Watch my interview with Michel Bryant on the Law and Crime Network discussing the Kowalski civil trial.
To watch the interview CLICK HERE
* Criminal Defense Attorney * Former Prosecutor * Former Parole Board Member * 724-658-8535
Watch my interview with Michel Bryant on the Law and Crime Network discussing the Kowalski civil trial.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber included former President Donald Trump’s name on the list of candidates certified to run in the state’s presidential primary, bucking several other blue states that are seeking to bar him from running, reported Politico.
Weber’s release of the list of candidates Thursday
evening means Trump will appear on the ballot in California’s presidential
primary on March 5. Weber’s decision came the same day that Maine Secretary of
State Shenna Bellows declared him ineligible to run for president because of
his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, and a week after Colorado’s
Supreme Court reached the same conclusion.
Several elected Democrats had tried to remove him
from the California ballot, including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who sent Weber a letter last week urging her to “explore
every legal option” to keep him off. Weber had pushed back on Kounalakis’
letter, telling her that “it is more critical than ever to safeguard elections
in a way that transcends political divisions.”
Democratic state Sen. Dave Min, an Orange County
congressional candidate, had said he would introduce a bill letting California
residents sue to block ineligible candidates — although given the legislative
calendar, it is all but impossible for such a measure to be passed and take
effect in time to apply to the March 5 presidential primary.
Gov. Gavin Newsom had signaled wariness of the attempts, issuing a statement
last week warning fellow Democrats of getting ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court,
which is almost certain to be the final arbiter of whether Trump can serve as
president again.
“There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to
our liberties and even to our democracy,” he said, “but in California, we
defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”
To read more CLICK HERE
The decline in crime contrasts with perceptions . . . that urban downtowns are out of control
Detroit is on track to record the fewest murders since the 1960s, reported The New York Times. In Philadelphia, where there were more murders in 2021 than in any year on record, the number of homicides this year has fallen more than 20 percent from last year. And in Los Angeles, the number of shooting victims this year is down more than 200 from two years ago.
The decrease in gun violence in 2023 has been a
welcome trend for communities around the country, though even as the number of
homicides and the number of shootings have fallen nationwide, they remain
higher than on the eve of the pandemic.
In 2020, as the pandemic took hold and protests
convulsed the nation after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in
Minneapolis, the United States saw the largest increase in murders ever
recorded. Now, as 2023 comes to a close, the country is likely to see one of
the largest — if not the largest — yearly declines in homicides, according to
recent F.B.I. data and statistics collected by independent criminologists and
researchers.
The rapid decline in homicides isn’t the only story.
Among nine violent and property crime categories tracked by the F.B.I., the
only figure that is up over the first three quarters of this year is motor
vehicle theft. The data, which covers about 80 percent of the U.S. population,
is the first quarterly report in three years from the F.B.I., which typically
takes many months to release crime data.
The decline in crime contrasts with perceptions,
driven in part by social media videos of flash-mob-style shoplifting incidents,
that urban downtowns are out of control. While figures in some categories of
crime are still higher than they were before the pandemic, crime overall is
falling nationwide, including in cities often singled out by politicians as
plagued by danger and violence. Homicides are down by 13 percent in Chicago and
by 11 percent in New York, where shootings are down by 25 percent — two cities
that former President Donald J. Trump called “crime
dens” in a campaign speech this year.
Just as criminologists attributed the surge in murders
in 2020 and 2021 to the disruptions of the pandemic and protests — including
the isolation, the closing of schools and social programs and the deepening
distrust of the police — they attribute the recent drop in crime to the
pandemic’s sliding into the rearview mirror.
“Murder didn’t go up because of things that happened
in individual neighborhoods or individual streets,” said Jeff Asher, a crime
analyst based in New Orleans who tracks homicides in nearly 180 American
cities. “It went up because of these big national factors, and I think the big
national factors are probably driving it down. The biggest of which is probably
Covid going to the background.”
In a country awash in guns, the normal that many
cities are returning to is still a violent one, with the biggest still enduring
hundreds of fatal shootings a year. And some cities are bucking the positive
trend, including Washington, where the murder toll continues a grim multiyear
climb. The homicide tally this year is the highest
in two decades, and there have been more than 900
carjacking incidents.
Washington is an exception this year even in the
Mid-Atlantic region. Baltimore is on track to report the fewest murders in nearly a decade, and Philadelphia to
post a homicide count more than 25 percent below its 2021 record of 562.
Several community activists in Philadelphia attributed
the surge of violence in recent years to the sudden vacuum of civic resources
at the onset of the pandemic. “We got to see what happens when there are no
programs available,” said Jonathan Wilson, who runs the Fathership
Foundation, a nonprofit in southwest Philadelphia.
Schools, recreation centers and libraries were closed,
and grass-roots groups like his were not equipped to fill the gaps. But the
city’s budget last year included more than $150 million for anti-violence efforts, some of
it in the form of grants to organizations that could match teenagers with jobs
or provide safe places for students after school.
The city of Detroit is on track to record the lowest number of homicides since 1966, a
remarkable milestone even given its substantially smaller population today.
Local officials credited an aggressive effort to jump-start the criminal
justice system, which had largely stalled in the pandemic.
“We know why violent crime soared in America,” said
Mayor Mike Duggan at a news conference this month. “The criminal courts shut
down. You couldn’t put 12 jurors in a room.”
