Criminal Justice Reform

[skinsmarydu]

Back in the late 80s & all thru the 90s, the most "popular" charge was "loitering for drugs" if you were waiting by a pay phone.  I had to educate some folks that there's no such charge unless you're standing near a sign that says NO LOITERING...pay phones were for general public use.  

I'm sure some public defenders were cursing me, they actually had to work.  

[China]

Felony count over 43 cents’ worth of Mountain Dew is dropped

 

Pennsylvania prosecutors have dropped a felony theft charge against a man who underpaid for a bottle of Mountain Dew by 43 cents.

 

Prosecutors in Perry County dropped the theft charge this month against Joseph Sobolewski, 38, and downgraded another charge, the Patriot-News reported Tuesday.

 

In August, Sobolewski went into an Exxon in Duncannon and saw a sign advertising two 20-ounce Mountain Dew bottles for $3, he said. He took one bottle, slapped $2 on the counter for what he thought was a $1.50 soda and walked out, not realizing the discount did not apply to a single bottle.

 

The bottle really cost $2.29, so including tax, he owed the store 43 cents.

 

State police found Sobolewski and arrested him on a felony charge. A judge ordered him held on $50,000 cash-only bond. He was in jail for seven days before his public defender successfully argued for his release, the newspaper reported.

 

Sobolewski had twice in the past 10 years been charged with theft, once for not paying for a tank of gas and another time for stealing a pair of shoes from a store. Under Pennsylvania’s three-strikes law, a third theft charge must be a felony, regardless of the amount or value involved. He faced up to seven years in prison.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[PleaseBlitz]

It's troubling that my first thought is, even though the article doesn't specify, that Joe Sobolewski sounds like a white-guy name, so of course they dropped the charges. 

[tshile]

Um. Maybe three strikes laws are bad 🤷‍♂️ not really one way or the other on that. But the point is the value doesn’t matter cause you won’t stop stealing stuff. 
 

I mean since when is randomly slapping money on the counter and walking out an acceptable way to go through life? 🤷‍♂️ 

[China]

Philadelphia's progressive DA wins big in primary, boosting momentum for reform movement

 

In a big win for the growing criminal justice reform movement, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner decisively beat his center-of-left challenger in a Democratic primary that pitted the incumbent’s progressive reforms against a rising tide of violent crime.

 

Krasner is one of several reformers who have taken over district attorney's offices in cities including Chicago, Baltimore and Los Angeles. Tuesday's primary was seen as a referendum on whether the current wave of reform-minded prosecutors would be blamed for increasing gun violence and whether the progressive movement could survive an uptick in homicides across the country.

 

“To me, it's an indicator that people have been ready for change and are happy with the change, which is the move away from using jails or prisons or other punitive measures for every social problem we have in our community and the need to look more holistically at each case as a prosecutor,” said Alissa Marque Heydari, deputy director for the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

 

“In Philadelphia,” she added, “this is a resounding affirmation of all the things DA Krasner has been doing.”

 

On Tuesday, he beat Carlos Vega, a longtime Philadelphia prosecutor who was among the first group of assistant district attorneys to be replaced when Krasner took office. Krasner, who was first elected in 2017, will now face off against Republican challenger Charles Peruto Jr. in November.

 

A former civil rights attorney, Krasner has pushed for increased police accountability and lessened the reliance on cash bail for low-level offenses. His office does not seek the death penalty and attempts to divert juvenile defendants away from the adult criminal justice system. He also beefed up the office's conviction integrity unit, which has advocated successfully for at least 20 exonerations since he's been in office.

 

His re-election campaign attracted national attention, and Krasner won endorsements from prominent lawmakers including Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who tweeted that Krasner is "a fighter for the people and is successfully taking on a broken & corrupt system." He was also the subject of a documentary series from “Independent Lens” on PBS.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

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

 

One Good Thing: A documentary about Philly cops’ worst enemy becoming their DA

 

If you want to change the world, is it best to enter the halls of power yourself so you can change the institutions in charge from the inside? Or is it better to stay agitating from the outside, where you won’t be corrupted and assimilated into an unjust system?

