Creators: The Efficacy of Shaken Baby Syndrome Remains Unresolved

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators
May 7, 2024

Robert Roberson's story is a tragic one. He is sitting on death row in Texas for killing his 2-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis by shaking her so violently that it caused her death. John J. Lennon, an incarcerated journalist who works with the Prison Letters Project at Yale Law School, recently wrote about Roberson for Slate.

The theory behind Roberson's conviction is what is commonly known as shaken baby syndrome.

Proponents of the theory of shaken baby syndrome claim that shaking a baby produces a so-called "triad" of catastrophic injuries exclusive to shaking — subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage and brain swelling. The diagnosis does not require the presence of other injuries such as bruises, grab marks or damage to the baby's neck.

Injuries from shaken baby syndrome are so severe, these experts say, the baby would immediately collapse. According to The Appeal, the last person with the baby — a parent, babysitter or day care worker — is the person often accused. That person is then left to prove they're innocent of a crime that may not have occurred.

The presence of shaken baby syndrome often pits the accused against the testimony of physicians, who say with certainty that the baby's injuries are comparable to those sustained from falling out of a window or being thrown from a car, reported The Appeal. In comparison, the defendant's explanation falls short of making an impression on an investigator or jury.

However, as with many types of forensic evidence — shaken baby syndrome is under scrutiny. Convictions are supposed to be final, but science is evolving. In recent years, prisoners and their lawyers have challenged a number of forensic disciplines: from eyewitness identification, to fingerprints as well as analysis of blood spatter, hair, bitemarks, toolmarks and a host of other traditionally "reliable" investigative techniques.

Since the 1980s, nearly a quarter of overturned convictions have featured "false or misleading forensic evidence," according to the national Registry of Exoneration.

"We believed anyone in a lab coat with letters after their names," M. Chris Fabricant, a lawyer for the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions across the country, told the Marshall Project. "But these methods were developed by law enforcement to solve possible crimes, not in laboratories."

A. Norman Guthkelch, a British pediatric neurosurgeon whose 1971 paper first posited the shaken baby syndrome, later reviewed a number of cases where defendants claimed their innocence. Patrick D. Barnes, MD of the Stanford University Medical Center, wrote in Bloomberg Law, Guthkelch was struck by the high proportion of cases in which the child had a history of illnesses, indicating their injuries were the result of natural causes, not abuse. In 2015, shortly before his death, Guthkelch told The Washington Post, "I am doing what I can so long as I have a breath to correct a grossly unjust situation."

According to Barnes, over the last two decades, courts in at least 12 states, including Alaska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, have overturned shaken baby syndrome convictions, or rejected outdated science.

Some medical organizations have pushed back, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, which fears marginal medical theories are gaining too much traction in the courts, allowing people who abuse infants to go free. In 2009, according to the Boston Globe, the academy did acknowledge the controversy brewing over the role that excessive shaking plays in creating extreme injuries.

The academy now tells doctors to use the term "abusive head trauma," rather than shaken baby syndrome, to indicate that traumatic blows to the head, not just shaking, are often behind the brain swelling and eye damage that afflict some 1,000 children each year, often causing permanent neurological damage if not death.

But the fact remains that at least 32 people have been exonerated for crimes based on shaken baby syndrome, according to The Guardian. In addition, last fall, Superior Court of New Jersey Judge Pedro J. Jimenez Jr. ruled that shaken baby syndrome was "junk science" and "scientifically unreliable".

A definitive answer for shaken baby syndrome remains elusive. Roberson's petition to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking review of his shaken baby syndrome conviction was denied without explanation.

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

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America’s aging prison population turns prisons into de facto nursing home

In state after state, prison systems have long been plagued by inadequate health care, resulting in the spread of treatable diseases and, in many cases, preventable deaths behind bars, reported Vox. But a key demographic trend threatens to make that problem even worse: Over the last several decades, America’s prison population has been rapidly aging, and, as in Washington’s case, prisoners’ health needs have become more significant as a result.