Chief Michel Moore of the Los Angeles Police
Department said that while he was encouraged to see such steady declines in
violent crime — murder and rape are down markedly and robbery is down slightly
this year — the city was struggling with property crime. Burglaries, car thefts
and personal theft are all up substantially.
In Los Angeles, much of the decline in murders comes
from a drop in the number of killings of homeless people; in both 2021 and
2022, more than 90 homeless people were killed, according to Crosstown, a nonprofit news outlet. So far this year, 35
fewer homeless people have been killed, a 55 percent reduction, according to
Chief Moore. While the trend is encouraging, he said, violence in L.A., like in
many cities, is still up compared with just before the pandemic.
“We still have far too much violence and we have more
work to do when we look at the pre-Covid period,” he said.
To read more CLICK HERE
True crime is among the most popular genres in podcasting. One of the biggest stories in the coming months is the wave of criminal charges facing former President Donald J. Trump, reported The New York Times.
The result: a boomlet of podcasts dedicated to the
criminal cases against him.
MSNBC, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NPR, Vox
Media and The First TV, an upstart conservative media company, have all
introduced or are about to start new shows examining Mr. Trump’s courtroom
travails as he campaigns to win back the White House.
On MSNBC’s “Prosecuting Donald Trump,” the legal commentators Andrew
Weissmann and Mary McCord offer analysis gleaned from their years serving as prosecutors.
A recent episode of “Breakdown,”
from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, includes a newsy interview with Fani
Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Recently on “Trump’s Trials,” the NPR host Scott Detrow discussed
whether Mr. Trump could claim presidential immunity.
The criminal
charges against Mr. Trump — brought by state prosecutors in New York
and Georgia, as well as in two federal indictments — involve allegations of
election interference, his role in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, his
handling of sensitive documents and payments to cover up a sex scandal. Mr.
Trump denies any wrongdoing.
Many of the hosts interviewed by The New York Times
cited the newsworthiness of the story — a former president and a leading
candidate for the office is facing a legal onslaught while battling for the
White House — as the impetus to go wall to wall with dedicated podcasts.
“He is the far and away front-runner to the nomination
and has a real chance of being president again,” Mr. Detrow said. “That, to me,
is an enormous legal story, an enormous political story.”
But there is a significant potential economic upside
as well: capturing a slice of the $2.4 billion that advertisers are expected to
spend on podcasts in 2024, according to the data firm eMarketer. For years,
news organizations have benefited financially from the public’s interest in Mr.
Trump — colloquially known as the “Trump bump.”
“The number of users is up, but the number of people
vying for those users in terms of dollars is also way up,” said Chris Balfe,
founder of The First TV.
Mr. Trump’s legal challenges present an unusual twist
on the true-crime genre, which often focuses on grisly murders or dramatic
heists. “Serial,” a podcast from the creators of “This American Life,” was a
pioneer of the category, which has also included entrants like “Exit Scam” (about a vanished cryptocurrency mogul) and “Last Seen,” a suspenseful yarn about the theft of 13
irreplaceable artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. (The
New York Times Company now owns Serial Productions, maker of “Serial.”)
The Trump cases, by contrast, involve complicated
questions about the Constitution and democracy. Adding to the complexity: They
span state and federal jurisdictions in Florida, Georgia, New York and
Washington, D.C.
Podcasts are an ideal format to explain the nuances to
the public, because they give journalists the time and space to examine
complicated issues at length, Mr. Balfe said. They also allow news
organizations to create a listener destination for coverage quickly and
relatively inexpensively, with two mics and a simple distribution feed for
Spotify and Apple Podcasts, he said.
“You don’t have to go lease a beautiful studio on
Sixth Avenue and hire a crew and all this other stuff,” Mr. Balfe said. “A
podcast is a low-floor, high-ceiling way to start a new product. And if it
works, it can be very successful, very quickly.”
Last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the
largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated the latest season of its true-crime
podcast, “Breakdown,” to the criminal investigation. Since then, it has been
all Trump, all the time, with 22 episodes on the topic since August.
This year, the podcast garnered more than one million
downloads, making it the newspaper’s most popular, finding audiences in Florida,
California and New York, according to a spokeswoman for The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.
The newspaper also has three full-time reporters
covering Mr. Trump’s case in Fulton County, where he faces 13 felony charges,
including racketeering.
Tamar Hallerman, one of those reporters, co-anchors
the podcast. She describes herself as a “recovering Washington correspondent.”
(She was previously a reporter at Roll Call.)
“All of these legal cases that Trump is in the middle
of are already creating a unique set of circumstances for a leading
presidential candidate,” said Ms. Hallerman, who covered the 2016 presidential
campaign. “This is absolutely not business as usual for the campaign press
corps.”
Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern
District of New York, has dedicated much of one of his three podcasts for Vox
Media to the criminal investigations facing Mr. Trump. Mr. Bharara has covered
Mr. Trump’s legal issues since 2018, saying, “There’s really been no shortage
of legal-based news.”
Yet “the dam broke” in April, he said, after Alvin L.
Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, brought the first criminal charges
against Mr. Trump.
“Every month or two, there was another one,” Mr.
Bharara said. “And it became clear that that was going to be a central focus.”
Political coverage of Mr. Trump should focus on the
criminal investigations into the former president, rather than traditional
horse-race coverage, said Timothy Crouse, whose 1973 book, “The Boys on the
Bus,” about the media’s coverage of the previous year’s presidential campaign,
became a classic of the genre.
Investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein, not campaign reporters, did the most enduring political journalism
of that era, Mr. Crouse said. At the time, many campaign reporters were skeptical
of those stories. He added that sustained exploration of Mr. Trump’s criminal
charges would probably follow the same pattern.
“Fewer political reporters might be OK, but only if
that decrease were to be balanced by an increase in investigative reporters,”
Mr. Crouse said.
To read more CLICK HERE
Pennsylvania will finally provide state funding for local public defenders, leaving South Dakota as the only state not to fund indigent defense, according to the Sixth Amendment Center.
Earlier in the year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro
included $10 million for indigent defense in the annual budget (subsequently
decreased to $7.5 million). However, this new funding could not be used without
the state legislature passing a fiscal code allowing for it.
On December 13, the final day of the 2023 session, the
legislature passed the fiscal code creating an indigent defense advisory group
within the existing Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. The
indigent defense advisory group is tasked with proposing minimum statewide
standards on qualifications and data collection, providing training, and
awarding grants.
Looking back, Pennsylvania has long been on notice for
failing to ensure effective representation:
· A 1995 ABA-sponsored report concluded that Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) prevented the public defender’s office from providing constitutionally adequate representation through underfunding and neglect.
A A 2011 ACLU report concluded
Allegheny County achieved no improvements in the intervening 16 years.
A 2002 NLADA report found that Venango County’s public
defender office was understaffed and underfunded.
A 2003 Pennsylvania Supreme Court Committee on Racial
and Gender Bias in the Justice System report found
serious indigent defense deficiencies, including a prevalence of flat fee
contracts creating disincentives to effective advocacy.
A 2003 Juvenile Law Center report found serious
deficiencies in the delivery of indigent defense to juvenile defendants
statewide.
A 2011 Joint State Government Task Force on Services
to Indigent Criminal Defendants report found
that the problems identified in the 2003 Supreme Court Committee remained.
A 2021 Legislative Budget and Finance Committee report found
that Pennsylvania public defender offices lacked caseload controls.
To To read more CLICK HERE
President Joe Biden pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia, the White House said, in his latest round of executive clemencies meant to rectify racial disparities in the justice system, reported The Associated Press.
The categorical pardon builds on a similar round
issued just before the 2022 midterm elections that pardoned
thousands convicted of simple possession on federal lands eligible. Friday’s
action broadens the criminal offenses covered by the pardon. Biden is also
granting clemency to 11 people serving what the White House called
“disproportionately long” sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.
Biden, in a statement, said his actions would help
make the “promise of equal justice a reality.”
“Criminal records for marijuana use and possession
have imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational
opportunities,” Biden said. “Too many lives have been upended because of our
failed approach to marijuana. It’s time that we right these wrongs.”
To read more CLICK HERE
A suspect had a Fifth Amendment right to refuse to give police his cellphone passcode, the Utah Supreme Court has ruled, reported the ABA Journal.
In a Dec.
14 opinion citing that right, the state supreme court reversed the
conviction of Alfonso Valdez for kidnapping and assaulting his ex-girlfriend.
Prosecutors had elicited testimony at trial about Valdez’s refusal to provide
his passcode and told jurors in closing arguments that the refusal undermined
one of his defenses.
The Utah Supreme Court said prosecutors violated
Valdez’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when they referred to
his refusal, and the error was not harmless.
Ars
Technica and the Salt
Lake Tribune have coverage, while the Legal
Profession Blog has highlights from the opinion.
Valdez’s ex-girlfriend told police that she agreed
to meet Valdez outside her workplace after he said in a text he had some of her
mail and wanted to give it to her. When the ex-girlfriend walked up to Valdez’s
SUV, he pointed a gun at her and told her to get in his vehicle, she said.
After she complied, Valdez allegedly assaulted her.
The defense claimed that the interaction was
consensual.
Police weren’t able to locate the ex-girlfriend’s
cellphone after the incident, but they seized Valdez’s cellphone to verify that
he had sent the text. Police obtained a warrant to acquire the cellphone
contents.
The Fifth Amendment’s privilege against
self-incrimination applies when a communication “is compelled, testimonial and
incriminating,” the Utah Supreme Court said. On appeal, the state conceded that
the password was compelled and incriminating but claimed that it was not
testimonial in nature.
Providing a passcode, the state argued, is not a
testimonial communication because it is like handing over a physical key, a
nontestimonial act. The Utah Supreme Court disagreed.
Providing a cellphone passcode is testimonial and
would explicitly communicate information from the suspect’s mind, making the
revelation testimonial in nature, the state supreme court said.
The state also argued that, even if the password is
testimonial, the Fifth Amendment does not apply under the “foregone conclusion”
exception. It was a foregone conclusion that Valdez owned the phone and knew
the password, the state argued, so turning over the passcode would disclose
what police already knew.
But the foregone conclusion exception applies only
in cases considering whether an “act of production,” such as turning over
documents, has testimonial value, the Utah Supreme Court said. At issue is
whether the act of production is testimonial in nature, as when producing the
documents amounts to a concession that the documents exist and are controlled
by the suspect.
“But here,” the Utah Supreme Court said, “we have a
verbal communication that would have explicitly communicated information from
Valdez’s mind, so we find the exception inapplicable.”
The state supreme court acknowledged that the
“analytical framework” would be different if Valdez had been asked to hand over
an unlocked cellphone, which would be a compelled act of producing evidence.
