Friday, February 03, 2012 10:14
Las Vegas's Metropolitan Police Department has agreed to open itself up to Justice Department officials, marking the start of a months-long process...
Read full entry »Friday, February 03, 2012 09:30
After denying any investigation into grand jurors who for six months investigated her office, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos said she directed her chief investigator to run "a cursory Internet search," the Houston Chronicle reports. Sources say an investigation by the DA's office into grand jurors, two judges, and a political opponent of Lykos was ongoing during the grand jury's probe. This week, the grand jury ended its investigation of possible problems with evidence from the Houston Police Department's DWI testing vehicles and the DA's office involvement.
The grand jury then accused Lykos' office of investigating them. Lykos first denied it, then said that because her office was "unfairly attacked" she had ordered an Internet search of members of the grand jury. "We were simply trying to learn if there was a political motivation behind the attacks," Lykos said. She suggested that a simple Google search did not rise to the level of "investigation." "The purpose of the Internet search was to simply try and determine what were the reasons for this grand jury's radical, erratic and what we believed to be unlawful actions," she said.
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By Deirdre Bannon
Friday, February 03, 2012 09:02
A proposed expansion of the federal Violence Against Women Act to aid “underserved” populations is in jeopardy after solid Republican opposition at a Senate markup yesterday.
Read full entry »Friday, February 03, 2012 08:41
While California’s corrections system is a trainwreck, Texas has become a model for corrections reform, says Governing Magazine. Last year, at least 11 states, including Arkansas, Kentucky, Ohio, and North Carolina, enacted sweeping corrections reforms somewhat similar to Texas' with the intention of limiting the growth of their prison populations. This year, states as diverse as Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Hawaii are expected to take up corrections reform based on ideas that have played out successfully in Texas.
“The Texas story helped spawn a wave of reforms around the country,” says Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project. “We hear over and over, ‘If Texas can do this, [the approach] can’t possibly be soft on crime.’” Governing attributes some of the shift to game theory, which seeks to understand what is a rational course of action in situations where other people’s responses determine outcomes. Academic game theorists have explored how promises, commitments, threats, the elimination of options, and other tactics can affect outcomes and the resulting “equilibrium.” In Texas and in a growing number of states and cities, policymakers have found a smarter approach based on a new generation of research that applies insights from the world of game theory to the criminal justice system.
Read full entry »Friday, February 03, 2012 08:17
Legislatures in 29 states last year adopted 55 criminal justice policies that may reduce prison populations and address collateral consequences...
Read full entry »Friday, February 03, 2012 07:53
Virginia is poised to lift a 19-year-old limit on handgun purchases, with the Republican-controlled state Senate expected to do away with the one-gun-per-month cap in a final vote today, reports the Washington Post. With the purchase limit likely headed for extinction, Virginia appears to have grown friendlier to gun rights since Republicans took control of the evenly divided Senate last month, pro-gun and gun-control activists agree.
This week, the Senate passed a bill barring localities from requiring that people seeking concealed handgun permits submit fingerprints. The House passed a bill allowing government employees to store guns and ammunition in personal cars parked in workplace lots, including those at child-care centers and parks. Lori Haas, a gun-control activist whose daughter, Emily, was injured in the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, believes the legislature is moving in the wrong direction this year. More than 40 bills related to guns are before the General Assembly this session, most of them meant to expand gun rights and a handful aimed at restricting them.
Friday, February 03, 2012 07:44
House Republicans accused Attorney General Eric Holder of hiding information at a hearing over the botched Operation Fast and Furious gun-trafficking...
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By Cara Tabachnick
Friday, February 03, 2012 07:30
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy heads the list of key speakers exploring the Drug War’s impact on the U.S. Justice System at a John Jay College symposium Monday
Read full entry »Friday, February 03, 2012 06:22
As the U.S. Department of Justice crafts a court order aimed at ending what it says is the unconstitutional use of force by Seattle police, some community groups — who have waited years for their complaints about police to be addressed — are feeling rushed by the process, reports the Seattle Times. A dispute has arisen over the makeup, or the need, for a citizens advisory panel to oversee implementation of the reforms, as suggested by Mayor Mike McGinn.
Justice Department civil-rights attorneys have met with McGinn, City Attorney Pete Holmes, members of the City Council and dozens of citizens groups and community members over the past three weeks with an eye toward completing interviews and most information-gathering by the middle of February. "There is a sense of urgency to get things done," said Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Bates. "Having this lingering and looming isn't good for anyone." Estela Ortega of El Centro de la Raza said she has asked the Justice Department to extend its deadlines for community input. After a dozen years of committees, task forces and reports about problems in the Police Department, "why suddenly is there a hurry?" she said.
