Criminal Justice Reform

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[PleaseBlitz]

That’s horrifying. 

[China]

Pretty much all the news out of Florida these days is horrifying...book banning, abortion laws, sargassum, death penalty, revised defamation laws, immigration laws, etc.

[Captain Wiggles]

"Pro life" and "All lives matter" tho. 🤷‍♂️

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[skinsmarydu]

It's terrible that it took so long, but at least it happened.  (Makes me sad to type that.)

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[China]

Texas Man's 90-Day Sentence for Killing Neighbor Sparks Outrage

 

Heartbroken parents whose son was killed as he slept when a neighbor accidentally fired through their shared wall have been left reeling after learning the shooter will serve just 90 days in jail.

 

Texas State University (TSU) student Austin Salyer was asleep in bed around midnight on September 16, 2021, when a bullet fired by his neighbor, Gabriel Brown, went through a shared wall and passed through both of Salyer's lungs before lodging in his right arm. The 20-year-old woke and managed to crawl across the room before dying from his injuries at his home in San Marcos, Texas, The University Star, a TSU student-run newspaper, reported.

 

Brown, who is now 24, said he had been trying to modify a gun when it discharged. He turned himself in to police and, although he was not arrested, he was later indicted and pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide. His initial sentence of 180 days in jail has now been halved to 90 days. His family are asking Hays County courts to review the decision, suggesting it represents a miscarriage of justice.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

The Supreme Court outlawed split juries, but hundreds remain in prison anyway

 

Jill Miller was facing life in prison for second-degree murder, but after hours of deliberation, the jury was deadlocked at 8-4 over whether to convict.

 

The prosecution's case seemed clear-cut: On July 7, 1998, Miller grabbed a .45-caliber pistol and fatally shot her husband, a local sheriff's deputy named Denver Miller, as he slept in bed at their home in Franklinton, La. Then she lied to police, blaming burglars, all because she wanted to have an affair with another man.

 

Still, there was uncertainty in the jury box. Yes, she blamed burglars before ultimately confessing to authorities. But Miller says it was because she was ashamed to admit that her husband was regularly violent with her. They were arguing when it happened, and Miller says he pointed a gun and fired first. Then she shot him in self-defense, she testified at trial.

 

"I can't begin to tell you how hard it is when you love someone — even if people don't understand why you love them — to know that you're responsible for their death. People don't understand that," Miller said in a recent interview, a quiver in her voice. "And there are so many women out there that nobody believes them, and I just ask people to look deep down inside, because nobody really knows what they would do if they were put in certain situations."

 

Ultimately, the jury split: 10 to convict, two not guilty. In most states, that would have been a mistrial. But in 1999, the year Miller was convicted, Louisiana was one of two states where a person could still be convicted by a non-unanimous jury; Oregon was the other. At 31 years old, the mother of four was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The U.S. Supreme Court outlawed split-jury verdicts for people accused of serious crimes in the landmark 2020 ruling Ramos v. Louisiana, righting a historical wrong propelled more than a century ago by white supremacy and xenophobic fervor. But the decision only applied to open cases and convictions that were under appeal at the time of the ruling. The justices left it to Oregon and Louisiana to decide whether to apply the decision retroactively and give inmates like Miller a second chance.

 

Today, the two states are on sharply different paths. In Oregon, the state's Supreme Court recently said these cases must be given a new look, while in Louisiana, only a handful of prosecutors have agreed to revisit past convictions decided by split juries — or what critics call "Jim Crow juries."

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

Quote

 Innocence Project New Orleans attorney Charell Arnold said Moses was spared the death sentence by a single juror's vote. 

 

"Mr. Moses is innocent. He has provided evidence of his innocence," Arnold said. 

 

According to Arnold, IPNO investigators found the state did not reveal evidence to the defense and his conviction was based on false testimony, and he wasn’t even in town when the shooting happened. 

 

"In this case... the sole eyewitness or a man who claimed to be an eyewitness, both had motivation to lie, and to implicate Mr. Moses over a romantic rivalry, and that this eyewitness actually had pretty severe mental health problems and was committed and underwent a psychiatric evaluation," Arnold said.  

 

In late May, a judge granted Moses post-conviction relief and vacated the verdict of his initial trial, but the fight isn't over. 