Here is a link to a column I wrote on prisons as de facto mental health facilities In the Criminal Justice System things are Worse than they Seem

People who were 55 years old or older made up about 3 percent of the US prison population in 1991; by 2021, they accounted for 15 percent. The total number of older prisoners is also steadily growing, with no signs of abatement: In 2020, there were about 166,000 incarcerated people aged 55 years or older; that number grew to about 178,000 in 2021 and 186,000 in 2022.

The graying of America’s incarcerated population is effectively turning the US prison system into a de facto nursing home, leaving hundreds of thousands of older people in its care each year. The result is skyrocketing costs: The Bureau of Prisons’ health care spending on federal inmates rose from $978 million in 2009 to $1.34 billion in 2016, and various state governments have seen similar increases.

Still, conditions in American prisons continue to be detrimental to people’s health and often lead to accelerated aging. Prisoners, for example, are much more likely to exhibit signs of cognitive decline, including dementia, at an earlier age than the general population, and one study found that a 59-year-old in prison has the same morbidity rate — that is, how often people get a disease — as a nonincarcerated 75-year-old.

“We have facilities that aren’t considered humane,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice. “They’re not places for elderly people who have dementia and diabetes and maybe walkers or wheelchairs.”

All of this raises both a moral and practical policy question that lawmakers have to face: Why are we forcing older people to spend their dying years in prison when they can get better care elsewhere?

People aren’t just aging behind bars; police are locking up the elderly

One of the explanations for the aging prison population is simple: Since the 1970s and the age of mass incarceration — when the American prison population ballooned and gave the United States the distinction of imprisoning more people than any other country in the world — people have been aging behind bars.

The other explanation, however, is less obvious: Older people have been getting arrested at higher rates than they used to. In 1991, for example, people who were 55 years of age or older made up only 2 percent of adults who were arrested; by 2021, they made up 8 percent, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that does criminal justice research and advocacy. The Marshall Project also found a similar pattern: Between 2000 and 2020, there was nearly a 30 percent increase in the number of arrests of people over 65, despite the overall number of arrests dropping by nearly 40 percent.

So why are arrests among older people suddenly on the rise? The resurging trend across many American cities and states to further criminalize poverty and impose harsher punishments for petty crimes, including things like shoplifting, is partly to blame because the groups of people who become common targets for police are getting older.

“People who are unhoused and people suffering from mental health disorders and substance use disorders are also aging,” said Mike Wessler, the communications director at the Prison Policy Initiative. “If you look across the country right now, we’re obviously seeing efforts to ramp up policing of people who are unhoused, people with untreated mental health disorders, people with substance use disorder. So it’s almost a certainty that in the coming years we are probably going to see this problem get worse.”

People experiencing cognitive decline, including those suffering from dementia, can also be especially vulnerable during interactions with police. Henry Hart, a 76-year-old with dementia in Maryland, for example, was arrested when he had what his daughter described as a mental breakdown. During the incident, Hart had grown agitated and hit her, and when she called for paramedics to take him to the hospital, police showed up at the scene instead. Officers ultimately arrested him for assault despite his family members’ pleas. After spending time in jail, Hart’s condition seemed to get notably worse, according to his daughter.

“As Maryland’s population ages, experts fear that police will encounter people with dementia more often and without recognizing the condition or knowing how to respond to it,” Baltimore Sun reporters Angela Roberts and Cassidy Jensen wrote. “Arrest or jail time can be especially harmful to people with dementia, given their mental and physical vulnerability, experts say.”

There’s also evidence that beefing up law enforcement has had a negative impact on older people. While younger people have become less likely to be arrested for drug-related crimes than in the past, arrests of older people for drug-related offenses have spiked. Between 2000 and 2018, for example, drug-related arrests of people over the age of 50 rose by 92 percent — the fastest increase out of any age group. And while substance use disorder among older people is on the rise, addressing the problem through stricter law enforcement is not a practical solution.

“It’s a heck of a lot easier to order the National Guard to go stand on subway platforms than it is to figure out how to expand mental health treatment in the state; than to figure out how to address substance use disorders in the state; than to figure out how to address the housing crisis in the state,” Wessler said.

