Criminal Justice Reform

[PleaseBlitz]

We have a prison reform thread, but not a criminal justice reform thread, which I view as two distinct topics.

 

The criminal justice system is currently making important strides away from the, IMO, harmful and counterproductive policies of the 1980s and 1990s.  Sentencing for minor drug offenses (overwhelmingly used to put young men of color in prison) is being relaxed, cash bail is being eliminated, many large cities are setting up sentencing review units to correct unduly harsh sentences, and the US Supreme Court has found that sentencing juvenile offenders to life in prison is unconstitutional in most cases.   The United States is the only nation that sentences people to life without parole for crimes committed before turning 18

 

This is a subject near and dear to me, as for the past 3 years I have been involved with trying to get a juvenile lifer, who has spent almost 30 years in prison, out.  

 

Today the WaPo has a story about a man, Joe Ligon, who was sentenced to life in prison at 15 years old and was recently set free at 83 years old.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/02/19/joe-ligon-release/?arc404=true

 

Quote

The son of Alabama sharecroppers, Ligon entered prison when Eisenhower was president. During the 68 years he spent incarcerated in a half-dozen penal institutions, the world outside moved on. At the one-day trial in 1953, Ligon and his co-defendants were referred to as “colored.” At school, his special-education classes were designated for the “orthogenically backward.” He was incarcerated in a facility named the Pennsylvania Institution for Defective Delinquents, the inmates classified by the courts “as mentally defective with criminal tendencies.”

 

Ligon, 83, has never had his own place, paid a bill, cast a ballot, earned the minimum wage, lived with a partner, fathered children.

While he was locked up, almost all of his family died; many of the men were murdered. A sister, some nieces and nephews are all he has left. This was his central sadness: “It would have been much better if I had come out when my parents were still alive,” he said.

 

Ligon was 15 on that wretched night when everything went wrong. Now, he is an old man with few teeth — but an old man who is free and, given the circumstances, in remarkably good health. He doesn’t take any pills except vitamins.

 

“I feel real good. One reason for that is because I’m out. I’m home,” Ligon said. “When you get life, you have no hope, especially if you give up. You don’t make plans like I made plans.” His plans were always to be free.

 

 

 

[China]

I had posted a version of that story in the Prison Reform thread this past Sunday, but you are correct Criminal Justice Reform is a separate topic.  Here's another story I posted in that thread recently that perhaps is more appropriate in this thread:

 

 

 

[bearrock]

There are two things I always recommend to up and coming law school students I meet.  Clerk or even intern for a judge if you can.  Not for the line in the resume, but for the appreciation of how the judicial system works behind the scenes, both the good and the bad.

 

Second is to intern or volunteer for your local public defender's office.  Go sit in on arraignments.  Tag along to jail visits and witness interviews.  Go visit those section 8 housing neighborhoods where seemingly every other family has someone caught up and ground up by the criminal justice system.  It certainly gave me a whole different perspective on the legal system.  Criminal justice reform is long overdue and I'm hopeful we're starting to move in the right direction.

[techboy]

1 minute ago, bearrock said:

Second is to intern or volunteer for your local public defender's office.  

 

The ridiculous (and untenable) workload placed on public defenders, who often have literal minutes to prepare for a case, is another area that needs reform under this broad topic.

[Larry]

39 minutes ago, techboy said:

 

The ridiculous (and untenable) workload placed on public defenders, who often have literal minutes to prepare for a case, is another area that needs reform under this broad topic.

I've long fantasized about a moral argument. 

The way I look at it, a trial is in some ways a trial by combat. The two positions choose their champions. And whichever champion won, well, they was the Right Side. 

The two champions need to be equal. 

I think there needs to be a rule. The Public Defenders office needs to be funded at exactly the same amount, per case, as the prosecutor's. 

Oh. And if the cops work for the prosecutor?  Then the PD needs their own, equal, unit, too. 

[PleaseBlitz]

12 minutes ago, Larry said:

I've long fantasized about a moral argument. 

The way I look at it, a trial is in some ways a trial by combat. The two positions choose their champions. And whichever champion won, well, they was the Right Side. 

The two champions need to be equal. 

I think there needs to be a rule. The Public Defenders office needs to be funded at exactly the same amount, per case, as the prosecutor's. 

Oh. And if the cops work for the prosecutor?  Then the PD needs their own, equal, unit, too. 

 

This is ...... brilliant. 

