The Cameron County, Tx., Bail Bond Board prohibits bail bond companies from approaching people to ask for business in a police station, jail, prison, detention facility, or anywhere on state, city, or county property where people are detained by law enforcement. Violation is rampant in Brownsville, and allows bondsmen to take advantage of stressed people unfamiliar with the bail system, police and others told the Brownsville Herald.
Every morning, throngs of bondsmen are in or near the courtroom inside the Brownsville Police Department, hoping to get business from those arrested the previous night. Elane Flores said she felt vulnerable and desperate the morning after her husband was arrested for public intoxication, and too willingly handed over a wad of cash to a stranger. She said the bondsman took the money and walked away without offering a receipt or business card. “As soon as he took the money and started leaving, my heart started racing. There was no business card. Everything was sinking in,” Flores said. The man did bail out her husband, but she was out several hundred dollars. The company refunded $150 of her $300 after she repeatedly complained.
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San Francisco's courts have cut their staff by 31 percent since 2008, forcing people to wait one to three hours in line to pay their traffic tickets. The San Francisco Chronicle says that was before Gov. Jerry Brown proposed cuts of $544 million to the state's courts this week as part of a plan to make up California's $16 billion deficit. "We're rationing justice," said Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the leader of the nation's largest judicial system.
After four consecutive years of state funding reductions totaling $653 million, courts up and down the state have shuttered courtrooms that hear disputes over child custody, mortgages, and layoffs. Repairs of aging, unsafe courthouses have been postponed. Clerks' offices where people file legal papers are closing early. Services for those who can't afford lawyers, like self-help kiosks for family law, have been reduced. If the Legislature approves Brown's court funding proposal, Cantil-Sakauye said, "the bottom is going to fall out. We've done all that we can."
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Next week, the Supreme Court may decide whether to hear an appeal from three Seattle police officers who say they are worried about the future of Tasers...
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The Massachusetts Appeals Court has called on judges to better police jurors’ use of the Internet and social media to make sure they do not discuss cases online, and thus risk a mistrial, reports the Boston Globe. The court said judges need to do more to explain to jurors that refraining from conversations about a case also means not posting anything about it on Facebook or Twitter, common practice in today’s technology-driven world. “Jurors must separate and insulate their jury service from their digital lives,’’ the court said in a ruling involving a Plymouth Superior Court case in which several jurors made comments on Facebook during a trial.
"Instructions not to talk or chat about the case should expressly extend to electronic communications and social media,’’ the court said. The directive follows a national trend, as such cases are reaching the appellate courts. Last year in Arkansas, for instance, that state’s high court overturned a murder conviction that carried the death penalty after finding that a juror tweeted that a verdict was reached before the court was notified. Law groups, such as the National Center for State Courts and a federal judicial conference committee, have also drafted advisory jury instructions, to limit the danger social media can pose to a jury’s private deliberations.
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When a Columbus police officer’s fatal shooting of a suspect inflamed passions last year, city authorities refused to identify...
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The South Carolina Supreme Court has declared lifetime GPS monitoring of sex offenders unconstitutional, says the Sentencing Law and Policy blog. In a split opinion, a majority of the court concurred with one justice who concluded that the "challenged mandatory lifetime, non reviewable satellite monitoring provision [of the law] is arbitrary."
The court ruled in an appeal by Jennifer Dykes, who contended that lifetime GPS monitoring violated five constitutional rights. An opinion that got only two of five votes by justices said the monitoring violated her "substantive due process rights." Blogger Douglas Berman of the Ohio State University law school said the ruling might "have ripple effects in at least a few other jurisdictions."
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Some 300 fugitives have faced a new, tougher punishment in the latest change for the Philadelphia criminal justice system in the more than two years since an investigative project by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The newspaper portrayed the courts as having one of the nation's highest fugitive rates and one of the lowest conviction rates for violent crime. A new Bench Warrant Court has been established to go after fugitives. Judge Joseph Waters has handed out 300 brief jail terms since the court kicked off last month. The court's warrant unit has been rounding up the most violent fugitives in that period and bringing them before the new court for hearings. "The idea is to send a message," Waters said. "I mean, 33 percent of our people don't show up for court."
Early figures suggest word of the crackdown is getting out. In the three weeks since the program started, judges have been handing out markedly fewer bench warrants for missing defendants. The trend could mean 1,000 or more fewer fugitives annually. "These are only very preliminary results, but they are incredibly compelling," said William Chadwick, a former prosecutor who helped design the new program. A skeptical note came from Bradley Bridge of the Defender Association, which represents most of the 60,000 arrested yearly, those too poor to hire a defense lawyer. He noted that cases passed up to Common Pleas Court for trial could still collapse or end in acquittals. Municipal Court judges might merely be failing in their "gatekeeper" role, he said. Only conviction data would resolve the issue.
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The Supreme Court is being asked to consider for the first time police use of Tasers, McClatchy Newspapers reports. With more than 11,000 agencies arming...
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Since the first drug court opened in 1989 in Miami, every state has embraced the popular drug treatment program for nonviolent drug offenders. says Stateline.org. The voluntary programs require that for at least a year, offenders submit to regular drug tests, check in with a judge, and complete court-prescribed treatments. If offenders fail a drug test, miss a court appearance or commit a new crime, they face strict sanctions, which can include jail.
