PA Superior Court: Juveniles not required to comply with sexual offense registration

The Superior Court of Pennsylvania issued an opinion concluding that an adult convicted of a sexual offense that was committed while a juvenile could not be required to register as a sex offender, reported Jurist.

The adult “pleaded guilty to two counts of Indecent Assault of a person less than thirteen years of age” in connection to “incidents. . . that occurred sometime between 2005 and 2006,” when the adult was still a juvenile.

In its decision, the Superior Court focused on a prior case where the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that lifetime sex offender registration requirements for juvenile sexual offenders were unconstitutional. There were two main reasons for this holding. First, the court found that juvenile sex offenders were less likely to offend again, which is “a fundamental underpinning to the registration requirements.”

Second, the court looked to US Supreme Court precedent which has “held that mandatory sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for homicide defendants under 18 years of age at the time the crime was committed [were] unconstitutional.” The reasoning was due to differences in brain development between juveniles and adults, which the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania applied in its holding.

Ultimately, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania found that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s holding in a previous case “should apply with equal weight to juvenile adjudications as well as to defendants convicted as adults for crimes committed as juveniles.”

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Mangino appers on WFMJ-TV21 Weekend Today

Watch my interview on WFMJ-TV21 Weekend Today.
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GateHouse: The argument against handcuffing children in school

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

November 1, 2019

This week a Pittsburgh family filed a federal lawsuit against the city’s school district after their first-grader was handcuffed in class.

The 7-year-old was handcuffed by a Pittsburgh school police officer at an elementary school after throwing a tantrum in class, according to WPXI-TV. The lawsuit claims a teacher “placed his knee on [the child’s] back while he lay on the floor,” and another time “reportedly choked” him. The suit said the principal, “physically prevented [the child] from leaving a small room.”

In Orlando, Florida a police officer was recently fired for restraining a 6-year-old with flex cuffs. In Georgia, a 6-year-old was cuffed and taken to the police station. There have also been incidents in Mississippi, St. Louis, New York City, Kentucky and Chicago to name a few.

According to ABC News, FBI statistics show that between 2013 and 2018 at least 30,467 children under the age of 10 were arrested in the United States. The numbers skyrocket for children between the ages of 10 and 12 with 266,321 arrested during the same six-year time span, according to the data.

There is no question that young students can involve themselves in serious violent crime.

In 2018, according to ABC News, 155 children under the age of 10 were arrested for possessing weapons, 22 were arrested for rape, 11 for robbery, 56 for arson, and 289 for larceny and theft, including 15 for vehicle theft. Criminal justice referrals are necessary in those instances.

Most of those crimes were not committed in school. However, according to the U.S. Department of Education in 2015-2016 over 290,600 cases in schools were referred to law enforcement or resulted in arrest.

When a school allows a school resource officer—a “specially” trained police officer assigned to the school—to arrest a student or refer a student to law enforcement or juvenile court as a form of discipline—they are using the juvenile justice system as a stand-in for school discipline and the consequences can be dire.

This process of moving disruptive students from the principal’s office to the courthouse is known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.” When young people are criminalized for their behavior in schools, exposed to law enforcement—and the rest of the criminal justice system—at an early age, they become more likely to interact with the criminal justice system down the line.

A 2009 study from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville found that students in schools with officers were almost three times more likely to be arrested.

The response to heavy-handed discipline is often that some of today’s students require extreme means to conform. Teachers and administrators lament an increase in disrespect, disruption and defiance in the classroom, even among the youngest students. But does handcuffing students bring about the school’s intended result?

Research on the subject suggests no. Harsh discipline, including arrest, may actually do more harm than good. According to Dr. Kathryn Seifert, in Psychology Today, “physical force as a form of discipline rocks a child’s world and breeds a general distrust for adults and authority figures. It may also teach children that the use of force is the best way to settle disputes; in other words, aggression breeds more aggression.”

Karol Mason, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told ABC News, “There are a lot of studies that talk about the effect of trauma on child development and arresting a 7-year-old, putting them in handcuffs and taking them out of school, that’s trauma and trauma disrupts normal development,” Mason said. “Is this child going to definitely wind up in the criminal justice system? No. But are you increasing the likelihood that it could happen because of this? Yes.”

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 at @MatthewTMangino.

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Judge strikes down Pittsburgh gun ordinance

An Allegheny County judge struck down Pittsburgh’s controversial gun control ordinances, ruling the city is prohibited by state law from regulating firearms, reported the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Common Pleas Judge Joseph James issued a five-page opinion granting three Second Amendment rights groups and three individuals a summary judgment that declared the ordinances illegal.

