It is a dramatic legal story….but with a twist. And it’s a hell of a twist having to do with a well-known prosecutor and a stripper.

First, here are the basics:

On Monday, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously that San Quentin inmate Adam Miranda should not have been sentenced to death twenty years ago because senior District Attorney Curt Hazell—and three sitting judges (formerly prosecutors), Judge Lance Ito, San Diego Judge Roger W. Krauel, and Orange County Superior Court Judge Frederick Horn —-either knowingly or accidentally failed to hand over an essential piece of exculpatory evidence—-namely the confession to a related killing by the prosecution’s star witness.

This is complicated case, and Miranda is not a good guy. Here’s how the LA Times explains it in yesterday’s editorial:

[Adam] Miranda is not a sympathetic symbol for abolishing the death penalty. Jurors were presented with a videotape at trial that showed him killing an Eagle Rock convenience store clerk; having committed such a brutal crime, he should never again walk free. But his sentence — death, and not life without parole — was based in part on another killing. The letter found in the prosecutor’s file, but never shared with the defense as required by law and thus never considered by the sentencing jury, contained evidence of another man’s admission to that crime.

In other words, Miranda is a stone killer who deserves life without possibility of parole. But, given the laws of the state, the central issue around which his death sentence was built, was entirely false.

Scarily, it was only the nearly two decades of pro bono digging on the part of entertainment lawyer George Hedges, that got Miranda off death row. Here’s what Hedges told Business Wire:

“We have been through a 20-year struggle to locate evidence the DA’s office intentionally withheld that showed our client did not commit the murder that placed him on death row 26 years ago,” said Mr. Hedges. “The case reveals an outrageous miscarriage of justice.”

“It took us years to force the DA’s office to turn over the Miranda files, and there in the back of one of the files was an envelope containing a confession to the murder by the star witness the prosecutors used to condemn our client to death,” added Mr. Bensinger. “It shows just how corrupt the system is. Without an all-out legal assault our client would have been put to death years ago for a crime he didn’t commit.”

And if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the twist to the story:

The main witness in Miranda’s murder trial (the murder for which he was righteously convicted), was a woman named Donna Navarro who was working as a stripper at the time of the trial, but who happened in on the scene of the crime, and had the courage to come forward in order to testify to what she saw.
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Another of the talented LA Weekly writers who’ve migrated elsewhere in the past year is Jeffrey Anderson. Jeff is an emblematic example of that much too rare breed, the crusading reporter. He has great street instincts, lives to afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted and rarely meets a wrong he doesn’t long to right. (While at the Weekly, he wrote about, among other topics, political corruption in Bell Gardens and Cudahy.)

Now Jeff lives in Baltimore and works for the town’s LA Weekly equivalent, the City Paper.

Earlier this year, I posted links to Jeff’s three-part series that connected dots in the LA-Baltimore drug connection,

Now, Jeff and his colleagues have been working on an investigative series that feels like it’s pulled straight from The Wire. This look at Baltimore’s shadow world involves the nexus of drug trafficking, respectable business and local politics.

Jeff sent me a link to the latest in the series yesterday. It’s an intriguing tale that makes for great reading and likely has many more chapters yet to come. But it’s scary stuff for any reporter to dig into, especially when one is working for the alternative weekly, not the town’s Tribune-owned, lawyer-heavy paper of record.

Here are the links to the pieces of the story thus far so you can follow along, and cheer Jeff on as he continues to dig.

1. Flight Connections

2. One Angry Man

And from yesterday...

3. Grave Accusations.…. in which a now dead prosecutor calls a local business man a “violent drug dealer.” (This last one’s by Jeff’s colleague, Van Smith.)

Photo above of murdered Baltimore-based Federal Prosecutor Jonathan Luna

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Today, the US Supreme Court voted in the much-watched case of Baze v. Reese that lethal injection doesn’t violate the eighth amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

This means that California’s executions will likely start up again. (The LA Times covers the CA angle here. . I blogged in detail about the issue here and here.)

