a volunteer policeman in Lake Arthur, New Mexico, population 433. Bloomberg brings us the fascinating story of the billionaire who works at least six days a year on a force whose calls for service include lost pets and theft of pecans: “It shows just how far a man of means will go to get something he can’t buy: the right to carry a concealed firearm anywhere in America.” — Joseph Neff |
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— Our reader, Janet McConnell, on the Pell-funded college classes for prisoners the Trump Administration may end. |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2018 7:02 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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I was too young to own a gun. “Raising the age” for gun purchases will help keep deadly weapons out of the hands of countless young men too immature to handle the life-or-death responsibility that comes with gun ownership. Here is original TMP commentary from Jerry Metcalf, a Michigan prisoner who volunteers as an aid to the mentally ill and trains service dogs. Did a prosecutor lie about whether the family of a murder victim wanted the death penalty for his killer? The parents of Jonas Cherry, a murder victim in Texas, did not want their son’s killer to be executed and told prosecutors so. But a prosecutor told jurors at the defendant’s capital trial “that all of Jonas’s family and everyone who loved him believe the death penalty is appropriate.” What happens now? In collaboration with WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” TMP’s Maurice Chammah has the latest installment of our “Case in Point” series. Why are Joe Biden and the NRA battling over a state judgeship in Wisconsin? Because this is the new normal in judicial campaigns — expensive, political, and about something else beyond the candidates’ qualifications. In this case, it’s mainly about partisan gerrymandering of election districts, a bitter legal and political conflict that’s now under review at the U.S. Supreme Court. Also included, an “old” normal: Soft-on-crime attack ads. Voting is today. Our Christie Thompson has the story. Where the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Arthur Longworth is serving a life-without-parole sentence for murder in Washington state. He’s also an accomplished and award-winning author. But now he’s being punished for what corrections officials say is the infraction of “lying to staff.” Longworth suspects he has lost privileges, including a job in the library and a seat in a classroom, because of his writing, including his work as a contributor to The Marshall Project. In collaboration with Crosscut, TMP’s Eli Hager has our story. Finding college by way of prison. Marcus Lilly says now that he knew he would go to prison before he would go to college. But a grant program offered during the Obama era allowed him to take classes at the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. The program changed his prison experience and gave him hope for the future. Now he’s out, studying at the University of Baltimore, and proud to be able to tell his teenage son that he’s turned his life around. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
The complexity and detail in this ProPublica/New York Magazine story is what’s been missing from most coverage of MS-13. It tells the story of Henry, a teenager who joined the gang (his initiation rite was to commit murder),fled the gang’s demands in El Salvador and tried to rebuild his life in Long Island, only to be enlisted by the MS-13 clique at his new high school. When several of his classmates were murdered by the clique’s leaders, Henry reached a breaking point. He told Long Island police and the FBI everything he knew about the gang’s operations, in hopes of getting free. Instead, law enforcement turned him over to ICE, which locked him up with the gangsters he snitched on. Read it from start to finish, along with the follow-up about his asylum hearing and the overwhelming response to his story. — Christie Thompson Louisiana is the only state where you can be convicted of murder even though some jurors aren’t convinced you’re guilty. The white men who wrote the law back in 1898 explicitly said they wanted to get around the constitution’s ban on all-white juries, which they felt were more likely to convict black people. Let a couple of black jurors in, the logic went, and then ten white jurors will overrule them. Fast forward to today, and a massive new analysis of nearly a thousand cases from the Baton Rouge Advocate shows that the law is still more or less working just as intended, acting “as a capstone to a trial system that becomes more tilted against black defendants at each stage.” The analysis and arguments are complex, but the takeaway is shockingly simple, and this analysis will surely be ammunition for the lawyers who have continually asked the Supreme Court to strike down the law. — Maurice Chammah More than 50 years have passed since Newark erupted into violence after police beat and jailed a black cab driver in the summer of ’67. The riots, which left scores of people dead and caused millions of dollars in damages, made national headlines. For the first time, many Americans were tuned into the poverty and police violence affecting Newark’s black residents. But for years leading up to the 1967 riots, a little known newspaper reporter named Ron Porambo attempted to shine a spotlight on the social ills of the inner city. Porambo never became a household name for his reporting, and his landmark book No Cause for Indictment, which implicated police in the unjustified killings of two dozen black residents, initially received rave reviews before fading from public interest. Greg Donahue uncovers Porambo’s eccentric life for the Atavist Magazine, noting that “during the years that should have been his journalistic prime, his dark side won the battle for his soul.” — Nicole Lewis |