 

This is a question basically anyone interested in making the world a better place has to ask themselves, and it’s the question that motivates and courses through Philly DA, an eight-part documentary released this spring by directors Ted Passon, Yoni Brook, and Nicole Salazar. If you care at all about the criminal justice debates that have been raging since last summer’s protests — or about the more general question of how to change an unjust world in the wake of the pandemic — it’s essential viewing. It’s the story of an outsider who chose to play the inside game, and a celebration of what that move accomplished.

 

The titular DA is Larry Krasner, who spent most of his career battling the police and district attorney of his city. He sued the Philadelphia PD 75 times. He became a Philly-specific Bill Kunstler, a radical lawyer who represented persecuted activists and other victims of an overzealous, racist criminal justice system.

 

Then in 2017, a strange thing happened: Krasner ran for district attorney, and he won. His opponents acted as though a fox had been elected to guard the henhouse. “I don’t like anything about Larry Krasner,” said Lynne Abraham, who as Philly DA from 1991 to 2010 became known as one of the deadliest prosecutors (in terms of capital sentences imposed) in the country.

 

How was Krasner going to turn the district attorney’s office, which had for decades focused on imprisoning or killing as many criminals as it could, into a force that actually seeks to shrink prisons? How could he change the institution from the inside without letting it change him first?

 

Early reviews of Philly DA compared it to The Wire, a brilliant but profoundly fatalistic show about the persistence of institutional pathologies everywhere from police departments to newspapers, and the inability of even the most passionate and hardworking individuals to fix them. It’s true that Philly DA, like The Wire, is heavily character-based and serialized, much more so than a typical documentary. If you ignore documentaries generally but enjoy a good prestige drama, there’s plenty for you here. It’s dialogue-heavy, full of impassioned debates in fluorescent-lit conference rooms.

 

But Philly DA is not The Wire, and it’s not fatalistic. Krasner did change the district attorney’s office, and he did change Philadelphia. He brags that his office has reduced the total time that Philadelphians will spend in prison in the future by over 18,000 years. His office has largely stopped prosecuting simple drug possession or prostitution charges, while bringing a homicide case against a Philadelphia cop.

 

Change was, in fact, possible. Krasner just had to fight hard, and sometimes fight ugly, to get it done, earning scores more enemies in the process.

 

Shortly after being inaugurated, Krasner fired dozens of veteran prosecutors because he didn’t feel he could trust them to prosecute cases in a way that reduced incarceration and respected defendants’ civil rights. The purge happened on a snowy day, resulting in news footage of civil servants forced to carry big cardboard boxes of their belongings to their snowed-in cars. It was ugly, but understandable. Krasner can’t implement his vision if the rank and file are going to resist it at every turn.

 

Again and again, Krasner and his team face these kinds of standoffs. The filmmakers follow Lisa Harvey, the head of the juvenile justice division, a highly experienced prosecutor not purged in the initial cull. Harvey believes she owes it to victims to charge the most serious crime she can in each case — even when that means sending more juveniles to prison for longer. She eventually resigns, unable to reconcile her understanding of her job with Krasner’s agenda.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

[PleaseBlitz]

On 2/19/2021 at 12:56 PM, PleaseBlitz said:

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.  

 

Maryland passed a law that went into effect on October 1 that entitles any prison inmate that was (1) convicted as a juvenile and (2) spent at least 20 years in prison to a hearing in front of a judge to reduce their sentence.  Although the law has only been in effect for a bit over 2 months, people are starting to be freed under it.  

 

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/dan-rodricks/bs-ed-rodricks-1117-20211116-xzdftkqdqnafhef24b3fryty2y-story.html

 

Quote

In court papers filed under a new law that allows someone convicted as a juvenile to seek a modification of his sentence, Gordon admits to shooting Sidney. He was an angry adolescent with a gun. And that’s a combination responsible for a lot of deaths in Baltimore over the years.

...

