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 Anyone convicted of a sex crime does not qualify, and pardons can be withdrawn if the recipient is re-convicted.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.

NBC News looks at the practice of “No Contest” pleas required by prosecutors in cases of wrongful conviction: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/end-decades-death-row-inmate-makes-agonizing-choice-n699561. The story focusses on James Dennis, who spent 25 years on death row in a case that was eventually thrown out in part because the prosecution had withheld evidence of innocence from the defense. The prosecutor required Miller to plead no contest to the original charge as a condition not to retry the case. As NBC news reports, the practice is not uncommon in claims of wrongful conviction. It allows prosecutors to keep a conviction without a new trial. The defendant, meanwhile, acknowledges there may be enough evidence for another guilty verdict but can still maintain their innocence.

Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor who runs The National Registry of Exonerations, said the offer of a no-contest plea puts defendants in an agonizing bind. “Typically, when someone has been on death row or general prison population for most of his adult life and is now offered an opportunity to leave prison right away, their family and friends and lawyers … urge them to take the plea and not take a chance,” Gross said. “Quite a few refuse.”

The NY Times reports that the US correctional population decreased in 2015 to the lowest level since 2002, while the overall crime rate continued to drop.  (Data for 2016 will not be available until next year).  The decline is attributable to the federal prison system releasing thousands of nonviolent drug offenders and states reducing prison populations as a cost-saving measure.

In California, for example, Proposition 47 — approved by voters in 2014 — retroactively reduced some drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Other states have offered expanded substance abuse treatment programs, established specialty courts and spent more money on re-entry programs aimed at reducing recidivism.

According to Pew research, while the nation’s imprisonment rate fell by more than 8 percent from 2010 to 2015, violent and property crimes dropped a combined 14.6 percent. In the 10 states with the largest declines in imprisonment (including California, Texas and New Jersey), crime fell by an average of 14.4 percent.

The Washington Post publishes an in-depth examination of search warrant procedure in Washington DC that argues warrants based solely on officers’ “training and experience” were ineffective – that is, the police discovered nothing illegal – 40% of the time. In comparison, warrants for which police do more investigative work appeared to bring better results.

Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, of the nonprofit group D.C.-based Equal Justice Under Law, said warrants that rely on training and experience as justification for a search subject the black community to abusive police intrusion based on flimsy investigative work. In the past two years, he has filed seven civil rights lawsuits in federal court challenging D.C. police’s practice of seeking search warrants based solely on an officer’s training and experience.

“They have turned any arrest anywhere in the city into an automatic search of a home, and that simply cannot be,” said Karakatsanis, who spent three years studying the issue, starting when he worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. “It would work a fundamental change in the balance of power in our society between government agents and individual rights.”

Read “Degrees of Freedom” – a 154-page report from the Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at Berkeley and the Stanford Criminal Justice Center Law on higher education opportunities for current and former prisoners in California. The report profiles existing programs and identifies recommendations for growth and sustainability, highlights challenges and successful strategies, and makes concrete recommendations for future programs.