A recent article in the Georgetown Law Review argues that the consequences of having a criminal record can outstrip any penalty imposed by criminal law, and that fact gives prosecutors additional power – effectively serving as substitutes for a criminal conviction, as a source of leverage, as a way to circumvent the requirements of criminal procedure, as a means of achieving deterrence or retribution, or as a way to promote their own public policy preferences.

The title says it all. An excellent article by San Francisco Public Defender Jennifer Johnson about the challenge at the heart of criminal justice reform.

The Boston Globe “Spotlight” team takes on the failures of the mental health care system in a recent article, succinctly titled “Families failed by a broken mental health care system often have no one to call but police.” The article focusses on issues around suicide, and “suicide by cop” incidents, and points out that in Massachusetts, where the suicide rate has long been lower than in most other states, the total number of suicides per year grew 47 percent from 2003 to 2012, from 424 to 624. Most occurred in a mental heath care vacuum: Two-thirds of Massachusetts residents who killed themselves in 2012 weren’t receiving any treatment, according to the Department of Public Health, though multiple studies have found that 88 to 90 percent of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable and potentially treatable mental condition.

An excellent article in the Denver Post discusses the political struggle to deal with juveniles sentenced to LWOP in adult court before Montgomery v. Louisiana, where the Supreme Court ruled in 2012  that those sentenced as teenagers to mandatory life imprisonment for murder must have a chance to argue that they should be released from prison. (Described here). The Denver Post examines both the politics and the personal costs for the prisoners, now adults, and the families of the victims.

The “Fair Punishment Project” has published a report on the relationship between individual prosecutors and the frequency and validity of death penalty convictions in particular jurisdictions in the US. Titled “How Overzealous Personalities Drive The Death Penalty,” the report concludes:

A former federal prosecutor dissects the “culture”of prosecution and the dangers of seeing the constitutional rights of suspects and defendants as barriers to justice in “Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor.” :

“American criminal procedure, as developed during the four-decade retreat from the Warren Court’s recognition of defendants’ rights, encourages prosecutors to argue that rights are irrelevant. The argument goes by genteel names like “harmless error” and “lack of prejudice” and “immaterial,” and it is omnipresent in modern criminal procedure. As a prosecutor, it was my job on dozens of occasions to invoke those doctrines to assert that even if defendants’ rights were violated, those violations didn’t matter.

Take search warrants, for example. Under most circumstances, the Fourth Amendment requires police to get a warrant before they make forcible entry to your home search it. May police officers lie to a magistrate to get that warrant, or deliberately omit information that contradicts the evidence they offer? No, says the Supreme Court—that would violate your rights. But the violation only has a remedy if the lie is material—that is, if the warrant application, stripped of the lie or supplemented with the deceitfully omitted information, would no longer be enough to support probable cause. If you identify a lie that’s immaterial, you’re not even entitled to a hearing on whether it’s a lie in the first place.

So when a defendant discovers that law enforcement agents have lied to get a warrant, a prosecutor has every incentive to argue that the lie didn’t matter, that the evidence was strong enough without it to get the warrant. The prosecutor will be making this argument in the context of a search that did turn up incriminating evidence (the defendant wouldn’t be making the argument if it didn’t), which tends to bias judges towards upholding searches. After all, the judge thinks—wasn’t the cop’s suspicion proved right? Moreover, probable cause—the proof necessary to support a warrant—is a very relaxed and inherently subjective standard, requiring only a “fair probability” that evidence will be found. The practical effect is that law enforcement can lie in warrant applications with relative impunity, and it’s a prosecutorial duty to think of ways to explain how those lies are irrelevant.

On the other hand, prosecutors are encouraged to think differently about lies by mere civilians. If federal agents lie about you to a magistrate to get a search warrant, the question is whether the lie did actually make a difference. But if you lie to federal agents, the standard is far less forgiving. The materiality of a false statement to the federal government is measured by whether it is the sort of statement that could hypothetically have influenced the government’s decision-making, not whether it actually did. Thus prosecutors are trained to treat defendants’ wrongdoing harshly and government wrongdoing leniently.”

In the appropriately named “The Desperate and the Dead” series, the Boston Globe “Spotlight” team examines the collapse of the mental health care services system in Massachusetts, here. The article summarizes:

“Indeed, family members are often all that stand between seriously mentally ill people and disaster — making sure they keep appointments, take their medications, and have a place to stay, while remaining vigilant for the next crisis. At the same time, thousands of those without family members to stand by them are relegated to streets, shelters, prisons, and county jails. They crowd emergency room wards and hallways.

This is, of course, not just a state but a national crisis. However, it is worse here than most would imagine. Massachusetts spends less per capita on mental health care than any other New England state except Rhode Island, and much less than some states of comparable means and politics — such as New York, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study. By this and other critical measures, Massachusetts has forfeited the leadership it once was known for in mental health care.”

As part of a shift in strategy on providing mental health services, San Diego County has adopted a new “housing first” policy. The program, dubbed Project One for All, uses a “housing first model” where, as the name suggests, people who are living on the street or in shelters are first provided long-term housing and then comprehensive care to treat their mental illness and other issues. It’s the first time that the county has used this approach to address this population.

An internal New York Police Dept. report released this week suggests that “broken window” policing – the theory that cracking down on petty crimes like vandalism and public urination will generate an atmosphere of lawfulness that then prevents more serious crime – does not work:

“The new report, released Wednesday by NYPD’s watchdog inspector general, finds no evidence that huge crack-downs on low-level “quality-of-life” incidents decrease felony crimes.

That study directly contradicts a report by Bratton’s NYPD last year that claims the exact opposite — that quality-of-life policing was responsible for fewer felony crimes in New York.

Wednesday’s report — by DOI Commissioner Mark Peters and NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure — takes direct aim at the “broken windows” policy that Bratton famously began pushing in the 1990s. Their report notes the cost of that policy “in police time, in an increase of the number of people brought into the criminal justice system and, at times, in a fraying of the relationship between the police and the communities they serve.”

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Lack of adequate representation continues to be a serious issue in juvenile court in 2016, according to the National Juvenile Defender Center. In the same article summarizing a recent conference on “Children and the Law” at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The conference also highlighted the drop in incarceration rates for juveniles, with a sharp decline in youth incarceration  matched by the shutdown of juvenile detention facilities around the country. Some 52 such facilities were closed between 2007 and 2011.