Gordon is now 51. He has spent 34 years in prison. The Juvenile Restoration Act, a criminal justice reform enacted by the Maryland legislature over Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto, allows a person like him — convicted as a juvenile, with at least 20 years in prison — to request a reconsideration of his sentence. Becky Feldman, chief of the State’s Attorney’s Sentencing Review Unit, and attorneys from Steptoe and Johnson (Charles Mills, Katie Dubyak and Lisa Southerland) joined in asking Judge Robert Taylor to modify Gordon’s sentence to the time he’s already served.

 

The state says it tried, but was unsuccessful, in contacting Benny Sidney’s next of kin, a fact that brought back memories of his sad, lonely death. To learn, as we did later, that a teenage boy had killed Sidney, and for no reason, compounded the tragedy.

 

At the hearing Tuesday afternoon in the same courthouse where he was sentenced in 1987, Gordon arrived in shackles that the judge told correctional officers to remove. He was no longer the skinny, frightened kid I once saw weeping at the trial table. He was a middle-aged man, a denim mask over his face and what appeared to be a goatee.

 

He’s been a model prisoner, without a rules infraction in 17 years, at the Western Correctional Institution near Cumberland. “He’s been transformed from an impulsive, reckless teen to the mature, thoughtful man you see today,” Dubyak told the judge.

...

A little after 3 p.m., Judge Taylor granted the request to modify his sentence, and David Gordon smiled; old friends from prison hugged him. He will soon be released into a supportive plan to help his transition back to freedom after spending two thirds of his life in prison for a crime he committed when he was a foolish, angry boy with a gun.

 

 

I flied a motion under the Juvenile Restoration Act for my pro bono client today.  

[China]

A Colorado truck driver was sentenced to 110 years for a deadly crash. Over 3 million people have signed a petition asking for clemency.

 

A truck driver was sentenced earlier this week to 110 years in prison for a 2019 crash that left four people dead and several others injured in Colorado. By Friday, more than 3.4 million people had signed a petition, asking Colorado Governor Jared Polis to grant clemency to Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, or commutation for time served.

 

Heather Gilbee, the author of the change.org petition wrote, "We are not trying to make it seem any less of a tragic accident that it is because yes, lives were lost."

 

In April 2019, the truck Aguilera-Mederos was driving lost its brakes, CBS Denver reported. He passed one of the state's runaway truck ramps as he descended from the mountains, a point the prosecution focused heavily on during the trial.

 

He then crashed into several cars stopped on eastbound I-70 in Lakewood, sparking a massive fire. The highway was shut down in both directions for roughly 24 hours, according to the station. 

 

The crash killed 24-year-old Miguel Angel Lamas Arellano, 67-year-old William Bailey; 61-year-old Doyle Harrison and 69-year-old Stanley Politano. 

 

Aguilera-Mederos was ultimately convicted of 27 counts, including vehicular homicide. 

 

Before he was sentenced, Aguilera-Mederos told CBS Denver he tried his best to avoid the vehicles stopped on the road, but couldn't avoid them all. 

 

"My life is not a happy life. It is a very sad life because four people died," he said tearfully, adding that he wished he had died rather than the four who did.

 

During sentencing, the judge acknowledged that Aguilera-Mederos didn't intend to harm anyone. But under guidelines set by the law, his sentence could be no less than 110 years.

 

"I accept and respect what the defendant has said ... but he made a series of terrible decisions — reckless decisions," the judge said. 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[Larry]

1,800 years is obviously excessive.  But have to say, I'm not sure a full pardon is in order.  Maybe commutation?  

 

[China]

3 hours ago, Larry said:

1,800 years is obviously excessive.  But have to say, I'm not sure a full pardon is in order.  Maybe commutation?  

 

 

Well, isn't cutting his sentence from 1,823 years to 20 commuting it?

[Larry]

7 minutes ago, China said:

 

Well, isn't cutting his sentence from 1,823 years to 20 commuting it?

 

The tweet says "officially pardoned".  Might be wrong.  

