By Steve Yoder
Many of the leading Republican contenders in the presidential race have pushed reformist 'smart on crime' agendas. But will those agendas survive if one of them sits in the White House?
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By K. Daniel Glover
Dozens of police agencies around the country are moving into the social media space. But social media can be a two-edged digital sword for law enforcement.
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Twenty-six journalists from across the nation gathered at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Jan. 31st and Feb 1st, 2011 for the 6th Annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America to discuss the conference theme: “Law & Disorder: Facing the Legal and Economic Challenges to American Criminal Justice.”
The journalists were joined by criminal justice professionals and speakers including New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, Hon. Sue Bell Cobb, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court; Hon. Andre Davis, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; and Hon. Robert T. Russell, Associate Judge for Buffalo City Court and a pioneer of the nation’s Veterans Courts. They were joined by ACLU president Susan Herman; John T. Chisholm, District Attorney, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin; Daniel F. Conley, District Attorney, Suffolk County, Massachusetts; and George Gascon, newly appointed DA in San Francisco and the city’s former Police Chief.
Panels included:THE COURTS, PUBLIC SAFETY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES: CHALLENGES IN 2011, THE COURTS ON TRIAL: IS THE SYSTEM FAILING US?,TECHNO-CRIME FIGHTING: LAW ENFORCEMENT, CIVIL LIBERTIES, PUBLIC SAFETY AND THE WEB.
See the symposium agenda here.
Fellows ask colleagues follow-up questions in a closed forum.
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By Debora Halpern Wenger
A team of five reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer has been documenting serious problems in Philadelphia’s court system for more than two years for their groundbreaking series, "Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied." Their investigation found that the city had the highest violent crime rate among America's 10 largest cities and among the lowest conviction rates for big cities. Nearly two-thirds of all defendants accused of violent crimes in Philadelphia have been allowed to walk free.
University of Missouri journalism professor Debora Halpern Wenger interviewed the reporting team about their investigative techniques.
Read the case study.
Read the NICAR tip sheet the Philadelphia Inquirer team put together.
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By Julia Dahl
Could the bad economy be good news for criminal justice? It's a radical idea, but over the last two days in New York City, where journalists and academics joined prison directors, DAs, victims advocates, judges and representatives from the Department of Justice and the FBI at John Jay College of Justice to figure out where the system is failing, it was a notion that kept popping up.
Since 1970, America has incarcerated more and more of its citizens every year. But now, the money is running out. State budgets for 2011 promise to be lean and mean, and everyone - from police to courts to corrections - is going to have to do more with less. And maybe that's a good thing.
Anthony Barkow, Executive Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University, says that many aspects of the criminal justice system aren't run according to best practices or good data, but politics. Being called "soft on crime" is perceived as a candidate's death knell, and people convicted of felony can't vote, so there there can be little incentive for a politician to seek out reform, especially with the fear of being hit by the next Willie Horton case alive and well. But, says Barkow, the fiscal crisis may be "a blessing in disguise to bring liberals and conservative together to find common ground to control the spending in the system."
New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman was similarly uncowed by looming austerity. In his keynote address at the Sixth Annual John Jay/H.F. Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America, which focused on a "crisis" in the court system, Lippman pronounced the state courts "engines of reform and innovation" and praised problem-solving courts "which not only punish the offender but address underlying problems like addiction...transforming the judicial role...by actively engaging defendants in behavior modification."
Below is an hour-by-hour guide to the Crime in America Symposium, where these, and many other discussions about criminal justice, took place on January 31-February 1, 2011. Topics included gun laws, family court, cyber criminals, crime rates, over-incarceration, and more.
DAY ONE
America's Prisons: A Progress Report from the States Moderated by Martin Horn, Former Commissioner of New York City Department of Correction and Probation
4:58pm
The panelists were asked what they thought of vocational training in prisons:
Jon Ozmint: "We eliminated vocational programs like computer programming and silly things like that. We gave them welding classes and they got jobs. A lot of guys don’t want to do a vocational program they want to work…they get a card that tells an employer this is where they’re at [skills-wise]; we found that was a lot better.
Gary Lanigan: "We’ve moved to certificate programs...welding, carpentry, roofing, electric, extermination. So they’re walking out with a certificate that says, I’ve completed this course."
4:33pm
Jon Ozmint on the skewed view a reporter with a notepad or camera gets when in a prison: "If you've got a group of teenage boys shooting hoops in the gym and the cheerleaders come in, do you think behavior is going to change?" The same thing, he says, happens when the media bring cameras into a prison: they see the worst behavior, instead of what's "really going on" which is people "just trying to do their time and get by."
Responding to a question about the large numbers of mentally ill inmates and how they are disciplined: "We can't hold a mentally ill inmate to the same standard" as an other inmate, said Ozmint.
Martin Horn said: "It's a very sad commentary on America that this problem has been dumped on the people who run our jails and prisons."
4:15pm
Jon Ozmint, Outgoing Director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, says the fact that most newspapers and news organizations don't have anyone covering corrections. He said he calls the new prison reporters "howdy doody's" because they're so young and "they’re gonna be there a year before they become too expensive and their paper pulls them off onto something else." But nonetheless: "Frankly, if you write on a topic you are an opinion shaper…and if you’re going to write about this topic you ought to try to get it right."
A woman in the audience asked about whether education within the prison increased safety within the prison and decreased recidivism. She also asked if the corrections directors on the panel would support allowing former prisoners to receive Pell grants and other funding for higher education.
Ozmint answered: "Restoration of Pell grants, in my state, is a bridge too far. It’s not going to happen…we have statutes on the books that prohibit public funding to inmates. We know that if you leave [prison[ with a GED, your recidivism rate is going to be lower, but not as dramatically lower as if you were a drug addict and got treatment. We know it works and higher education would work too, but who’s gonna pay for it?"
4:01pm
Martin Horn asks: "Who cares if a prisoner has a cell phone?"
Lanigan does: "A cell phone in a prison is as dangerous as a gun…inmates are using to put hits out on the street. A correction officer in South Carolina was actually shot in his own house [based on a ] hit put out by an inmate. The are used to intimidate witnesses, to run drug and gang activity. We spend a lot of money trying to intercept them, when it would be a whole lot wiser if the government would allow us to jam that signal. No one, not me or any corrections officer, is allowed to bring a cell phone in."
3:55pm
Adam Gelb, Director of the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States, talked about his organization's most recent survey: "Prisons have been the fastest growing part of state budgets besides medicaid in the past decade. They cost $50 billion a year, and that doesn't even count federal prison."
Martin Horn chimes in saying, "If you count the federal facilities it's $70 billion. Each year 10 million people are in and out of the jails and prisons."
Back to Gelb: "Overall, we know so much better today than 30 years ago how to slow the revolving door. First, it's risk assessment: making meaningful distinctions between high, medium and low risk offenders. We know who needs to go to prison and stay there, and for those who stay in the community, how they need to be supervised.
"Second: we have technologies that didn’t exist 30 years ago when we started down this prison building path. We have GPS, electronic monitoring and even automated kiosks to manage probationers and parolees who are low risk.
"Treatment programs have changed because now we know it doesn’t help to sit around in a circle and talk about your relationship with your mother...[What works is] cognitive behavioral therapy: how am I gonna avoid those negative influences and not surround myself with crime? Very practical.
"There has been a shift in public opinion since the late 80s when crack came on the scene. People have been supportive of alternatives to incarceration for low level drug offenders. They want to see a trade off made between length of stay and recidivism…move toward results-based government. We're seeing states like Texas reduce crime and incarceration rates at same time...A decade ago New York and Florida each had about 70,000 prisoners. Today, Florida’s prison population is now over 100,000, and New York's is under 60,000. Tax payers in which state got a better deal? These stories lay the groundwork for additional reform."
3:45pm
Gary M. Lanigan, Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, explained that prison directors have a lot of tough decisions to make: "When you have to make a decision about medical care versus security, the bottom line is your conscience. Christie wanted smarter cheaper more efficient, so we made some of those tough decisions. The easiest way to save money is housing. Philosophically I believe inmates sentenced to state custody belong in state care, in New Jersey we dropped by 60 percent the number of inmates we were housing in city jails. Saved $20 million last year.
"In a city jail you’re really holding inmates for the judicial process – they aren’t beginning their programming or reentry back to society once they come to a state facility, they are beginning that – education, drug treatment – things the media doesn’t focus on in a positive sentence.
"I don’t have the luxury to say who I have in custody. I have to put them in a safe environment and help transitioning them back into society; a student going nowhere in high school on the streets, is mandated to be educated in our system. Drug addiction experts say you want to begin that two years prior to release."
Lanigan spoke about a new alternative to correction program that has resulted in "half the rate of re-arrest after one year—what that tells us is for next year’s budget we’re going to increase that program."
Crime and Criminal Justice Trends 2010-2011 Moderated by Stephen Handelman, Director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice
1:40pm
Al Blumstein, Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University, began by showing slides depicting the dramatic rise in incarceration since the 1970s. What's the change?:
"The dramatic story is the rise in drug incarceration. between 1980 and 2001 growth by a factor of 10; major consideration in the growth of prison pop; is drug abuse a public health issue? Is it a criminal justice issue? We became very frantic about in 1980s and 1990s, largely driven by the crack epidemic, [creating] mandatory sentences for crack. It became a highly politicized issue."