The Utah attorney general’s office told the Salt
Lake Tribune in a statement that it is disappointed in the ruling and “is
evaluating options for further review.”
In a post at the Volokh
Conspiracy, Orin S. Kerr, a professor at the University of California at
Berkeley School of Law, said the decision “might be a good candidate for U.S.
Supreme Court review” to clear up the “total mess” of lower court decisions on
the issue. The state supreme court had cited Kerr’s law review articles in its
opinion.
Weighing against cert, however, is that Valdez’s
case concerns compelled disclosure of a password, rather than compelled
unlocking of a cellphone. If the Supreme Court was to accept the case, “it
might have to only answer the compelled disclosure issue, and then save the
compelled unlocking issue for another day,” Kerr said.
The case is State of Utah v. Valdez.
To read more CLICK HERE
Listen to my interview with Nancy Grace on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace discussing the case of 13-year-old Derek Rosa accused of stabbing his mother to death.
Over 10,000 people appear before New York’s parole board each year. Hearings are often rushed, lasting an average of 15 minutes. Commissioners are afforded wide discretion in how they decide cases, with little oversight or review. They decide to keep around 60 percent of parole seekers in prison.
New York Focus and Bolts reviewed dozens of
parole board decisions and appeals. The decisions run as short as a single
paragraph, providing parole seekers little guidance on how to win their
release. Many repeat variations of the same vague phrases when denying release,
many lifted directly from the state’s parole statute. Applicants are often
informed that their release “is not compatible with the welfare of society,”
for example, without explaining how the board arrived at that conclusion.
“They’re not giving people any clarity about what they can do to obtain parole the next time,” said Michelle Lewin, executive director of the Parole Preparation Project. “They’re not giving individualized reasons for denials, despite the fact that their own internal regulations demand that they do so.”
The parole board’s lack of transparency creates
difficulties for applicants of all stripes. But it especially burdens parole
seekers serving lengthy sentences for violent crimes. Despite decades of
incarceration, these individuals face the very real possibility of dying in
prison, even if they have demonstrated sincere growth and rehabilitation.
“I think it’s time that we gave people a chance to be
productive citizens,” said Assemblymember David Weprin, a Democrat who has
introduced legislation to increase the parole board’s transparency, “especially
in the case when they’ve shown that … they’re not the same individuals that
they were when they committed the crime 20 years ago, 30 years ago.”
Advocates for reform have sought to strengthen board
oversight from every angle: legislation like Weprin’s, direct pressure on
Governor Kathy Hochul, and cases before the Court of Appeals.
Last month, Appellate Advocates, a non-profit
organization of public defenders, argued before the state’s highest court that the Department of Corrections and
Community Supervision should release the training documents it provides to
board members. The documents include hypothetical decisions and sample language
— all materials that parole advocates say could help incarcerated individuals
understand how the board makes decisions and how to make the strongest case for
release.
doccs has resisted, and argued in court that it
should be allowed to shield the documents, in a dispute that has dragged on for
over five years.
Jose Saldaña, the director of the Release Aging People
in Prison campaign, described a similar experience with the board. He spent decades incarcerated in New York, in his case
for the attempted murder of a New York City police sergeant when he was 27
years old. Though he had earned his associate degree and led several
restorative justice and victim awareness programs, the parole board denied his
release four times.
“We discussed these vague reasons … ‘Releasing you at
the time would so deprecate the nature of the crime as to undermine respect for
the law,’” Saldaña said. “What does that really mean?”
“Nobody knows what that means,” Steven Zeidman,
director of the City University of New York School of Law’s Criminal Defense
Clinic, told Bolts and New York Focus. Not even parole commissioners. Zeidman
said commissioners apply the same language differently from one another, even
when evaluating the same individual. “What’s the message to people inside
preparing? How do you prepare?”
NEW YORK LAW requires board members to consider many enumerated factors in their decisions, but the commissioners frequently emphasize the nature of the parole seeker’s offense over their rehabilitation and growth while incarcerated. Their cases are often dismissed with terse lines like, “Your positive programming to date is noted.”
Reform-minded lawmakers have long supported Weprin’s
bill, the Fair and Timely Parole Act, which would reduce the board’s
opacity and limit some of the commissioners’ discretion. The legislation would
eliminate the vague statutory language cited in board decisions and require
commissioners to explain in “detailed, individualized, and non-conclusory
terms” exactly why they decided to deny release. It would also require the
board to issue a quarterly report that includes the reasons for each denial,
which commissioners were assigned to each case, and how they voted.
The bill would establish a presumption that the board
would grant parole once an applicant has served their minimum sentence. To deny
release, parole commissioners would have to clearly articulate how a parole
seeker threatens public safety.
Weprin first introduced the bill in 2017. Since then,
three separate iterations have died in committee, where the 2023 version now
sits. Dixon attributes the icy reception in Albany to upstate conservative
legislators, whose constituents disproportionately benefit from employment
opportunities in the prison system. “Upstate districts have a vested interest
to keep this no-sense institution going,” he said.
Senator Patrick Gallivan, the chamber’s Republican minority whip, is a former parole commissioner who opposes the Fair and Timely Parole Act. His district encompasses Erie County’s Collins Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison employing hundreds of people. But he said his opposition to the bill has nothing to do with protecting upstate jobs.