[techboy]

5 hours ago, Larry said:

1,800 years is obviously excessive.  But have to say, I'm not sure a full pardon is in order.  Maybe commutation?  

 

 

The article linked says it's a "conditional pardon", which in Virginia is different from a full pardon, and sounds pretty similar to commutation.

 

https://www.commonwealth.virginia.gov/judicial-system/pardons/

[PleaseBlitz]

Very long article in the Post today.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/28/maryland-parole-life-criminal-justice-politics/

 

They were sentenced to life in prison. Who should decide if they get a second chance?

 

Quote

Nineteen years after Darryl Taylor was sentenced to life for a murder he says he did not commit, a board of parole commissioners recommended him for early release. The feeling, he remembers, was like standing with one foot out the prison gates, close enough to Baltimore to see his childhood home, his wife and his five living children.

 

But Taylor never made it out. In 2020, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) rejected his release, overturning the decision of the 11-member parole board. No reasons were given.

 

“That was a crushing feeling,” Taylor, 50, said last fall from a medium-security prison in Jessup, Md. “You feel like you’re on the verge of having some sort of freedom, and they hand you a piece of paper that just says, ‘no.’”

 

For decades, politics has shaped the parole process for those serving life sentences in Maryland. In the heat of a tough-on-crime campaign in the 1990s, a governor declared that he would reject all “lifers” for parole even after parole commissioners had recommended their release. The policy, maintained by governors from both parties, left hundreds of prisoners with parole-eligible sentences — the vast majority of them Black men — to grow old and die in prison.

 

Between 1969 and 1994, Maryland paroled 181 lifers. In the following two decades, none.

 

When the murder of George Floyd set off a wave of racial justice activism across the country, nearly 80 percent of Maryland’s lifer population was Black, the highest rate in the nation. Hogan released some prisoners as the coronavirus pandemic took off, but state lawmakers, buoyed by the Floyd protests, wanted the governor out of the parole process. They voted in December to revoke his authority over parole, taking one of the most concrete steps nationwide to change the prospects of early release for lifers, and pushing men like Taylor into a new state of limbo.

 

Much more at link. 

[China]

The Supreme Court’s new death penalty order should make your skin crawl

 

Hamm v. Reeves, a death penalty order that the Supreme Court handed down Thursday night, is an epilogue to a longstanding tension between drug companies that do not wish their products to be used to kill people, and states that are willing to use unreliable drugs to conduct executions if effective sedatives are not available.

 

It’s also unsettlingly cruel.

 

The upshot of the Court’s 5-4 decision in Hamm is that a man was executed using a method that may have caused him excruciating pain, most likely because that man’s disability prevented him from understanding how to opt in to a less painful method of execution.

 

There is significant evidence that Matthew Reeves, a man convicted of murder that the state of Alabama executed after the Supreme Court permitted it to do so on Thursday, had an intellectual disability. Among other things, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in a 2021 dissenting opinion, an expert employed by the state gave Reeves an IQ test and determined that “Reeves’ IQ was well within the range for intellectual disability.”

 

The Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) that “death is not a suitable punishment” for someone with an intellectual disability. Nevertheless, in its 2021 decision in Dunn v. Reeves, the Supreme Court voted along party lines to effectively prevent Reeves from avoiding execution.

 

The issue in Hamm, the decision that the Court handed down Thursday night, is quite narrow. After Dunn, it was no longer a question of whether Alabama could execute Reeves. The only question was how Alabama could conduct this execution — and whether the state was allowed to use a method that may very well amount to torture, even over Reeves’s objection.

 

This time the Court split 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing over to vote with the three liberal justices. But, in a Court with a 6-3 Republican supermajority, Barrett’s vote was not enough to save Reeves from the fate that Alabama chose for him. He was executed by lethal injection.

 

Many states used to use a three-drug combination to execute people on death row. First, the inmate would be injected with sodium thiopental, an anesthetic that was supposed to prevent the inmate from feeling the effects of the drugs that would kill them. The inmate would then be injected with a paralytic drug, and finally with a lethal drug that would stop their heart.

