#cut50  is a national bipartisan effort to reduce America’s incarcerated population by 50 percent over the next 10 years. More than two million people are behind bars in the United States, which is close to 1 out of every 100 Americans, at a cost of $80 billion every year. Reliance on overly long sentences and tough on crime policies is both morally indefensible and economically unjustifiable. The statistical reality:

More than 70 million people living with some type of criminal record.
23 million bear the label “convicted felon”
5 million children have at least one incarcerated parent
2.2 million people in prisons and jails
$80 billion per year spent on prisons

The idea behind #cut50 is to foster connections between the expertise of criminal justice reform organizations and the media – and other influencers:

“By humanizing the narrative and pursuing transformative legislation, #cut50 is uniting the political machine of Washington DC, the financial reach of Wall Street, the innovation of Silicon Valley, and the cultural dominance of Hollywood to roll back the incarceration industry.”

From the Sentencing Project:

Florida: there is a new House bill to amend the state Constitution that would and automatically restore voting rights to Floridians with felony convictions three years after they have completed their sentence. If passed, the constitutional amendment would be placed on the next general election ballot. This is at the same time as a proposed constitutional amendment by Floridians for a Fair Democracy that would automatically restore voting rights on completion of an individual’s sentence, which is up for hearing this month in the Florida Supreme Court.

Florida is one of only four states in the nation – along with Virginia, Iowa and

Kentucky – there has been a 68% increase in disenfranchised Kentuckians since 2006
Over 300,000 Kentuckians are barred from voting due to a felony conviction, according to a recent report by the League of Women Voters (LWV).

Kentucky has the third highest felony disenfranchisement rate in the country, with one of every 11 adults disenfranchised. And the state has the highest rate for African Americans (26.2%—more than triple the national rate), with one in four disenfranchised. More than 92% of Kentucky’s disenfranchised population is not incarcerated, including 78% who have fully completed their sentence.
Virginia:  A Senate bill to limit governor’s power to restore voting rights has been blocked in the House
Mississippi:  A Bill to study changes to state disenfranchisement laws unanimously passes House but dies in Senate.
Nebraska: Half of state counties give misinformation on how people regain voting rights.

For the moment, its still a “voluntary” request, as this article from The Atlantic points out – referring to Customs and Border Protection agents requesting ID from passengers deplaning on an SFO to JFK flight. As the author, Garrett Epps of the University of Baltimore Law School, points out, “voluntary” in legalese does not mean what ordinary people think it means. Supreme Court caselaw makes clear that officers may block an exit and ask for ID or permission to search. They aren’t required to tell the individual stopped that he or she may refuse: “while most citizens will respond to a police request, the fact that people do so, and do so without being told they are free not to respond, hardly eliminates the consensual nature of the response.”

Epps concludes: “Justice William O. Douglas once wrote that a regime of liberty includes “freedom from bodily restraint or compulsion, freedom to walk, stroll, or loaf.” A shadow is falling over that freedom, both for aliens and for citizens. Its loss will be devastating.”

Prosecutorial misconduct is rarely the subject of formal discipline, but the California State Bar recently moved to discipline former LA County DA Carmen Trutanich for failing to disclose eyewitness information to the defense in a 1985 murder trial. The disciplinary action follows a ruling last year where a a federal judge threw out the conviction and death sentence, ruling that Trutanich’s “deeply troubling” behavior during that case had deprived Barry Williams, a South L.A. gang member, of a fair trial.

In that case, Jerome Dunn was shot and killed on a street in South Los Angeles by someone in a passing van. Patricia Lewis, who was a passenger in a car driving nearby, was the only eyewitness to testify.At the trial, Lewis identified Williams as the van’s driver and said she saw him, not others in the van, fire at Dunn, but she also lied on the stand about the identity of the person who was driving her, giving a fake name to protect her friend, Arlean McKay, who was afraid of getting involved.

The judge found that Trutanich was aware of the deception before and during the trial – in notes, Trutanich wrote both McKay’s name and the fake name Lewis made up, next to each other and in quotation marks — which the judge said indicated Trutanich knew there were doubts about the woman’s actual identity. However, he did not provide this information to the defense.

The Miami Herald reports the Florida Senate Criminal Justice Committee has unanimously passed  SB 290, which would end minimum mandatory sentences for nonviolent offenses. The measure represents a major shift from the tough-on-crime bills of the last two decades that filled prisons and created what both liberals and conservatives now believe has been a subclass of lifers in jail and a waste of tax money.

