In 30 states, the police can collect DNA samples from arrestees to compare with national databases, without any finding of guilt. A recent report for the Pew Charitable Trust examines the practice, which on its face might seem to violate basic principles of “innocent until proven guilty.” The Supreme Court doesn’t think so: in 2013 it upheld the practice, saying taking samples at the time of arrest doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. “Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure.” (Maryland v. King, a 5-4 decision with the unusual dissenting group of Scalia, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan)

California Governor Jerry Brown’s new budget asks for $10.6 million to implement Propostion 57, the criminal; justice initiative approved on the ballot this past November.  Scott Kernan, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the governor’s new state budget lays out a primary framework for implementing the reforms in Prop 57, which seeks to reduce the state’s inmate population by giving parole officials greater latitude to offer early release to thousands of prisoners.

“We are in the preliminary stages,” said Kernan, whose agency expects to complete the new package of rules by the required October 2017 deadline. “Proposition 57 is a significant change for this department, and a significant change for the criminal justice system in California.”

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently voted to expand the  department’s Mental Evaluation Teams so they can respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The LA County Sheriff was the first SoCal law enforcement agency to create such teams, and with this new plan will add 25 staff members and  $4.7 million in funding in order to double the number of Mental Evaluation Teams from 10 to 23 and create a “triage help desk” for residents to call during a psychological crisis.

The teams pair deputies with mental health clinicians and respond to calls that require special handling of mentally ill people who are threatening others or being disruptive. The goal is to reduce the use of jail as a de facto mental health treatment facility and send those in need to psychological services rather than custody. Ideally law enforcement contact with individuals with mental illness will then result in connection with treatment rather than cycling in and out of the criminal justice system.

The Supreme Court issued a surprising stay of an Appeals Court order of  special elections in North Carolina  following a finding  that a number of NC state legislative districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. That three-judge court refused to halt the 2016 elections being held under those illegal lines, but ordered the NC legislature to  create a new districting plan to fix the constitutional problems for special elections to be held in 2017.

North Carolina asked the court to stay its own order pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. As that is pending, the state filed an emergency motion with Chief Justice Roberts asking for the Chief or the Court to stay the requirement for a special election, in essence pushing the matter to the 2018 elections and giving the new current legislature the freedom from a new round of redistricting and new elections. That is the request the Supreme Court has granted.

This order could be short-lived: the Court will consider whether to take up the underlying appeal in the case in the next two weeks.

NY Governor Cuomo’s new pardon program is essentially a work-around for the legislature’s failure to act in raising the age of adult criminal responsibility from 16 to 18. Only NY and North Carolina currently charge 16 to 18 year olds as adults. Cuomo announced the program in 2015, for former offenders who committed a nonviolent crime when they were 16 or 17 and have stayed conviction-free for at least 10 years. Anyone convicted of a sex crime does not qualify, and pardons can be withdrawn if the recipient is re-convicted. The first group of 101 pardons was announced this Dec. 30. The governor’s office estimates at least 10,000 people qualify for the program – so far they have received 260 applications.

This month the Supreme Court will hear Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, which centers on the question of what level of educational benefit schools are required to provide to children with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Endrew F. was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In public school though 4th grade, he had an IEP, but he didn’t make much progress and the IEP repeated the same goals from year to year, or gave up on them. In 5th grade, Drew’s parents withdrew him and enrolled him in a private school. The private school developed a behavior intervention plan that worked – since then, Drew has made significant academic progress.Drew’s parents then filed a complaint for reimbursement for the private school tuition with the school district. The District Court and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the parents, finding that  all the school district had to do for Drew was provide education and services that gave him a “merely more than de minimis” benefit – and that Douglas County had done that, even though Drew never met most of his educational goals. Drew and his parents are challenging this decision in the Supreme Court.

The filings and other more detailed case information are here.