The city vowed to appeal.

Pittsburgh City Council in April approved three bills signed by Mayor Bill Peduto. One would ban possession and use of certain semiautomatic weapons, including assault rifles. A second would ban the use of ammunition and accessories, such as large capacity magazines capable of holding 10 rounds or more of ammunition. A third bill, dubbed “extreme risk protection,” would permit courts to temporarily remove guns from a person deemed to be a public threat.

“The city and its outside legal counsel have always expected this would be a long legal fight and will continue to fight for the right to take common sense steps to prevent future gun violence,” said Peduto spokesman Tim McNulty.

Three organizations — Firearm Owners Against Crime, Firearm Policy Coalition Inc. and Firearm Policy Foundation — along with Matthew Boardley, Saadyah Averick and Fred Rak, sued seeking to overturn the ordinances.

James ruled that state law preempted the bills.

“Despite the city’s efforts to avoid the specific preemption set forth in the (act) they are not able to avoid the obvious intent of the Legislature to preempt this entire field,” he wrote.

Josh Prince, an attorney with Berks County-based Civil Rights Defense Firm, which represented the plaintiffs, said his clients were prepared to pursue the case “as far as necessary.”

“We’re very pleased with the decision rendered by Judge James, and we’ll wait to see if the city will appeal,” he said.

“I believe all the organizations and plaintiffs involved are prepared to take it as far as necessary to ensure that their rights are not violated.”

Pittsburgh, which is being represented at no charge by attorneys from Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization that advocates against gun violence, along with its Law Department, agreed in May to postpone enforcement of the ordinances until the court cases are resolved.

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Catholic Bishops: Change Canon Law and allow ordination of married men

A summit of Roman Catholic bishops meeting at the Vatican recommended that Pope Francis allow the ordination of married men as priests in the Amazon region, that would change a roughly 1,000-year-old canon law and potentially revolutionize the priesthood, reported the New York Times.

It is the first time a grouping of bishops convened by a pope has endorsed such a historic change to the tradition of a celibate priesthood. The proposal is limited to remote areas of South America where there is a scarcity of priests but could set a precedent for easing the restriction on married priests throughout the world.

If Francis, who has already signaled an openness on the issue, accepts the bishops’ recommendation, he will turn the remote areas of the Amazon region into a laboratory for a Catholic Church looking to the global south for its future, with married priests and indigenous rites mixing with traditional liturgy.

The pope is expected to respond to the proposals by the end of this year.

The final document of the summit, noting that many of the faithful in the Amazon region have “enormous difficulties” in receiving communion and seeing a priest, proposed to “ordain priests suitable and esteemed men of the community,” who had already had “fruitful” experiences as deacons and who “receive an adequate formation for the priesthood, having a legitimately constituted and stable family.”

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Forensic genealogy has expanded the reach of law enforcement

DNA databases are not new. Since the U.S. DNA Identification Act of 1994, law enforcement agencies around the country have been collecting and searching the DNA of missing people, convicted felons and from crime scene evidence, reported the ABA Journal.

Some states also collect DNA from those arrested on felony and misdemeanor charges. These datasets are stored in the FBI-operated Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. California has its own similar statewide system, which as of 2009 includes the DNA of those arrested on any felony charge.

With these databases, law enforcement can run DNA against them to find matches or generate leads. With rare exceptions, CODIS was not developed to assist in the investigation of a family tree. Now, private companies have changed the game and expanded the data pool to include people with no criminal histories and looped in extended family members with no knowledge that they are in a perpetual genetic lineup.

These private databases have been around since at least 2000, which is when direct-to-consumer sales of the DNA tests began. Led by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, the products let customers—through a mouth swab or spit—receive raw and analyzed data about their DNA. These companies collect more genetic markers than CODIS, including height, geographic ancestry or whether an individual carries a genetic disease or is a product of incest.

Once in possession of their DNA data, consumers can upload it to websites like GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, which allow for people and law enforcement to search for missing relatives or suspects.

“You’re reverse-engineering a family tree,” says Leah Larkin, a genealogist and founder of The DNA Geek, which helps people find missing relatives. “It’s a lot like putting a puzzle together.”

Not just built on DNA, this technique includes public documents, news clippings, social media and other documents to re-create a family tree.