The consequences of an aging prison population

Studies have shown that incarcerated people have signs of aging at a faster rate than others as a result of prison conditions, and that each year in prison can shave years off of someone’s life.

“Health care behind bars is bad even in the best scenarios,” Wessler said. “And that’s kind of by design in a lot of respects: Prisons are not places that are therapeutic or designed to heal; they are places that are designed to punish.”

Infectious diseases tend to disproportionately affect prisoners compared to the general population, and the Covid pandemic in particular showed why prisons are especially dangerous for older people. Deaths of inmates rose by nearly 50 percent in the first year of the pandemic, and while mortality rates increased for prisoners across all ages, older people saw the highest surge in mortality. By contrast, among the general population, it was younger people who saw the highest increase in death rates.

From a public policy standpoint, the aging prison population is a failure on multiple fronts. Most importantly, prisons cause people to age more quickly and die prematurely. After all, while so-called “natural” deaths — that is, death from disease or old age — make up the vast majority of deaths behind bars, they often receive little scrutiny despite the fact that many of them have been found to be the result of medical neglect.

But it’s also costing states a lot of money — money that is clearly not well spent. In Texas, for example, the state’s prison health care costs increased by more than $250 million between 2012 and 2019, although the prison population actually decreased by 3 percent during that time. The state’s prison population aged 55 or older, on the other hand, had increased by 65 percent during that same period, according to data reviewed by the Texas Tribune.

Some lawmakers have noted this is unsustainable. As former state Sen. John Whitmire told the Tribune, “Nobody’s tougher on crime than me, but once you’ve incarcerated a guy past the point that he’s a threat to anybody, I’d like to save that $500,000 to put him in a nursing home as a condition of parole, take that money, and spend it on either other public safety efforts or prison costs.”

The system as it is, in other words, isn’t benefiting anyone. It’s both deadlier and more financially costly.

And from a moral standpoint, it’s hard for a society to defend these outcomes. “Do we morally think that it is good to have people spend their dying years behind bars, especially for drug crimes from the ’80s and ’90s?” Wessler said. “That strikes me as morally wrong in addition to being bad public policy.”

Tougher penalties turn into de facto death sentences

In many ways, America’s aging prisons are the expected end result of the tough-on-crime approaches and surge in arrests of the 1980s and 1990s.

A study by researchers at the the State University of New York at Albany, the University of Pennsylvania, and the RAND Corporation, found that young people who were locked up in the 1990s spent more time behind bars than any other generation, in large part because of tougher and longer sentences, higher recidivism rates, and escalating punishments for people who are rearrested. And that generation is now aging behind bars, unlikely to ever come out of prison.

“These extreme sentence lengths paired with narrow release mechanisms — meaning fewer ways to actually leave the system — led to this huge crisis of older adults in American prisons,” Eisen, from the Brennan Center, said. “Because what you had is more people coming in, people staying for longer, and then fewer avenues for release because of mandatory minimums, because of three strikes [laws], because of life without parole.”

While many older people in prison today are being sent there for petty crimes, it’s also true that many others, particularly those serving longer sentences, have been convicted of serious crimes. But regardless of what a person is guilty of, the fate of a death behind bars — which can be the result of inadequate medical care and botched treatments — could itself be seen as a cruel punishment, especially when people no longer pose a threat to society.

Take, for example, the case of Walter Jordan, another elderly Arizona prisoner whose story is eerily similar to Richard Washington’s. Jordan, a 67-year-old man who was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping, was serving a life sentence. In a memo he wrote to a federal judge in 2017, he alleged that the state’s Department of Corrections and its private health care contractor had delayed his treatment for skin cancer. The memo was, in his words, a “notice of impending death.”

Jordan wrote that he was in pain and suffering from memory loss. He alleged that other prisoners were also being denied care, and he wrote that as a result of his delayed treatment, he would be “lucky to be alive for 30 days.”

Jordan was right: Just over a week later, he was dead. A physician who reviewed his case found that Jordan could have survived had he received adequate care. The situation was “horrific,” the physician wrote. “He suffered excruciating needless pain from cancer that was not appropriately managed in the months prior to his death.”