While the prison population booms, Blumstein said that, but for a "blip" in 2005-2006, there has been a drop in major crimes—including murder and robbery—every year since 2000. Preliminarily, Blumstein said that in 2010 we're seeing murder down by seven percent and robbery down by 11 percent, nationwide.
Chuck Wexler, Executive Director of the Police Executive Research Forum, takes issue with Blumstein's calling the 2005-2006 year a "blip," saying that he found crime increases in many cities in those years (including Orlando, Cincinnati, Boston and Minneapolis). "Something was happening at that moment in time," he said.
2:25pm
Handelman asks, "How do we measure success in this new environment?"
Marc A. Levin, Director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said, "Texas has some of the nation’s highest incarceration rate [but we] have seen double dip decline in both prison population and crime rate. Have put the funds in alternative programs. Still have fourth highest rate [of incarceration], but we used to be number two. We've driven that down, and at same time driven down crime rate—through evidence based programs."
Thomas Abt, Chief of Staff in the Office of Justice Programs at the Department of Justice said:
"Fiscal year 2011 is still in flux. I think that the administration's position is fairly clear: we are extremely supportive of the [justice] reinvestment model...lead by an extraordinary states like Texas and Kansas. We can support and encourage this, but it is most likely that you won’t see an increased budget for criminal justice this year.
"Anyone who says with absolute certainty what influenced crime trends we should take with some grains of salt. It is pretty clear that effective modern policing, including community-based policing was partly responsible for part of the crime drop. We’ve made such tremendous progress but we are at a time where we will have to make some very difficult choices. Policy equals budget."
2:45pm
Al Blumstein, said, "It doesn’t matter how many cops you have [what matters is] how sophisticated the management is in exercising their forces. Big cities still have resources to quench hot spots—not because of data but of management philosophy...But smaller cities need the skills and information...that they don’t have. Also there has been a enormous disconnect between the left and the right for the last three years, but now they are coming together for the first time due to the budget crisis."
PANEL 2: The Courts on Trial: Is the System Failing Us? Moderated by Amy Bach, Faculty Fellow at The Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics and the Media at Syracuse University
11:10am
Amy Bach asks the panel what they see as the "red flags" illustrating problems in the courts.
Robin Steinberg, Executive Director of the Bronx Defenders began with a scene she encounters every day in the Bronx:
"What I see every morning, I pass the “hall of justice” in the courthouse, is a long line, literally around the block, of people of color. The people are standing in line with no coverage from the cold or heat, for 30 min to an hour before let into the building. The line is made up almost exclusively of men of color...[this shows] the racial disproportionality of what’s coming into the courtroom. [We're] not providing the basic human dignity to even get access to the building, much less access to justice.
"When you get into the building it doesn’t get any better. You see a system that is almost all plea bargaining. Partly it's overcrowding…but it’s also a reflection of mandatory sentencing…which provides a reason to take a plea to avoid unduly harsh sentences...This shifts power from judges to prosecutors...[and in]...any state court, access to defense council ranges from indifference to incompetence to no defense at all.
"The people that are being dragged into the state court system are being charged with misdemeanors...[many] take a plea, which is far from benign. You can’t get away from are all the consequences that come from that…[if you] plead guilty to disorderly conduct, you’ll be precluded from ever receiving federal financial aid for college. Plead guilty to assault, and you can be excluded from public housing and lose your kids in family court."
John T Chisholm, District Attorney, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin said: "We’ve created an unsustainable system...we have a 50 percent recitivism rate from the Department of Corrections. This has a real impact on your community – if you’re taking hundreds of African American men from that system [and putting them back in the community], it’s not surprising that [certain areas] have the highest rate of violence and disorder. We invest an enormous amount of resources in these communities without good results. How do we change that?
We recently received a grant to engage system wide in evidence based framework which requires people to step outside their comfort zones. "
The Honorable Robert T. Russell, Jr., Associate Judge for Buffalo City Court: "In 1972 about 200,000 people incarcerated in the U.S, now it's two million. What has happened that impacted our justice system? One is substances, drugs, and those that are dependent on substances. Is the system responding to what we’ve noticed? The first drug treatment court began in 1989, now there are thousands across US. 70-80 percent of the people in our justice system are dependent on or users of substances. How do we get these people clean and sober, not re-offending?
Mental health treatment court began in late 1990s. IN the 1970s there was a significant movement in mental health [through which] many [inpatient] facilities closed. [We] thought they could be better served in the community, but when community could not provide, the transference was in our justice system. Our jails and corrections are the largest residential facility for our severely mentally ill."
11:50am
Anthony Barkow, Executive Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University said: "Of the 200,000 people in the federal system, three-quarters are African-America or Hispanic; 11.5 percent of African American men under 40 are currently in prison. And more than 20 percent of African American men born since the 1960s have spent at least a year in jail on a felony conviction. You can’t help but conclude that the system is failing.
There is a lack of data in the system...[it is an] Irrational system making decisions based on anecdotes and media. Fiscal crisis a blessing in disguise to bring liberals and conservative together to find common ground to control the spending in the system.
The people most directly affected can’t vote – so [there is] a lack of voice in the political system of the people most negatively affected by it. For a long time you could only win an election by being “tough”; when that’s the political culture you can’t help but end up in a situation like this. It’s a breakdown in the political system."
Kendall Coffey, author of Spinning the Law, and former U.S. attorney for the southern district of Florida, said: "There is an unwillingness to go to trial because the sentencing system is so loaded up. In Florida it’s clearly out of kilter…[there has been a] revolution in victims rights, so much more than ever before, victims needed to be heard in the process of resolving criminal cases. [This is] mostly very good, but when the prosecutor needs to get the victim sign off on sentence...[they] aren’t exactly objective.
"The proliferation of media makes it hard to do anything but maximum punishment anytime the media is watching. It becomes that much tougher to try to reach some sanity in [sentencing] outcome.
"There is no presumption of innocence in the court of public opinion. It’s impossible to humanize the defendant in terms of the public’s perception of the case. Questions of mental illness are getting swept aside, and in Florida especially youthful offenders as young as 12 are treated as adults.
"There is absolutely no political constituency for a balance in the process. The system has a profound imbalance…we have a lot of work to do before the world’s best justice system can be one we can truly be proud of it."
12:20pm
Robin Steinberg on possible solutions: "I think more money might not give us higher quality justice but higher quality judges...There aren’t enough courtrooms to actually hear everybody’s story—trials have virtually vanished…which means there is no check and balance on police. If police are sweeping people into the criminal justice system and [never have to answer for the arrests in court]...they can [do this with] impunity.
[I'd like to see] a Defender General position created so someone has real oversight over the indigent defense community…Until you start searching the kids coming out of the fancy private school on the Upper East Side the same way you search the kids coming out of the public schools in the Bronx, you’ll never galvanize the communities with power."
10:30am
PANEL 1: The Courts, Public Safety and Civil Liberties—Challenges in 2011, moderated by Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker
Long prison sentences are not the only thing that don't correlate to dropping crime rates. Sue Bell Cobb, Chief Justice of Alabama Supreme Court, says that she thinks crime is being thwarted by technology, specifically cell phones: "Now, you call for help," before entering a potentially dangerous situation.
Andre Davis, Federal Judge for the United States Court of Appeal, Fourth Circuit, also sees better medical care in trauma centers as contributing the the drop in homicides: "In Maryland, you now have a community of wheelchair-bound young men, drug dealers who would have been homicide victims 30 years ago."
On indigent defense and sentencing:
Judge Cobb: "I believe our civil liberties have been eroded because of inadequate indigent defense...people are urged or coerced into entering a guilty plea...they are not being informed of their rights...Are our sentencing laws continuing the revolving door? To [address that] we need to see if we are using anger-based sentencing or evidence based sentencing."
Susan Herman, President of the ACLU, followed up by saying that "Prison is extremely destabilizing" and that the problems former inmates have getting jobs chips into their civil liberties post-incarceration, as well as into their family lives.
Doug Berman, William B Saxbe professor of law at Ohio State University, pointed out that as "corrections spending has gone up, education spending has flattened...[and yet] the easiest way to predict whether someone it going to commit a crime or not is whether they have a high school diploma."
On juvenile justice:
Judge Cobb explained that in Alabama "we worked on four counties [looking at] how and why we are detaining kids. Were we detaining more kids of color? Yes...And when we locked kids up they were more likely to be sent to state school and get in more trouble. What we discovered [was that reducing the number of] kids in detention... reduced our services to juvenile justice. We are contributing to making Alabama safer to not locking up kids that shouldn’t have been in there in the first place."
DAY TWO
The Crisis in the Family Courts Moderated by Cara Tabachnick, Deputy Director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice
1:35pm
King says she sees judges abdicating their decision making responsibility to mental health professionals: "Legally, [judges] should be making their decision based on the evidence. If you’re a psychologist you can take information from people and smash it to make it come out the way you want it...It can be very biased, it can be manipulated and massaged and I don’t think it’s particularly reliable. Whoever picks the evaluator [has an agenda] and picks an evaluator to produce results that [whoever hired/picks] wants."
