Georgia town fines victims of domestic violence who refuse to testify

The Columbus, Georgia Recorder’s Court has been fining victims of domestic abuse who decline to testify against their alleged abuser, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The Southern Center for Human Rights on Wednesday sued in U.S. District Court in Macon, charging that domestic violence victims in Columbus are required by city ordinance to help law enforcement prosecute their attackers. If they don’t — even if they did not report the abuse — they must be fined.

“The city’s policy toward women experiencing domestic violence sounds like something out of the 19th century,” said attorney Sarah Geraghty with the Southern Center. “It’s a holdover from an era in which women were blamed for male violence.”

The suit said women who ask that charges be dropped or who refuse to testify against spouses or boyfriends are ordered to pay a “victim assessment” of at least $50 — and often several times that much — “without any consideration of the circumstances of their cases or their reasons for desiring not to prosecute.”

The complaint was brought in the name of Cleopatra Harrison, 22, who earns $12 an hour as a cleaning and food service contractor at Fort Benning. The defendants listed in the suit are Recorder’s Court Judge Michael Cielinski, Muscogee County Sheriff John Darr, Columbus Police Chief Ricky Boren and officer Michael Lincoln.

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Texas carries out first execution in 82 days

The 16th Execution of 2016
Six months after the Texas death chamber held its last execution and 82 since the last execution in the U.S., Barney Ronald Fuller Jr. was put to death by lethal injection on October 5, 2016 for the 2003 shooting deaths of his neighbors in rural East Texas, according to the Texas Tribune.

Fuller's execution broke the longest gap between executions in Texas since 2008, when the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the constitutionality of lethal injection. It also marks the first time Houston County hasput someone to death since the penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976.

Laid out in the Texas death chamber with an IV in his arm, Fuller declined to give a last statement. At 6:23 p.m., a lethal dose of pentobarbital started running through his veins, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He was pronounced dead at 7:01 p.m.

Fuller, 53, was sentenced to death for killing Annette and Nathan Copeland, his neighbors on the outskirts of Lovelady, a small town with around 600 residents at the time about 100 miles north of Houston. In the early morning of May 14, 2003, he fired into their home with an assault rifle before breaking in and killing them both with a pistol, according to court documents.

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Tennessee analysis reveals death penalty imposed infrequently and unfairly

Lawyers routinely challenge the death penalty as arbitrary. A new analysis in Tennessee, believed to be one of the most comprehensive of its kind, attempts to put new numbers and data behind that old argument, reported the Tennessean.

The lawyers who did the analysis examined more than 2,000 first-degree murder cases, the only crime punishable by a death sentence, since 1977. That is the year capital punishment was reinstated in Tennessee. They say the numbers show the death penalty is imposed infrequently and unfairly and thus the system as a whole is unconstitutional.

"This is the first time this kind of information has been laid before the court," said Brad MacLean, one lawyer involved in the study and who for 20 years has represented a man on death row. "If we’re going to remain true to the principles set forth by the Supreme Court, there is no logical way, no rational way we can sustain this system. It really operates like a lottery. It’s a crapshoot. It’s like being struck by lightning whether you get executed or not."

The key findings of the analysis are outlined in a motion filed by MacLean. He is asking Nashville Criminal Court Judge Monte Watkins to deem the death penalty unconstitutional as part of an appeal on behalf of Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman. Abdur'Rahman, who formerly used the name James L. Jones, has been on death row nearly 30 years.

Those who support the death penalty say they've heard this argument before. They say it is just another attempt to delay, which harms grieving victim's families even further.

No matter what the judge rules, it will almost certainly be appealed, putting another legal challenge to the controversial punishment system in the pipeline even as the Tennessee Supreme Court takes up capital punishment issue.

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Defendants can sue public defenders in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania’s highest court will allow criminal defendants to sue a county in an effort to prove a public defender’s office isn’t adequately funded to provide the constitutional right to an attorney, a victory for civil rights lawyers, reported the Times-Leader.

The state Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling late Wednesday overturned a lower appellate court decision.

Mary Catherine Roper, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said Thursday that, while the ruling is a victory, it is not a final victory for the plaintiffs — two criminal defendants — in the lawsuit against Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Those two plaintiffs, Adam Kuren and Steven Allabaugh, have since been convicted or pleaded guilty.

But it is new avenue to force better representation for poor criminal defendants in Pennsylvania, the only state that leaves funding for the defense of indigent defendants entirely up to county governments, according to the ACLU.

The 61-page ruling now means that criminal defendants have standing to sue before their case is decided in an effort force counties to adequately fund the public defender’s office, Roper said.

The ACLU originally filed a lawsuit in 2012 on behalf of the chief public defender in Luzerne County, Al Flora, alleging that funding and staffing were so low that defendants were not properly represented and were being denied their Sixth Amendment right to an attorney.

The ACLU pressed on with the lawsuit on behalf of poor defendants after the county fired Flora, who is being represented by the ACLU in his illegal retaliation lawsuit against the county. Lower courts, however, had ruled that criminal defendants did not have standing to sue.