There are more humane approaches. States and the federal government can start, for example, by expanding eligibility for compassionate release, which truncates sentences but tends to be reserved for people with terminal illnesses. Parole — which can sometimes have unintended consequences including strict rules that often result in parolees being sent back to prison — can also be especially beneficial to elderly prisoners who can get better health care outside of prison. And yet, tough-on-crime laws like those recently passed in Louisiana are making it harder for prisoners to be eligible for parole.

Governors can also make use of their pardon powers and commute sentences for older prisoners who have shown signs of rehabilitation. And instead of readopting a tough-on-crime approach that will likely result in more arrests of older people, states and the federal government can support social safety net programs that would lift older people out of poverty and homelessness, reducing their odds of being arrested in the first place.

America’s jail and prison population peaked in 2008, when more than 2.3 million people were behind bars. And while it has mostly declined since then — especially during Covid, when many prisoners were released as the virus ravaged prisons — it has recently been ticking back up.

“We have far too many people in our prisons,” Eisen said. One of the fastest ways to address that problem is to release older people, who generally don’t pose a public safety risk. “This is a population that shouldn’t be behind bars.”

But until lawmakers acknowledge that the current prison system is failing some of the most vulnerable people in its care, cases like Washington’s or Jordan’s will become all the more common. And more and more people who are now serving time in an American prison will slowly come to learn that their punishment has morphed into a death sentence.

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Erik Larson: 'When people say outlandish things take them serious'

I had the opportunity to attend a recent lecture in Pittsburgh by best selling author Erik Larson on the release of his new book, "The Demon of Unrest" about the months between Lincoln's election in 1860 and the start of the Civil War.

Larson opened his lecture to questions, and one thoughtful member of the audience asked Larson--with his new book and prior book "The Splendid and the Vile" about Churchill taking the reins during the Nazi Blitz--what common themes are there to the run up to war?

Larson replied--with an answer befitting of today's political climate--"When people say outlandish things take them serious." 

The little know 'last meals' for the executioners

Out of all the meals consumed on death row, most people on the outside only know about the “last meal” requested by the condemned, provided out of some sense of dignity and humanity as window dressing for state-sponsored killing, reported The Appeal. They imagine lavish meals savored by hardened killers—and the invectives hurled by politicians as they pander to constituents about the extravagant cost. 

But the public never hears about the executioner’s meal. I was not sentenced to death until March 18, 1999. Prior to that, as a “safekeeper” at Central Prison awaiting my capital trial in 1998, I experienced two executions. The first being North Carolina’s last use of the gas chamber, though I didn’t know it at the time. I just knew the state was putting people to death. My first execution on death row occurred a mere eight days after I got there. The feeling was different since I had been sentenced to death. It was exponentially heavier. I would feel that enormous weight and grinding pressure thirty-three times before executions stopped in 2006. 

We heard talk about the executioner’s meal before on Unit Two, the old death row, but no one saw it. The idea of it spurred vicious imaginings. However, between 2002 and 2006, after death row had been moved to the new Unit Three, we witnessed something no one facing death should: A party the night of the execution. 

The most galling part was the sheet cake. 

At the time, the prison-staff break room was located in the main hallway of Unit Three. Two large plexiglass windows made it a sort of fishbowl: anyone could look in, whether the lights were on or off. On the day of an execution, the break room door was locked, and two long tables appeared, hugging the walls. Stacks of paper plates, napkins, Solo cups, and plastic utensils anchored one table, while a mess of food spread out over the other. Usually, there would be a half dozen two-liter bottles of soda, oversized family bags of chips, dips, cheeses, crackers, jars of cocktail sausages, trays of cookies, and that enormous sheet cake covered in colorful swirls of frosting. I know because I could see it. The meal was, for those of us shuffling back and forth from the chow hall, on full display. In 2003 there were seven such feasts. 

Wide-eyed, and with barely concealed smiles, prison staff would deny that this was a celebration of any kind. No, they told us, on the night of an execution, extra staff were called in, just in case they had to quell a riot. And all those guards and executioners, well, they had to eat something. Execution nights are long nights, they insisted. Their denials were clearly lies, always delivered lightly with a guilty child’s who me? impudence. 