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— Our reader, Kerry Kennedy, on the myth of the criminal immigrant |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2018 7:02 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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I was too young to own a gun. “Raising the age” for gun purchases will help keep deadly weapons out of the hands of countless young men too immature to handle the life-or-death responsibility that comes with gun ownership. Here is original TMP commentary from Jerry Metcalf, a Michigan prisoner who volunteers as an aid to the mentally ill and trains service dogs. Did a prosecutor lie about whether the family of a murder victim wanted the death penalty for his killer? The parents of Jonas Cherry, a murder victim in Texas, did not want their son’s killer to be executed and told prosecutors so. But a prosecutor told jurors at the defendant’s capital trial “that all of Jonas’s family and everyone who loved him believe the death penalty is appropriate.” What happens now? In collaboration with WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” TMP’s Maurice Chammah has the latest installment of our “Case in Point” series. Why are Joe Biden and the NRA battling over a state judgeship in Wisconsin? Because this is the new normal in judicial campaigns — expensive, political, and about something else beyond the candidates’ qualifications. In this case, it’s mainly about partisan gerrymandering of election districts, a bitter legal and political conflict that’s now under review at the U.S. Supreme Court. Also included, an “old” normal: Soft-on-crime attack ads. Voting is today. Our Christie Thompson has the story. Where the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Arthur Longworth is serving a life-without-parole sentence for murder in Washington state. He’s also an accomplished and award-winning author. But now he’s being punished for what corrections officials say is the infraction of “lying to staff.” Longworth suspects he has lost privileges, including a job in the library and a seat in a classroom, because of his writing, including his work as a contributor to The Marshall Project. In collaboration with Crosscut, TMP’s Eli Hager has our story. Finding college by way of prison. Marcus Lilly says now that he knew he would go to prison before he would go to college. But a grant program offered during the Obama era allowed him to take classes at the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. The program changed his prison experience and gave him hope for the future. Now he’s out, studying at the University of Baltimore, and proud to be able to tell his teenage son that he’s turned his life around. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
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Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. The complexity and detail in this ProPublica/New York Magazine story is what’s been missing from most coverage of MS-13. It tells the story of Henry, a teenager who joined the gang (his initiation rite was to commit murder),fled the gang’s demands in El Salvador and tried to rebuild his life in Long Island, only to be enlisted by the MS-13 clique at his new high school. When several of his classmates were murdered by the clique’s leaders, Henry reached a breaking point. He told Long Island police and the FBI everything he knew about the gang’s operations, in hopes of getting free. Instead, law enforcement turned him over to ICE, which locked him up with the gangsters he snitched on. Read it from start to finish, along with the follow-up about his asylum hearing and the overwhelming response to his story. — Christie Thompson Louisiana is the only state where you can be convicted of murder even though some jurors aren’t convinced you’re guilty. The white men who wrote the law back in 1898 explicitly said they wanted to get around the constitution’s ban on all-white juries, which they felt were more likely to convict black people. Let a couple of black jurors in, the logic went, and then ten white jurors will overrule them. Fast forward to today, and a massive new analysis of nearly a thousand cases from the Baton Rouge Advocate shows that the law is still more or less working just as intended, acting “as a capstone to a trial system that becomes more tilted against black defendants at each stage.” The analysis and arguments are complex, but the takeaway is shockingly simple, and this analysis will surely be ammunition for the lawyers who have continually asked the Supreme Court to strike down the law. — Maurice Chammah More than 50 years have passed since Newark erupted into violence after police beat and jailed a black cab driver in the summer of ’67. The riots, which left scores of people dead and caused millions of dollars in damages, made national headlines. For the first time, many Americans were tuned into the poverty and police violence affecting Newark’s black residents. But for years leading up to the 1967 riots, a little known newspaper reporter named Ron Porambo attempted to shine a spotlight on the social ills of the inner city. Porambo never became a household name for his reporting, and his landmark book No Cause for Indictment, which implicated police in the unjustified killings of two dozen black residents, initially received rave reviews before fading from public interest. Greg Donahue uncovers Porambo’s eccentric life for the Atavist Magazine, noting that “during the years that should have been his journalistic prime, his dark side won the battle for his soul.” — Nicole Lewis |