Gallivan said the bill would limit the board’s ability
to consider negative aspects of the parole seekers’ applications, such as their
institutional records. He agrees with reformers that the Board of Parole has
too much discretion — but he sees them stretching the rules to grant release,
rather than keeping people in prison. Gallivan said that when he was a parole
commissioner, he tried to set his biases as a former sheriff and state trooper
aside and vote according to the law. He said he wants everyone on the board to
do the same. Some commissioners say at their confirmation hearings that they
will abide by the law, he said, but “the minute that they got sworn in, they
said, ‘I don’t care what the law is. I’m here to release people and I’m going
to.’”
Reform advocates have repeatedly called on Hochul to
reform the parole system. As New York Focus and Bolts have previously reported,
the board features zombie commissioners serving long past their terms
have expired and a medical parole system that leaves most terminally ill people
to die behind bars. The vacancies
on the board have long afforded Hochul the opportunity to staff it
with reformers. But Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy
Initiative, said she does not expect Hochul to expend any of her political
capital on the issue. Under Republican pressure, she noted, Hochul has
supported other
rollbacks to criminal justice reforms in recent years.
Hochul has pointed to fluctuations in crime and rearrest rates
when backing down from other reforms. But Bertram claims that lenient parole
policies don’t undermine public safety. She points to a federal study showing
that people who commit violent offenses are the least likely to be rearrested after release. “The safest person you can
release from prison is a murderer, especially someone that served 10 to 20
years,” said Bertram. “That’s just what the data shows.”
Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for
comment.
FRUSTRATED BY New York’s legislative and
executive branches, parole reformers have turned to the judiciary. The state’s
courts have limited power to modify parole board decisions, but advocates hope
they will at least compel the board to be more transparent.
At a November 15 Court of Appeals hearing, Appellate
Advocates argued that the state’s Freedom of Information Law mandates the
release of the board’s training documents.
doccs revealed the existence of the training
materials in 2020 when they told Appellate Advocates they were withholding
certain documents in response to a records request. Michael Higgins, assistant
director of the University at Buffalo Law School Civil Rights and Transparency
Clinic, says that administrative agencies routinely prepare interpretations of
the law that govern what they do, but they often keep the interpretations
secret. “Basically, they make up rules that are written down in their training
documents or in manuals that the public can’t access,” he said. He says foil requires
the release of those documents upon request.
At the hearing, doccs argued that foil does
not extend to the training materials because a parole board lawyer prepared
them, shielding them from disclosure under attorney-client privilege. (doccs declined
to comment due to ongoing litigation.) Appellate Advocates countered that
attorney-client privilege covers legal advice on real world scenarios, not
abstract training documents.
While the Court of Appeals has shown signs of a
leftward shift on
some criminal-legal issues, it’s unclear whether the newly reconfigured court
will flex its power on behalf of parole seekers. During oral argument,
Associate Judge Shirley Troutman, a Hochul appointee, expressed concerns that
ruling for Appellate Advocates would foist an “unreasonable burden upon trial
courts” handling future disputes over attorney-client privilege. Even Chief
Judge Rowan Wilson, the court’s liberal leader, said Appellate Advocates’
arguments had “frightening” implications for attorneys. The court scarcely
touched on how its decision would impact incarcerated individuals.
For advocates like Dixon, obtaining the release of
these documents would only be a first step. Achieving a truly transparent
parole system would require wholesale changes, from data disclosure to board
appointment procedures.
“The matrix itself needs to be dismantled,” Dixon
said. “The system has to change because it is criminal what is happening.”
To read more CLICK HERE
Interviews and newly unearthed documents by ProPublica reveal that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, facing financial strain, privately pushed for a higher salary and to allow Supreme Court justices to take speaking fees.
Congress never lifted the ban on speaking fees or
gave the justices a major raise. But in the years that followed, as ProPublica
has reported, Thomas accepted a
stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be
unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living
expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries,
tires. Other
gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such
as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas
real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.
Precisely what led so many people to offer Thomas
money and other gifts remains an open question. There’s no evidence the justice
ever raised the specter of resigning with Crow or his other wealthy
benefactors.
To read more CLICK HERE
Inside the high walls of the Holy See, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu — former head of the office of “miracles” that minted saints — was considered papabile, a possible next pope.
Then his career collided with church prosecutors,
who charged the 75-year-old Italian and nine other officials with corruption,
setting up the Vatican’s trial of the century, reported the Washington Post.
On Saturday, Becciu — the first cardinal to be tried
by the Vatican’s little-known criminal court — was found guilty of three counts
of embezzlement and sentenced to five years and six months in a verdict read
out in a converted quarter of the museum that houses the Sistine Chapel. He was
acquitted of charges of money laundering, abuse of office and influencing a
witness.
Becciu’s lawyers said they would appeal the
decision. But the ruling put the cardinal closer to one of Vatican City’s
handful of jail cells — a result that amounts to both an affirmation of
accountability and an embarrassment for an institution that has struggled for
decades to root out corruption.
Becciu was barred from holding any Vatican office
and fined 8,000 euros (around $8,700).
The trial, a hodgepodge of charges heard over a
marathon of 86 courtroom hearings, offered an unusual glimpse into the murky
world of Vatican finances and Pope Francis’s campaign for accountability —
even, critics argued, at the cost of due process.
Eight of Becciu’s co-defendants — Vatican officials,
Italian business executives, consultants and brokers — were found guilty of
financial crimes or abuse of office. A ninth was acquitted of all charges.
But the star defendant was Becciu, a papal confidant
before a surprise 2020 meeting during which Francis dramatically confronted him
with the accusations against him.