Tabachnick turned to Amy Leichtenberg, whose former husband killed her sons and himself; she is the founder of "In Loving Memory of Duncan and Jack Leichtenberg":
"In 2006, after years of emotional and mental abuse, I decided to leave my children's murderer. We went into hiding because of the fact that he was so obsessed with me and finding out where I was. He ended up calling me over 500 times in one week. I did get an order of protection for myself and the boys. He was arrested shortly thereafter for, apparently, 'accidentally' finding us…After that he went to Florida and then decided to come back. He left his job and instead of paying for child support he went into a shelter and then he was able to see the boys in a state visitation center. He saw them on a regular basis on supervised visits. The judge at the time told him that if he got himself a job, a place to live and started getting counseling, he would allow him to see the boys in a more normal setting.
"My ex represented himself and I hired an attorney at $200 an hour. He filed continuous motions. He went to a psychiatrist who said that ...he was depressed and that if he saw his children he would get better. [At one point, my ex] told the visitation supervisor that he would commit suicide. The supervisor wrote to the judge, but judge brushed it off. He’d also told police on many occasions that he was going to kill himself.
"In August 2008, the visitation center was losing their funding and the judge wanted to start [my ex] to have some “normalness” in his life. The judge allowed supervised visits in his home with someone who represented me and someone who represented my ex. My friend documented his erratic behavior...but the judge ignored my friend’s 20 page report and accepted his friend's.
"In December 2008, the judge told my attorney, 'oh you don’t know him—he’s not going to do anything. I just want to give him what he wants to get him out of my courtroom...After his sixth supervised visit, he failed to return them. On march 9, three weeks later, they found them in the back of his car in a remote part of Illinois, drugged. He had stabbed my youngest and he hung himself. That Saturday he was given them, he had told the boys this was probably going to be their last visit because daddy was moving…I called the police but [the police told me that if I didn't hand them over, he'd raise a stink and] they were going to have to arrest me. On March 8, I dropped them off at their executioner. It took 26 hours to get an Amber Alert – the police didn’t want to scare him or make him go into hiding.
"The system failed my babies on so many levels. I did everything I was supposed to do. I reported his violations, I did everything was supposed to do in court. And I still feel guilty. If I can save just one life I will do whatever I have to do to do that...I currently have a lawsuit against the [local] police department for violating me and the boys' civil rights. It’s about accountability. It’s about changing the system and about bringing awareness to what’s going on to prevent this."
12:45pm
Tabachnick began the panel by recounting some of what she learned reporting two feature articles —"Failure to Protect: The Crisis in the Family Courts" and "Disciplining the Judge." First she spoke about the lack of coordination between criminal and family court. If a woman has an order of protection against her husband, the family court judge dealing with custody may have no knowledge or records of the criminal matter. She recalled the case of a woman who reported her partner's abuse to the police, but the family court still granted the father custody; on an overnight visit, he killed the child and himself.
"This is not unsual. This is going on in family court all over the nation. In New York there is now an integrated domestic violence court – if you have an open criminal justice case and a family court case, they automatically run concurrently."
Next to speak was Eileen King, regional director of Justice for Children. King hoped to spur the reporters in the room to look into the family courts:
"This is one of the most under-reported areas of law; if you are one of the 3 million women each year who is a victim of domestic violence and you do what everyone asks you to do, you leave him and get yourself safe, get your kids safe….You have a legal relationship with the person abusing you or your child and that legal relationship will follow you until at least your child is 18. These women find themselves in one of the worst catch-22 situations they can imagine.
"...When questions of custody come up they are always handled in family court. In criminal court you have certain protections afforded by the Victims Right Acts. Not so in civil court. You find yourself in an extremely hostile environment...this provides the perfect arena for an abusive person to go to war. It’s a war where people are unequally armed."
According to King and Tabachnick, family courtrooms and judges are notoriously unfair:
"There is a perception that there is a lawlessness in these courts: Constitutional rights can be disregarded, rules of evidence are disregarded; people are told to shut up and not speak…higher standards for women…[there can be an] attitude of the 'f-you' rule: you married him, you made your bed, you lie in it," said King. "[Most family court judges] don’t seem to really be interested in judicial education. There is a certain arrogance... 90 percent of people in family court in Maryland have no representation…it’s hugely expensive…one hearing could be $10K...[but] settlements don’t work real well in abuse cases."
Tabachnick followed: "Family court judges tend to be the most inexperienced. It’s thought of as a black hole, [for] people who are going nowhere. Family court is very underfunded...Most people are in family court represent themselves...Family lawyers are often like ambulance chasers."
Techno-Crime Fighting: Law Enforcement, Civil Liberties, Public Safety and the Web Moderated by Bernice Yeung, Contributing Editor, California Lawyer
11:45am
Dennis Jay Kenney, Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice predicted more public-private partnerships when it comes to keeping control of data: "With few exceptions, the government can’t manage the technology out there today. [I think we] will increasingly see public-private partnerships so private companies will increasingly have power over us that the government traditionally had…"
11:35am
Zack Miller, Section Chief of the FBI's Cyber Division, discusses cyber crime:
"I think there is a growing cyber crime problem that we are continuing to chase a bit behind the curve…bank robbery, fraud are all facilitated by the internet. We're seeing a lot of cars or other items for sale. People put up ads, solicit deposits before delivering the goods, then the victims forward their payments but don’t receive the goods. A lot of cyber threats come from overseas."
An audience member asks about the "Anonymous" group that launched attacks on companies perceived as being opposed to Wikileaks:
Miller responds:
"This is a rising threat - a group of individuals adopted a mob mentality…[and] anybody can be nominated to be the victim…this is like pitchforks and torches storming the castle. The potential is that whatever you intentions are, if you get enough people to back what you’re presenting to the crowd, you’re creating a huge threat to whoever the victim is going to be. It is something that we’re keeping an eye on. In that case, they used a tool that was readily available…but didn’t give them the ability to block their IP addresses."
Still, criminals are aware of law enforcement tactics to catch them. Gascon pointed out that many drug dealers no longer use cell phones because they know police can trace them.
"[Tech law] is a body of law that’s developing and the law is always behind. There’s no question that with very little money you can get a tremendous amount of personal information [on someone], you can take somebody’s ID…I don’t believe the body of law in this area is mature enough to deal with this and I don’t think it ever will because technology moves too fast," Gascon.
"Police departments are technologically way behind the curve and they will continue to be because there just isn’t enough money. The banking industry has to self-police and has spent a great deal of money because police are behind. And [the problem with] the push to make medical records...is that when that information is readily available it’s accessible for people who may use it for inappropriate uses."
11:15am
George Gascon, District Attorney and former Chief of Police of San Francisco: In the 1990s we started with CompStat and hot spot policing and automated crime mapping systems, [so we could see] where crimes were occurring [and use that] as tool to deploy police. [Has had a] tremendous impact and [has led to] reductions of crime. But it also created a problem, started leading to an over-criminalization in the community.
"[We also have] data mining tools so we can take old crime mapping, arrests, vehicle stops and start mining for information on a particular incident. We're having early discussions of predictive policing. Many factors: weather, temporal issues,
"The problem with all these tools are that they're retroactive – they look at what has [already] occurred. As we get into predictive policing we have to go beyond and look at things that aren’t really tied to criminal justice system, other social indicators. We know that young people that do not attend school in earlier years of life have a greater likelihood of being involved in crime at a later date. There is a lot of information that is available with those tools. But we have silos of information: education, social services, health services that need to be connected in a way that we can start…reducing the likelihood of young people committing crimes.
"There is also a danger: how good do we want the government to get at connecting all this info? How do you protect the privacy of these people? I believe these are legitimate concerns, but not good enough not to do it..Instead of looking at how to arrest the next offender tomorrow, we need to look forward 10 years. How do we stop people from engaging in that behavior to begin with?"
10:50am
Yeung begins the panel by asking how technology has changed how each panelist does their job over the past 10 years.
Daniel F. Conley, District Attorney of Suffolk County, Massachusetts begins:
"When I began my career as an ADA in 1984, technology was barely used. We almost never any surveillance video, and if we did it was very grainy. Now it’s a rare case that doesn’t have some kind of high quality surveillance footage as part of the evidence.
"Boston is grappling with youth gun violence. When an active police office is on the streets, a common scenario is that the officer will see suspicious activity, try to stop the suspect and end up in a chase. Common practice is [for the perpetrator] to discard the firearm. Once apprehended, now, officers can retrace path of flight using a thermal imaging device to locate firearms, [which, when] held close to the body will retain heat.
"Another tool is the “shot spotter," an acoustics system that picks up and triangulates with pretty darn good precision where gunshots originate from. So often before the 911 call goes out, police can get to the crime scene relatively quickly. Technology can even distinguish caliber so we know how many firearms used.
"Private cameras, help, too. In convenience store robberies, outstanding resolution captures gruesome detail [so that even if] the perp is masked, it gives the jury the full story about what happened.
"The Craigslist killer purchased his firearm by going to New Hampshire. We have him on his cell phone from Boston all the way to the place where he purchased the firearm under a false name.
He spoke about using GPS devices for young gang members on parole.
"[We also use] social media. What has [the defendant] been saying on Facebook before and after the event? We had two defendants who were involved in a gang and did a shooting…they denied their affiliation wth the Mass Ave Hornets, but we were able to put into evidence that one of the defendants put on his MySpace [a photo of himself] with a Hornet tattoo. [Social media] can be a treasure trove of evidence to solve and prosecute defendants."