Birthday cake is an odd requirement for a supposedly utilitarian staff meal, but there it was, served on execution night. We prisoners began to think of it as the executioner’s last meal, and one year, it was. 

As of 2023, no one has been put to death in North Carolina since 2006. Executions were initially stopped because doctors refused to participate in them, and the European makers of one of the drugs used in lethal injections refused to export it to US prisons. Ongoing litigation over North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, which allows death row prisoners to challenge their sentence if it was “sought or obtained on the basis of race,” has kept the de facto moratorium in place. Given the evolving standards of decency in the criminal justice system, the decline in capital sentences and executions, a high rate of death sentences reversed on appeal, and the increasing number of innocent people exonerated from death row, North Carolina may never put another prisoner to death. But until the state abolishes capital punishment, my friends and I know that our “last meal” may come much earlier than we hope.  

What would you eat for your last meal? Would you even have an appetite, knowing that, in a matter of hours, after hugging and kissing your loved ones goodbye, your life would end? On death row, we rarely discuss last meals.  

In 2006 the day before he would have been put onto death watch— the final seventy-two hours of isolation before the lethal injection—my friend JT received a stay of execution. I asked him about the last meal. “Eating?” He shook his head. “Who can think of food when you’re preparing to die? I probably would have refused it.” Newspapers report the condemned’s last meal in the same paragraph as their final words, how long it took for the death to occur (and whether any step was “botched”), who attended the execution, and whether the prosecutor and victims’ families made a statement. Lumping that information all together furthers the misconception that the last meal is eaten in smug satisfaction, at expense of the victims and the public.  

For all the handwringing about extravagant last meals, those of us who know executions know that the gustatory requests of the condemned are seldom, if ever, met. Those awaiting death frequently refuse a last meal; others find that their facility allows them only to choose from what’s on the standard chow hall menu that day. Visions of delivery drivers lining up with steaks from one place and milkshakes from another are almost laughably false. So, no, prisoners don’t sit around drooling over what we would request, because we have no illusions that it would ever be provided. Discussions like that would just be feeding a fantasy, contrasting bitterly with the bleak food-as-required-calories system we actually live (and may eventually die in).

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In 2023 cities experienced the largest single-year decline in violent crime since the FBI began keeping track

 In 2021, Detroit was in trouble.

The city, which already had one of the highest murder rates in the country, was experiencing a surge in gun violence coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic. In the first five months of the year, homicides were up 27 percent, and nonfatal shootings were up 44 percent, reported Vox.

James White, who was Detroit’s assistant police chief from 2012 to 2020, had only been retired from the department for a year when he got the call to return, this time as chief of police, in June 2021. When he came back, he said, “policing had completely changed.”

“It was on the heels of the George Floyd murder, it was the pandemic — all those things kind of intersected,” White told Vox. It wasn’t just Detroit: Homicide spiked 30 percent across the US in 2020, the largest single-year increase since the FBI began tracking it. “We found ourselves [facing] a really big question, and rightly so, about the validity of policing and the model of policing that was happening around the country.”

Three years into his time as chief, White and others in the community have much to celebrate. At the end of 2023, the city reported the fewest homicides since 1966, a decline of 18 percent over the previous year. Nonfatal shootings fell nearly 16 percent, and carjackings dropped by a third. By the end of 2023, the city’s homicide rate had returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Detroit is on the leading edge of a national trend. Across US cities last year, homicides fell more than 12 percent, the largest single-year decline in violent crime since the FBI began keeping track. In Buffalo, they fell 46 percent from a year earlier — the fewest homicides since 2011. In Philadelphia, they dropped 21 percent. New York and Los Angeles also saw double-digit declines, according to preliminary data.

What explains the precipitous rise — and sharp fall — in violent crime? Experts caution that several complex, intersecting factors drive crime trends, and no single explanation can easily answer the question.

The best working theory is that multiple overlapping social crises — including pandemic-related disruptions that kept more people stuck at home and out of work, and the unrest across major cities after the murder of George Floyd — contributed to a breakdown of trust between the public and police, and created conditions ripe for violence in a country awash in too many guns.