In response, Becciu resigned as head of the
Vatican department that leads the canonization process. Francis stripped him of his privileges as cardinal before any
finding of guilt. Later, some of those rights were unofficially reinstated.
To read more CLICK HERE
Listen to my lively interview with Nancy Grace discussing the appeal of actor Jesse Smollett.
To listen to the interview CLICK HERE
Watch my one-on-one interview with Sierre Gillespie of Law and Crime Network about the upcoming hearing on YouTubers Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt.
To watch the interview CLICK HERE
Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners examined hundreds of state appellate decisions to identify claims of prosecutorial misconduct in Ohio, reviewed hundreds of pages of police records and personnel files, and interviewed dozens of criminal justice experts, legal scholars, judges and defense attorneys from around the United States, along with prosecuting attorneys, and defendants whose cases were affected by the wrongdoing, reported NPR.
Among the findings:
The findings are a first-ever attempt to pull back the curtain of anonymity shielding Ohio prosecutors from public scrutiny when appeals courts affirm claims of improper conduct. They also show a systemic failure to hold prosecutors accountable that experts say is not exclusive to Ohio.
Legal scholars say the number of known misconduct
cases is a vast undercount. About 3% of criminal cases make it to trial, and a
fraction of those are appealed. Defendants often lack resources to challenge
convictions, or they face procedural barriers that prevent them from doing so.
In Ohio, there were roughly 4,700 criminal trials
statewide between 2018 and 2021. Nearly 450 appeals — about 10% of those trials
— included an allegation of prosecutorial misconduct during that four-year
period, CJI and NPR's analysis shows.
Appeals involving prosecutorial misconduct are rare,
but in Ohio about 1 in 4 claims ended in a ruling of improper conduct in that
time — a ratio that suggests a systemic problem, experts said.
Former prosecutor Bennett Gershman, who now teaches
at Pace University's School of Law in New York, called the pattern of
prosecutors who repeatedly act improperly in cases in Ohio a
"microcosm" of the criminal justice system in states across the
country.
In Tennessee, the Shelby County prosecutor was
rebuked at least twice by higher courts in several murder cases for withholding
key evidence or improper opening remarks, records show. Two of the convictions
were overturned, and a new trial was ordered in one case. Voters ousted her
last year.
In St. Charles County, Missouri, the state appeals
court admonished a prosecutor in two cases for his "brazen use of
propensity evidence" and in a third case for withholding evidence from the
defendant, court records show. The attorney retired this year.
And in Monroe County, N.Y., which includes
Rochester, the courts reprimanded a prosecutor in three sex crime cases for
misrepresenting evidence and deals with jailhouse snitches, and for trying to
slip inadmissible evidence into the record by asking the defendant to read it,
according to court records. She is now a judge in a nearby county.
"Once you start focusing on these prosecutors, you can learn a lot about the prosecutorial mentality and why prosecutors engage in unethical behavior and why they consistently get away with it," said Gershman, one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the topic. "You'll find other jurisdictions in America which are equally shocking."
He said the Ohio statistics "show a shocking
disregard for ethical behavior."
To read more CLICK HERE
What makes a murderer? Intent is often assumed to be a factor. But, for hundreds of years, the felony-murder doctrine has muddled this conceit, writes Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker.
In 1716, the legal theorist William Hawkins argued
that a crime like robbery “necessarily tends to raise Tumults and
Quarrels . . . and cannot but be attended with the Danger of
personal Hurt.” Any resulting death, he posited, was tantamount to murder. Such
notions began being applied in British courts later in the eighteenth century,
and, almost from the beginning, Britons were questioning whether the
felony-murder doctrine was just.
The question came to a head in 1953, when, despite
widespread pleas for clemency, a nineteen-year-old Londoner named Derek Bentley
was executed because his sixteen-year-old accomplice in a burglary killed a
policeman during the crime. Four years later, the U.K. abolished the doctrine,
and other Commonwealth nations followed suit. The United States, meanwhile,
went in the opposite direction.
According to Guyora Binder, of the University at
Buffalo School of Law, the modern felony-murder doctrine is best understood as
“a distinctly American innovation.” Although it was first applied early in the
nineteenth century, use of the charge surged in the nineteen-seventies, when
the era of mass incarceration began. Fifty years later, Binder contends, no
country relies on the doctrine more.
In Tulsa, two men attempted to steal some copper
wire from a radio tower and accidentally electrocuted themselves. One of them
died and the other was charged with first-degree murder while recovering from
his burns in the hospital; the girlfriend of the deceased was also charged with
murder, for having driven them to the tower. In Topeka, a twenty-two-year-old
made the mistake of hiding his gun atop his girlfriend’s refrigerator; he was
charged with first-degree murder several days later, when a child inadvertently
fired it at a thirteen-year-old girl. In Minneapolis, a sixteen-year-old girl
who sat in the car while two older men killed someone in a robbery was charged
with felony murder. Deemed too young to enter the adult prison population after
her conviction, she was placed in solitary confinement for months, purportedly
for her own safety. In Somerville, Tennessee, last May, three teen-age girls
overdosed on fentanyl in their high school’s parking lot before a graduation
ceremony. Two of them died, and the surviving girl was charged with murder.