Through their growth in popularity over the last decade, DNA testing companies boasted 26 million users as of the end of 2018, according to the MIT Technology Review. Today, the databases are so robust that 60% of Americans with European ancestry are identifiable from DNA within these databases, according to research published in Science in 2018. That number is expected to jump to 90% in just a few years, researchers say.

This increased data pool has opened up a new avenue for law enforcement and genealogists to find fresh leads for investigations that long ago went cold, which also brought increased attention.

“Since the Golden State Killer case broke, it’s been an ongoing wildfire of media interest and public interest,” says Larkin, who does not take criminal genealogy cases for ethical reasons related to informed consent and government overreach. “Genetic genealogy was a sleepy little backwater hobby prior to that.”

Larkin is referencing the April 2018 arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo—the “Golden State Killer”—who was charged with eight counts of murder related to a prolific number of rapes, murders and burglaries committed in California between 1976 and 1986. With prosecutors seeking the death penalty, the trial is ongoing.

High-profile or not, forensic genealogy is used to develop leads to investigate a person and has so far not been used to generate probable cause warrants, which makes the technique hard to challenge in court.

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Pennsylvania a leader in criminalizing drug deliveries resulting in death

Pennsylvania prosecutors can charge people with “drug delivery resulting in death” (DDRD) if they give or sell an illicit substance to someone who dies because of using it. DDRD is a first-degree felony that carries a sentence of up to 40 years in prison. Charging someone with this can also make it easier for prosecutors to obtain a conviction on other charges; its harsh sentences provide them leverage during plea negotiations, reported The Appeal.

Drug-induced homicide charges have rapidly increased since 2011, according to data collected by the Health In Justice Action Lab, a project of the Northeastern University School of Law. The lab found 23 cases total between 1974 and 2000, less than 100 a year through 2011, and exponential growth since: 326 in 2015, 495 in 2016, and 717 in 2017.

But this legislative change also speaks to the importance of DAs and their associations. The Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association lobbied for the 2011 reform, asking lawmakers “to remove that malice requirement.” Other prosecutors demanded statutory changes elsewhere. Expanding prosecutors’ ability to charge people with drug-induced homicide was a priority for the Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys this year, for instance. Madeline Singas, the Democratic DA of New York’s Nassau County, wrote draft legislation to the same effect. 

With 49 Pennsylvania counties electing their DAs this year, the surge of homicide prosecutions could have been a core issue up for debate. The same goes for New York, home to 25 DA elections this year, and where prosecutors have also somewhat frequently charged people with homicide in the aftermath of an overdose. I have identified few counties where this has played out, though.

One candidate ruled out homicide charges, and three shared concerns

The Political Report contacted DA candidates running in the nine Pennsylvania counties and two New York counties with contested elections this year that have prosecuted at least six people for drug-induced homicide, based on the Health In Justice Action Lab’s data.

Across these eleven counties, only one candidate ruled out ever charging someone with homicide in the aftermath of an overdose.

It just so happens that this one candidate is running in Lancaster, the Pennsylvania county that has used this approach more frequently than any other county nationwide. 

“We must prioritize treatment over punishment, and DDRD laws prioritize punishment over healing,” Hobie Crystle, the Democratic nominee in the Nov. 5 election, said in a statement emailed via a spokesperson. “That approach sends folks into the shadows. We need light and air to heal, so my office will not pursue DDRD charges. Period.” Crystle said DAs have other tools than homicide at their disposal to hold “profiteers who have caused a death” accountable. “We can punish peddlers of poison severely enough using regular drug delivery laws, without involving the families and loved ones of those who succumb to their illness,” he said.

Crystle’s stance sets up a potentially stark policy shift in Lancaster given the office’s current policies. Steadman, the Republican incumbent, is not seeking re-election. Heather Adams, the Republican nominee and a former prosecutor who now works as a criminal defense lawyer, did not answer multiple requests for comment. The Political Report could not identify her stance from her website or other reporting. Adams and Crystle have publicly disagreed on other issues such as the death penalty, which Adams supports and Crystle opposes.

Three other candidates shared their discomfort with drug-induced homicide prosecutions. 

In Pennsylvania, Lisa Middleman (an independent in Allegheny County) and Jack Stollsteimer (the Democratic nominee in Delaware County) expressed concern that DDRD charges are used excessively against people with addiction issues and people who shared their drugs in the context of using them. Shani Curry Mitchell, the Democratic nominee in New York’s Monroe County (Rochester), said she saw no deterrent effect in drug-induced homicide prosecutions, and worried about the racial disparities in their use.

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