 

"The charges were not dropped by the district attorney's office... he's been granted a new trial, that means he's actually he could actually have a new trial," Arnold said.

 

 

[PleaseBlitz]

https://abovethelaw.com/2023/06/sullcrom-is-super-proud-of-themselves-for-making-it-easier-for-the-state-to-confine-the-innocent/?utm_campaign=Above the Law Daily&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=263676204&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--VqPGVWO7uEDA07WzPVivezJ8alzJo0Ao-j3Vsq6XS2oI1nx06jAbhXUDZCSKy9B6n-e1C3OFIZkxZ-1GqLK2SAVm-kA&utm_content=263676204&utm_source=hs_email

 

Sullcrom Is Super Proud Of Themselves For Making It Easier For The State To Confine The Innocent
 

Quote

Habeas corpus is a foundational concept for a society that lives under the rule of law. Full stop. Barring rebellion or invasion, it is the procedural lifesaver when a state actor in a position of authority unlawfully detains someone. Jones v. Hendrix dealt with one such case. Marcus Jones was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm and given about 27 years in prison. Nineteen years into his sentence, the Supreme Court clarified that for the crime he was convicted of, prosecutors had to prove that the defendant knew that their possession of a gun was illegal.

Two big issues here. The first is that it is plausible for Jones to not have met the knowledge requirement because he thought his record was expunged. The second, and this is the big one, whether he actually knew or not, the prosecution never met its burden of proving that he knew. It doesn’t take the next Learned Hand to recognize that a person thrown behind bars for twenty years without the prosecution proving its case is a clear problem. Jones petitioned for habeas corpus on the ground that the state doesn’t have the authority to confine him because it didn’t prove its case.

In an unfortunate 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court bypassed the issue of Jones’s innocence completely and decided not grant the petition because federal law only grants one bite at the habeas apple and Jones previously filed one. It’s a sad day that someone will spend 20+ years in prison for a conviction that never actually existed.

 

[The Evil Genius]

 

[China]

Ron DeSantis Delivers Blow to Republicans

 

Governor Ron DeSantis delivered a blow to Republicans in the Florida Statehouse this week by vetoing a popular criminal justice reform bill they'd championed in a move some believe was intended to bolster his "tough on crime" credentials for the GOP presidential primary.

 

On Tuesday, DeSantis vetoed a popular criminal justice reform bill that would have allowed offenders to apply for their criminal record to be cleared if the charges against them had been sealed or expunged. The bill also included exceptions to current law for those who previously received expungement of offenses committed as a minor, though it would not apply to a minor who was charged as an adult.

 

Though the bill passed with near-unanimous support in the Florida House and Senate, DeSantis did not issue a letter with his veto explaining why he did not support the bill, prompting speculation he did so not because he disagreed with the bill but because he sought to solidify his credibility as a "tough on crime" candidate in a campaign in which he lags far behind former President Donald Trump in national polling.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Is Ron DeSantis speeding up Florida executions in an attempt to garner votes for a presidential run?

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is poised to execute a fifth man on death row within six months, ramping up the state's speed on capital punishment ahead of the 2024 election.

 

In recent months, DeSantis signed two pieces of legislation related to the death penalty, including one allowing the state to seek capital punishment in non-murder cases of sexual battery involving kids under the age of 12 that will become law on Oct. 1. The other bill allows for the death penalty without a unanimous jury decision.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Connecticut Has Done Something Remarkable With Crime

 

In 1999 Connecticut had so many people in prison that it paid to send 500 of them to be incarcerated in Virginia. Nearly 25 years later, the state has not only sliced its number of imprisoned people in half, but been able to close more than 10 prisons while keeping its crime rate at its lowest level in more than 40 years.

 

“It is kind of remarkable,” said Mike Lawlor, a former state legislator and state official who has worked on these issues for 30-plus years. “We could probably close a few more.”

 

Connecticut currently runs 13 prisons, which house about 10,000 people. Two-thirds of these are serving sentences; the other third are those who have yet to be sentenced. (Five of the closed prisons have been mothballed, meaning they could be reopened if needed.) The state’s rate of 155 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents is now the ninth lowest in the country and well below the national average of 350 people per 100,000.