For prosecutors, the felony-murder rule offers an
efficient path to conviction: winning a case is much easier if you don’t need
to prove a person’s mens rea—“guilty mind”—or even, in some cases, to establish
that the accused was at the scene of the crime. Forty-eight states now have
some version of the statute. Charlie Smith, the president of the National
District Attorneys Association, told me that the tool is particularly useful in
cases with vulnerable victims, such as an elderly woman in a wheelchair who
gets assaulted in a purse-snatching incident and dies. “The community would
feel it’s not reasonable if the old lady’s death was just a simple misdemeanor
assault,” he said. Prosecutors often employ felony murder when a death results
from an armed robbery—a category of crime that Smith contends, in the spirit of
Hawkins, carries death as a foreseeable outcome.
Another benefit to prosecutors is that the steep
penalties often attached to felony murder—including life sentences—compel
defendants to plead guilty to a lesser charge. “We shouldn’t underestimate how
many plea bargains occur in the shadow of felony-murder charges across the
country,” Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan, told me.
“It is one of those quiet drivers of mass incarceration we never acknowledge.”
Remarkably, no one knows how many people in the
United States have been imprisoned for the crime. So in 2022, working with
students and colleagues at the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab, I decided to
try to get a sense of the scale. We started by filing public-records requests
to state corrections departments and other agencies across the country; to our
surprise, most told us that they weren’t keeping track. “The records do not
exist,” an official at the Virginia Department of Corrections wrote, in a
typical response. In most states, a felony-murder conviction gets lumped in
with other types of murder, clouding the data. It was as if the extent of
felony murder in America were hidden by design.
To identify cases in other states, we worked with
analysts at the nonprofit organization Measures for Justice, and with several
law-school clinics, to obtain previously unpublished data. Thus far, we’ve
documented more than ten thousand felony-murder convictions nationwide. We’ve
also scoured trial records, appeals, and news clips, finding and scrutinizing
more than two hundred cases, like Baxter’s, in which the defendant neither
killed nor intended to kill the victim. Women were sometimes charged for
driving getaway cars for abusive partners, or performing other tasks under
duress; some of the women served longer jail terms than their partners who’d
committed the killing. And, time and again, young people were prosecuted for
what an acquaintance, to their shock, had decided to do. In the past two years,
I travelled from Alabama to California to Michigan to meet some of the
individuals who have served time on the charge—along with crime victims’
families, prosecutors, public defenders, and others—to consider how a doctrine
so widely critiqued, and rejected elsewhere in the world, has proved stubbornly
resilient in the United States.
To read more CLICK HERE
Special Counsel Jack Smith asked SCOTUS to intervene
Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting former President Donald J. Trump on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, asked the Supreme Court to rule on Mr. Trump’s argument that he is immune from prosecution. The justices quickly agreed to fast-track the first phase of the case, reported The New York Times.
Mr. Smith’s request was unusual in two ways:
He asked the justices to rule before an appeals
court acted, and he urged them to move with exceptional speed.
“This case presents a fundamental question at the
heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from
federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally
protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted
before the criminal proceedings begin,” Mr. Smith wrote.
On Monday evening, just hours after Mr. Smith filed
papers in the Supreme Court, the justices granted his initial request: to put
their consideration of whether to hear the case on a fast track. The
court ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to file their
response to the petition seeking review on an abbreviated schedule, by Dec. 20.
Mr. Smith’s filings represented a vigorous plea to
keep the trial on track by cutting off an avenue by which Mr. Trump could cause
delays.
A speedy decision by the justices is of the essence,
Mr. Smith wrote, because Mr. Trump’s appeal of a trial judge’s ruling rejecting
his claim of immunity suspends the criminal trial. The proceeding is scheduled
to begin on March 4 in Federal District Court in Washington.
Any significant delays could plunge the trial into
the heart of the 2024 campaign season or push it past the election, when Mr.
Trump could order the charges be dropped if he wins the presidency.
“The United States recognizes that this is an
extraordinary request,” Mr. Smith wrote. “This is an extraordinary case.”
The trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, rejected Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he enjoyed
“absolute immunity” from the election interference indictment because it was
based on actions he took while in office.
To read more CLICK HERE
Watch my interview with Julie Grant on Court TV discussing the prosecution of Lori Vallow Daybell for conspiring to murder her fourth husband Charles Vallow and her nieces ex-husband.
To watch the interview CLICK HERE
Multimillion-dollar payouts come before the Chicago City Council on an almost monthly basis, with the largest sums typically going to victims of police misconduct. Since 2000, the city has paid out nearly $700 million in 300 cases in which people said they were framed by Chicago police, reported the Chicago Sun-Times.
Of that, $138 million went to outside lawyers who
defended the city.
The tally covers only federal lawsuits and does not
include fees awarded to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Also not included are
police-related lawsuits alleging misconduct such as false arrest and excessive
force, or for crashes and fatal shootings.
“The city is looking at, easily, a billion-dollar
liability over the last 23 years, with plenty more on tap,” said Andrew M.
Stroth, a civil rights attorney whose nonprofit organization, Truth, Hope &
Justice, collaborated on the report with the global law firm Ropes & Gray,
the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance and Chicago-based insurance and risk
management firm Aon.
Stroth is currently representing James Gibson in a lawsuit against the city, alleging he was tortured by
former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge into a false confession that landed him
in prison for nearly 30 years.
“As far as I can tell, they have no strategy for how
they evaluate these cases,” Stroth said. “And that is delaying justice for men
like James Gibson at phenomenal costs to taxpayers.”
Law Department spokeswoman Kristen Cabanban said
Wednesday that “the city is keenly aware of the complexity and special
challenges presented by reversed conviction cases and continues to give careful
attention to these cases both individually and as a group.