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— Our reader, Kerry Kennedy, on the myth of the criminal immigrant |
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2018 7:05 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Gabe Isman |
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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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The candid cameras of Attica. Even after the infamous uprising in 1971, the upstate New York prison was a place marked by unusual hostility between guards and inmates. Then came the installation of surveillance cameras and microphones around the facility. And that was good news for inmates, writes John J. Lennon, a TMP contributor who spent years in Attica. He reports that dubious “misbehavior reports” there are down sharply as guards cope with new levels of scrutiny. In collaboration with Vice, Lennon filed this story from Sing Sing prison, where he’s now confined. Injury to insult. Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, two intellectually disabled brothers, were wrongfully convicted of murder and spent 30 years on death row. Then, after receiving compensation from North Carolina for their decades of confinement, they were victimized again by financial predators. In partnership with The New York Times, TMP’s Joseph Neff has our story. Seven years in prison for two joints. And now he’s free. Bernard Noble became a national symbol of harsh drug sentencing laws when he was given a 13-year prison term for three grams of marijuana Louisiana police found on him in 2010. Since then judges, lawyers and advocates have lobbied for his early release. And it has taken a series of changes to state law to make it happen, earlier this week, when Noble was freed from a Bossier Parish prison. TMP’s Nicole Lewis and Maurice Chammah have our story. How police brutality drove a wedge between me and my church. Black parishioners are leaving white churches at accelerating rates, and it’s not hard to understand why. It all starts with the fact that white Christians are failing to hear their brothers and sisters of color. Here is original TMP commentary from Anthony Fowler, Jr., who resides in North St. Louis County. The judge who dreads execution day. Mike Lynch retired from the bench in Texas in 2012. During his two decades as a judge he presided over eight capital cases and each time, he writes, he was aware of the enormity of condemning a man to death — of “invading God’s province,” as he puts it. Once, in such a moment, he wrote in his journal: “If only we could execute the bad side and keep the good side alive.” In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series.
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Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Domestic violence—what old-school cops used to call, dismissively, a “family beef”—rarely makes the news. But of police shot dead in the line of duty last year, more were killed responding to domestic conflict than to any other type of emergency. A young nonprofit news organization, The Fuller Project for International Reporting, leveraged that startling data point into a front-page story in USA Today, and looked at one North Carolina department that is training police to recognize such cases before they explode. — Bill Keller Four military veterans, one mentally ill. A missed disability payment, a hostage taking, a SWAT team and a standoff at a branch bank. Task & Purpose, in collaboration with Longreads, goes into fine detail to examine this 2017 incident in Georgia, raising many questions on how police use their words and how they use force. “I’m just baffled about what is so hard to negotiate,” said a Marine who served with the hostage taker. “This isn’t a terrorist. This is a guy who fought against terrorism. As a veteran it makes me feel smaller than a grain of sand, the way he was treated.” — Joseph Neff President Trump’s immigration crackdown has prompted different reactions from jurisdictions across the country; some have restricted police from cooperating with federal immigration agents, while others have embraced the new tactics. Pennsylvania hasn’t committed to either approach, and with this lack of guidelines, some officers have taken it upon themselves to work closely with immigration officials. According to an investigation published this week by ProPublica and the Philadelphia Inquirer, officers there are detaining people they suspect of being undocumented, without any legal authority, until immigration officials arrive. “The whole central Pennsylvania area is like the opposite of a sanctuary city,” said one immigration lawyer. “Cops are out there looking for people.” — Alysia Santo What does it look like to restart life after decades in prison? In a series of photographs for The New York Times, Joseph Rodriguez shows what life is like for formerly incarcerated people returning to Stockton, a city in California’s Central Valley. A series of recent criminal justice measures in the state changed the parole requirements, creating a “cluster effect” of many long-term prisoners returning to the city. “It’s a lot of work to unravel the garbage I created,” said Jesse De La Cruz, who spent three decades in and out of California prisons. Former prisoners, he said, are expected to “change everything they’ve done all their lives in three months. It doesn’t work that way.” The photographs show the deep psychological scars that remain long after freedom. — Abbie VanSickle “Which way do you think is better financially—to cripple them or kill them?” That was the question Kern County (Calif.) Sheriff Donny Youngblood asked rank-and-file officers during his 2006 campaign, regarding police shootings of suspects. Somebody from the audience suggested the second option. According to The Guardian, the sheriff's reply was: “Absolutely. Because if they’re crippled we get to take care of them for life. And that cost goes way up.” The relevance of something that was said 12 years ago? Youngblood is running for reelection. — Manuel Villa |