 

Nationally, states have reduced the number of people held in their prisons by 25 percent since each state’s peak number of incarcerated people, according to statistics compiled by the Sentencing Project. But although some other states are closing prisons, none have come close to Connecticut’s efficiency. Indeed, in the past three years, eight states have opened, renovated, or finalized plans to build new prisons, according to Jacob Kang-Brown, a senior research fellow at Vera Institute, a nonprofit that works to transform legal justice systems throughout the country.

 

“It’s troubling to see many states still trying to build more and more prisons,” Kang-Brown said.

 

“We’ve shown over a 15-year period how to do [criminal justice reform] right,” said current state Rep. Steve Stafstrom, a Democrat from Bridgeport, the state’s most populous city. “I actually wish other states spent more time looking to Connecticut.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Federal judge orders Southwest Airlines attorneys to attend ‘religious-liberty training’ from conservative group

 

A federal judge in Texas on Monday ordered three attorneys for Southwest Airlines to attend “religious-liberty training” from a conservative legal advocacy group as punishment for allegedly violating his ruling in a religious discrimination case brought against the company by a fired flight attendant.

 

The sanctions order handed down by District Judge Brantley Starr, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, are an unusual demand given that the group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, has a lengthy history of representing religious adherents in high-profile cases seeking to bolster religious protections and roll back LGBTQ and reproductive rights nationwide.

Last year, a jury found that both Southwest and Transport Union Workers discriminated against Charlene Carter when it fired the flight attendant after she “expressed her pro-life beliefs to her union president.”

 

Following the verdict, Starr ordered Southwest to reinstate Carter and take several other corrective actions, including requiring both the airline and the union to “inform Southwest flight attendants that, under Title VII, they may not discriminate against Southwest flight attendants for their religious practices and beliefs, including – but not limited to – those expressed on social media and those concerning abortion.”

 

But in messages sent by three Southwest attorneys to the company’s employees, according to a sanctions order handed down by Starr, the airline instead said that “Southwest does not discriminate against our Employees for their religious practices and beliefs.”

 

The judge said Southwest also sent around a memo to flight attendants in which the company “lambasts Carter” by taking issue with the conduct she was fired over.

 

“It’s hard to see how Southwest could have violated the notice requirement more. Take these modified historical and movie anecdotes. After God told Adam, ‘[Y]ou must not eat from the tree [in the middle of the garden],’ imagine Adam telling God, ‘I do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden’ – while an apple core rests at his feet. Or where Gandalf bellows, ‘You shall not pass,’ the Balrog muses, ‘I do not pass,’ while strolling past Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm,” Starr wrote.

 

“The Court concludes that training on religious freedom for three lawyers at Southwest the Court finds responsible (Kerrie Forbes, Kevin Minchey, and Chris Maberry) is the least restrictive means of achieving compliance with the Court’s order,” the judge said. “The Alliance Defending Freedom (‘ADF’) has conducted such training in the past, and the Court deems that appropriate here.”

 

The sanctions order was featured earlier Tuesday in the Law Dork newsletter authored by Chris Geidner.

 

Southwest and Transport Union Workers have appealed the judge’s ruling from December, and the airline said in a brief statement to CNN that it plans to appeal Starr’s sanctions order.

 

ADF has a long history of advocating for conservative causes at courts around the country, including the US Supreme Court, where its lawyers successfully represented the plaintiff in a major free speech case this term in which the conservative majority rolled back some key LGBTQ protections.

 

Click on theh link for the full article

[China]

Mississippi to pay more than $400K in attorneys’ fees over unconstitutional sodomy law

 

Mississippi will have to pay more than $400,000 in attorneys’ fees after the attorney general’s office spent years defending a sodomy law that criminalizes oral and anal sex. 

 

The law in question — Section 97-29-59 — was deemed unconstitutional in 2003 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case Lawrence v. Texas that private sexual conduct was constitutionally protected. 

 

But Mississippi kept its sodomy law on the books, opening the door for a 2016 legal challenge that resulted in the expensive attorneys’ fees. 

 

The AGs office, under both Democrat Jim Hood and Republican Lynn Fitch, fought the class action lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights and other advocacy legal organizations, which sued on behalf of five Mississippians who were required to register as sex offenders for sodomy convictions. 