“However, the Law Department cannot comment publicly
on ongoing litigation or provide litigation assessment,” she added. “Nor do we
authorize the firms we engage to comment because doing so is inconsistent with
our professional obligations and could jeopardize efforts to resolve these
matters in a way consistent with the city’s best interests.”
Rivera was one of the first people to be exonerated
based on claims of misconduct against former Chicago police Det. Reynaldo
Guevara. The report lists 11 active lawsuits involving claims against Guevara.
To read more CLICK HERE
City dwellers have long noticed that gentrifying neighborhoods report more gun violence, reported The Guardian. Now, a study, published in Jama Surgery earlier this year and conducted by a team of researchers at Harvard Medical School with Brigham and Women’s hospital, shows just how much – and could suggest new ways to combat gun violence.
The report found that the firearm injury incidence
rate was 62% higher in neighborhoods that had gentrified between 2014 and 2019
than in non-gentrifying neighborhoods with similar sociodemographic
characteristics. On top of that, it found that the gunshot injury rate was an
additional 26% higher in neighborhoods that were actively gentrifying.
(The study didn’t specify who was committing the violence.)
Molly Jarman, a researcher and professor at Brigham
and Women’s hospital and one of the co-authors on the study, says that the
social disruption and residential displacement associated with gentrification
might explain the findings.
“There’s evidence that communities with good social
cohesion have less violence,” she said, such as when people who live near each
other go to the same schools, offices or churches. But rising home prices that
force longtime residents to relocate can disrupt that cohesion. “It means
people who have known each other for a very long time and seen each other and
understand and respect and get along are no longer seeing each other every
day.”
Gentrification – the process where wealthier people
move into poor urban areas, raising housing prices, bringing new businesses and
often displacing previous residents – is rampant in California. According
to a 2020 study by
the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, five of the country’s 20 most
intensely gentrified cities are located in the state: San Francisco-Oakland,
San Jose, Sacramento, San Diego and Los Angeles.
Reading the study felt like “a validation of what
we’ve been saying for decades”, said Jose Bernal, the organizing director at
the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an Oakland-based advocacy organization
focused on prisons, policing and community development.
In his work, Bernal regularly speaks with residents
who are contending with rising housing prices in neighborhoods they’ve long
called home – and ensuing cultural changes, like grocery stores that stop
carrying certain hair care products or restaurants that no longer serve
longtime favorites.
“It creates a lot of anxiety, uncertainty, and it
creates a lot of stress for the community who is trying to hold on and try to
stay there,” said Bernal.
The study’s researchers used US census data to
identify gentrifying neighborhoods, then cross-referenced that data with
statistics from the Gun Violence Archive – a non-profit that collects and
verifies firearm incidents from law enforcement, government and media
resources.
Jarman says the study adds an important element of
“when” to a conversation that’s long been about “where”.
“We understand that there are some neighborhoods
that have more firearm injuries than other neighborhoods,” she said. “But even
within the neighborhoods that have a lot of injuries, it changes over time. And
so there may be weeks or months where there are no firearm injuries and then suddenly
there is an outbreak.”
George Tita, a professor of criminology at the
University of California,
Irvine, says that “there’s an enormous body of literature on how gentrification
impacts crime”, going back more than a hundred years to 19th-century Paris.
Theories from that literature include the concept of social disruption, as well
as the idea that policing – and therefore arrests – increase in gentrifying
neighborhoods.
Studies looking at gentrification in Chicago, San
Francisco, New
Orleans and Washington
DC all noted that police stops and arrests – especially for unhoused
people and sex workers – increase during gentrification. One 2020 study from
researchers at Rutgers University found that misdemeanor policing increased in
neighborhoods experiencing the real estate reinvestment typical of
gentrification: as property values increased, new residents were more likely to
call police to report loitering or disorderly conduct. The Gun Violence Archive
data that researchers used for this study includes information on
officer-involved incidents.
Tita believes it is key that researchers “look at
specific kinds of violence so that we can formulate interventions”. Much of his
own research, for example, has looked at the relationship between
gentrification, gang violence and homicide.
“There is no such thing as a gun violence problem.
There is domestic violence that involves guns. There’s gang violence that
involves guns. There’s interpersonal, friends getting into an argument that
involves guns. There is the accidental discharge of firearms. There is
suicide,” he said. “Without knowing the categorization of that violence, it’s
really hard to come up with policies to combat and address and try to reduce
gun violence.”
Although California has the strongest gun safety
laws in the nation, according to the Giffords Law
Center and Everytown
for Gun Safety, the total
number of gun homicides remains high in regions like Los Angeles and
the East Bay (although the per capita rate is higher in some non-urban
counties).
Jarman and her co-authors say that strategies to
curb gun violence in the US must address both the availability of guns and the
social dynamics of poverty. They hope their research might support policies to
reduce the displacement of longtime residents when neighborhoods gentrify or
the introduction of violence intervention programs in areas expected to
gentrify or ones that are currently gentrifying.
Bernal and his colleagues at the Ella Baker Center
say that investing in prevention is key, pointing to Oakland’s department of
violence prevention, which was founded in 2017 as an alternative to the police
department, as an example.
“To me, the solution is not complicated,” said
Bernal. “It’s invest in people, invest in futures, invest in the youth, invest
in resources that are going to keep people safe. And that’s it.”
To read more CLICK HERE