Gun Violence, The Media and The Role of Courts and Law Enforcement Moderated by Maurice Possley, Coordinator of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice's Joyce Gun Violence Project.
10:10am
An audience member asked a question following up on Ludwig's assertion that gun buy-backs don't work.
Ludwig responded:
"[I think] everyone in the [academic] community is of the same mind on gun buybacks: you’re not buying back the guns used in crimes...Who’s going to give you their gun for $50 [when they bought it] for $300 on the street? It’s the grandma who finds the old gun in the attic [whose guns the buy-backs collect]."
Spitzer addressed the issue of the proliferation of gun shops along the U.S./Mexico border:
"There are 7,000-8,000 gun dealers [along the border] – there is no doubt that American bought guns are fueling Mexican violence. The Obama administration looks to be doing a pivot on this, [is] swooping in on dealers selling large numbers of guns to straw purchasers. The extent to which violence spills over into America will [have some impact on how this is addressed…The Mexicans view it as an American fueled problem: America has the appetite for drugs, America is supplying the guns."
Hemenway pointed out that the ATF is "not allowed to do stings with its own personnel...30-40 percent of all gun transfers don’t go through licensed dealers."
He continued: "Most of the guns brought into places like New York and Chicago are brought it through trafficking...[I'd like to see a] national one-gun per month law [to cut down on bulk gun purchasing and make trafficking less financially attractive.] Every gun purchase should require a background check [there are typically no background check at gun shows], and we want really good enforcement of dealers who are doing the checks.
"It's all about preventing the guns from getting into the city. There are 25 other developed democracies that do a better job than we do. They have inner cities too, they have the same horrible videos and movies, but they aren’t killing each other with guns"
9:50am
Robert Spitzer, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at SUNY Cortland, talked about the politics behind gun laws and our attitudes about gun ownership:
"There is a very close connection between political assassination and outbreaks of violence and gun control. [So after the Loughner shooting] why is it that general sentiment is that there will be no change in policy regarding guns? [One reason is the ] NRA, which has a relatively small membership -four million members, but several deeply vested political advantages: First, a single-issue ideology. It focuses in a laser-like fashion on that issue. It isn’t enough to have numbers on your side. Gun rights people will contribute money, will vote, will write letters a range of activities that the typical American does not, on the gun rights issue...A zealous, motivated constituency that can have decisive impact on the political landscape.
"[There is the] Brady Coalition, but the pro-gun regulation side, politically speaking, has been smaller and had a more difficult time motivating and maintaining the motivation of their base.
"The NRA has been successful at framing how the issue of gun control is presented. As a matter of law…it was never true that the second amendment confered the right to individual gun ownership…[they've also been successful at] demonizing the ATF…and at keeping its appropriations low.
"The Democrats, by and large have retreated on the gun issue; many said Al Gore’s defeat was due in part to [his support of] … gun regulation. I think the actual adverse affect of the gun issue was greatly overstated, nevertheless that was their feeling and the Democratic party began to back away from the gun issue.
"George W. Bush's presidency was the most gun-friendly presidency in the history of the United States, period. John Ashcroft was the most gun-friendly member of the Senate, [and just after he was appointed Attorney General] he issued a letter to a member of the NRA [saying that] the justice department was reversing over 50 years of policy regarding how they interpreted the meaning of the second amendment. One interpretation is that it’s a militia based right. The alternative interpretation is the so-called individualist view, that the second amendment allows an individual to have a gun for personal reasons.
"Bush moved to restrict access to gun data, and ended federal gun buy back program. U.S. representatives at the United Nations blocked efforts to restrict international gun trafficking. And it all culminated in the 2008 Supreme Court case D.C. v Heller where, for the first time in history, the court affirms the individual right to have a handgun."
9:15am
Jens Ludwig, McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, talked about the politics and history of gun regulation:
"[There are about] 250 million guns in the country and about 20 percent of gun owners wind up owning 80 percent of all the guns.
"This is going to be a very difficult problem for us to regulate out way out of. There are no border checks driving from Virginia to Chicago, and [there has been] a series of federal court decisions striking down gun laws."
But, said Ludwig, there are some law enforcement activities that could work:
"The huge majority of homicides in Chicago committed with guns and out of doors. Someone was carrying a gun in a public place illegally. Two types of behaviors lead to gun homicides in Chicago: the decision to use the gun in your waistband or the trunk of your car, often you're drunk or high or someone has just said something about your girlfriend.
"[Where we may be able to affect change is in that] decision about whether you want to take the gun with you or not...so gun is not available when someone provokes you."
"The NYPD does a lot of anti-gun patrolling (stop and frisk) searching for guns; it does seem to work. Pittsburgh is also an example.
"[From police, we] hear frustration that they’ll catch someone carrying a gun illegally in public and that the courts will just give the guy a slap on the wrist. Makes me think of how we used to think about drunk driving 20 years ago." Just because you don't kill someone driving home drunk, doesn't mean it was safe to drive drunk. "We have a new understanding of drunk driving where we think of probabilistic
"[We should] Provide incentives to lock your gun up—500,000 guns stolen every year, right into the hands of criminals...A disproportionate share of crime guns are traced to individual gun shops. We can do a better job of investigating these sources....[use] ATF trace data. New Jersey state police, when they catch anyone for anything related to a gun, they provide them with very powerful incentives to exchange information about where they got the gun.
"Gun buybacks are probably the least promising thing."
8:40am
David Hemenway, Professor of Health Policy, Harvard School of Public Health, compares the United States to the rest of the developed world:
"Nobody outside the U.S. in a developed country can understand what we’re doing with guns. The winning argument [for enacting gun laws overseas] is, Do you want to end up like the US? And the answer is NO, then they pass these laws.
"If you’re a surgeon in the developed world and you want to learn to do surgery on gunshot wounds, you go to the U.S.
"The public does not understand what sort of an outlier the U.S when it comes to guns. Nor do they understand what a horrible neighbor we are – how we supply guns to Mexico, Canada, Jamaica."
"American children (ages 5-14) are 13 times more likely to be killed by in a homicide with a gun than kids in the rest of the develped world. This age group has eight times gun suicide rate and 10 times the unintended firearm death rate. This is how we’re protecting our children with our guns
"The rest of the world cannot understand why we do nothing. It’s not like we have worse kids – our bullying rates are average – we are an average crime country in everything but gun violence.
"I hate this notion that you’re either pro-gun or anti-gun. I do car safety work, I’m not anti-car; I do water safety, I’m not anti-swimming pool. It's a very simplistic view of the world.
"Jared Loughner was a law-abiding citizen until he shot 20 people. In any other developed country he probably couldn’t have gotten a gun." He said in many countries an application to get a gun requires at least two personal references - and he probably couldn't have gotten those.
"There are mass shootings in other countries. Gun control doesn’t work perfectly – we have huge numbers of mass shootings, [other developed countries] have very few. Crime guns are trafficked – it’s hard to keep guns away from D.C. criminals, can go to Virginia or Maryland.
"[But] suicide guns and unintentional death guns are home guns, whereas homicide guns are trafficked."
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By Julia Dahl
New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman is rethinking justice and ready to make changes.
It was nothing less than a blueprint for action. With a new governor in Albany, a lean budget imminent and overcrowded courts doling out "assembly line" treatment to the poor, Chief Judge Lippman yesterday laid out his plans to remake the state's court system.
"State court judges are on the front lines dealing with drug-related crimes, mental illness, evictions, foreclosures, family violence and on and on," said Lippman, reminding the audience at the John Jay/H.F. Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America that 97 percent of all litigation is filed in state courts, and that in New York County alone, just one week of filings equaled an entire years worth of filing in the federal court system "State courts, out of sheer necessity, have become innovations of reform and innovation."
Lippman praised problem solving courts, including special domestic violence courts, drug courts and mental illness courts, which don't just punish offenders but "address underlying problems like addiction...by actively engaging defendants and promoting behavioral modification." Lippman said that in New York State, where community courts have been flourishing (New York City alone already has the Midtown Community Court and the Red Hook Community Court, and the wheels are in motion on a youth court in Brownsville, Brooklyn - what Lippman described as "ground zero for crime in the city") prison population has "dropped steadily" in the past decade.
But why do we need all these court reforms? Finances, and fairness top the list.
"Corrections spending at nation level has grown at a faster rate than every other state expenditure other than Medicaid in past two decades," said Lippman. "We spend $50 billion a year on corrections." But, he said, that the nation's 120 drug courts have saved the system $200 million in incarceration costs because the people who appear before these courts are "almost one-third less likely to commit another crime than similar defendants in traditional court process."
Finally, Lippman discussed the problem of inadequate indigent defense. Because of "chronically underfunded public defenders" the poor are subjected to "assembly line" treatment. To address this in New York State, Lippman helped create an Office of Indigent Legal Services which will collect data and make recommendations, including caps on the number of indigent defendants an attorney can be asked to handle, so as to allow them more time to investigate and put on a strong case for their client.
Lippman's address at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, marked the beginning of two days of discussions and panels at which leading judges, state prison directors, senior law enforcement officers, civil liberties advocates and journalists will explore criminal justice trends and their implications over the next 12 months.