BUT….and this is a BIG but……instead of the usual majority/minority written opinions explaining the SCOTUS POV on the Kentucky-originated case, the justices wrote an astonishing seven separate opinions, so complex were their reactions to a moral/legal issue that is anything but cut and dried.

Legal experts are already madly opining that this unusual splintering of opinion, rather than settling the matter, will blow the issue open to further court challenges.

Here’s what the McClatchy folks had to say:

“Capital punishment is constitutional,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said Thursday morning in announcing the opinion, “so there must be a means of implementing it.”

But with justices filing an extraordinary seven separate opinions, and with no one conclusion gaining a majority, the complicated case, Baze v. Rees, tinkers with rather than concludes the larger death-penalty controversy.

“I assumed that our decision would bring the debate about lethal injection as a method of execution to a close,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote. “It now seems clear that it will not.”

The New York Times has one of the best follow-up pieces featuring quotes from other Supremes.

“The question of whether a similar three-drug protocol may be used in other states remains open and may well be answered differently in a future case on the basis of a more complete record,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas said “today’s decision is sure to engender more litigation” because “we have left the states without a bright-line rule.”

[SNIP]

Justice Stevens urged states to consider abandoning one of the three chemicals, the paralyzing drug that would leave an unsedated inmate conscious but unable to move, breathe or cry out. The justices in the plurality said the drug, pancuronium bromide, made executions more dignified and faster, interests Justice Stevens dismissed as inadequate.

“States wishing to decrease the risk that future litigation will delay executions or invalidate their protocols would do well to reconsider their continued use of pancuronium bromide,” Justice Stevens wrote.

“Opponents of the death penalty said the decision was little more than a road map for more litigation,” writes Adam Liptak for the NY Times. “’I think it opens the door,’ said Elizabeth Semel, the director of the death penalty clinic at the University of California Berkeley.”

Expect some of those challenges to come from California.

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650,000 Americans are paroled from prison each year. Within 12 months, around half will be back behind bars.

Yesterday George Bush signed into law a long-stalled piece of legislation called the Second Chance Act of 2007, which, as Catholic Charities USA’s press release put it, is an important first step in “reducing recidivism, promoting public safety in communities, addressing the barriers faced by offenders exiting the prison system, and helping to reduce poverty in our country.”

It’s a good bill and could make a real dent in the incarceration statistics that have become a national crisis—- if congress decides to fully fund the thing.

Credit where credit is due, George Bush suggested the concept in his 2004 State of the Union speech when he proposed a “prisoner re-entry initiative to expand job training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups. America is the land of second chance,” said Bush, “and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.”

Well, yes.

But there was never enough support in Congress to pass the bill until recently. The Republicans ignored it and the Dems didn’t do much better. Finally in the last few months it picked up enough momentum to sail through.

Here’s what Bush said when he signed it:

The country was built on the belief that each human being has limitless potential and worth. Everybody matters. We believe that even those who have struggled with a dark past can find brighter days ahead. One way we act on that belief is by helping former prisoners who’ve paid for their crimes — we help them build new lives as productive members of our society.

The work of redemption reflects our values. It also reflects our national interests. Each year, approximately 650,000 prisoners are released from jail. Unfortunately, an estimated two-thirds of them are rearrested within three years. The high recidivism rate places a huge financial burden on taxpayers, it deprives our labor force of productive workers, and it deprives families of their daughters and sons, and husbands and wives, and moms and dads.

Our government has a responsibility to help prisoners to return as contributing members of their community. But this does not mean that the government has all the answers. Some of the most important work to help ex-convicts is done outside of Washington, D.C., in faith-based communities and community-based groups. It’s done on streets and small town community centers. It’s done in churches and synagogues and temples and mosques.

Very nicely put.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

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On Wednesday, the LA City Council passed a resolution that asks Federal law enforcement to mind its own damn business when it comes to medical marijuana.