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— Our reader, Nancy McHugh, on Finding College By Way of Prison |
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2018 7:49 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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The Trump administration’s war on abused women seeking asylum. President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have been chipping away at federal immigration policies that offer refuge to victims of domestic or sexual violence. The feds now are re-evaluating whether such claims of violence can ever be used to justify asylum, and have raised new procedural hurdles for women whose cases are moving through immigration courts. In collaboration with Politico, TMP’s Julia Preston has our story. Cops caught in the middle. The Trump administration has denied federal funding for police programs in dozens of jurisdictions around the county because of a dispute with Chicago officials over immigration policy. That’s bad news for cops in places like Anniston, Alabama, who are fully on board with new ICE priorities and yet can’t now buy new computers and radar equipment for their police cars. In collaboration with Slate, TMP’s Simone Weichselbaum has our story. Will the Supreme Court rescue Corey Williams? He was an intellectually disabled 16-year-old when he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death two decades ago in Louisiana. Now his lawyers are trying to get his conviction overturned by pointing out the extent to which prosecutors failed to tell jurors (or defense attorneys) the truth about the witnesses against him. In collaboration with WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” here is the latest in our “Case in Point series.” Framed for murder by his own DNA. It turns out that we shed our DNA with every touch of every object every day. Now scientists, police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges are better understanding the extent to which our DNA turns up in places we’ve never been, like on the fingernails of a murder victim. Here’s the story of one such discovery and a defendant lucky to have benefitted in time. In partnership with Frontline and Wired Katie Worth brings us this TMP investigation. A blackout in prison made me fear the dark. Derek Trumbo, an accomplished prison writer, is serving a 25-year sentence in Kentucky for child sexual assault. Here he recounts the fear he felt in confinement when the power went out at his prison. He’s lucky, he realizes, that he wasn’t attacked by his fellow inmates during a rare moment of vulnerability on the cellblock. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Over the last five years, Denver researchers have surveyed thousands of people in jail, drug courts or on probation and made a significant discovery: 54 percent of them had a serious brain injury in their past. That’s compared to just 8 percent in the general population. The research raises more questions than it answers, about how brain injuries influence criminal behavior and how courts should take it into account. But like the discussion around mental illness and the justice system, their study suggests we should be having a similar conversation about traumatic brain injuries. — Christie Thompson You may not have heard of Palantir but there’s a good chance it’s heard of you. The massive data-mining firm founded by libertarian tech mogul and diehard Trump supporter Peter Thiel vacuums up huge amounts of personal information — financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings — and maps connections for intelligence agencies, banks, and police departments. Its “Gotham” product is used by the LAPD to predict who’s “likely to commit crimes,” sweeping up ever more people in its algorithmic dragnet. And Palantir’s looking for new customers. Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s cover story is downright terrifying. — Andrew Epstein Former FBI Director James Comey has been in the news after the publication of his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” and its account of his conflict with President Trump. Peter Maass goes beyond the Trumpian nuggets to explore what Comey — former US Attorney, FBI director and career prosecutor — thinks about criminal justice issues. Writing in The Intercept, Maass unpacks Comey's perception of mass incarceration and the lenient treatment doled out to General David Petraeus. "Comey is certainly right about the danger of Trump, but that doesn’t mean he’s right about other things.... Comey describes the killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray as “tragic deaths.” But he turns the killings around, lamenting that they “‘dominated perceptions of the police. They swamped and overshadowed millions of positive, professional encounters between citizens and police officers, and extraordinary anger was building toward all uniformed law enforcement.’ Yes, Comey really went there — blaming the victims of police abuse for making people upset that police were abusing them." — Joseph Neff When 11-year-old Ashlynne Mike and her 9-year-old brother Ian went missing in Shiprock, New Mexico, a town on the sprawling Navajo reservation, law enforcement knew they had to move quickly and coordinate with other local police departments. They also knew they needed to issue an Amber Alert right away. None of that happened. In a heartbreaking Esquire longread, the fate of one little girl illustrates the terrible consequences when police forces in Indian Country and nearby US cities and towns collide: “jurisdictional issues” become obstacles to getting kids home safely. —Beth Schwartzapfel |