The decrease, meanwhile, may have much to do with society reopening and stabilizing, but it also probably has something to do with changes to the way some police, prosecutors, and civic leaders — in Detroit and elsewhere — have been operating after the major challenges of 2020.

For Detroit, what worked was a coordinated effort across multiple agencies and community organizations that was targeted at reducing and preventing gun crime and mobilizing the judicial system after a pandemic-era shutdown seriously hampered the courts.

That’s not to say Detroit, like other cities in the US, doesn’t face severe challenges when it comes to reducing violent crime. Though the city saw the fewest killings since 1966, it also had a much larger population back then, meaning 2023’s per capita homicide rate of around 41 people per 100,000 is much higher than the 1966 homicide rate of 15 people per 100,000.

Still, White says, elected officials and community leaders in Detroit are encouraged by the fact that homicide fell back to the pre-pandemic baselines. “We’re not satisfied,” White says, but there’s satisfaction in “knowing our plans are working.”

US President Joe Biden shakes hands with Detroit Police Chief James White in February in Washington. Biden met with White to tout Detroit’s efforts to reduce crime, including using federal funds to transform policing and community interventions. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

It’s not just the chief of police saying that, either. “I think our people are hardwired to be skeptical of any news that comes from top to bottom, like, is this a political ploy? Is it real?” says Alia Harvey-Quinn, the founder of FORCE Detroit, a community violence intervention program that is active in northwest Detroit and is part of the effort to reduce gun violence. “We’re hearing people actually feel safer as of late, and that’s exciting.”

Violent crime is continuing to fall across the US this year, but it’s still a major voter concern, driving politicians to pass laws aimed at reducing it further. Here’s how Detroit is reducing crime, and what other cities can learn from their success.

Detroit changed the way police respond to some calls

In 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd, the city came up with plans for a Crisis Intervention Team, a partnership between mental and behavioral health specialists and police. The Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network (DWIHN) staffs 911 call centers with mental health professionals and offers week-long training programs for police officers to learn about trauma-informed policing. The network also partners with police on a centralized mental health unit co-response team, where officers are paired with behavioral health specialists who can respond to people experiencing mental health crises. DWIHN’s Andrea Smith, who has answered 911 calls and worked with the crisis response team on in-person calls, says the goal is always “to bring a situation down instead of contributing to an escalation of the crisis,” and to help officers find other ways of responding to certain calls.

The approach, modeled on methods first implemented by a team in Memphis, Tennessee, “contributes to a lower number of incidents of use of force,” says Smith. “It’s allowed us to have more of a focus on, ‘OK, this person might not have a behavior problem. It might be a behavioral health problem.’ … When you have the community that knows that the police are looking at alternatives to just pulling out their gun, that enhances or improves the relationship between the police and citizens.”

For White, who in addition to being police chief is also a licensed mental health counselor, paying attention to the mental health needs of community members makes sense, but it was far from the only strategy.

The city also unveiled a 12-point “summer surge” plan that increased police presence, curfew enforcement, and strategic traffic restrictions to secure downtown Detroit following the murder of a security guard last year. Police also cracked down on drag racing and stepped up their presence at community events where they had reason to believe there might be a risk of gun violence.

The city council also approved a contract that gave officers a roughly $10,000 raise at the end of 2022 to help offset the recruiting problem other police departments are also facing across the country. White was careful to point out, though, that the work is far from over: “The challenge is to continue to drive down violent crime while providing policing excellence to our community and treating everyone fairly,” he says.

Prosecutors made community outreach a key priority

Courts across the country shut down because of Covid-19, delaying trials and preventing felony charges from moving through the adjudication process.

To get the system moving again and to reduce the backlog of felony gun cases, district and circuit courts moved to get more hearings on the calendar. The US attorney for Eastern Michigan, Dawn Ison, also partnered with federal agencies to prosecute gun crimes and take illegal weapons off the street.

Ison also led violence prevention and reentry efforts for formerly incarcerated people.