Results show the program has consistently lowered recidivism rates, while returning on investments. It might follow that making the court mandatory would help even more people and reap more benefits for the community. New Jersey’s Republican Governor Chris Christie, a former U.S. attorney and board member of a halfway house for recovering addicts, thinks so. In his 2013 budget proposal, Christie asked for an additional $2.5 million investment in the state’s drug court program to reach all eligible offenders, not just the ones who choose it. "Budgets come and go, taxes go up and down; but saving lives, that lasts forever," Christie said. Drug court professionals are encouraged by Christie’s strong endorsement of drug court, but some worry that the untested mandatory requirement could jeopardize the program’s success.
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A federal appeals court overturned a jury and found that Waukesha, Wi., police used excessive force when they shot a suspected drunken driver four times with rubber bullets in 2005. reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. One shots caused a six-inch gash in the driver's ankle that required 30 stitches. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that a trial judge should have granted Tamara Phillips' motion for judgment as a matter of law, despite a jury's verdict in favor of the police.
The case now heads back to federal district court for a hearing on the extent of Phillips' damages and attorney fees. "In an excessive force case, while we accept the factual inferences made by the jury, we must independently review the jury's interpretation of what is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," wrote Judge Ann Claire Williams, joined by Judge Diane Wood. Dissenting Judge John Daniel Tinder wrote that he believed a jury could have found the force was reasonable. Phillips' attorney, Mark P. Murphy, said the incident was a turning point in his client's life. "She's very grateful to the judges," he said. "The easy, political thing to do would have been to say, 'The jury has spoken.' "
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Top Maryland law enforcement officials are pushing back against a Court of Appeals decision that prohibits DNA collection from suspects charged — but not yet convicted — of violent crimes, saying the ruling will allow dangerous criminals to go undetected by authorities, the Washington Post reports. Gov. Martin O'Malley, police chiefs, and prosecutors are urging the state’s attorney general to challenge the ruling, which found that swabbing criminal suspects for DNA samples after they are charged is a violation of the suspects’ constitutional rights.
Police and prosecutors say the case could jeopardize the convictions of 34 robbers, burglars, and rapists whose genetic samples were taken after they were charged in separate cases. They also said it will hamper detectives’ ability to solve cold cases.“It really sets Maryland back in the crime fight,” said Col. Marcus L. Brown, superintendent of the Maryland State Police. The case puts Maryland at the center of a brewing national debate that raises the question of how to balance privacy rights and public safety. Federal and state courts across the country have issued mixed opinions on when DNA collection is legal. The governor’s office says 26 states have legislation similar to Maryland’s. The issue seems destined to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.
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With more cuts scheduled for Oregon courts, even longer lines at courthouses seem inevitable, reports the Oregonian. By May 1, court administrators expect to eliminate the equivalent of 95 full-time positions statewide, and that means fewer employees at the counter to accept payments for tickets, to answer questions, to pull files from archives, to enter warrants into the computer system and to staff courtrooms that hear criminal and civil cases.
The cutbacks bring the total number of positions cut since 2009 to 296, a 17 percent decrease. Some of the eliminated jobs were vacant already and left open because administrators predicted future budget woes, but the others are now held by dozens of employees who will get laid off. There is the chance that lawmakers will add back some of the jobs in coming weeks or years. The Judicial Department is applying for a $1.1 million emergency infusion from the Legislature this spring in hopes of softening the blow.
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By Laura Amico
America’s top cops say they need more help from the courts
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Change has come slowly, but Texas is among a number of states where courts are converting from a paper-intensive to a paperless operation, reports Stateline. The new electronic system in Texas uses a fee-based model in which private sector providers act as electronic couriers and a centralized service provider is a sort of electronic post office. Around the country, private sector companies are willing to pay many of the upfront costs of building electronic court filing systems in the hopes of eventually making their money back — and then some — through fees.
Most state judiciaries are now moving toward electronic filing, although with dramatically varying degrees of speed and sophistication. Some electronic systems simply allow litigants to email files to the court. Others automate a host of judicial functions, such as sending notices to other involved parties when a document has been filed or a judge has taken action on a case. According to the National Center for State Courts, statewide electronic filing is up and running in Delaware, Colorado, Alabama, Utah and Nebraska, with a number of other state judiciaries phasing in systems that are intended to go statewide eventually. In Nebraska, the state estimates that electronic filing in 2011 saved more than 12,000 hours of administrative court staff time.
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Monday marks five years since the massacre at Virginia Tech, where a mentally ill student used two legally-bought handguns to kill 32 people and wound 25 others. Other than a minor law to improve the national database used for background checks, no significant gun-control legislation followed, writes UCLA law Prof. Adam Winkler in the Washington Post. Since then, there have been several mass shootings. Gun control may be dead politically but it remains alive and well in the courts.
Second Amendment experts predict that the next major gun case at the Supreme Court will be a challenge to one of the remaining state or local laws that effectively bar the carrying of concealed weapons. Given that most states allow almost anyone to carry guns on the streets, what the justices have to say about concealed carry will be less significant than what they say about the role of the courts in scrutinizing gun laws. Will the justices respect the long-standing tradition of gun control? Or will they create novel, untested hurdles for such laws? Winkler says that in a hostile political environment, the courts have been gun-control advocates’ best friend. Whether that 200-year friendship can last much longer will be the question that next confronts the Supreme Court.
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