Underlying the two days of discussions at the conference are the extreme challenges facing the courts.
“We cannot fight for the rule of law overseas and lose it here at home as our courts crumble from neglect,” says Steven N. Zack, president of the American Bar Association.
The courts' problems are “now crises,” he added. “Reports are rampant of courts closing for good, cutting hours and reducing the types of services most important to ordinary people. It is happening in every region of the country and every size state. The impact is devastating.”
The past year posed challenges at every level of the nation’s justice system. From the continuing debates over gun control and inhumane conditions in our prisons to growing concerns over prosecutorial misconduct and racial bias in sentencing, the courts have been in the spotlight. Pending judicial decisions at every level, starting with the Supreme Court, are likely to have a major impact on the criminal justice system (and on our lives) in 2011.
While court administrators and judges are likely to be asked to do more with less as states slash their budgets further this year, Steven Zack is quick to note that lack of money isn’t the only threat to the system.
“It is unacceptable that groups of all political stripes, often without any clear identification of donors, poured more than $13 million into state judicial races across the country,” says Zack. “Citizens must speak out and let their leaders know they oppose the judiciary becoming a new political football.”
In response to the challenges, the ABA recently announced the creation of a Task Force on the Preservation of the Justice System. During 2011, the association will solicit input from members all over the country to put together an accurate, comprehensive portrait of the problems faced by courts around the country. On February 9, the Task Force will meet in Atlanta to hear testimony from locals. Another meeting is tentatively set for spring in New Hampshire.
Already, Zack says, the task force is generating ideas and recommendations for keeping the courts solvent and fair. “It almost immediately became clear that one solution is to ensure courts have dedicated funding streams so they are not prey to the chopping block every time a state budget is reduced,” he says.
A full transcript of The Crime Report's interview with Steven Zack can be seen here.
Among those scheduled to speak on these issues at the H.F. Guggenheim Symposium are the Hon. Sue Bell Cobb, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court; the Hon. Andre Davis of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; and the Hon. Robert T. Russell, Associate Judge for Buffalo City Court and a pioneer of the nation’s Veterans Courts.
They’ll be joined by American Civil Liberties Union President Susan N. Herman, Milwaukee County District Attorney John T. Chisholm, San Francisco DA George Gascon (and former chief of San Francisco’s Police); Daniel Conley, DA of Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which includes Boston.
Julia Dahl is a freelance writer and contributing editor to The Crime Report.
A new bill before Congress aims to overhaul the nation’s legal aid systems
A bill introduced in Congress last week offers long overdue help to the country’s beleaguered public defenders.
The omnibus Justice for All Reauthorization Act of 2010, introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) contains language earmarking $20 million between fiscal years 2011 through 2015 for the country’s under-funded and over-worked legal aid providers. Including a two-year program of technical assistance, the amendment to Bill S3842 is aimed at ensuring that states comply with Sixth Amendment guarantees of the right to counsel, and it allows the Attorney General to sue states who are deemed to be not in compliance.
The bill, a larger and more substantive version of justice reform legislation enacted in 2004, probably has little chance of approval this Fall. Observers say S3842 has come too late in this Congressional session to have a chance of passage, and any decision to reintroduce it will depend on the political landscape following the November midterm elections.
Nevertheless, the fact that the bill was introduced at all suggests that Justice officials are now willing to “bring in the resources, prestige and power of the government to this problem,” says Robert C. Boruchowitz, founder of the Washington Defender Association, and author of Minor Crimes, Massive Waste: The Terrible Toll of America's Broken Misdemeanor Court.
Boruchowitz and other experts contacted by The Crime Report say the staggering case load for the few public defenders available has created one of the most egregious gaps in the U.S. Justice system.
They say that thousands of poor people, many of them minorities, have been left with a stark choice: plead guilty and accept whatever punishment is meted out; or put themselves at the mercy of the court.
And more troubling still, many public defenders or attorneys assigned by the court do not have the training or time to build an adequate defense.
Boruchowitz, now a professor at the Seattle University School of Law, cautioned that while the Attorney General has long had the power to enforce Sixth Amendment compliance in the juvenile justice system, the power has yet to be used in indigent defense cases. It would be rare for the DOJ to sue states, he notes, adding that it was more likely they would try to first come to a compromise.
This latest legislative attempt to fix systemic problems throughout the nation’s public defense system comes on the heels of the September 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics release of the first study of such programs.
5.6 million cases
Using information from the Census of Public Defenders to produce the reports State Public Defender Programs, 2007 and County-based and Local Public Defender Offices, 2007, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) researchers found that approximately 1,000 offices across the nation employing 15,000 attorneys processed 5.6 million cases that year, the last year statistics were tracked.
Almost a quarter of the 530 county-based public defender offices reported a lack of resources and attorneys to process the 4 million cases tried at a local level. And only four of the 17 reporting state programs had enough attorneys to meet caseload standards.
This wasn’t news to David Carroll, the director of research for the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, a Washington D.C. based not-for-profit group which unites individual legal professionals and legal organizations working to ensure indigent defense.
“In many states there is public defense in name only,” said Carroll, who has conducted research on public defense systems in Michigan and Louisiana, and says the crisis is “much worse” than indicated by the BJS reports.
Although the right of access to counsel was reinforced by the groundbreaking 1963 Supreme Court decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, state public defense or legal aid systems widely vary in quality, standards and structure around the country. The public defender may be employed by a state office, an individual counsel assigned to the court or outsourced to a local law firm which signs a contract with the court.
The patchwork system is aggravated by the chronically under-funded and under-staffed legal aid offices around the nation. The result: an untold thousands of cases have ended with wrongful convictions. Most of the public outrage over the situation has focused on death penalty exoneration cases, where DNA evidence or more sophisticated legal teams have been able, on appeal, to undo the harm committed in initial trials by either the lack of legal aid help or a poorly mounted legal defense.
But experts contacted by The Crime Report say some of the most blatant injustices occur in misdemeanor courts or in cases where defendants are brought up for relatively minor charges.
‘Running people through the mill’
“In some jurisdictions they just not assigning public defenders in misdemeanor courts,” said Carroll. “If we are just running people through mill and not worrying about fairness, then we are sending innocent people to jail and leaving real perpetrators in the communities.”
A roadmap for change has been available since 2002, ,when the American Bar Association (ABA) issued “ten principles” of a public defense delivery system—highlighting judicial independence and quality control.
Several states have indeed responded to the ABA’s call. This July, Maine opened its first statewide Commission on Indigent Legal Services, running it as an office separate from its judiciary. “This is giving us assurance that every client is getting quality representation to the extent that we can,” said Executive Director John D. Pelletier.
But the majority continue to ignore it. A 2009 report, Justice Denied: America’s Continuing Neglect of our Constitutional Right to Counsel, published by the think tank Constitution Project’s National Right to Counsel Committee, charged to find solutions, noted that lawsuits highlighting failures in the public defender system have been filed in 29 States.
The nature of the lawsuits varies. At least seven more states more than the 29 mentioned in the report face pending litigation on indigent defense. In Michigan and New York, lawsuits have been brought challenging entire systems for the delivery of indigent defense services. In Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee, litigation is pending in which defense lawyers have challenged the actions of trial courts in seeking to require public defense programs to handle excessive caseloads alleged to be excessive.
Things are likely to get worse as states face new demands for budget cuts in today’s strained economic climate.
“There are still lots of needs, caseloads are too high, and benefits are too low, (and) budget problems can push them further into abyss,” says Boruchowitz. “But maybe this [federal bill] is a light shining into the darkness.”
Cara Tabachnick is news editor of The Crime Report.
Photo Via County.org
The Crime Report talks funding, inertia and over-incarceration with the man who heads Vera Institute of Justice’s NOLA office.
It’s rare for an entire city to get a do-over, but after Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans and the levees gave way, the Crescent City became ground zero for policy makers and visionaries wanting to transform the city’s agencies and social structures.
KIPP and Americorp are involved in education reform, Brad Pitt is building houses in the Ninth Ward, and Harry Connick, Jr., and Branford Marsalis are behind a village for musicians.
But there is one New Orleans structure that hasn’t attracted celebrity attention: the notoriously dysfunctional criminal justice system. Even before Katrina, the New Orleans Police Department was plagued by brutality and corruption. In the storm, they lost hundreds of officers, not to mention guns, cars, records and ammunition. They also lost face as the country learned of police brutality immediately post-Katrina, including the shooting of civilians on the Danzinger Bridge.
For the past five years law enforcement in NOLA has struggled to take advantage of an opportunity to rethink the system. The city saw a slight dip in violent crime just after the storm, but by the summer of 2006 the situation was so bad Governor Kathleen Blanco called in the National Guard to police city streets – they stayed for almost three years. In May, mayor Mitch Landrieu brought in outsider Ronal Serpas to remake the department, he also wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder asking for the federal government to help him by investigating “what has been described as the worst police department in the country.”
Meanwhile, in the fall of 2006, city council members invited the Vera Institute of Justice to study and report on the problems in the city’s justice system, and arrange a retreat for department leaders with the aim of coming to consensus on the best ways to begin reforming the system. Four years later, a two-person team from Vera remains in the city, working actively with everyone from the Sheriff to public defenders to local religious groups to implement fundamental changes, including speeding up the arraignment process, “professionalizing” the public defenders office, and weighing in on the construction of a new jail.