But supplies of sodium thiopental dried up, at least for executioners, around 2010 — in part because pharmaceutical companies refused to sell the drug for use in executions, and in part because the European Union forbids companies from exporting drugs for such a purpose. As a result, some states turned to less reliable sedatives.

 

The result was botched executions, where inmates were visibly in excruciating pain during their executions. As Sotomayor wrote in a 2015 dissenting opinion, these unreliable execution drugs leave death row inmates “exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.”

 

But the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has not shown much sympathy for inmates who ask not to be tortured to death. Among other things, the Court has held that an inmate who objects to one form of execution must suggest an alternative method or their objection will fail. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the Court in Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), “a prisoner must show a feasible and readily implemented alternative method of execution that would significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain and that the State has refused to adopt without a legitimate penological reason.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Missouri Republican’s bill would give killers immunity if they just claim self-defense

 

Let’s call Missouri Senate Bill 666 what it is: state-approved violence, or the “Make Murder Legal Act,” as Dan Patterson, president of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, calls it.

 

State Sen. Eric Burlison, a Republican lawmaker from near Springfield, wants to give qualified immunity to suspected murderers.

 

Here’s his proposed law: “A person who uses or threatens to use force in self-defense is immune from criminal prosecution and civil action for the use of such force, unless such force was used against a law enforcement officer who was acting in the performance of his or her official duties and the person reasonably knew or should have known that the person was a law enforcement officer.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

 

[China]

A teen wrongly charged in a shooting says police offered him fast food to get a confession

 

Advocates for juvenile justice are calling for changes to the way police and schools handle arrests after the lawyer and family of an Illinois teenager said he was coerced into giving a false confession that led to him spending two days in lockup and charged with attempted murder.

 

The attorney for Martell Williams, 15, said Waukegan police interrogated the teen for hours without his parents or a lawyer present and tried to bribe Williams with food from McDonald’s in exchange for a confession; Williams caved after police promised he could go home once he confessed.

 

Williams said during a Monday news conference that he didn’t know why his principal pulled him from class at Waukegan High School on Friday morning, or why the two police officers waiting for him in the office immediately announced that he was under arrest.

 

“When they came and got me from school, I was very confused by the situation,” Williams said. “I was scared. I just wanted to go home.”

 

Kevin O’Connor, an attorney representing Williams, said that when officers coerced the teen’s wrongful confession, they had not yet told him that he was suspected in a shooting.

 

“They tried to bribe him with McDonald’s and saying, ‘Look, just tell us you were there … and we’ll get you home in 10 minutes,’ ” O’Connor said.

 

Williams’s family knew he was not involved and soon found video evidence to prove as much: He was playing in a high school basketball game 20 miles away when the Feb. 4 shooting in Waukegan took place.

 

“If his sister hadn’t found this evidence, he would have been convicted,” O’Connor told The Washington Post on Wednesday, noting that Williams would not have had his first court date for at least a month.

 

O’Connor said Williams is receiving counseling, but the trauma of his arrest and detention is still fresh.

 

“You can see it in his eyes that he is reliving this and thinking of nightmares that, ‘Oh God, I could have spent 10 to 20 years in jail,’ ” O’Connor said.

 

Williams’s family isn’t alone in being alarmed by his arrest and wrongful charges; advocates in juvenile justice and wrongful convictions say stories like Williams’s still happen despite a recent Illinois law that was meant to prevent them.

 

In January, Illinois became the first state in the country to bar police from lying to minors during interrogations — including using tactics such as false promises of leniency if the accused person cooperates.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

[China]

 

[China]

Why some Republicans are turning against the death penalty

 

It’s rare for a politician to admit they were wrong. But Jean Schmidt will own up to this: She used to support the death penalty.

 

In 2001, Schmidt was an Ohio state representative when the legislature debated ending the use of the electric chair. Schmidt, a Republican, argued on the house floor that even if the electric chair was on the way out, the death penalty was still necessary as a deterrent to, and a punishment for, the worst kinds of crimes. “I was just very, very forceful about keeping it,” she says.