Read full entry »Friday, February 03, 2012 05:00
Before he became governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie made his name as a prosecutor. It was a surprise when he added his voice to the chorus of those who say the war on drugs has failed, says Governing magazine. Christie is expanding his state’s drug court program, offering treatment and counseling to more nonviolent offenders, rather than prison sentences. “I don’t believe that the only weapon we [should] use against the drug problem is incarceration,” he has said. “I just don’t think it’s worked.”
Last year, an international commission that included figures such as former United Nations chief Kofi Annan and former Secretary of State George Shultz called for legalization and regulation as a way to reduce violence. “It’s certainly a plus if well-known politicians add their voice, and it’s especially good if it’s conservatives like Christie,” says Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard University economist. “I hope the signal is that drug use is an individual choice for adults, just like zillions of other risky decisions, such as alcohol.” It’s precisely such signals that have led to an increase in illegal drug use over the past couple of years, after a decade of decline, say the proponents of tougher laws. Strategies like Christie’s will contribute to the sense more people have that it’s OK to take drugs, says Dr. Robert DuPont, who served as drug czar under presidents Ford and Carter. “As the perceived risk goes down, the use goes up,” DuPont says, “and an element of that risk is the criminal justice system.”
Read full entry »Friday, February 03, 2012 04:55
The Obama administration, which has made reducing crime a priority in its attempt to improve the quality of life at dozens of Indian reservations plagued by violence, recently ended a two-year crime-fighting initiative at Wyoming's Wind River reservation and three others deemed to be among the country’s most dangerous, reports the New York Times. Nicknamed “the surge,” it was modeled after the military’s Iraq war strategy, which helped change the course of the conflict.
Hundreds of officers from the National Park Service and other federal agencies swarmed the reservations, and crime was reduced at three of the four reservations — including a 68 percent decline at Mescalero Apache in New Mexico, officials said. Wind River, as has been true for much of its turbulent history, bucked the trend: violent crime there increased by 7 percent during the surge. Wind River has a crime rate five to seven times the national average and a long history of ghastly homicides. During the initiative, which increased the number of officers to 37 from 6, crimes included the murder of a girl, 13, who had been missing for four days and whose partly clothed body was found under a tree, and the killing of a 25-year-old man, who police say had been beaten with a child’s car seat and a dumbbell by two friends after a sexual encounter.
Read full entry »Friday, February 03, 2012 04:06
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly watched as a doctor extracted a bullet from officer Kevin Brennan this week, says the New York Daily News. Describing the procedure, he says "They take this huge needle, full of novocaine, and then I see it going right into the bullet hole, a big hole from a .38, because it’s a big bullet. You stand there and you can feel this kid’s pain when the needle goes in, into the back of his head."
Kelly talked about the anti-gun television commercial New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Tom Menino will do during the Super Bowl on Sunday night and how he hopes that when people watch that commercial they will think about Brennan, 29. “The guns keep coming and will keep coming until the laws get tougher,” Kelly said.
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Thursday, February 02, 2012 11:29
Black males face significantly longer federal sentencing than white males due to prosecutorial charging decisions, found researchers in a new study.
Read full entry »Thursday, February 02, 2012 10:32
In Eastern Kentucky’s Floyd County, some prescription drug addicts trade food stamps for pills while others buy clean urine from strangers so they can pass drug tests, says the Louisville Courier-Journal. In Oldham County, police trace spikes in burglaries and other crimes to a wave of addictions to the powerful painkiller Opana. Those are some of the stark realities Kentucky faces in its escalating struggle with pain pill addictions, a Kentucky Prescription Drug Abuse Summit was told yesterday.
The conference — held by the U.S. attorneys in Kentucky in cooperation with the University of Kentucky, brought officials from law enforcement, health care, government, and other arenas together. Gov. Steve Beshear told 300 attendees “nothing is more important” than prescription drug abuse, which takes the lives of almost 1,000 Kentuckians a year — more than traffic accidents on the state's roads. “It’s literally killing our people,” Beshear said. “This issue will rank among the highest priorities. We must work together. We must be aggressive, and we must act now.” That action includes spending $4 million in his proposed two-year state budget to expand the prescription-drug monitoring system known as Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting, or KASPER. Beshear is working with Attorney General Jack Conway and House Speaker Greg Stumbo on a wide-ranging prescription drug abuse bill expected to be introduced in the legislature soon.
Read full entry »Thursday, February 02, 2012 09:03
Last year, New York City police officers made the greatest number of marijuana arrests in more than a decade, reports WNYC Radio. About 50,700 people...
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