“The studies show enforcement alone has never been effective at moving the needle to reduce violent crime. We have to be transparent and bring legitimacy. We can’t do this work without the community,” Ison says.

When developing One Detroit, her office’s program to reduce violence in the two city precincts with the highest rates of gun crime, Ison drew upon several evidence-based strategies outlined in the book Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets by Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland.

This included reaching out last summer to 200 individuals who, based on their previous interaction with the state’s legal system, were believed to be at highest risk of becoming a victim of, or perpetrating, gun violence. They were invited to a roundtable to hear from people who’d been incarcerated in an effort to deter them from violence.

Ison’s office also focused on engagement with the city’s residents. In the summer, she goes into the precincts with high rates of gun crime and hands out fliers letting the public know that her office is looking to prosecute the small number of people driving most of the gun violence in the city.

The office also puts on what they call “peacenics,” or summer block parties with DJs, bounce castles, and vendors from the city and local government who help people with basic services, like getting a driver’s license or having their record expunged for low-level offenses.

“My vision is for it to be our non-enforcement engagement with the community,” Ison says. “We have to be talking to them, and not only there when we’re kicking in their doors or arresting somebody.” By the end of 2023, the city reported that homicides were down 17 percent in the precincts targeted by One Detroit, and carjackings were down 63 percent.

Ison isn’t the only prosecutor focusing on violent crime reduction. At the direction of the Office of the Attorney General, each US attorney was asked to come up with their own district-specific violence reduction plan in response to the pandemic-related spike. But Thomas Abt says that the energy Ison brings to the effort is unusual. “The US attorney and Chief White are demonstrating an exciting new form of collaborative leadership,” Abt says. “They’re people who can celebrate the successes of others. I think that’s really positive and constructive.”

Detroit invested in community violence interruption

Detroit received $826 million through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, and in 2023, the city allocated a small slice of the money to a handful of community-based programs working to reduce gun violence in the neighborhoods that suffered from it the most. One of those programs is FORCE Detroit, which works on the west side of Detroit in a neighborhood that saw a significant reduction in gun violence last year.

“Our goal is to create peace, so we’re dealing with people on multiple sides of conflict,” says Harvey-Quinn, the group’s founder. “They understand that our space is a neutral zone.”

Since FORCE has begun its work, she says, the group has had at least 87 instances of intervention or deescalation. Those incidents range from getting someone to take down a threat made on social media before it escalates into violence to convening rival gang members and saying, “Let’s sit everyone down, and as long as people don’t want to go to prison, or die, there has to be a solution.”

Mostly, it’s about connecting young people with credible messengers who have served time and lost friends to gun violence and are now trained by her organization in deescalation and crisis mitigation strategies.

FORCE Detroit was touted by city leaders when the neighborhood they serve saw no homicides between November 2023 and January 2024.

“We’re working with the people who shoot guns, and we’re encouraging them not to,” Harvey-Quinn says.

“Statistically, less than 2 percent of our community is ever going to shoot a gun.” By designing programs focused on meeting that 2 percent in their own neighborhoods, she says, “you have a real opportunity to deeply impact them. It really matters whether or not they get the good, wraparound services. It really matters that they have mentors that care.”

With polls showing that voters think of crime as a major concern this election year, political leaders are looking to show that they’re serious about reducing it. If they’re interested in what reduces crime, they should look at what worked in Detroit. It wasn’t the “tough on crime” approach that so many leaders are now pursuing as a too-late reaction to the crime surge of 2020 and 2021.

Detroit succeeded by thinking creatively, working cooperatively, and asking the city’s residents to partner with them in the effort. City leaders demonstrated that they were willing to offer resources to help, even as they acknowledge there’s so much more work to be done. It’s a strategy designed for long-term improvement, not election-year grandstanding.

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Arizona legislature repeals 1864 abortion ban

 The Arizona State Senate voted 16 to 14 to repeal an abortion ban dating back to 1864, leaving it to Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs to sign the repeal into law, which she has committed to do, reported Jurist.

The State Senate’s debate was contentious, with lawmakers delivering theatrical monologues frequently punctuated by cries of protest in the gallery.