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— Our reader, Suzanne, on Bernard Noble who spent seven years in prison for two joints worth of marijuana |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2018 7:02 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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The Catalyst. Thelton Henderson devoted much of his life on the federal bench to solving California’s prison crisis. He pressed relentlessly to ease overcrowding, to make the facilities less dangerous for both inmates and staff, and to provide prisoners with opportunities to safely transition to life on the outside. Now he’s ailing, retired, and watching as police and prosecutors try to roll back the state’s sweeping reform measures. In collaboration with Pacific Standard TMP’s Abbie VanSickle has our story. A reckoning in North Carolina. The state bar is investigating Patrick Megaro, a Florida lawyer who attached himself to two intellectually disabled men after they had spent 31 years in prison for a rape and murder they did not commit. Megaro is accused, among other things, of pocketing funds the men received for their wrongful convictions. TMP’s Joe Neff continues his coverage here. Take our “Jailhouse Quiz.” Perhaps you’ve been following the Orange County, California, jailhouse snitch scandal, which has ruined both careers and criminal convictions. Earlier this month, the ACLU waded into the fight with a lawsuit alleging patterns of misconduct by local officials. Here’s a quiz to test your knowledge and prime you to follow the lawsuit as it proceeds toward trial. TMP’s Beth Schwartzapfel put together the questions and answers. Fear of a black patron. The racial discrimination at the heart of the Starbucks case in Philadelphia goes beyond a single store or chain. It’s an endemic problem across America’s retail universe. Here is original TMP commentary from Aaron Ross Coleman. The hard truths about prison and policing. Two documentaries premiering this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York tackle justice issues in starkly different ways. The first, “It’s a Hard Truth, Ain’t It,” goes inside an Indiana prison from the perspective of inmates. The second, “Charm City,” takes a look at the Baltimore Police Department and the communities it serves. TMP’s Celina Fang has our preview. How I am preparing for parole after 27 years. Lawrence Bartley is serving out the end of a second-degree murder sentence in New York after being granted parole earlier this month. For the moment after he fired the fatal shot he has regretted the choice he made. Now as he prepares to re-enter society he knows he may never earn the forgiveness he seeks. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Timed to accompany the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, the New York Times Magazine published a breathtaking account of one family’s journey to Mississippi, to discover and confront a long-buried secret in their genealogy. Their ancestor, Elwood Higginbotham, was lynched by a white mob in 1935. “What does it mean to confront the past?” writes Vanessa Gregory. Such questions can only be answered in fragments, through reaction, reflection, and conversation, and Gregory is there to show us at a granular level what how one family experiences the confrontation. — Maurice Chammah In schools across the country, black students are four times more likely than their white peers to receive an out-of-school suspension and twice as likely to be arrested. Flooded with complaints of racial discrimination in the way student discipline is meted out, the Obama-era Department of Education opened investigations into school systems large and small. But with Betsy Devos now at the helm, many of these investigations have been quietly, and abruptly, closed. A ProPublica investigation revealed that the department has closed at least 65 cases without any mandated reforms, despite finding evidence of unequal treatment. In Bryan, Texas, where black students account for 20 percent of the student body, but 60 percent of the arrests, students like Trah’Vaeziah Jackson have been swept up into the juvenile justice system for minor offenses, elevating their risk of dropping out. — Nicole Lewis WIth this week’s guilty verdict in Bill Cosby’s sexual assault retrial, it’s worth revisiting this 2006 Philadelphia magazine profile of the real-life Cliff Huxtable, then in the midst of a nationwide “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” tour aimed at scolding poor black communities into bettering themselves. Beyond its characterization of Cosby as “transparently controlling and paranoid,” the article is striking in that it includes accounts by three separate women — including Andrea Constand herself — of being drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby. Constand had filed her civil suit in Philadelphia the previous year, the article reported, and 13 women stood ready to testify to being victims of similar assaults by Cosby. In other words, women have been speaking up about Bill Cosby for more than a decade, but it’s only now that police, prosecutors, and juries are listening — lending credence to the sense that the #metoo movement is shaping the criminal justice system’s approach sexual assault. — Beth Schwartzapfel |