More accurately, the resolution supports the state in its push to get the Feds to back off. Last August, the Council tried on its own when it passed the an ordinance to regulate and oversee the medical marijuana trade in LA, and politely asked the DEA to stop launching 100-agent raids on lawful clinics. But the DEA blithely ignored the request and kept on raiding the marijuana clinics anyway. “We’re just enforcing the law,” DEA spokeswoman Sara Pullen told me when I reported on the issue last summer for both WLA and the LA Weekly.. (I believe I mentioned to Pullen that I could personally point out a couple of meth-dealer locations, the raiding of which might be a better use of her agency’s time, but she declined to take me up on the offer.)

With Wednesday’s resolution, sponsored by Dennis Zine, Janice Hahn, and Bill Rosendahl, (the lone No vote from Greig Smith) the Council is trying a new strategy by calling for support of California State Senate Joint Resolution 20. The state resolution asks the President and Congress to enact legislation to require the DEA and all Federal agencies and departments to “respect the compassionate use laws of states”. SJR 20 also requests Federal law enforcement to enforce Federal medical marijuana laws in a manner consistent with the laws of the State of California.

California Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, was passed 12 years ago, yet still the DEA continues to raid clinics, and arrest patients, although the charges rarely stick.

As recently as last month, I talked to a med marijuana patient who, in the course of a routine traffic stop, was asked by two LA sheriff’s deputies if he had any drugs or alcohol in his car. The man had just come from purchasing his month’s supply and answered honestly. Yes, he said, he did have a small amount of marijuana, but he had a prescription for the stuff and handed the officers both his just-purchased weed and his official state card. (Yeah, the guy was a real patient with a real medical condition, not a scammer just wanting to smoke out) The cops confiscated the weed and wrote up a misdemeanor citation meaning the guy had to take off work and show up in court. The judge promptly dropped the case as soon as the proper paperwork was produced. “Oh, yeah we get these all the time,” the bailiff told the man, explaining that the judge usually dropped the charges forthwith if the prescription was legit.

Meanwhile we have overcrowded courtrooms and a state, county and city budget crisis. So does this seem like a good use of your tax dollars?
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I don’t want to seem like a killjoy, but I don’t think asking politely is quite the comprehensive gang violence-reduction strategy we’ve been calling for.

Yesterday the Los Angeles City Council asked residents to stop killing each other for a minute or two and instead to promote peace and talk about the causes of violence — for at least 40 hours.

The “period to promote peace, justice and non-violence” will begin at exactly 6:01 p.m. on Friday and end at 10:01 a.m. on Sunday—dates that coincide with the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Okay, nothing wrong with that, per se, but some of us were looking for something…meatier.

Evidently the talk-don’t kill thingy was originally proposed by activists Earl Ofari Hutchinson and Eddie Jones to be a straight up ban on murder. As blogger Zuma Dogg rightly put it “I thought murder was already banned in Los Angeles.”

Uh, yeah.

Opposing activist Joe Hicks also gave the whole idea a large raspberry: “It’s just an incredibly silly notion that you can do some kind of symbolic maneuver for 40 hours that the street terrorists that are killing people are going to notice that and say, `Well, I can hold off for a few hours here. Forty-five hours in, I can get busy again,”’ Hicks told KTLA.

According to David Z. over at the LA Times, the LA County Board of Sups passed its own resolution, declaring a moratorium on violence during the same 40-hour period.

Call me boringly literal-minded, but frankly, I’d have really preferred that the Council instead acted on Laura Chick’s gang violence report, which would put into place actual, you know, programs. (It’s been a month and a half and counting on Laura’s, a year on Connie’s.) But yesterday, it seemed, it was politics as usual meaning only purely symbolic actions were on the agenda.

I think the Daily News has it right. The LA public has to start screaming “NO” to politics and keep screaming until the Council gets it, grows a backbone, and says NO to Tony Cardenas’ political stalling.