Must reading for anyone interested in the criminal justice system (which should, of course, be everyone):the report on Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The report looked at pattern matching forensic disciplines such as bite mark matching, shoe print matching, blood spatter analysis, fingerprint matching and hair fiber analysis. It also looked at DNA testing when investigators find biological material from multiple sources. With the exception of single-source DNA testing, the report found serious deficiencies in all areas of forensics it studied.

As the Washington Post points out in analyzing the report, it is DNA testing that has exposed these other flaws in forensic science, by proving innocence in cases where other forensic “sciences” had argued for guilt. But DNA testing isn’t a panacea; the percentage of all cases in which DNA testing can conclusively prove or disprove guilt is  10 percent at most. The flaws in the system that DNA exposed in those 10 percent of cases logically must persist throughout the system, and likely at about the same rates. If we don’t correct the problems with other forensic disciplines that DNA testing has exposed in those 10 percent of cases, and that the report explores in depth, those problems will continue in the remaining 90 percent of cases.

According to a recent report from the Brennan Center, Florida is one of only three states with a lifetime voting ban for people with felony convictions. That means disenfranchisement for 1.6 million citizens, including 21 percent of the state’s voting-age African Americans.

The report comes as Florida’s Supreme Court considers a grass-roots initiative to put a measure on the 2018 ballot that would restore most of those voting rights. That initiative has surprising support from many in law-enforcement and corrections – evidence from Florida suggests that voting makes criminal behavior less likely.

The report also documents the extent of change in disenfranchisement laws across the country. Over the last two decades, more than 20 states have allowed more people with past convictions to vote, to vote sooner, or to access that right more easily. In 2016, Maryland’s legislature enfranchised more than 40,000 people, Delaware removed financial barriers to rights restoration, and Virginia’s governor committed to restoring voting rights for over 200,000 citizens.

The NY Times reports on winemaking programs in an Italian prison – Lecce Penitentiary, where inmates can learn to be sommeliers. The course is part of a program to teach prisoners new professional skills, as well as to help them develop a connection with the region, Apulia, which is known for its wine made from negroamaro grapes, the DOC Leverano Negroamaro Rosato.

There are other innovative rehabilitation programs, including  a restaurant inside a medium-security prison near Milan in which the waiters and cooks are inmates. But the sommelier class at the Lecce prison is believed to be unique in Italy.

“Of course, sommelier courses can’t be considered a treatment,” said Georgia Zara, the head of a program at the University of Turin that offers a master’s degree in criminological and forensic psychology. “But they do educate inmates and create social interaction, which is very important.”

The classes also offer a “bridge between the jail context and the world outside, so it’s a small investment to reduce the risk of recidivism,” Ms. Zara said.

President Obama addresses criminal justice reform in detail today in a Harvard Law Review commentary, “The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform” (130 Harv. L. Rev. 811). The President says: “We simply cannot afford to spend $80 billion annually on incarceration, to write off the 70 million Americans – that’s almost one in three adults – with a criminal record, to release 600,000 inmates each year without a better program to reintegrate them into society, or to ignore the humanity of 2.2 million men and women currently incarcerated in the United States…”

The commentary addresses the issue of criminal justice reform in 4 parts:

• Part I details the current criminal justice landscape and emphasizes the urgent need for reform. focussing on the seventy million Americans — almost one in three adults — with some form of criminal record.
• Part II covers the Obama administration efforts, including changes to federal charging policies and practices, the administration of federal prisons, and federal policies relating to reentry.
• Part III details the approaches that Presidents can take to promote change at the state and local level, recognizing that the state and local justice systems have a far broader and more pervasive impact than the federal justice system.
• Part IV discusses reforms that Obama feels are supported by broad consensus and could be completed in the near term. These include
  • passing bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation in Congress,
  • adopting commonsense measures to keep firearms out of the hands of those who are a threat to others or themselves,
  • finding better ways to address the opioid abuse,
  • implementing critical reforms to forensic science,
  • improving criminal justice data, and
  • using technology to enhance trust in and the effectiveness of law enforcement.