The “prison diversion bill” would save the state $131 million in avoided costs and put 1,001 fewer people in jail, said Sen. Daryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, the bill’s sponsor. Judges would no longer be bound by 118 minimum mandatory sentences in Florida law. It also restores the Florida Sentencing Commission, which existed from 1982 to 1997, but limits its scope to determining the severity ranking that adds points to an offender’s record based on certain offenses. Anyone who commits a violence offense, is not eligible for the court’s leniency.

“We are in an interesting juncture in our society and the Legislature, where Democrats and Republicans in both chambers agree that it’s really time to look at our criminal justice system and start to make some reforms,” said Sen. Randolph Bracy, D-Orlando, chairman of the committee.

The Supreme Court rules in favor of a student with a disability and her family, holding that the parents do not need to exhaust administrative procedures before suing a school district with a claim of disability discrimination.

The Fry case was brought by the parents of a Michigan grade school student with cerebral palsy who wanted their daughter to be able to bring her service dog Wonder to school. Wonder is trained to help the student with many life activities, including helping her pick up dropped items and assisting with balance when she uses her walker. After the school refused to allow Wonder at school, the parents filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging disability discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Lower courts dismissed the case because they considered the Frys’ claims educational in nature, and so held they were required to file an administrative IDEA complaint and pursue it to its conclusion – in other words, to “exhaust” the administrative process.

The Supreme Court said no, discrimination claims, such as those asserting rights to equal access to public programs or services under the ADA and Section 504, can be brought directly in court even when such claims arise in schools. The Court held that parents need not use the IDEA administrative process and exhaust IDEA claims when the crux, or “gravamen,” of their complaint does not involve the failure to provide the student a free and appropriate public education (FAPE). Even if the alleged discrimination occurs in a school setting, in non-FAPE cases parents may go directly to court to protect the student’s rights.

Former Federal Judge Shira A. Scheindlin offers some thoughts on sentencing and mandatory minimums in a recent Washington Post op-ed. Its no surprise that judges don’t like mandatory sentences, but Judge Scheindlin took the time to look at the data from her own sentencing history:

“After I left the bench, Peter Dubrowski — my last law clerk — and I decided that we would review the sentencing protocols for each of those 200 [drug case] defendants. As I expected, we found strikingly similar storylines. The overwhelming majority of the defendants were indigent. Seventy-two percent had children to support, and many of the defendants were under the age of 25 — barely adults themselves. More than half had not graduated from high school, most had not obtained a GED, and barely 5 percent had attended college. A majority battled alcohol addiction, drug addiction or both, and had begun abusing substances by age 14. Most were unemployed. Most came from single-parent homes, and most had at least one parent who was, or had been, incarcerated.

These common characteristics suggested that the defendants needed a brand of justice that would allow them to get their lives back on track, rather than deprive them of future jobs, roles supporting their families and chances to become productive in their communities. The right punishments would have given them a chance to achieve those goals. But many of the defendants in my courtroom were charged with crimes requiring a mandatory minimum sentence. As with Fabre, there was nothing I could do other than impose the required term.”

Juvenile Court magistrate Jean Pierre Rosenczvieg of Bobigny, a suburb of Paris, discusses efforts to lower the age of criminal responsibility in France from 18 to 16 in this blog post in Le Monde. Rosenczvieg rebuts the proposal by Nikolas Sarkozy, made  as part of his current presidential campaign, pointing to facts that should sound familiar to us here in the US: the crime rate is falling, not rising; there are adequate penal consequences for all ages in existing law; the “super predator” concept of more mature criminals at younger ages has been debunked; and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (of which France is a signatory) prohibits it.

…about the lies from the President: per Charlie Sykes, it is the corrosive influence of years of criticism of the mainstream press from conservative media. Sykes argues in his NY Times op-ed that the cumulative effect of attacking the perceived bias and double standards of mainstream journalism was to delegitimize those outlets and “essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information.” Instead of creating  a more skeptical audience, Sykes argues, the conservative news strategy (of which Sykes himself was a part) created an audience that could be easily misled – and opened the door for President Trump

Sykes’ takeaway is prescient: the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.

Two new books discussing Bard College’s prison education initiative: College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration by Daniel Karpowitz, and Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, are reviewed in this article in the New York Review of Books. The article documents how few college-in-prison programs there are in the US, and looks at the background of increasingly punitive views of criminal justice over the past several decades, coupled with a simultaneous drop in public commitment to higher education:

“Since the 1960s, America has incarcerated more people—and for longer periods of time—than at any time in its history, and more than any other nation on earth. Many criminals were seen as beyond rehabilitation, so the only seemingly reasonable thing to do was to lock them up for many years. And even as states and the federal government plowed more money into prisons, they cut funds for colleges and universities. They also slashed student aid, shifting the cost burden from grants to loans—that is, from public to private hands. The imprisoning widened, and the educational state withered.”