The Crime Report asked Jon Wool, Director of Vera's New Orleans office, to discuss the progress and problems of the city’s criminal justice system.
TCR: What was the state of NOLA’s criminal justice system the day before the storm hit?
Jon Wool: Before the storm the criminal justice system in New Orleans was fraught with problems. Problems in the police department in terms of huge numbers of arrests and a great disaffection of community members with the way they were treated by police. There was a seeming lack of accountability for police misconduct and extremely long delays charging people arrested with crimes. Many of these things are problems in a good number of jurisdictions— it’s not only New Orleans. But I’m tempted to say that New Orleans may be unique in the extent to which all of these unaddressed practices come together and build on one another.
Katrina presented, in a complex sort of way, an opportunity here. There were some new people in government who stepped up to try to bring a reform agenda to bear and there was tremendous national attention being paid to the city. There was an absolute need to open up government here to the assistance of the outside…but private foundations had avoided funding reform work in New Orleans because reform was so difficult to achieve. Katrina changed that, although to what extent and for how long is yet to be seen.
TCR: What aspects of the system did you decide were most important to reform?
Wool: We spend a tremendous amount of money on criminal justice. Roughly a third of the city’s budget is spent on criminal justice. But what people care most about -- violent crime, is simply not being adequately addressed.
The jail in Orleans Parish held roughly 7,200 people at the time of the storm. The rate of detention in local jails was greater here than in any other city in the country, and that’s still the case: it is now three times the national average. [Part of the problem is] an absence of a pre-trial service system. New Orleans detains virtually all the people who come before a magistrate, unless they’re able to pay their bond. It used to take 64 days to get a simple drug case from arrest to first court appearance; because of our alliance’s work it now takes 10.5. If the person cannot post the bond then they’re incarcerated throughout this time. Now, with marijuana cases, 10.5 days in jail before seeing a judge is still unacceptable, so we moved those cases to the Municipal Court where they are heard in one day. But even in cases in which the normal sentence is rarely jail time, defendants serve at least 10.5 days in jail on minor offenses.
The biggest hole in the system is this overreliance on detention. People should not be in jail if they do not pose a public safety risk and have not been convicted of a crime. We detain more people per capita than any other city in the country. And, 89 percent of the city prisoners are not convicted of a crime—they’re awaiting their day in court. Many of our initiatives have as a result, if not the direct goal, the reduction of the use of detention when not necessary to advance public safety. This is where justice, efficiency, and good government come together.
But changes in practice are difficult whatever the field. With expedited screening, we suggested reforms where each agency would have to get its staff to change the way they did things, day in and day out. The police would have to the file their police reports the same shift in which the arrest was made, where they previously were not required to do that. And supervisors would have to review those reports and get them to the District Attorney the same day or the next day. That’s nuts and bolts stuff that leaders know is not always going to be easy to bring about. But collectively, we came up with ways to make things better for the officers. We got scanners for each of the police districts so instead of driving police reports to the DA’s offices, they’re able to scan and email them.
TCR: But you write in your recent report that the problem of over-incarceration was more insidious than just a slow system. The courts and jails literally run on the money gleaned from these low-level offenders. How does funding play into all this?
Wool: Part of the resistance to [expediting midemeanor cases] was that the state court from which the cases were being moved objected to losing the revenues from those cases. In marijuana cases particularly, defendants have a little money and could pay the court fees. And since there are so many of these cases, it amounted to $200,000-$300,000 in lost revenue to the state court. Now, that should not be a consideration when trying to design a reform that makes the system both fairer and more effective and efficient, but because of the way the funding structures are, it is a consideration for the judges who have to operate their court with the revenue they have at hand.
TCR: But there has been success remaking the public defense system, correct?
Wool: The storm basically ended the funding structure for the public defense system. The system was funded by fees from the conviction of defendants, as well as traffic tickets and the like. And since the court system stopped and certainly traffic arrests stopped, the money stopped. This is a really poor way to fund any part of a justice system.
Before the storm, public defenders worked essentially for the judges in whose section of court they practiced and were not part of an independent professional office devoted to representing the indigent. Now, with the help of a local judge and others, the city has created a truly independent public defense office now funded through a new statewide public defense system. But it is still considerably underfunded and plagued by what many public defense offices are plagued by — a crushing caseload. Systemically it’s well designed and well carried out, but not yet well funded.
TCR: Right now, the city is planning to build a new jail, since the current one has been declared unconstitutional by the Department of Justice. How is the reform effort playing out there?
Wool: The jail, perhaps unlike any jail in the country, is funded by a per diem. The city pays the sheriff, who is the jailer, a fixed amount of money per prisoner per day—$23.39 a day to house a human being most of whom have substance abuse, medical or mental health problems—rather than a budgeted [annual amount] for the jail. The amount of money [per prisoner] is very low. And in order to have the revenues to run his facility, the sheriff has an incentive to keep as many people in that facility at any one time as possible. This is not a good way to run a jail because it influences decisions about whether people are incarcerated or not.
So we need to…allow the sheriff to have the same amount of money, but to reduce the population dramatically, getting it in line with other cities. That way he could do more with the money and…could bring conditions to a point where they could meet constitutional standards and in fact help the people in the jail leave there in better shape than when they came in, which of course is critical to breaking the entire cycle of these small scale criminality that plagues the community. It’s important to do those things together – to fund it properly, adequately, and in a way that incentivizes the entire system to try and use the jail only for those who truly pose a public safety risk and not for others who for a number of reasons have been put in jail, including that they have dollars attached to them.
TCR: Why is it so important to do away with this funding system?
Wool: It poses very starkly for the city whether its going to be doing business as usual, which is large scale incarceration of our citizens with little public safety gain to show for it,, or whether we’re going to … make rational decisions about who needs to be in jail pretrial. Only those who truly pose a public safety risk [should be detained]…the rest should not be held simply because they’re poor, which is what a commercial bond based system does. It allows people to get out if they have money but it doesn’t make a rational determination of risk.
This new jail is going to set the tone for the city for 30 years or so. In a strange way, supply really drives demand in this business. If you have the jail beds, all of the parts of the system will adjust and you will use those jail beds. If you build them they will fill them, that’s a common saying in corrections. In addition to reforming enforcement and court practices to better address violent crime, we need to help drive down demand for jail beds for nonviolent arrests by reducing supply.
One of the great opportunities posed by the disaster was that the jail buildings were essentially destroyed by the storm. And that presented the ability for the city to rethink whether it is going to rely so heavily on detention. And that’s why at this fifth anniversary we have such an important decision to make in whether the city embraces new approaches to criminal justice, ones that are fairer, more effective and more efficient. Will we use the available federal dollars to rebuild an enormous jail complex or use that money to otherwise solve the tremendous crime problem that the city faces and restore the public’s confidence in criminal justice?
Julia Dahl is a freelance writer and contributing editor to The Crime Report.
Photo by Kris Krug via Flickr.
Read full entry »The practice of excluding blacks and other minorities from Southern juries remains widespread and, according to defense lawyers and a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Montgomery, Al., largely unchecked, the New York Times reports.
The organization studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — and found areas in all where significant problems persist. In Alabama, courts have found racially discriminatory jury selection in 25 death penalty cases since 1987, and there are counties where more than 75 percent of black jury pool members have been struck in death penalty cases. An analysis of Jefferson Parish, La., by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. found that from 1999 to 2007, blacks were struck from juries at more than three times the rate of whites. In South Carolina, a prosecutor said he struck a black potential juror because he “shucked and jived” when he walked.
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When a mother’s bitter custody battle ends with the death of her child, something has gone terribly wrong with the system.
Wyatt Garcia was born in April 2009. Nine months later, he was shot and killed by his father, who then turned the gun on himself.
It might have turned out differently—if a family court judge had listened to Wyatt’s mother.
Stephen Garcia, 25, a Pinon Hills, California contractor, had been allowed unsupervised visits with his son only a few days earlier by San Bernardino County Superior Judge Robert Lemkau, who was adjudicating a bitter custody battle between Garcia and the boy’s mother, Katie Tagle. The judge had refused to take seriously her repeated warnings of her ex-boyfriend’s violent and abusive behavior.
Shortly after Wyatt was born, she left Garcia after he hit her so hard during an argument about his video-game addiction that “he knocked me out” Tagle said. After she moved home to her parents, her ex-boyfriend began harassing her and her family when he learned she was dating again, and he filed a motion for custody of little Wyatt. In turn she filed three motions for an order of protection against Garcia, which were ignored: in the last motion she charged that he had threatened to kill her and their baby.
Judge Lemkau, however, chose to believe her former boyfriend’s denials rather than the evidence she supplied of Garcia’s threats―including e-mails, text messages and voice messages. Although no extenuating circumstances were raised in court transcripts of the case, the judge simply accused Tagle of lying, and ordered that she turn Wyatt over to his father—with fatal results.
Katie and her sons Wyatt and Dakota
Tagle, 23, believes the odds against her and Wyatt were stacked the moment her case entered the emotional, chaotic world of the family court system.
“I was treated like a criminal, like a complaining woman,” she says.
The story of baby Wyatt Garcia is, sadly, not unusual.