The vote follows a ruling by Arizona’s Supreme Court that the 159-year-old law banning abortion was enforceable in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn abortion rights case Roe v Wade, sending a 52-year-old case back to trial court.

The Arizona State House took up and passed the bill to repeal the ban, HB2677, two weeks following the state Supreme Court’s ruling, sending the bill to the State Senate.

Arizona’s abortion ban was enacted shortly after it was designated as a US territory and decades before it attained statehood. The ban was part of the Howell Code, a comprehensive set of laws enacted by the territory’s First Legislative Assembly, encompassing procedural regulations and establishing criminal laws ranging from bigamy to duels to mayhem.

That code stated, in relevant part:

Every person who shall administer or cause to be administered or taken, any medicinal substances, or shall use or cause to be used any instruments whatever, with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child, and shall be thereof duly convicted, shall be punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than two years nor more than five years.

The 1864 version provided an exception if a physician were to perform an abortion in order to save the mother’s life. The following year, the provision was amended slightly to stipulate that the life-saving exception could apply to anyone performing an abortion. The regulation has remained largely unchanged since 1865, and the near-total abortion ban was codified into Arizona state law in the early 20th century.

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Creators: Pregnant Women Don't Belong in Prison

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators
April 29, 2024

The United States has the second highest rate worldwide of incarcerated women. In recent decades, there has been a dramatic increase in U.S. correctional population, and women are a rapidly growing segment of that population. The U.S. incarcerates about 65 out of every 100,000 women, according to The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

Most women who are incarcerated are within their reproductive years, and many women are pregnant at reception. Nearly 4% of incarcerated women in the U.S. are pregnant; some reports estimate that there are approximately 58,000 pregnant women in jail or prison.

Pregnancy can be challenging to a mother and fetus under the best of circumstances. According to Johns Hopkins University, pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to life-threatening complications if not closely monitored by a physician. Now imagine if you are a pregnant woman in prison.

Nearly 50 years ago, the United States Supreme Court found that the U.S. Constitution requires prisons to provide medical care to inmates by holding that "deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners" violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

However, prisons and jails continue to act with indifference to the care and treatment of pregnant prisoners. For instance, the use of restraints on pregnant women and women in labor appears to knowingly increase the risk of significant medical harm to the mother and unborn child.

Outside of the prison walls, the government and private businesses make a host of accommodations for pregnant and parenting women. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act is a federal statute that protects pregnant workers and requires covered employers to make job-related modifications for pregnant employees. The Act forbids employment discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth, or medical conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth.

When a family is expecting a new child, the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides equal leave for both the mother and father. Both, or either, covered parent, may take 12 weeks leave for the birth of a newborn. If both parents work in positions covered by the FMLA, they will both be entitled to leave. FMLA also provides leave for pregnancy-related health reasons.

In prison, the government is not so generous when it comes to pregnant women or women who have recently given birth. A significant majority of correctional facilities do not have on-site obstetric care; pregnant women are typically transported to community-based providers for prenatal care, and women in labor are transferred to medical facilities for delivery. Though policies vary by jurisdiction, during transport, labor, delivery and post-delivery, women are frequently shackled with handcuffs, leg irons and/or waist chains, reported AMA Journal of Ethics.

Shackling pregnant women being transported for or being provided medical treatment is a remnant of the institutions that, have for years, predominately housed men.

Prisons and jails are not equipped to properly care for pregnant women. For instance, pregnant women with mental health problems are advised to stop taking psychotropic drugs for bipolar, anxiety and depression. Obviously, confinement exacerbates their condition. Intensive mental health therapy must, but doesn't always, stand in the void.

Special nutritional concerns like seafood, foods not fully cooked or fruit and vegetables not properly cleaned put women and their babies at risk. Proper intake testing and evaluation, prenatal care and postpartum care, especially mental health care after separation from a newborn child, can go a long way toward protecting pregnant women and their newborn.

Pregnant women do not belong in prisons or jails, but until we get to the point where society can achieve an alternative — at a minimum cruel and unusual methods such as shackling women during prenatal care and childbirth must stop.

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

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