A survey of victims of violent crime by the Alliance for Safety and Justice found that the overwhelming majority of crime victims believe that the criminal justice system relies too heavily on incarceration, and strongly prefer investments in treatment and prevention to more spending on prisons and jails. By two-to-one, victims said the criminal justice system should focus more on rehabilitating people who commit crimes, as opposed to punishing them. By similar margins, the victims preferred shorter prison sentences over keeping criminals incarcerated “as long as possible.”

A bill that would make certain types of prosecutorial misconduct a felony passed out of committee yesterday. The bill, AB1909, is in significant part a response to recent events in Orange County, where accusations by defense attorneys that Orange County prosecutors and police illegally use jailhouse snitches and regularly withhold information favorable to the defense resulted in the removal of the  Orange County District Attorney’s Office from the penalty phase trial of Scott Dekraai, who murdered eight people at a Seal Beach salon in 2011. That decision is being appealed by the state Attorney General’s Office, which inherited the case.

You can follow the bill’s progress here.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder speaks out on the issue of mandatory minimum sentencing in today’s NY Times. The gist:

“The nation’s lawmakers must stiffen their spines, ignore divisive language and schedule votes in this congressional session on reform legislation. An opportunity like this comes once in a generation. We must not miss it.”

The Treatment Advocacy Center has published a report on the perspective of county jail staff members on inmates with serious mental illness in their charge. The findings:

Adam Liptak of the NY Times analyzes the weakness of representation for criminal defendants whose cases reach the US Supreme Court. The primary factor, according to Liptak, is vanity: lawyers in those very rare cases that make it to the Court don’t want to pass the once-in-a-lifetime chance to argue there, and so most are by definition inexperienced.

Lipton cites another difficulty facing criminal defendants in the Supreme Court: Six of the eight members of the current court have worked in prosecutors’ offices. Four of them served in the Justice Department; Justice Clarence Thomas was an assistant attorney general of Missouri; and Justice Sotomayor was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. Should the Senate confirm President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick B. Garland, the court would gain a former Justice Department official who supervised the prosecutions of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber.With Judge Garland on the court, the justices would have a total of 36 years of prosecutorial experience, the most in at least four decades.

The NY Times examines the disappearance of jury trials in the Southern District of NY – where there were only 50 in 2015. Nationally, 97% of cases are resolved by plea, compared to 81% in 1980. Legal experts attribute the decline primarily to the increased power of prosecutors, resulting largely from sentencing guidelines and the increased use of mandatory minimum sentences, as well as overcriminalization – the result of which is to  discourage defendants from going to trial, where, if convicted, they might face incredibly harsh sentences.

John Thompson, a Louisiana man who spent 18 years in prison after the prosecutor in his case withheld exonerating evidence, has filed a complaint with the Justice Department seeking a federal investigation of that prosecutor, John Williams. The complaint alleges “a pervasive and unapologetic pattern of unethical improper conduct” perpetrated by Williams and his colleagues at the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office.

Thompson served 18 years, most of them in the notoriously violent Angola Penitentiary after being found guilty of a murder he did not commit. He spent 14 of those years on death row until — weeks before one of his seven proposed execution dates — a team of pro bono lawyers discovered that prosecutors led by Williams had failed to disclose blood samples from the scene of the crime at Thompson’s original trial. Those samples showed that the perpetrator had type B blood. Thompson has type O blood. Eventually Thompson was granted a retrial and, in 2003, a jury took 30 minutes to find him not guilty.

Thompson went on to sue the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office for failure to train its prosecutors and won a jury award of $14 million — one for each year he spent on death row — only to have that verdict overturned by a controversial 5–4 U.S. Supreme Court decision. While prosecutors conceded they had withheld evidence supporting Thompson’s likely innocence, the court held that the district attorney’s office could not be found civilly liable because the mistake by prosecutors did not stem from a deficiency in training.

A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor examines the practice of “central data collection” by police in Sacramento – a central location from which officers can monitor all their existing surveillance technologies, including 32 surveillance cameras.  equipped to read license plate numbersPODs included.

The idea is that consolidating information about criminal activity – from stalking complaints to potential lone wolf terrorist attacks – would make law enforcement more effective at investigating and perhaps preventing some incidents. The process would also promote accountability and transparency at a time of rising tension between police and the black community, providing evidence of both police and suspect behavior during tense encounters, proponents say.