In the nine months between June 2009 and April 2010, 75 children have been killed by fathers involved in volatile custody battles with their former partners, according to the Center for Judicial Excellence, a court advocacy organization which has been tracking news articles of such deaths around the U.S. Based in San Rafael, California, the Center focuses on strengthening court integrity as well as improving public accountability of the judiciary.
Some recent examples from the dockets of Family Courts around the country:
An investigation by The Crime Report shows such tragedies are the consequences of family court procedures that allow abusive spouses to manipulate the system and leave at-risk children at the mercy of prolonged, expensive court battles over custody. These battles end all too often with a parent forced to share unsupervised custody with an abusive spouse.
The problems have been complicated by systemic flaws in the nation’s family courts that have gone unaddressed far too long.
A Broken System
Lawyers, judges, psychologists and representatives of women’s groups interviewed by The Crime Report describe a broken family court system that is already burdened with a heavy caseload and too few judges—many of whom are forced to rotate between cases—and in which serious criminal allegations of domestic or sexual abuse are routinely ignored. The crushing financial costs of pursuing long custody battles is an additional burden on indigent mothers, who get little or no legal support. The odds are particularly stacked against children at risk when the court battle revolves over “he said, she said” arguments.
The system has particularly failed parents―usually mothers―whose efforts to protect their children collide with an approach to custody issues that is based on narrow legal concepts of balance and fair treatment rather than psychological or medical evidence. “Courts assume mothers are orchestrating misinformation, instead of trying to protect their children,” said Kathleen Russell, director of the Center for Judicial Excellence.
The idea of family courts or dockets began with the best of intentions. Established in the early nineteenth century, they were designed to protect the equitable rights of both parents and children and protect the family. Too often, however, that creates a built-in conflict. Judges, as in the case of Katie Tagle, adopt a skeptical attitude towards abuse charges, which most often come from the mother, on the grounds that it is hard to distinguish fact from fiction in arguments between quarreling parents.
“The problem is that family court is not set up to protect children,” says Joyanna Silberg, PhD,Executive Vice President of the Leadership Council. “It is set up with the intent of equitable division for families. And this presents an overwhelming paradigm: how can you equitably divide a child?”
And while the deaths of children are the public face of family court tragedies, the daily reality is that thousands of parents are trapped in prolonged court battles where they either lose their children to their alleged abuser, or are forced to share unsupervised custody.
Advocacy groups interviewed for this story reported receiving between 450 and 1,000 requests for help in contested custody battles this year. The National Network to End Domestic Violence, a prominent national not-for-profit, says it is the biggest problem they are now facing. And the Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence, an independent scientific organization, estimates that each year more than 58,000 children are ordered by family courts into unsupervised contact with physically or sexually abusive parents following divorce in the United States
Experts say abusers use the court system to exercise control over their former partner’s lives, manipulating the players and risking the safety and well being of the children’s lives the courts are sworn to protect.
“Family courts are trained to look for cooperative behavior,” says Rob (Roberta) Valente, general counsel for the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which is based in Washington D.C. “When someone raises an abuse allegation, the court sees it as uncooperative behavior. The result, advocates say, is that the abuser is able to manipulate the court, while a child’s safety and well-being is placed at risk. Many judges are likely to view abuse complaints as a tactic to win custody battles. What the courts have failed to take into account but research has clearly shown time and time again, is that most of the cases that make it to trial in family court are high-risk abuse cases.
Compounding the problem is that judges, attorneys and custody evaluators have little or no training in detecting signs of abuse.
Just 20 per cent of the almost one million divorces and separations registered every year in the U.S. actually land in court. Most are settled in the pre-trial phase, according to Prof. Janet Johnston of San Jose State University, in research studies written for the journal, The Family Court Review.
But of the few who make it to a judge, over 75 percent of these cases are victims of some form of domestic or sexual abuse, according to a 1995 paper by Prof. Peter Jaffe of the University of Western Ontario, who studies children and violence in U.S. and Canadian court systems.
He Said, She said
Today’s family courts have also been affected by the rise of the Fathers Rights movement. During the 1950s, family courts almost exclusively awarded custody to mothers. But complaints by fathers that their rights were ignored in custody battles led to a shift in the 1970s to awarding shared custody, on the grounds that it was in the best interest of the child to maintain a relationship with both parents.
Nevertheless, only a small percentage of high-conflict cases require judges to act as conciliators between parties locked in otherwise endless litigation. The majority involve mothers and children that are suffering from serious sexual or domestic abuse.
The National Father Resource Center disputes this, claiming that its member organizations report that 80 percent of mothers’ abuse allegations are false. Although Canadian research from the University of Toronto studying false allegations in U.S. and Canadian custody cases has found that between one and two percent of mothers make false allegations, the fathers’ rights argument has had a powerful impact. As shown by the Tagle case, courts don’t want to hear the mothers’ allegations.
“Historically, allegations of abuse and incest are [met] with a great deal of suspicion, and there is a tremendous resistance to hearing these types of allegations,” said Eileen King, director of Justice for Children, a national non-profit that works to protect children involved in contested custody cases.
Deborah Hicks tells her story
Such resistance has already cost Deborah Hicks, 46, a former New York City television editor, six years of pain. In 2003, she filed for sole custody of her son, then three years old, when he came home from a visit to his father with suspicious signs of sexual abuse. There was reason to be worried. Her ex-partner had already been convicted of molesting a two-year old boy in Florida for which he served eight years in prison, and he was a registered sex offender in New York City. Despite her ex-boyfriend’s record, the judges who heard the case (there have been two), decided they had to give a fair hearing to his denials.
She has already spent almost $100,000 on the case, with no end in sight. Nevertheless, she still shares custody with her ex, and says, “I am not about to give up on my child.”
Even for those mothers who can afford it, the battle can take a psychological toll. Even when the evidence of risk to their children seems impossible to deny, the family court system that has proven incapable of treating these high-conflict cases with the serious attention and professionalism they require.
Moreover, courts are now often swayed by a concept called “parental alienation syndrome” (PAS), coined by the late psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Richard A. Gardner in the 1980s to describe situations in which one parent is trying to turn the children against the parent during a divorce process. Dr. Gardner, a former professor of child psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, testified in more than 400 child custody cases about its effect on children.
PAS has been seized by the Fathers Rights movement as a way to defend husbands and other male partners from what they consider unjust accusations, and it has received support from other psychologists, who deny that it allows genuine child abuse to go unpunished. “If attorneys, child care evaluators, and judges were all doing their job, protective mothers wouldn’t have anything to fear,” says psychologist Amy J. Baker, author of Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties that Bind.
The concept has made little documented headway in the professional and legal field, and the syndrome has been used very rarely in legal precedent. PAS is not included in the most recent American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, although the association is currently weighing whether to include it in the 2013 issue of the manual.
It may be ironic that efforts to give fathers more rights in custody cases have increased the odds against victimized mothers and children.
“When the pendulum swung to shared custody somewhere in the midst of that (fathers) movement, the safety of children was compromised,” argues Helga Luest, founder of Witness Justice, a group that helps heal victims of violence.
A Complex Web
Amy Leichtenberg and her sons Duncan and Jack
Tears fill Amy Leichtenberg’s voice as she recounts the horrible months before her two young boys, Duncan and Jack Connolly, ages 9 and 7, were killed by their father last March. “I felt like I did everything right, I sat there, I didn’t speak out of turn,” she said of her courtroom experience. After a 20-year abusive relationship with her ex-husband Michael Connolly, she finally gathered the strength to leave him. But he wouldn’t let her go. . Each time she moved her address, he showed up at her house. She got numerous orders of protection; he violated them repeatedly.
Every six or seven weeks, the couple was back in court, following a motion filed by Connolly for one reason or another. Representing himself, he would badger Leichtenberg on the stand. Yet despite his behavior, the court allowed him unsupervised access to his young sons.
“The ball was dropped in so many places,” said Leichtenberg. “Court was just one of them.”
That points to another problem. Once a family enters the family court system, other forms of protection of women and children often fall by the wayside. Typically, law enforcement agencies are reluctant to investigate abuse charges if they learn that the parties are involved in a custody battle, said Karen Borders, a former police officer and victim of a contested abuse case, who now runs an forensic risk assessment company called Borders McLaughlin. Orders of protection that are filed in criminal court often don’t make its way over to the civil system. Child protective services (CPS), which investigate allegations of child abuse, usually close or suspend a case if the child is involved in a custody battle, she said.
In the 450 high-risk custody evaluations her company investigated over the past five years, almost 90 percent of the children were abused.
“One of the things you see very often is when there is a custody case pending, child protection services, prosecutors and law enforcement will not take the charges seriously or be willing to investigate because they think it is about custody instead of a crime,” says Barry Goldstein, co-author of Domestic Violence, Abuse and Child Custody: Legal Strategies and Policy Issues.
Decision-making in these highly volatile cases are left to an army of custody evaluators, guardians ad litem (volunteer lawyers who are assigned by the court to represent the child), and other members of the court who may not have experience in domestic violence issues.
Custody evaluators can be assigned by the court or hired by one of the parties. The cost, which can run from $5,000 to $20,000, can be picked up by the parent who hired the evaluator, or it can be split by both parties. The custody system is beset by charges of cronyism―arising from evaluators’ employee relationship with the court―and incompetence. Advocates charge that evaluators are often poorly trained on how to handle or detect an abuser.
