Mangino discusses the Rittenhouse trial on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with Erin Simonek about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial on WFMJ-TV21.

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Sex work may soon be legal in the state of New York

 In New York, selling or buying sex is illegal. That might change in the near future, reports Law360.com.

Two separate bills making their way through the state Legislature — the Stop the Violence in the Sex Trades Act and the Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act — aim to decriminalize sex work, although with significant differences.

The first bill seeks to fully decriminalize sex work for workers themselves as well as their clients and managers, while the second would only decriminalize it for sex workers. At the root of the difference between the two approaches is a philosophical tug of war: Is sex work a business like any other, or a trade that objectifies and victimizes people and needs to be stopped?

With the exception of Nevada, where prostitution is legal in most counties, sex work is illegal across the United States, so New York lawmakers are looking at countries abroad for insights.

The Stop the Violence in the Sex Trades Act, introduced by state Sen. Julia Salazar, D-Brooklyn, in 2019 and resurfaced this year as S. 3075, borrows the full decriminalization approach adopted by New Zealand in 2003 and by the Australian state of New South Wales in 1979.

The bill would decriminalize consensual sex between adults in exchange for a fee, which is currently a class B misdemeanor. It would also decriminalize use of buildings for sex work, and has a provision to expunge criminal records for prostitution-related offenses that create barriers to employment, housing and access to higher education.

"[What] we're advocating is decriminalization of two parties that agree to exchange sex, for money or for whatever they are exchanging it," Cecilia Gentili, a transgender rights activist and former sex worker who advocates for the bill, told Law360. "It's very personal for me, because I am a sex worker, and I am also a person who experienced trafficking in my life."

Gentili helped found Decrim NY, a coalition of current and former sex workers, public defenders and advocates that has led a campaign for the bill, which has six co-sponsors in the Senate. A companion bill, A. 849, was introduced by Assembly Member Richard N. Gottfried, D-Manhattan, and currently has 17 co-sponsors.

Advocates of the bill seek to treat sex work as any other profession.

"Sex work is a service," Gentili said. "Sometimes it's not even about the sex. Sometimes it's like supporting a person, you know, supporting somebody in other ways and listening to people."

The rival bill, introduced by Sen. Liz Krueger, D-Manhattan, as S. 6040 in March, has a different end game: to help sex workers exit the industry by providing them with social services, housing and other types of support. The bill would make selling sex legal but still prosecute patrons and pimps. It would also continue to forbid sex workers living in the same dwelling. 

This approach, commonly referred to as the Nordic model, was first adopted by Sweden in 1999 and has since been embraced by other European countries such as Norway, Iceland, France, Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Dawn Gresham, a policy adviser to Krueger, said that most sex workers are coerced into the trade, mainly by economic circumstances. The bill would help them escape it, she said.

"People in the sex trade are victims themselves," Gresham told Law360. "Survivors report this as being raped on a daily basis. There is sexual violence they have to contend with."

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Reginald Rose the man behind the cinema classic '12 Angry Men'

Whenever the ABA Journal has conducted a survey to find the best legal movies or the best legal plays, 12 Angry Men has made the list. The black-and-white 1957 film about a deadlocked jury coming to a consensus in a murder trial has become a classic, one of Henry Fonda's most striking roles. As a play, 12 Angry Men is performed around the world, in many languages, in theaters large and small.

But the path to becoming a classic was not a simple one, and the man behind the script was not a simple man. In Reginald Rose and the Journey of 12 Angry Men, author and business professor Phil Rosenzweig has written the first biography about the man who brought 12 Angry Men to screen—first as a television program and then as a film.

Rosenzweig has long used the film in his classes to discuss group dynamics. Delving deeper into Reginald Rose’s work, he uncovers the background of one of the unsung pioneers of the television age. In addition to 12 Angry Men, Rose also wrote The Defenders, a seminal television show that has also been named by the ABA Journal as one of the most important legal TV series ever.

One of the striking things that Rosenzweig has observed about 12 Angry Men is the ownership that two industries feel toward it. For legal professionals, this is a script about the law and a commentary on justice; business management circles feel equally certain that this is a script about the art of persuasion and getting buy-in.

Rose claimed that the idea to write about a jury stemmed from an experience that he had when called for jury service. Through careful examination of the criminal dockets during the time, Rosenzweig has identified the real-life (but little-known) case he thinks gave Rose that inspiration. In this Modern Law Library podcasst episode, he discusses his discovery with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles and shares his opinion about why this script has stood the test of time.

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Henry Montgomery whose case retroactively banned mandatory JLWOP is still in prison

The United States is the only country in the world that sentences children to life without the possibility of parole, according to The Atlantic. One of those children was a boy named Henry Montgomery. In 1963, Montgomery was 17 years old, and was convicted of shooting and killing a plainclothes police officer in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was initially sentenced to death, but the Louisiana Supreme Court decided that racial tensions, including Ku Klux Klan activity in the area, had influenced the jury’s decision. Instead, the court resentenced him to life in prison. There is hope, however, that soon he’ll be coming home.