But the technology raises big privacy issues. The surveillance cameras remind some of the 24/7 monitoring from the dystopia “1984,” and privacy advocates are troubled by the prospect of centralizing law-enforcement data, especially in a post-9/11 world where data is being shared more widely across federal, state, and local lines.

That’s the title of a recent NY Times op/ed piece about sex offender registries, their overuse and abuse. As the Times writer observes:

“The expansion of sex offender laws to include juveniles was based on the assumption that kids who sexually transgress cannot be reformed. However, research has shown this assumption to be false. Only 1 percent to 7 percent of children who commit sexual offenses will do it again — much lower than the 13 percent recidivism rates for adult sexual offenders.

The policy seems to succeed only in making life difficult for offenders, subjecting them to harassment and isolation. Of the more than 500 youth sex offenders whose cases Ms. Pittman examined, about 100 had attempted suicide.”

The National Association for Public Defense examines the debate on criminal justice reform through the lens of the party platforms, and observes that there is no call to provide greater resources for the public defenders, arguably at the heart of any attempt to address the imbalance of power in that system.

Here is the NAPD’s proposed plank:

“We will finally live up to the unfulfilled constitutional mandate to ensure that every person accused of a crime be provided a lawyer with the resources, time, training, experience, and commitment to adequately represent them. As the Supreme Court announced over fifty years ago, the lawyer is the vehicle necessary to ensure justice in our courts. If we truly believe in equal justice, we must ensure that people without means have access to the same quality lawyers that those with means would pay for.

We recognize that until we complete the difficult work of transforming societal values so that we truly embrace the humanity and dignity of every person equally, the best safeguard against the implicit biases that drive those who administer justice is to support public defenders, the men and women tasked with protecting the fundamental rights of our most vulnerable citizens.

Because we understand that even if we change laws, there will continue to be some police, prosecutors, and judges who will abuse their discretion in an effort to punish vulnerable populations they view as dangerous, we must support public defenders who ferret out this abuse and bring it to the attention of courts and policymakers. We recognize that while most of the professionals entrusted with administering justice strive to be fair, there will always be some who are driven by values inconsistent with justice and who are willing to cut corners to achieve those values. Although a minority, their actions have a destructive ripple effect on our system of justice. Public defenders who have adequate resources, training, experience, and support are best positioned to identify these abuses and shine a corrective light on them.

Because we understand that even the best intentioned prosecutors and judges have limited information about the men and women whose fate they control, we must support public defenders who can help decision-makers understand the accused as a whole person. While judges and prosecutors frequently have examined the behavior that led to the arrest, this information paints an incomplete picture of the accused. Without a fuller picture prosecutors and judges are left to act on the assumption that the accused is defined by the worst thing he or she has done. Only through the efforts of a compassionate and prepared lawyer do prosecutors and judges learn about other information necessary to achieve just outcomes. Lawyers are necessary to help the court understand the accused’s background and accomplishments; whether they suffer from mental illness or substance abuse; and a host of information necessary to understand the whole person and to counteract the human instinct to judge based on stereotypes and biases. In this vein we understand that even our best prosecutors and judges cannot deliver just outcomes without good public defenders.

Because we understand that unequal justice in the courts is fueled by a justice narrative that deems some lives as less valuable, and we understand that this is driven by the fact that our most marginalized communities have been rendered voiceless in criminal justice process, we must support public defenders who are tasked with giving voice to over eighty-percent of the people in the criminal justice system. Public defenders who have the time to learn about the individuals and families they represent, and to serve as the vehicle for these populations to be heard throughout a process that has such tremendous impact on their communities, are essential to our commitment to overcome our implicit biases and to begin to treat those in the system with dignity. Until we take the time to understand the humanity of those in the criminal justice system, rather than to treat them in accordance with our subconscious biases, we will not have equal justice. Public defenders are the necessary vehicle for those who mete out justice to gain that understanding.

*****

The criminal justice section of the platform ends with the statement:

We have been inspired by the movements for criminal justice that directly address the discriminatory treatment of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and American Indians to rebuild trust in the criminal justice system.

But these movements are necessary because we do not truly embrace the ideal that all lives matter equally. Our criminal justice system is driven by a value-system that understands some lives as less valuable. Even the best intentioned among those of us who work in the system have internalized this narrative. So if we want to be true to these movements, we better engage in the hard work of changing hearts, in additional to changing laws. We cannot do this in the criminal justice arena without public defenders.”