[China]

The U.S. locks up far more people than any other nation. Check out this incredible infographic

 

 

To get a feel for what it means to have 2.3 million Americans jailed or imprisoned, start scrolling through this infographic.

 

As you scroll, the infographic presents some facts:

 

There are more incarcerated people than members of almost any profession. There are more incarcerated people than military personnel. There are more incarcerated people than bus drivers, bar tenders, and hair dressers combined.

 

More Americans are incarcerated today than there have been Americans killed in all of the wars in all of history combined.

 

Almost all accused people are extorted into taking plea bargains under the threat of a longer sentence, the ruinous cost of mounting a defense, and the wildly under-resourced public defender system.

 

One quarter of incarcerated Americans have not even been convicted of a crime. Instead, they are mostly held in pre-trial detention, usually due to the high cost of cash bail.

 

About 1 in 3 black men will go to prison at some point in his life. Not jail, prison.

 

Click on the link for more

[PleaseBlitz]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/juvenile-parole-life-maryland-settlement/2021/03/10/0ebb6c3e-81d6-11eb-ac37-4383f7709abe_story.html

 

Lawsuit settlement changes Maryland parole system for those sentenced to life as juveniles

 

Quote

Marylanders sentenced to life in prison for crimes they committed as juveniles have a meaningful chance at parole for the first time since the mid-1990s.

 

On Wednesday, the Maryland Board of Public Works approved a legal settlement that requires the Maryland Parole Commission, the Division of Correction and Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to consider in parole requests how old someone was when they committed their offenses. The settlement also requires the state to improve transparency, giving parole candidates access to information used in decisions about their release, and reaffirms their right to written explanations about those rulings.

 

The new regulations are designed to remove controversial barriers to parole and encourage coordination between the prison system and parole commission to better prepare people as they return to society.

 

“Today’s settlement is a victory for those sentenced as children and their families, who have fought for recognition of their humanity for decades,” said Sonia Kumar, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland.

 

More at link. 

[China]

Mississippi man must serve life sentence for 1.5 ounces of marijuana

 

Allen Russel, a 38-year-old Black man, will still serve a life sentence for possession of marijuana after a Mississippi Appeals Court upheld his sentence. 

 

Under Mississippi state law, the possession of 1.05 to 8.8 ounces of marijuana can hold a sentence of up to three years, a $3,000 fine, or both, according to the Associated Press.

 

Russell was reportedly in possession of five bags of marijuana when he was arrested in 2017, and two of the five bags contained 1.5 ounces. 

 

Russell's life sentence was upheld by the state appeals court because of his status as a "habitual offender."

 

Mississippi law permits a life sentence for habitual offenders if the offender served a year in prison for two individual felonies and if one of the felonies was a violent offense. 

 

Russell served more than eight years in prison for two home burglaries and an additional two years for the unlawful possession of a firearm, according to the Mississippi Court of Appeals ruling.

 

A number of judges on the court of appeals dissented. 

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[PleaseBlitz]

https://theappeal.org/politicalreport/maryland-bans-sentencing-children-to-life-without-parole/
 

Quote

Maryland has banned life without the possibility of parole for people convicted of crimes that occurred when they were children. On Saturday, the Democratic-run legislature overrode Republican Governor Larry Hogan’s veto of the legislation.

Maryland is the 25th state, in addition to Washington, D.C., to bar these sentences. With the vote, hundreds of people will have an opportunity for earlier release. 

“I had anticipated that Governor Larry Hogan would veto the bill but had full confidence that the Maryland General Assembly would do the right thing,” said Fatima Razi, co-founder and executive director of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Coalition. “This body of legislators has brought me closer to restoring my faith in Maryland’s justice system.”

The legislation, Senate Bill 494, known as the Juvenile Restoration Act, applies retroactively. It allows anyone who has served at least 20 years for a crime that occured when they were a minor to petition the court for a sentence reduction, including if they were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The court then must hold a hearing where a judge should consider a number of factors, including the offense, evidence of rehabilitation, childhood trauma, and victim statements. A person whose petition is denied can request a hearing two more times, three years apart.

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[Captain Wiggles]

[China]

Arizona wants to use Zyklon B to execute inmates on death row

 

The state of Arizona is preparing to execute inmates on death row using Zyklon B, the same gas used by the Nazis in death camp gas chambers.

The Arizona corrections department has spent more than $2,000 on the ingredients required to make the deadly gas also known as hydrogen cyanide, and have conducted inspections to make sure that their gas chamber, which has been unused for 22 years, is in operable condition.