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— Our reader, Katherine Edwards, on this commentary about the fear of a black patron |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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The People v. Cy Vance. The Manhattan prosecutor has taken heat for not pursuing charges against some of the the rich and powerful but Vance is far harsher in pursuing the poor and powerless than prosecutors in other New York boroughs. His policies help keep the Rikers Island jails brimming, his bail demands are stiff, and his discovery practices undermine the ability of defense attorneys to zealously represent their clients. In partnership with New York Magazine, TMP’s Tom Robbins has our story. The Trump administration ramps up it’s war on unaccompanied children at our border. Over the past month federal officials across a range of agencies have begun curtailing legal protections for children who cross into America without parents or guardians. Accompanying these moves is a wave of rhetoric which calls current rules “loopholes” and says the children must be barred to prevent gang violence. In collaboration with The New York Times, with reporting assistance by Caitlin Dickerson, TMP’s Eli Hager has the story. The city trying ‘trauma training’ for citizens — and cops. Policing training in Newark, New Jersey, includes a mandated, three-day session with city residents. The idea is to have both cops and citizens better understand the nature of community policing. So far even police union officials have bought into it. In collaboration with NorthJersey.com, TMP’s Simone Weichselbaum brings us the story. Michael Karas brings us the video. Rewriting the story of civil rights, one auditorium at a time. Bryan Stevenson, a member of The Marshall Project’s advisory board, now has, in the new lynching museum in Alabama, a bricks-and-mortar expression of his push to change the nation’s narrative on race and justice. Here is a field report from TMP President Carroll Bogart. America’s lynchings didn’t all take place in the South. In June 1920 a white mob of perhaps 10,000 residents of Duluth, Minnesota, surrounded a jail where six black men stood accused, without physical evidence, of raping a white woman. Three of the men were taken out and lynched. Last week a delegation of 35 from the city went to Alabama to mark the opening of the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Rooting them on was Duluth’s chief of police, whose great aunt was the white woman implicated in the fated allegations nearly a century ago. Robin Washington has our story. Prosecutor reform is shaking up races where it never has before. The Democratic primary race for district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, is unusual this year for one obvious reason. All three candidates are campaigning on progressive platforms that emphasize bail reform, restorative justice, the growing use of mental health courts, and new training to combat racial bias. TMP’s Joseph Neff has our story focusing on a challenger, Satana Deberry, and what she sees as institutional racism built into the system. Too “woke” for the jury box? Potential jurors should think twice about expressing their skepticism about police testimony during voir dire to help ensure that juries in criminal cases aren’t devoid of citizens sensitive to the need for police reform. Here is original TMP commentary from Todd Oppenheim, a veteran public defender in Baltimore. Want to escape your criminal past? Head north, to Alaska. JT Perkins spent time in prison in Kansas for dealing cocaine near a school and when he was released he realized that state’s drug offender registry would hinder his ability to move on with his life. When he could he moved to Alaska, perhaps the final American frontier, where he says people, and government officials, are far less interested in his past than they are in his future. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Not long ago, our own Bill Keller interviewed the architect Frank Gehry, who has taken a late-career interest in prisons, and whose students at Yale are envisioning all sorts of radical experiments in how you might make a place to serve time more humane. But can any of these designs be built, given the real world constraints of budgets, security, and good old fashioned bureaucracy? A new piece in Architectural Digest surveys the current state of prison and jail design, laying out all sorts of practical concerns — colors, light, distances, sight lines — that makes the debate about incarceration surprisingly tangible. — Maurice Chammah It’s worth reading this op-ed by historian Heather Ann Thompson — whose book on the Attica uprising won the Pulitzer Prize — about what inmates say happened during the South Carolina prison riot in April, when seven men were killed. As with most prison violence, it was about more than an individual outburst; it was the result of understaffing, over-punishing, gang violence and dehumanizing conditions. And the cell phones that corrections officials say fueled the violence were also how inmates were able to capture the chaos and share it with the outside world. — Christie Thompson When we think about the current challenges within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, words come to mind such as “Trump,” “Russia Investigation” and “political circus.” A TIME magazine investigation cuts through the twenty-four-hour news cycle headlines and reveals how the FBI’s ongoing problems has impacted the everyday criminal justice system. “The number of convictions in FBI-led investigations dropped last year for the fifth consecutive year–from 11,461 in 2012 to 10,232,” writes Eric Lichtblau. Public opinion of the bureaus is also on the decline, which experts warn, makes it harder to recruit cooperating witnesses. Also, fewer than half of cases filed by FBI agents result in a conviction — one of the lowest success rates for a federal agency. — Simone Weichselbaum |