 

The case was finally resolved this summer when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed and affirmed the attorneys’ fees – and that Mississippi’s sodomy law is unconstitutional. The deadline for the state to appeal passed earlier this month. 

 

Yet Mississippi’s “unnatural intercourse” law is still law. A state representative introduced a bill earlier this year to repeal it, but it received no attention and died in committee. And according to an attorney who worked on the lawsuit, there are still 14 people on the Mississippi Sex Offender Registry who were solely convicted under that law. 

 

They could sue at any time, said the attorney, Matthew Strugar, and put the state on the hook for even more fees. 

 

“They could file a lawsuit tomorrow,” Strugar said. “And given what the Fifth Circuit has said about the law being unconstitutional, it should be an easy win for those people.” 

 

A spokesperson for the AGs office said Fitch does not have the authority to remove these 14 Mississippians from the registry. Mississippi code requires sex offenders to petition a circuit court in order to be removed from the registry. 

 

Because the state’s unconstitutional sodomy law does not distinguish between consensual and nonconsensual sex, the circumstances that led to the convictions of the 14 Mississippians aren’t immediately known.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Florida death penalty changes causing ‘chaos,’ attorneys say

 

A new state law lowering the number of jurors required to recommend death sentences has spurred a rash of litigation, triggered conflicting judicial rulings and infused an additional level of uncertainty in capital cases.

 

The changes have caused what numerous attorneys called “chaos” in the death-penalty system.

 

The law allows death sentences to be imposed based on the recommendations of eight of 12 jurors, an easier threshold than a previous requirement of unanimous jury recommendations. The change — prompted by Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz receiving a life sentence after a jury did not unanimously recommend death — gave Florida the lowest death-penalty jury standard in the nation.

 

Allowing 8-4 recommendations is the latest in a series of changes in the capital-sentencing process since a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case known as Hurst v. Florida. The ruling found that the state’s death-penalty process was unconstitutional.

 

In October 2016, in the similarly named case of Hurst v. State, the Florida Supreme Court interpreted and applied the U.S. Supreme Court ruling and said unanimous jury recommendations were required. The Legislature responded in 2017 by putting such a unanimous requirement in law.

 

Amid uncertainty over whether the unanimity requirement should be applied retroactively to older cases, justices ordered resentencing for about 150 Death Row inmates who were sentenced based on recommendations by non-unanimous juries. Before 2016, inmates could be sent to Death Row based on majority — or 7-5 — jury recommendations.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

[China]

An Oklahoma judge could be removed from office for sending more than 500 texts during a murder trial

 

A new Oklahoma judge could lose her job for sending more than 500 texts to her bailiff during a murder trial, including messages mocking the prosecutor, praising the defense attorney and calling a key witness a liar.

 

The chief justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court recommended the removal of Lincoln County District Judge Traci Soderstrom in a court filing Tuesday following an investigation by the state’s Council on Judicial Complaints.

 

Soderstrom has been under scrutiny since July after she was caught on camera scrolling through social media and texting during the trial of a man accused in the fatal beating of a 2-year-old.

 

 

Soderstrom, who was sworn in on Jan. 9 after being elected in November, was suspended with pay pending the outcome of a hearing by the Court on the Judiciary, which will determine whether to remove her from the bench.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

[China]

The Scandal That Never Happened

 

TWO YEARS INTO his 25-year sentence for attempted aggravated rape, Nathan Brown could tell the man sitting across from him — a jailhouse lawyer improbably named Lawyer Winfield — was not going to help him get out of prison. It was astounding to Brown that he was pinning his hopes on a fellow inmate who had an eighth grade education and whose formal legal training amounted to a prison paralegal course. “But he knew more than I did,” Brown said.

 

Brown laid out for Winfield the details of his case. In the summer of 1997, a woman was assaulted in the courtyard of the apartment complex in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, where Brown was living with his mother. The woman, who was white, fended off the attacker with her high-heeled shoe until he fled on a bicycle. When sheriff’s deputies arrived, a security guard suggested they question Brown — one of the few Black tenants in the complex.