The Republican-controlled state has not carried out any executions since 2014 when a lethal injection went wrong, but they are now working towards reinstating capital punishment.

In 2014, the execution of Joseph Wood took two hours and 15 injections before he was declared dead. Since then, the state has not carried out any executions.

The last person to be executed in Arizona by gas was German national Walter LaGrand, who was convicted for armed robbery and executed in 1999. A witness account reported that it took him 18 minutes to die, and that he was coughing violently throughout.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Alabama: Construction nearly finished for nitrogen gas executions

 

Alabama told a federal judge on Tuesday that it has nearly finished construction to use nitrogen gas to carry out death sentences, an execution method authorized by state law but never put into use.

 

The court filing did not describe how the proposed execution system would work. When the Alabama legislation was approved authorizing nitrogen hypoxia, proponents theorized that death by nitrogen hypoxia could be a simpler and more humane execution method. Death would be caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, thereby depriving him or her of oxygen.

Alabama in 2018 became the third state — along with Oklahoma and Mississippi — to authorize the untested use of nitrogen gas to execute prisoners.

 

Lawyers for the state wrote in a court filing Tuesday that the Alabama Department of Corrections “is nearing completion of the initial physical build for the nitrogen hypoxia system and its safety measures.”

 

“Once the build is completed, a safety expert will make a site visit to evaluate the system and look for any points of concern that need to be addressed,” the lawyers added.

 

The information was disclosed in a court filing Tuesday involving a lawsuit over the presence of spiritual advisers in the death chamber. State lawyers wrote that they did not yet know if a spiritual advisers could safely be present during an execution via nitrogen hypoxia.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Man serving life for water pistol robbery gets clemency nod

 

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said this week he intends to commute the sentence of a man who’s been serving life in prison for robbing a taco shop in 1981 with a water pistol.

 

Hutchinson on Thursday announced he intended to make Rolf Kaestel immediately eligible for parole. There’s a 30-day waiting period to receive public feedback before the governor’s decision can become final.

 

Kaestel, 70, was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to life in prison after he robbed a Fort Smith taco shop of $264. Kaestel was armed only with a water pistol at the time.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[PleaseBlitz]

This is the story of a young autistic boy who tried to go to the library when he was 18.  For no reason, other than the fact that he was a young black man, someone called the police on him for being "suspicious and probably carrying a gun" although he was unarmed and had done nothing wrong or suspicious.  When the police confronted him, being autistic, he had a "fight or flight" response typical of autism and injured the officer.  He was convicted and sentenced to over 10 years in prison.  He then endured nearly four years of solitary confinement and mistreatment in various Virginia jails and prisons, including being shocked with a Taser and placed in a restraint chair for nine hours in response to a minor disciplinary incident.

 

 

Neli Latson is — finally — free. It only took 11 years, two governors and a national conversation about race and disability.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/neli-latson-black-autistic-free/2021/06/23/1024d4e4-d446-11eb-a53a-3b5450fdca7a_story.html

 

Quote

Reginald “Neli” Latson doesn’t know yet what he will do with his freedom.

The last time he got to choose where he wanted to go and how he spent his days, without having to ask permission from a law enforcement official, he was 18.

This year, he will turn 30.

“I’m still kind of scared, to be honest,” Latson tells me over the phone on a recent afternoon.

Growing up in Stafford County, Va., he enjoyed walking through his neighborhood by himself. Now, he doesn’t go anywhere alone. Not to the store. Not to the park. Not to a coffee house.

“I’ve been changed, you know,” he says. “I just try to stay out of trouble and things like that. I never want to get into trouble.”

On Monday, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) granted a pardon to Latson that ends his time under state supervision. He is now free to choose where and how he lives, without having to get approval from a probation officer. He is now free to go about his days, without worrying that one misstep could send him back to prison.

...

On the day of his arrest, Latson woke up and walked to his local library. As he waited outside for it to open, someone called the sheriff’s department and described him as a “suspicious male, possibly in possession of a gun.”

Authorities would later say the caller hadn’t actually seen a gun, but by the time that was sorted out, Latson was under arrest, charged with assaulting a deputy who had responded to the call.

The family never denied that the deputy got hurt, but they contended that Latson was trying to walk away when the deputy grabbed him. They argued that Latson, who was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome in eighth grade, responded with a fight-or-flight response, which is common for autistic individuals in that type of situation.