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— Our reader, Lisa Nosal, on the city trying trauma training for citizens and cops |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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The poster child who isn’t. Accused of shooting two police officers, Michael Christopher Mejia has become a poster child for opposition to California’s dramatic efforts to reduce its prison population. But a closer look at his record in collaboration with the Los Angeles Times belies that narrative. He was able to cycle in and out of jails before the shooting because county agencies failed to properly document his parole violations or coordinate with one another. Prosecutors also failed to send Mejia to drug treatment when they had the chance. The Connecticut experiment. Corrections officials in the Nutmeg State have imported a prison practice from Germany to try to prevent young offenders from turning into habitual criminals. It’s a pilot program, called TRUE, in which inmates are paired with older prisoners who help the young mentees deal with prison and prepare for their release. It’s too early to tell if the program is a success but already similar programs are planned for Massachusetts and South Carolina. Faking innocence for a payday. New York attorney Scott Brettschneider, nicknamed “Mighty Whitey,” had a bright idea, picked up by a government wiretap. He would entice a witness in a murder case to recant his testimony in the hopes a killer would be freed and awarded compensation for a wrongful conviction. Brettschneider would share in his new client’s payday. What went wrong? Well, for starters, the “witness” wanted to be paid in advance for his false recantation. Another Georgia story about a white jury and a black defendant. The latest in our “Case in Point” series with “The Takeaway” examines a 41-year-old murder case that ended with a capital conviction of a black man accused of murdering a white woman. Notes from jury selection, disclosed only a few months ago, show how prosecutors separated black potential jurors from white ones to ensure that Johnnie Lee Gates would be tried by an all-white jury. When your dad gets locked up — and then deported. Kevin crossed the Mexican border with his parents when he was 6 years old, and he never had the childhood he once had hoped for, he writes in our latest “Life Inside”. His dad was arrested, and then imprisoned, and for a while in middle school Kevin flirted with the idea of joining a gang. But he was lucky. He was given a mentor who helped him regain his balance. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
During last month’s prison riot in South Carolina, 44 officers were guarding 1,500 prisoners, and waited four hours for backup. It seems obvious that there is a correlation between violence in prisons and a shortage of officers, but it can be tough to understand. So I was impressed by Jolie McCullough’s investigation for The Texas Tribune of one particularly violent and understaffed prison in a remote corner of Texas. She sorts out the reasons for the shortage and the implications: The unit was on lockdown for 100 days last year, meaning the men were often fed in their cells, getting meager sandwiches of spoiled meat; some are losing scary amounts of weight and claiming malnutrition. It’s a sobering read. — Maurice Chammah As Kentucky moves to automatically terminate parental rights for parents whose babies are born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (the constellation of symptoms some newborns exhibit after their mothers take opiates during pregnancy), the New York Times magazine takes a nuanced look at what life is like during pregnancy and in the fragile weeks after birth for women who struggle with opioid addiction. We’re all too familiar with the broad strokes of the epidemic: prescription painkillers, multiple laps through treatment, babies at risk. But here Jennifer Egan (better known as a novelist) lovingly renders the day-to-day details behind the usual narrative, highlighting just how mighty a struggle is behind each success story. — Beth Schwartzapfel Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee released a condemnatory report of what they call the degradation of the judicial nominations process under the Trump administration. The report accuses majority leader Mitch McConnell of undermining “the vetting process that ensures qualified, impartial judicial nominees, in order to advance the president’s picks, too many of whom have proven to be unprepared and unqualified.” Among other points, they blame Republicans for sabotaging the role of the ABA in ensuring the nominees’ qualifications and allowing dark-money political groups to influence their selection. The consequences of this phenomenon, they warn, will undermine justice for generations of Americans. — Manuel Villa In many prisons across the country, inmates are not just prisoners—they’re also laborers. Prison industries are a billion-dollar business, but many workers earn only pennies on the dollar and are not afforded the same benefits as workers on the outside. So what do inmates do when they want better wages and working conditions? They strike. Except prisoner strikes are not legally protected, making them risky to pull off. “Yet, despite the lack of legal protection, prison strikes have recently been increasing in frequency, size, and intensity,” wrote Arvind Dilawar for Pacific Standard Magazine. Dilawar takes a look at some of the 17 strikes in Florida state prisons to explore the lengths prisoners must go to organize. — Nicole Lewis |
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— Our reader, Mike Mitchell, on our commentary about whether people are “too woke” for the jury box |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Closing Argument |
Edited by Yolanda Martinez |