 

Brown, 23 at the time, was in his pajamas, rocking his baby daughter to sleep. The deputies put him in handcuffs and brought him to the victim. When she couldn’t identify him, the officers allowed her to get close enough to smell him. She had told them her attacker had a foul body odor. Brown, she would later testify, smelled like soap; he must have showered immediately after, she speculated. In a trial that lasted one day, the jury found him guilty. After his appeal was rejected, he no longer had a right to an attorney provided by the state.

 

Winfield began translating Brown’s grievances into a legal petition. He argued that Brown’s lawyer had provided ineffective counsel: He had overlooked the most basic defense strategies, failing to challenge the discrepancies in the victim’s story and to insist on DNA testing. The two of them worked on the petition for months, so Brown was surprised when the Louisiana 5th Circuit Court of Appeal delivered a rejection just a week later. The denial — a single sentence that didn’t address any of Brown’s claims — bore the names of three judges. But something didn’t feel right. How could they return the ruling so quickly? Why was it so vague?

 

The answer to those questions would come years later, in the suicide note of a high-level court employee who disclosed that the judges of the 5th Circuit had decided, in secret, to ignore the petitions of prisoners who could not afford an attorney. It was a shocking revelation. In a state where police and prosecutorial misconduct frequently make national headlines and a stream of exonerations has revealed a criminal justice system still functioning in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, a group of white judges had decided that the claims of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of inmates — most of them Black — were not worth taking the time to read.

 

Among those petitions was Brown’s claim that a DNA test would have proven his innocence.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[China]

A man cleared in a 1996 Brooklyn killing said for decades he knew who did it. Prosecutors now agree

 

A man who served 14 years in prison for a deadly 1990s shooting was exonerated Thursday after prosecutors said they now believe the killer was an acquaintance he has implicated for decades.

 

“I lost 14 years of my life for a crime that I didn’t commit,” Steven Ruffin told a Brooklyn judge after sighing with emotion.

 

Although Ruffin was paroled in 2010 and has since built a career in sanitation in Georgia, he said that getting his manslaughter conviction dismissed and his name cleared “will help me move on.”

 

“If you know you’re innocent, don’t give up on your case — keep on fighting, because justice will prevail,” Ruffin, 45, said outside court. “That’s all I’ve wanted for 30 years: somebody to listen and really hear what I’m saying and look into the things I was telling them.”

 

Prosecutors said they were exploring whether to charge the man they now believe shot 16-year-old James Deligny on a Brooklyn street during a February 1996 confrontation over some stolen earrings. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said after court that charges, if any, wouldn’t come immediately.

 

“You have to be able to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt, and we have to make sure that that evidence is sufficient to do so,” said Gonzalez, who wasn’t DA when Ruffin was tried. “You have a lot of factors working against us procedurally, but also factually — unfortunately, this is 30 years ago.”

 

Ruffin’s conviction is the latest of more than three dozen that Brooklyn prosecutors have disavowed after reinvestigations over the last decade.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Supreme Court takes up appeal of Oklahoma death row inmate after state attorney general admitted mistakes

 

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up the extraordinary appeal of an Oklahoma death row inmate named Richard Glossip, a man who even the state attorney general said should not be executed.

 

Last May the justices halted the pending execution while legal challenges played out.

 

Glossip has endured 26 years behind bars, nine execution dates, three last meals and two independent investigations that raised serious doubts about his conviction.

 

“We are grateful that the court is providing Richard Glossip the opportunity to argue that Oklahoma should not be permitted to kill him,” Glossip’s attorney, John Mills, said in a statement. “The court should reverse the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, which has inexplicably refused to accept the state’s confession of error.”

 

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner F. Drummond told the Supreme Court that the state had recently made the “difficult decision” to confess error in Glossip’s case and supports vacating the conviction of Glossip. The move was an about-face and came after review of new information that had come to light related to prosecutorial misconduct at Glossip’s trial.

 

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals refused however, to accept the confession of error and determined the execution should go forward.

 

“That decision cannot be the final word in this case,” Drummond told the justices. “The injustice of allowing a capital sentence to be caried out where the conviction was occasioned by the government’s own admitted failings would be nigh unfathomable,” Drummond told the court in court papers.

 

Click on the link for the full article