 

Times have changed — and so have her feelings about capital punishment. Schmidt, who went on to serve in Congress from 2005 until she was defeated in a 2012 primary, ran for the state house again in 2020 and won. One of her primary motivations for coming out of retirement was trying to end the state’s death penalty. “I’m a true conservative, a Trump supporter all the way,” she says, “and I have changed my mind on this.” She thinks other Republicans are ready to change their minds, too.

 

Schmidt, along with a Democratic cosponsor, introduced legislation last year that would end the death penalty in Ohio. The bill is currently working its way through committees. A similar bill has been introduced in the state’s senate, and a survey of 44 Ohio state lawmakers from the final week of February showed that 46 percent of Republican lawmakers felt that the state should eliminate the death penalty, while 38 percent of Democrats said the same (and half of the Democrats polled were undecided).

 

Supporters of the legislation expect it to pass sometime in the next year or so; they say it’s not a matter of if, but when. “I have no doubt that the votes are there,” says Rep. Ron Ferguson, a Republican cosponsor of the bill. “I think we’re going to get it done because of how many people from across party lines support this bill.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Court Rules That Police Can Inflict Pain On Detained Individuals

 

Police across the country have often been caught using excessive force during arrests and other confrontations. Even when such incidents are captured on video, officers are often able to escape punishment or other consequences. Such appears to be the case yet again. In a controversial ruling, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that an officer who admitted to twisting a teenage girl’s arms to cause her pain did not violate the law in his actions.

 

The case at the center of the controversial ruling involves Fort Worth, Texas, resident Jacqueline Craig and her young child. In 2016, Craig called the police to report an assault committed against her then-7-year-old son. Craig said that a neighbor choked the child for “littering” after the young boy had dropped raisins in the neighbor’s yard. But when Officer William Martin showed up on the scene, he berated Craig and her child.

 

Martin ended up violently arresting the mother and her 19-year-old daughter, Brea Hymond, who intervened in the argument. In the process, Martin purposely hyperextended Hymond’s handcuffed arms, and he admits he did intend to force her to tell him her name and age after she initially refused to do so. Video footage of the encounter between the Craig family and Martin was eventually released online, showing the confrontation that also saw Martin using violence against Craig’s other underage teenage children during the encounter.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Court halts South Carolina plan for firing squad execution

 

The South Carolina Supreme Court has issued a temporary stay halting the state from carrying out plans for its first-ever firing squad execution.

 

Wednesday's order by the state’s high court temporarily halts a scheduled April 29 execution of inmate Richard Moore.

 

The court order said a more detailed order will follow.

 

Moore’s attorneys had asked justices to block the execution plan so they could ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review whether his crime rises to the level of a death penalty offense.

 

Moore has spent more than two decades on death row for the 1999 killing of convenience store clerk James Mahoney in Spartanburg.

 

 

[PleaseBlitz]

On 2/19/2021 at 12:56 PM, PleaseBlitz said:

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.  

Bench trial is this Wednesday. Stay ****ing tuned yall. 

[dfitzo53]

Good luck!

[PleaseBlitz]

On 5/14/2022 at 9:46 PM, PleaseBlitz said:

Bench trial is this Wednesday. Stay ****ing tuned yall. 

Today was the least satisfying “win” Ive ever had. 
 

My pro bono client has been in prison for 30 years. He killed a guy when he was 17.  During his 30 years in prison, my client has made every effort to improve himself and risked his life to **** up the dominant prison gang. For his efforts in helping law enforcement, he got stabbed 14 times and nearly killed. He got his GED and was valedictorian. He’s completed college level courses in theology and IT.  He leads bible study 3 times a week. 
 

Today I asked a judge to reduce his life sentence to time served. judge basically agreed, but asked me to engineer a home plan where he is supervised on an impatient basis., which i can do. So, assuming I can put a home plan together, which should be easy, i will get my client out of a life sentence and send him home. 
 

 

Ive been taliking about this representation a lot and just wanted to note my appreciation from ES.