There is scant research on decision-making by custody evaluators and how they effect their cases. “Many child custody evaluators are not comprehensive (and ) their work is not buttressed by collateral evidence,” says psychologist Eugenia Patru, who has worked as a custody examiner in Louisiana and Michigan for the past 30 years.
According to Patru, the difficulty of custody cases increases when domestic violence is an issue. “Most (evaluators) are not educated enough and just in for the money,” she says.
In the saddest irony of all, attorneys have learned to caution their clients not to reveal abuse allegations in custody cases since research suggests that such allegations can work against mothers fighting for custody. A National Institute of Justice-funded study found that 35 percent of mothers who alleged abuse got primary custody, while mothers who said nothing got custody 42 percent of the time.
Moreover, when abuse allegations are raised, judges tend to suppress or not enter the abuse into evidence, making it harder to try these cases at the appellate level. “Family courts don’t adequately deal with abuse by refusing to hear the evidence,” charges Joan Meier, director of the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project, which provides legal representation at the appellate level, trains trial lawyers and has represented the domestic violence advocacy community in Supreme Court briefs.
Meier, a professor at George Washington University Law School who has been appealing contested custody cases for the past decade, says such suppression of evidence makes it very hard to overturn bad case precedent on appeal. Additionally, cases tend to be an intense financial and time drain, with the average case running over $100,000 in costs and lasting eight years.
Signs of a Shift?
“There are thousands of good decisions being made by judges each day who err on the side of safety,” says Judge Janice Rosa, who sits on New York Supreme Court in the 8th Judicial District and is chair of the Family Violence Department Advisory Committee for National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.
Judge Rosa points to New York’s practice of appointing a separate attorney for the children as a best practice in sorting out custody cases. Another breakthrough idea has been integrated domestic violence courts. There are approximately 40 such courts in New York State, which has become the trendsetter in this area. These courts, which have civil and criminal jurisdiction, could offer women and children a way to get the protection they need.
In 2002, the Office of Violence Against Women developed and implemented a four-year demonstration initiative to examine promising practices in the field of supervised visitation and safe exchanges called Safe Haven.
Grants were awarded to four demonstration sites: the Bay Area, California; the City of Chicago, Illinois; the City of Kent, Washington; and the State of Michigan for four years. Praxis International, a nonprofit research and training organization that works toward the elimination of violence in the lives of women and children, and oversaw these projects still offers technical assistance and advice for visitation centers.
Praxis International also partnered with The Battered Women’s Justice Project starting a two-year research project to determine a best model and legislation for Family Courts.
But the resources are not in place now for children and mothers who need a way to safety now. One of the more promising projects The ABA Child Custody and Adoption Pro Bono Project ended in August, 2008.
“For the moment, abused mothers who are trying to protect their children through the overworked family court system have the cards stacked against them,” says Silberg of the Leadership Council.
“I did everything right, and my children are in a cemetery now right now,” said Leichtenberg, who founded “In Loving Memory” to in order to lobby for changes in legislation relating to the response of family court and law enforcement to abuse cases. “I have a lot of ‘what could have, what should haves’ every day. But with my last breath, I will make sure they did not die in vain.”
Cara Tabachnick is news editor of The Crime Report. Additional reporting by John Jay Center on Media, Crime and Justice researcher Daonese Johnson-Colon
Read full entry »Felony case jurors in New York City's Bronx borough found defendants guilty only 43 percent of the time last year, the lowest conviction rate in the city since the state began tracking such data 22 years ago, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Bronx stands in stark contrast to the other boroughs, all of which had felony conviction rates of 70 percent or higher last year, says the New York State Unified Court System.
High arrest rates may have contributed to the low conviction rate. In closing arguments of a drug trial that resulted in an acquittal last week, defense attorney Seann Riley hammered home a message he'd been suggesting to the jury all along: You can't trust the police. Anthony Schepis, an executive assistant district attorney for Bronx County, defended the conviction rate numbers, saying that felony jury trials account for only a small proportion of the office's cases. He added that the conviction rate is near 90 percent when plea deals are factored in.
Read full entry »Policy Analyst, Corrections Statistics Program
Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice
810 7th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20531
PH: 202-353-2132
FX: 202-514-1757
christopher.mumola@usdoj.gov
Press office contact, Kara McCarthy. She can be reached at Kara.McCarthy@usdoj.gov or at 202-307-1241.
Read full entry »The Kentucky court system, which has already laid off 47 people last fall, may be in for more drastic measures this year, reports the Lexington Herald-Leader. If the courts don't get a $76 million increase in funding, Kentucky may reduce courthouse hours or take other steps. Gov. Steve Beshear has recommended an extra $50 million for the courts, both to make up for past budget cuts and to pay for the 38 new courthouses that will be opening in the next two years, a vast building initiative that began before the current financial crisis.
Since 2000, $880 million has been appropriated for new courthouses, part of a program designed by former Chief Justice Joseph E. Lambert aimed at putting a new courthouse in all 120 counties. The state must start paying for the courthouses, or the counties will default on the bonds. So the court system's budget will have to be cut in other areas. But the judicial branch's financial conundrum — in the midst of one of Kentucky's worst fiscal crises ever — is raising questions about the politically popular but expensive courthouse construction program.
Read full entry »Mark Pryor is an assistant district attorney in Travis County,Texas. A former newspaper reporter, he will write for theCrimeReport.org every other Wednesday giving readers a glimpse into the world of a state prosecutor in Texas. Today, he explains to our readers the "anatomy of a trial."
In substance they (trials) are all different, of course, all fact-dependent, but the basic skeleton is the same: a two-part sytem whereby guilt is assessed in the first phase, in other words where the jurors are faced with the yes/no issue of "Is the defendant guilty of the crime charged?"
Then comes the second phase, the assessment of punishment (i.e., probation? How many months/years in jail?) if the defendant is found guilty in phase one.
Here's how it breaks down, starting with the Guilty/Not Guilty phase:
1. Voir dire -- on Monday afternoon after the morning docket, the panel of 60 jurors is seated and the lawyers conduct voir dire. Here in Travis County, we always have two ADAs trying a case, the lead lawyer (aka the "first chair" and a helper, or "second chair"). The first chair prosecutor goes first, then the defense attorney talks to the panel. Strikes for cause and peremptory challenges are made, and the final 12 is chosen.
2. The reading of the charge -- this usually happens Tuesday morning. Before the trial gets under way one of the ADAs will stand before the jury and read the indictment. The defendant will be asked how he pleads (always "not guilty," hence the need for a trial).
3. Opening statements -- immediately after the reading of the indictment the prosecution will give its opening statement. It's called a "statement" as opposed to an "argument" because both sides are limited to telling the jury what they believe the evidence will show, as opposed to arguing what the evidence means. For the State, it's usually the first chair who gives the opening.
4. State's case -- the State will put on all the witnesses it belieevs it needs to prove the case beyond a reaosnable doubt. When finished, the ADA will tell the judge and jury that "The State rests."
5. Case for the defense -- if the defense is planning to call witnesses, to mount a defense that way rather than arguing that the State has simply failed to meet its burden, then this is when the defendant's witnesses testify. Once they have done so, the defense counsel will similarly anounce, "The defense rests."
6. State's rebuttal witnesses -- if the defense has put on witnesses, the State may call additional witnesses to rebut their testimony. For example, if the defendant calls his boss to testify that he believed the defendant was working that day, the State can call his work colleagues to testify that, in fact, he was not at work that day.
7. The "Close" -- after all rebuttal witnesses, the State will tell judge and jury "they State closes." The defense will do the same.
8. Preparing the Jury Charge -- if it hasn't been done beforehand, or during trial, the judge will hand a copy of his proposed charge to the prosecutor and defense lawyer. If they are satisfied with its contents (see below) they say so, or if not they ask for changes. The judge has the final say what is included.
9. Reading the Jury Charge -- The jury is brought back in and the Judge reads the charge to them. So what is the charge? The charge lays out the elements of the crime charged, and gives legal definitions for some or all of those elements. For example, in a DWI case the charge will give the legal definition of "intoxication." The charge is a roadmap for the jurors to follow in deliberation, and they are told to consider only those issues included in the charge. Another example: in a murder trial a jury cannot deliberate on whether the defendant is insane if that issue isn't inlcuded in the charge.
10. Closing arguments -- most lawyer's favorite time. Studies show that most jurors have made up their minds by this point, but we don't seem to care. We are far too impressed with our rhetorical skills and powers of persuasion to worry about that! Again, because we have the burden of proving the case, the State goes first. Then the defense gets to argue, and when they are done the State gets to finish the argument. Usually, here, the second chair takes the first part of closing, and the first chair takes the last part.
11. Deliberations -- after the closings, without further ado, the jury is sent to begin its work.
12. Punishment phase -- if the verdict is "not guilty" then that's it, there is no more. If it's "guilty" then we move onto the punishment phase. This second trial is structured pretty much like the first, in terms of who does what when. The State puts on evidence of other nasty thins the defendant has done, and the defense puts on mitigating evidence.
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Below are copies of three chapters on covering criminal justice, a special report by Criminal Justice Journalists and the John Jay Center on Media, Crime and Justice:
Part One: Covering Prisons and Jails
Part Three: Covering Community Corrections, Probation and Beyond
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