Montgomery is now a long way removed from the teenager he once was. He is 75 years old. He has been in prison at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, for 57 years.

Sometimes numbers like this exist as abstractions. What does 57 years mean? What are 57 years spent living inside a cage? What they are is a lifetime.

When Montgomery was sent to prison, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act had yet to be signed. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were still alive. Ruby Bridges was 9 years old. Four little girls had just been killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. A gallon of gas was 30 cents and a loaf of bread was 20. The Beatles had yet to come to America. “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” by the Beach Boys, was Billboard’s No. 1 song of the year. My own parents, now in their 60s, had yet to begin kindergarten.

Today, according to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization that works to reduce incarceration in the U.S., more than 53,000 people are serving life-without-parole sentences. The state of Louisiana, where 70 percent of people serving life sentences are Black, has more people serving life sentences per capita than any other state in the country. Until recently that number included thousands of children, but two relatively recent Supreme Court cases, one of which had Henry Montgomery at its center, changed that. More than 50 years after his original sentence, Montgomery became the petitioner in a 2016 case, Montgomery v. Louisiana, in which the Court ruled that its 2012 decision, Miller v. Alabama—which banned mandatory life without parole for children—could be applied retroactively. The Miller decision was based on research demonstrating that children’s brains are not as fully developed as adults’. This seems obvious and intuitive, but new neuroscientific evidence made clear that children who commit crimes cannot be held culpable to the same extent as adults, and that they have even more of an opportunity to change.

The decisions affected more than 2,600 people who had been sentenced to life without parole, who could now be resentenced.

But simply because someone has had the opportunity to be resentenced doesn’t mean that they will be released. Miller banned juvenile life without parole as a mandatory sentence, but did not ban it outright. So although 800 people who had been previously sentenced to life without the possibility of parole have been released since the Montgomery ruling, more than 1,700 people sentenced as juveniles to life without parole across the country still remain behind bars. And despite the Supreme Court’s assertion that he is “an example of one kind of evidence that prisoners might use to demonstrate rehabilitation,” the petitioner of the case, Henry Montgomery, has remained in prison as well.

One person who is free because of Montgomery’s case is Andrew Hundley, a co-founder and the executive director of the Louisiana Parole Project. Originally sent to prison at 15 years old, Hundley served nearly 20 years in state prisons across Louisiana until 2016, when he became the first juvenile lifer in Louisiana released from prison following the Montgomery ruling. Since his own release, he has been working to get Montgomery and others out of prison. “I feel like it’s my life’s work,” he told me. He was grateful to have been released, but thought that Montgomery should have been the first one allowed to come home. “Henry was in prison for 18 years before I was born. And I’ve been home five and a half years now.”

Soon, Montgomery could join Hundley and the hundreds of other people who became free because of his 2016 case. Next Wednesday, Montgomery is scheduled to go in front of a three-person parole board that will decide whether he will be released or remain incarcerated. This will not be the first time that Montgomery has gone in front of a parole board. He has been denied parole on two occasions, mostly recently in April 2019. In each case, two of the parole-board members voted in favor of release, and one did not. In Louisiana, at that time, parole decisions had to be unanimous.

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Mangino on Law and Crime Network

Watch my comments regarding jury selection in the Ahmaud Arbery trial on Law and Crime Network.

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Mangino chats with Nancy Grace on Crime Stories

Listen to my appearance on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace talking about the missing mom Suzanne Morphew.

To listen to the interview CLICK HERE

Defense in Arbery trial object to black pastors being in courtroom

A defense attorney for one of the three White men charged in 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery's killing objected  to nationally recognized civil rights leaders attending the trial to support the victim's family, reported CNN.

"If we're going to start a precedent, starting yesterday, where we're going to bring high-profile members of the African-American community into the courtroom to sit with the family during the trial in the presence of the jury, I believe that's intimidating and it's an attempt to pressure," attorney Kevin Gough, who represents William "Roddie" Bryan Jr., told the court following a lunch break. "Could be consciously or unconsciously an attempt to pressure or influence the jury."

In Georgia's majority White Glynn County, where the trial is taking place, race has played a central role in the case.

Last week, following a long and contentious jury selection process, Judge Timothy Walmsley said the defense had appeared to be discriminatory in selecting the jurors but allowed the case to go forward -- with only one Black member in the panel.

Just days prior, Gough had complained that older White men from the South without four-year college degrees, "euphemistically known as 'Bubba' or 'Joe Six Pack,'" seemed to be underrepresented in the pool of potential jurors that had turned up.

The Rev. Al Sharpton joined Arbery's parents Wednesday and led a prayer vigil outside the Glynn County Courthouse, asking for a just verdict in the case and calling Arbery's killing "a lynching in the 21st century."

Sharpton said that while the country has seen some positive milestones for the Black community, such as electing former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris, "you still can't jog through Brunswick without being shot down, like you are a suspect, only because of the color of your skin."

The judge told Gough on Thursday that he was aware Sharpton would be inside, apparently taking the place of an Arbery family member, and that he did not have an objection as long as there were no disruptions.

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