Write letters. Make phone calls. Send emails.

Dear fellow Angelenos, as we say in pre-school: use your words. Loudly.

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In the upcoming April 17 issue of the New York Review of Books, veteran investigative reporter Raymond Bonner reviews four books that cover aspects of Guantanamo. But as is often the case for the best NY Review of Books stories, Bonner’s piece is less review than it is a comprehensive essay on the issue that the books generally cover—which is, in this instance, the ghastly moral and legal bungling that has characterized the Bush administration’s handling of terrorists suspects both at Guantanamo Bay and the various “black sites” that we, the lowly American public, have learned about only in disturbing dribs and drabs.

Here’s the opening of Bonner’s essay:

On February 11, 2008, the Pentagon announced that charges were being filed against six men in connection with the September 11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the attacks and one of al-Qaeda’s most senior members, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a leader of the Hamburg cell that included several of the September 11 pilots. It has taken nearly seven years for these men to be indicted—while more than 240 other prisoners continue to remain at Guantánamo in a state of indefinite detention without charge. In contrast, Britain, after one of the longest and most expensive trials in its history, has already convicted and sentenced four men for the failed attacks on the London subway on July 21, 2005.

Last year, British officials also arrested three other men for involvement in the deadly attacks on three London subway lines and a bus on July 7, 2005, two weeks earlier; they are scheduled to go on trial at the end of March. Spain has convicted twenty-one of twenty-eight men charged in connection with the terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004; and Indonesia has held lengthy trials and convicted four men who were accused of the terrorist attacks in Bali in October 2002, two of whom have been sentenced to death, and two to life imprisonment.

“Justice delayed is justice denied” is a guiding principle of the American criminal justice system. The Bush administration has ignored this principle with impunity, and America’s image abroad has suffered greatly as a result.

The administration could have avoided much of the criticism it has received for its handling of terrorism suspects. It didn’t have to listen to the civil libertarians and human rights lawyers. All it needed to do was heed the advice of the country’s military lawyers…..

[snip]

As the Bush administration, in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, began hurriedly drafting rules to try suspects, the most senior military lawyers, from all four services, were “appalled” at the lack of rights that the administration proposed granting the defendants….

Bonner’s essay goes a lot further, including references to what the three presidential candidates have been willing to say—and not say—about Guantanamo and torture. For example there’s this:

“Only Obama makes a point in his speeches that he would restore habeas corpus for Guantánamo prisoners,,” writes Bonner. “It generally brings loud applause.”

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It turns out I was not the only person annoyed by Sunday’s James Q. Wilson Op Ed. Texas smart guy, Scott Henson, the public policy wonk who runs the excellent blog, Grits for Breakfast, fulminated mightily over Wilson’s one-sided natterings. Here’s some of what Henson posted on the issue.

For starters, his comment about incarceration vs. safety results in states cannot survive a comparison between Texas and New York, for example, so I’d like to see the research backing up that statement. By relying on Mr. Levitt’s [Freakonomics] often controversial work, he’s identified a scholar whose estimates of the effectiveness of imprisonment fall on the high end of those produced in the last decade. Levitt thinks that imprisonment accounted for as much as 32% of the reduction in crime in the 1990s (See “Understanding why crime fell in the 1990s”).

Other econometric estimates - including one by UT-Austin’s Bill Spelman - found that expanding the prison population accounted for about a quarter of the crime reduction in the ’90s. (Bill and I have enjoyed a friendly dispute about this in the past, because I think some of his assumptions overstate incarceration’s effectiveness and understate its harms). Overall, according to a recent paper by the Vera Institute, Levitt and Spelman “produced a fairly consistent finding, associating a 10 percent higher incarceration rate with a 2 to 4 percent lower crime rate.”