In prison, Latson spent long stretches in solitary confinement, including his first nine months, his mother says. A civil rights lawsuit filed in his name also details a mental health crisis that led to a physical encounter with a corrections officer and ended with Latson being Tasered and strapped in a restraint chair for more than nine hours.

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

[China]

50-year war on drugs imprisoned millions of Black Americans

 

Landscaping was hardly his lifelong dream.

 

As a teenager, Alton Lucas believed basketball or music would pluck him out of North Carolina and take him around the world. In the late 1980s, he was the right-hand man to his musical best friend, Youtha Anthony Fowler, who many hip hop and R&B heads know as DJ Nabs.

 

But rather than jet-setting with Fowler, Lucas discovered drugs and the drug trade at the height of the so-called war on drugs. Addicted to crack cocaine and involved in trafficking the drug, he faced decades-long imprisonment at a time when the drug abuse and violence plaguing major cities and working class Black communities were not seen as the public health issue that opioids are today.

 

By chance, Lucas received a rare bit of mercy. He got the kind of help that many Black and Latino Americans struggling through the crack epidemic did not: treatment, early release and what many would consider a fresh start.

 

“I started the landscaping company, to be honest with you, because nobody would hire me because I have a felony,” said Lucas. His Sunflower Landscaping got a boost in 2019 with the help of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a national nonprofit assisting people with criminal backgrounds by providing practical entrepreneurship education.

 

Lucas was caught up in a system that imposes lifetime limits on most people who have served time for drug crimes, with little thought given to their ability to rehabilitate. In addition to being denied employment, those with criminal records can be limited in their access to business and educational loans, housing, child custody rights, voting rights and gun rights.

 

It’s a system that was born when Lucas was barely out of diapers.

 

Fifty years ago this summer, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Today, with the U.S. mired in a deadly opioid epidemic that did not abate during the coronavirus pandemic’s worst days, it is questionable whether anyone won the war.

 

Yet the loser is clear: Black and Latino Americans, their families and their communities. A key weapon was the imposition of mandatory minimums in prison sentencing. Decades later those harsh federal and state penalties led to an increase in the prison industrial complex that saw millions of people, primarily of color, locked up and shut out of the American dream.

 

An Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data shows that, between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million Americans. Among them, about 1 in 5 people were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

How AI-powered tech landed man in jail with scant evidence

 

Williams’ experience highlights the real-world impacts of society’s growing reliance on algorithms to help make consequential decisions about many aspects of public life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in law enforcement, which has turned to technology companies like gunshot detection firm ShotSpotter to battle crime. ShotSpotter evidence has increasingly been admitted in court cases around the country, now totaling some 200. ShotSpotter’s website says it’s “a leader in precision policing technology solutions” that helps stop gun violence by using “sensors, algorithms and artificial intelligence” to classify 14 million sounds in its proprietary database as gunshots or something else.

 

But an Associated Press investigation, based on a review of thousands of internal documents, emails, presentations and confidential contracts, along with interviews with dozens of public defenders in communities where ShotSpotter has been deployed, has identified a number of serious flaws in using ShotSpotter as evidentiary support for prosecutors.

 

AP’s investigation found the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots. Forensic reports prepared by ShotSpotter’s employees have been used in court to improperly claim that a defendant shot at police, or provide questionable counts of the number of shots allegedly fired by defendants. Judges in a number of cases have thrown out the evidence.

 

ShotSpotter’s proprietary algorithms are the company’s primary selling point, and it frequently touts the technology in marketing materials as virtually foolproof. But the company guards how its closed system works as a trade secret, a black box largely inscrutable to the public, jurors and police oversight boards.

 

The company’s methods for identifying gunshots aren’t always guided solely by the technology. ShotSpotter employees can, and often do, change the source of sounds picked up by its sensors after listening to audio recordings, introducing the possibility of human bias into the gunshot detection algorithm. Employees can and do modify the location or number of shots fired at the request of police, according to court records. And in the past, city dispatchers or police themselves could also make some of these changes.

 

Amid a nationwide debate over racial bias in policing, privacy and civil rights advocates say ShotSpotter’s system and other algorithm-based technologies used to set everything from prison sentences to probation rules lack transparency and oversight and show why the criminal justice system shouldn’t outsource some of society’s weightiest decisions to computer code.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Three police officers went to an *elementary* school in Tennessee & arrested four Black girls.

 

Three police officers went to an *elementary* school in Tennessee & arrested four Black girls.

