Art collector Agnes Gund recently sold her 1962 Roy Lichtenstein “Masterpiece” for $165 million, among the 15 highest known prices ever paid for an artwork, and used the proceeds to to create a fund that supports criminal justice reform and seeks to reduce mass incarceration in the United States.

The Art for Justice Fund — to be announced Monday at the Museum of Modern Art, where Ms. Gund is president emerita — will start with $100 million of the proceeds from the Lichtenstein.

Former Dallas Police Chief David Brown is publishing a book, Called To Rise, detailing his 33-year-career in law enforcement and suggesting directions for the next generation of policing. In an interview with The Crime Report, Chief Brown discusses criminal justice reform:

“I understand how people may not get it initially, including people who are policy makers. I [came] into the profession without a full range of knowledge and experience on what the shortcomings of traditional policing does to the community. I fully understand, for example, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wanting to revert (to tough sentencing guidelines). He doesn’t have that experience, so it just seems like the way to fight crime is to just lock people up. We know through research and experience that we weren’t any safer when we are in a “lock them up, tough-on-crime culture.” But human nature sometimes drives us to make decisions not based on facts. People generally sense that if you put a bad guy in jail, they’ll be safer, when that is absolutely not the case.

You have to find a way to peel back the layers, and find root causes, and mitigate the root causes where they occur, whether that’s mental illness, drug addiction, job training, opportunities in the community, or economic development. You have to find those root causes to have a really clean sense of what would make us safer, what impacts these communities. We criminalize poverty, we criminalize mental illness, we criminalize drug addiction, and those are treatable things that we can resolve with policy. Handcuffs are not the solution.”

The Nevada legislature passed two laws last week designed to counter prosecutorial misconduct – or at least give some defendants the ability to undo suspect plea agreements. Unfortunately, one was substantially gutted under pressure from prosecutors and police.

The bill that passed after being substantially watered down was AB376. If passed as originally drafted, it could have exacted penalties for the misconduct like withholding evidence, requiring prosecutors to share evidence with the defense 30 days prior to trial or risk exclusion, broadening the scope of favorable evidence they are required to share and mandating that courts dismiss charges when prosecutors showed bad faith in failing to turn evidence over. After objections from prosecutors and police, all that survived was a requirement that prosecutors press charges within 72 hours against defendants in custody.

Another bill allowing certain defendants to undo plea agreements, supported by prosecutors, also passed and was signed into law by the governor.

Slate has published an interesting dialogue between Judges Posner and Rakoff on issues of truth and justice in a world of “alternative facts.” Some of the comments:

Rakoff:  “Discovering the truth is, of course, often difficult. To give just one example, one of the most common reasons for false convictions is inaccurate eyewitness identifications. These eyewitnesses—who powerfully point a finger at a defendant and declare that that is the person they saw commit the crime—are almost always trying to tell the truth as best they remember it. But for reasons that have more to do with limitations of human perception and memory than of bad police practices or subjective biases, their identifications are often wrong. Thus, no fewer than 72 percent of the more than 340 persons exonerated by the Innocence Project were convicted on the basis, in part, of inaccurate eyewitness identification.”

“[T]he Fifth Amendment privilege is one of the few remaining limitations on prosecutorial overreach. In the typical criminal case, the prosecutor has been able to prepare his case well in advance of indictment while the defendant has few, if any, investigative tools at her disposal. The only advantage she has is the ability to remain silent. Then, after indictment, the defendant receives very little in the way of discovery and is typically facing, under current law, lengthy imprisonment if she is convicted. As a result, she faces tremendous pressure to plead guilty; and in fact, the defendant does so in 97 percent of all cases (including a fair number of cases in which the defendant is in fact innocent but prefers to plea bargain for a lesser sentence than she would face if convicted at trial). But if she is innocent and wants to go to trial, the only remaining advantage she has is that, at the trial, the government will have to prove her guilt by independent evidence rather than by attacking as “incredible” whatever she might say in her defense if forced to testify. This is more than simply a tactical advantage: It is the one remaining respect in which the government is actually “put to its proof”—that is, obliged to come forward with independent evidence of guilt.”