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PA Supreme Court: For sex offenders 'a deal is a deal'

Sex offender registration requirements can't be increased for people who reached deals to plead guilty to sex crimes before Pennsylvania's latest registration law took effect, the state Supreme Court has decided, reported Pennlive.com.

The high court reached that conclusion in an opinion Justice Max Baer issued this week on three consolidated cases involving York County sex offenders. 

All three men pleaded to crimes that, under Megan's law, required them to register with state police as sex offenders for 10 years. Under SORNA, however, the crimes to which Shower and Martinez pleaded carry lifetime registration requirements, while a 25-year registration would apply in Grace's case. 

Like the lower courts, Baer's court essentially agreed that a deal is a deal and that the plea agreements constituted enforceable contracts. “In this commonwealth, when trial courts accept plea agreements, the convicted criminals...are entitled to the benefits of their bargains," he wrote.

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Support for the death penalty at lowest point in four decades

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear the first of two death penalty cases in this year’s term, the share of Americans who support the death penalty for people convicted of murder is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, reported Pew Research Center .

Only about half of Americans (49%) now favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 42% oppose it. Support has dropped 7 percentage points since March 2015, from 56%. Public support for capital punishment peaked in the mid-1990s, when eight-in-ten Americans (80% in 1994) favored the death penalty and fewer than two-in-ten were opposed (16%). Opposition to the death penalty is now the highest it has been since 1972.
In my book, The Executioner's Toll, 2010 I examined the resurrection of the death penalty after the 1972 Supreme Court decision of Furman v. Georgia.  The book also examine the slow decline in executions through 2010, which have further slid through today.  
There have been only 15 executions in 2016, the last on July 15, 2016.

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GateHouse: Crime makes a comeback on national stage

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

September 30, 2016

Criminal justice issues have long been ignored by national candidates.

Unlike the days of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and, of course, Bill Clinton, crime has not been on the national radar. The reason is simple, violent crime has fallen to unprecedented lows.

But crime — or at least the rhetoric of crime — is back in the presidential race.

During Monday’s presidential debate Donald Trump pledged to bring stop-and-frisk to every town in America. Hillary Clinton said the courts have declared stop-and-frisk unconstitutional. Trump retorted stop-and-frisk was behind the dramatic decline in NYC murders, Clinton said murder is still falling in NYC.

They are both wrong.

Stop-and-frisk is a practice in which police officers stop and question a person based on reasonable suspicion and frisk that person for weapons.

In 2013, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin called NYC’s stop-and-frisk tactics “indirect racial profiling.” The police used the tactic more than 4.4 million times between 2004 and 2012. The vast majority of the stops were of blacks, 52 percent, and Hispanics, 31 percent.

Judge Scheindlin did not say that stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional. She couldn’t. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court made it clear in Terry v. Ohio that stop-and-frisk was constitutional.

Judge Scheindlin instead focused on NYC’s tactics, “In their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective, they have willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting ‘the right people’ is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States Constitution.”

Nowhere has the decline in violent crime been more startling than in New York City. According to the New York Times, there were 2,272 victims of murder in the NYC in 1990 — in 2015, there were 352. There are a number of theories as to why violent crime fell so dramatically. Some suggest that at the height of the surge in violent crime, crack cocaine dominated the streets. As crack fell out of vogue, violent crime fell as well.

There is also the “broken windows” theory introduced in 1982 when criminologist John Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published an article in The Atlantic Monthly. The broken windows theory is simple. If one window is broken in a building and left unrepaired, soon all the other windows would be broken and crime would take over allowing violence to become pervasive. The solution? Crime can be controlled if neighborhoods are maintained.

In 1994, when Rudy Giuliani took office as mayor of NYC, violent crime was out of control. He hired William Bratton who had used some of Wilson’s ideas as the chief of the New York City Transit Police. The results were remarkable. New York’s success can also be attributed to efficiency and innovation.

 The New York Times reported that former Police Commissioner Raymond M. Kelly said, “success can be traced to eight years of programs like Operation Impact, which attacks stubborn crime plateaus, and the Real Time Crime Center, which feeds detectives instant intelligence.”

Murder in New York City increased six percent between 2014 and 2015. Although, according toPolitifact.com murder is down in the last week, last month and last 12 months. As a result, the New York Daily News which wrote after Scheindlin’s decision, “Make no mistake — Scheindlin has put New York directly in harm’s way with a ruling that threatens to push the city back toward the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed,” rescinded its position.

In a recent editorial, The Daily News wrote, “We are delighted to say that we were wrong.”

NYC police scaled back stops under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and accelerated the process under Mayor Bill de Blasio. As a result, the number of stops reported by the police fell 97 percent from a high of 685,700 in 2011 to 22,900 in 2015.

Not only did crime fail to rise, New York’s crime rate continues to hit record lows.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010,” was recently released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him atmattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

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