 

One girl fell to her knees. Another threw up. Police handcuffed the youngest, an 8 yo with pigtails.

 

Their supposed crime? Watching some boys fight — and not stopping them. (THREAD) 

2/ The police wound up arresting 11 kids in total, using a charge called “criminal responsibility.”

 

The arrests created outrage. State lawmakers called the case “unconscionable,” “inexcusable,” “insane.”

 

So how did this happen? 

3/ These arrests took place in Rutherford County, which had been illegally jailing kids for years, all under the watch of Judge Donna Scott Davenport. 

4/ Donna Scott Davenport is the only elected juvenile court judge the county has ever had.

 

She oversees the courts.

 

She oversees the juvenile jail.

 

She directed police on what she called “our process” for arresting children. 

5/ In this deposition, a lawyer asks Davenport about taking the bar exam.

 

It took her nine years and five attempts to pass.

 

Three years after she got her law license, she was on the bench.

 

6/ Davenport describes her work as a calling.

 

 

“I’m here on a mission. It’s God’s mission,” she once told a newspaper. 

7/ She says children must have consequences. She encourages parents to use drug-testing kits on their kids. “Don’t buy them at the Dollar Tree,” she says. “The best ones are your reputable drug stores.” 

8/ Under Davenport, Rutherford County locked up a staggering 48% of children whose cases were referred to juvenile court.

 

The statewide average was 5%.

 

---------------------------------------

 

12/ The police officer who investigated this fight was Chrystal Templeton. She wanted to charge every kid who watched. She believed charging them was helping them.

 

By the time of this investigation, Templeton had been disciplined at least 37 times, her personnel file shows. 

13/ To arrive at a charge, Templeton met with two judicial commissioners.

 

In Rutherford County, these commissioners wield great legal power. They can issue warrants, set bail and conduct probable cause hearings — all without needing a law degree. 

14/ One commissioner, who used to work in a post office, came up with the charge of “criminal responsibility for conduct of another.”

 

The problem? There’s no such charge.

 

These kids were charged with a crime that doesn’t exist.

 

Click on the link for the rest

[China]

Here's the non-twitter version:

 

Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.

[China]

Texas Court Recommends New Trial for Jewish Death Row Inmate Whose First Trial Was Overseen by ‘Anti-Semitic’ Judge

 

A judge in Texas has recommended a new trial for a Jewish death row inmate whose original trial was overseen by an antisemite.

 

Randy Halprin has been fighting legal battles in state and federal courts for years seeking a new trial after it was revealed that former Dallas judge Vickers Cunningham had a documented history of making racist and antisemitic statements and writings.

 

An August 2019 filing with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals seeking a stay of execution offered relevant excerpts of that bigotry:

 

Quote

The Honorable Vickers Cunningham, the presiding judge at Mr. Halprin’s capital trial, is a racist and anti-Semitic bigot who described Mr. Halprin as “that ****in’ Jew” and a “goddamn kike.” That judge—who decided all pretrial motions, challenges during jury selection, and all objections during the taking of evidence—believed that Jews “needed to be shut down because they controlled all the money and all the power.”

 

In October 2019, Halprin was granted that stay of execution.

 

A member of the so-called Texas 7, Halprin did not actually kill anyone–but he was part of a prison break. Ultimately, another inmate who also escaped killed then-Irving police officer Aubrey Wright Hawkins. The defendant was convicted under the Texas “law of parties” that allows convicted co-conspirators in felony cases to be put to death if the state successfully argues they could have “anticipated” that someone else in the conspiracy would use deadly force in a crime.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

Edited October 14, 2021 by China

[Destino]

On 10/9/2021 at 12:22 PM, China said:

By the time of this investigation, Templeton had been disciplined at least 37 times, her personnel file shows. 

I really need to find me a union job.  37 damn times and not fired?  I can’t imagine your average office drone, that wields no real power over anyone at all, surviving a third of that.  
 

 

On 10/9/2021 at 12:22 PM, China said:

14/ One commissioner, who used to work in a post office, came up with the charge of “criminal responsibility for conduct of another.”

 

The problem? There’s no such charge.

 

These kids were charged with a crime that doesn’t exist.

Let me guess how this will play out.  There’s no law making this a crime so these assholes will skate, and the local government will pay out a settlement.  That’s how it always goes for the powerful.  The evil they do isn’t in the criminal code and we get payouts instead of justice.  
 

Also you’ll never convince me these people didn’t know there was no such law.  This wasn’t an honest mistake.