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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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They know what he did. They just don’t know who he is. There will be a federal sentencing in Maryland today for a man convicted in November of fraud and aggravated identity theft. His crimes were so efficient his identity is still unknown to prosecutors and his judge. He lived for decades under a name stolen from a prisoner serving time now in Antigua. Turns out that inmates are particularly susceptible to identity theft and have few practical options to protect themselves from online fraudsters. TMP’s Justin George has our story. Maryland, my Maryland. The Preakness is tomorrow and Marylanders have more good news to celebrate. The state saw the largest drop in prisoner population in 2017, nearly 10 percent from 2016 figures, helping to push the U.S. prison population below 1.5 million for the first time since 2004. Louisiana and Illinois also showed significant decreases, according to a new report by the Vera Institute of Justice. Tennessee, Utah, and Kentucky led the nation in prisoner population increases. TMP’s Nicole Lewis has our story. Good eggs and bad. Timothy White is on North Carolina’s death row, awaiting execution for a murder to which he pleaded guilty in 2000. Here he sheds a little light on how even the smallest good fortune in prison — in this case a surprise at breakfast, a boiled egg — can be taken away in a moment. “Sometimes it’s a matter of greed. Other times it’s pure nastiness. Then there is stupidity, for which there is little excuse,” he writes. In collaboration with Vice, here is the latest in our “Life Inside” series. |
Criminal justice stories from around the web as selected by our staff. |
Historian Jill Lepore wrote for The New Yorker about how the “victims’ rights” movement, beginning in the 1970s, succeeded in transforming American trials. She’s not a fan, calling the movement a “bad marriage” of the “speak-your-truth commitment of a trauma-centered feminism and the punitive, lock-them-up imperative of law-and-order conservatism.” She doesn’t directly make an argument for rolling back any one particular gain, but she does a good job explaining the dilemmas confronted by judges as they try to delineate a role for victims in their courtrooms, while also preserving the rights of the accused. She focuses on Timothy McVeigh, and by the end, I felt deep sympathy not only for survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, but also the judge who had to oversee McVeigh’s trial. It’s helpful history to read as we think about how our legal institutions should respond to the #MeToo movement. — Maurice Chammah Take time for this beautifully written, very human story in the New York Times Magazine about a hospice unit in a California state prison and the men that spend their days caring for their fellow inmates. (Such programs are becoming more necessary — a new Osborne Association report points out that more than a third of U.S. prisoners will be 55 and older by 2030.) The program is one of the first of its kind in the country, and gives dying inmates someone to turn to in their final days other than prison staff. For the hospice workers, it’s a chance at redemption — a way to atone for their past crimes and learn how to be a caregiver. “Before, I was numb. Death didn’t hold the weight that it should have held,” one hospice worker told The Times. “[Now] I get the chance to be with people — to impart what I have...It gives me a chance to live.” — Christie Thompson In a compelling multimedia column, the New York Times’s Nick Kristof examines the case of Kevin Cooper, a man who may have been framed by sheriff’s deputies for a 1983 quadruple murder. Investigators threw away evidence and never followed up on key leads that would have been damning to another suspect, and planted evidence suggesting Cooper did it. California Governor Jerry Brown refuses to let Cooper test crime scene evidence that could settle the question of his guilt or innocence once and for all. Cooper awaits execution in San Quentin, and Kristof argues that “if we execute a man in so flawed a case without even bothering to test the evidence rigorously, then a piece of our justice system dies along with Kevin Cooper.” —Beth Schwartzapfel The enthusiasm with which teens have seized the gun control debate has spread even to towns such as Gillette in northeast Wyoming, a state with the unofficial motto: “Welcome to Wyoming: Consider Everyone Armed.” Wyoming has more guns per capita than any other state, with sales rising in each of the past five years, Eli Saslow reports in The Washington Post. And it’s here that he finds 16-year-old Moriah Engdahl trying to lead demonstrations for gun control. Despite having a father who once owned 250 guns and a mother who is an avid hunter and teacher who feels more secure carrying a concealed weapon in the classroom, Moriah’s lone, small voice is able to break through. “I want to hear what you have to say,” the girl’s mother says. “I know there’s some gray area, but you’re up against people who see black and white.”— Justin George |
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— Our reader, Chrystal Noneya, on our story about how incarcerated people can be easy targets for identity thieves |
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2018 7:02 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2018 7:02 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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Dianne Tramutola-Lawson
From: The Marshall Project [mailto:in...@themarshallproject.org]
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2018 7:03 AM
Subject: Our Weekly Highlights
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