But if we are to be honest about the state of empirical research on the topic, one cannot declare emphatically, as Wilson does, that “deterrence works” or that expanded incarceration “reduces crime.” According to the Vera Institute, “One could use available research to argue that a 10 percent increase in incarceration is associated with no difference in crime rates, a 22 percent lower index crime rate, or a decrease only in the rate of property crime.”

What’s more, even the highest estimates, like Mr. Levitt’s, still contend that 2/3 of the crime 0reduction had nothing to do with incarceration. So the decline in crime, according to these sources, mostly wasn’t because of putting more people in prison.

Wilson says as much when he writes that, “Several scholars have separately estimated that the increase in the size of our prison population has driven down crime rates by 25%.” But crime has declined much more than that since the early ’90s, and Texas’ prison population tripled since then, for example, so if it takes a 300% increase in prison capacity to get a 25% reduction in crime, how far can we really take that strategy?

Wilson similarly ignores research that suggests real, immediate limits to the benefits of incarceration in states that have large prison systems, again from the Vera Institute (p. 7):

Raymond Liedka, Anne Piehl, and Bert Useem have confirmed, moreover, that increases in prison populations in states with already large prison populations have less impact on crime than increases in states with smaller prison populations. States experience “accelerating declining marginal returns, that is, a percent reduction in crime that gets ever smaller with ever larger prison populations,” they argue. Thus, increases in incarceration rates are associated with lower crime rates at low levels of imprisonment, but the size of that association shrinks as incarceration rates get bigger.

There’s more here. Go Scott!

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In Sunday’s LA Times Opinion section, famous conservative criminology prof, James Q. Wilson, is once again trotting out his contention that locking up masses of people is a fabulously effective crime-fighting tactic. This time Wilson busily opines that the fact that 1 in every 100 American adults is behind bars, and 1 in 9 African American men between the ages of 20 to 34 is locked up (as revealed by the recently released Pew Center on the States’ study)…..isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Aside from the jaw-dropping level of cynicism required for such a perspective, it doesn’t hold water.

For years, Wilson (AKA Mr. Broken Windows Theory) has attempted to draw a straight line between incarceration patterns and crime patterns, but to do so he has to cherry-pick his studies and statistics. I’d launch a study-filled counter argument but fortunately, Robert Gordon writing for the New Republic, has done it for me here.

PS: Before I turn you over to Wilson and Gordon, a couple of facts and figures: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics drug offenders account for about 25 percent of local jail inmates, 21 percent of state prisoners, and 55 percent of federal prisoners. Since 1980 the number of drug offenders in state prisons has increased by 1,200 percent, more than four times the increase in violent offenders.

And have our drug use, abuse and sales stats gone down a commensurate 1200 percent in that time? Has this crazy incarceration binge reduced the number of drug users, gangs and gang members? You do the math.

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As the perplexing tale of Sara Jane Olson’s release and rearrest continues, I am still unable to stop thinking of other criminal cases I’ve followed.

One in particular comes to mind this morning: the case of kid named Michael Duc Ta who, at sixteen, was the wrong place at the wrong time, the same year that Sara Jane Olson was arrested. I’ll tell you about him in a minute. But first, an update on Olson:

In the latest chapter, Olson’s attorney, Shawn Holley, announced on Sunday that she’s going to use every legal remedy to prevent Olson being sent back to prison for another year.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation takes the blame for the whole mess—namely releasing Olson, then rearresting her after supposedly discovering that they’d miscalculated her sentence by a year. Many, however, believe that pressure from the furious LA Police Protective League caused the CDCR to extend her sentence.

While the latter scenario is not at all impossible, the probability of the CDCR simply screwing up in their calculations, even with a high-profile prisoner, is sadly one that is all too likely, as preposterous as it seems. (Remember this story that ran back in December about the prison system failing to calculate the sentences for as many as 33,000 California inmates?)

It hasn’t helped matters that Olson’s sentencing has had a more complicated history than most.

Two articles in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle (linked here and here) give a good snapshot of where things stand now. Here are some clips:

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