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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

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!

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to:

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

6 PM UPDATE: Sara Jane Olson has just been taken back to prison. It seems that the CDCR counted on its fingers wrong and forgot that she had another two years on her sentence (even though they said she didn’t), meaning they will let her out in one.

(The CDCR has had a habit of miscalculating release dates of late.)

CONFUSED? HERE’S HOW IT WORKS: For murder you generally get life in prison, but if you’re Sara Jane Olson that’s divided by 2 because your hair is blond going tastefully gray, and you have a really, really expensive attorney, which means your sentance is now…..let’s call it half-life. Divide that half-life sentence by 2 again because you look very sad and are very, VERY regretful, and your attorney says you can’t get a fair trial because of September 11. [Nope. Not joking.] And then multiply the total by point 5 because your husband is a rich surgeon and he is very sad too, and you told the press that you only did the bank robbery, bomb, murder thingy because “It was in the air. It was impossible not to be involved.” Okay, so now the total sentence equals 12 years. Divide 12 by two because although you were in a bank robbing, murdering, kidnapping, would-be-cop exploding cult, at least your cult wasn’t all robby and murdery in a bad way, like say, a street gang; it was more hip and counter-culturally murdery, which is, when you think about it, VERY different, paradigm-ly speaking. Now were down to 6, but then add back 2 because the cops are super-pissed that a murderer and a would-be cop killer is out, which equals eight, but then subtract 1 because the CDCR looks like complete idiots for doing the math wrong, and that means Sara Jane Olson will get out next March 20.

See, once you understand it, it’s simple.

**********************************************************************

3 PM: Sara Jane Olson, who was released from prison a few days ago after serving six years of her already low 12-year sentence, was re-arrested at noon today when she attempted to leave the state of California, which is a violation of the terms of her parole.

Ooops.

(Its a violation of nearly any felony parole, girlfriend. In fact, not leaving the state is Parole 101.)

UPDATE: It turns out she had permission from her parole officer to leave the state, although why she was given permission to do something that most parolees would never have been allowed to do so soon after their parole, if ever, is another question.


Now there is some rumbling from the California Department of Corrections about her sentence being miscalculated.

The LAPPL—LA’s police union—who had not been in a good mood about Sara Jane Olson’s release to begin with, was very much in favor of her rearrest, and sent out a new press release to that effect this afternoon. The statement from union prez Tim Sands reads in part:

“Justice is not served if convicted murderer Kathleen Ann Soliah can simply wander back to Minnesota after having served only a token sentence for murder and attempted murder. Her prison sentence is not completed until her time on parole has been served. The fact that parole might be an inconvenience to her should be weighed against the heinousness of the murder she committed and the coldblooded criminal intent she demonstrated by trying to blow up police officers and innocent bystanders. She was a flight risk 30 years ago, and she is a flight risk now.”

As it happens, I agree with the union, although for slightly different reasons than those Sands cites. Look, I personally have no interest at seeing Sara Jane or Kathleen Ann or whatever her name is…locked up for decades at taxpayer’s expense. Yet she was convicted of 2nd degree murder and two counts of attempted murder.

Now, let’s imagine for discussion’s sake that a former gang member participated in a drive-by shooting in 1994 when he was young and stupid. Let’s say that, as a result of his and his friends actions, an “innocent” person died. Maybe the victim was sixteen-year-old boy who was a good student at a local high school, or maybe the victim was a mom with kids—sorta like Myrna Opsahl, Olson’s group’s murder victim.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

Six years ago, Kathleen Soliah AKA Sara Jane Olson, a former member of Symbionese Liberation Army (the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst) pled guilty to second degree murder for her part in a bank robbery where a customer was killed by one of her cohorts. Olson also pled to “two counts of attempted explosion of a destructive device with intent to commit murder” for her failed attempt to blow up a police car. Olson as served six years of a 12 year sentence and was released from prison this week. The rationale was that her sentence could be cut in half because Olson was a model prisoner, worked while she was locked up and was a middle class mom, married to a surgeon, thus no danger to society.

(Olson was on the lam from 1975 to 1999, sentenced in 2001. The LA Times has the rest of the story in case you want to read it.)

Then in another part of town, the Long Beach prosecutor’s office announced Thursday that it intended to try two kids ages fourteen and fifteen as adults for the shooting death of another kid, a sixteen year old. Naturally gangs were involved.

If convicted, the two teenagers will get a minimum of 50 years to life in prison. But with the gang allegations that the DA’s office is already lining up, the sentences will more likely be 75 years or longer.

Olson did whatever she did when she was in her early 20’s and got caught up with cult (sort of like a gang) that was retaliating because the the death of her friends (sort of like gangsters might).

Broadly speaking, the case of Eric Benites, 15, and Jason Trejo, 14, has some similarities. Both participated in the death of another—a sixteen year old named Florentino Rivera, whom Benites and Trejo are accused of shooting on January 6, when they fired into a group of gang members with whom Rivera was standing.

As with Olson, Benites and Trejo were retaliating for another killing: Eric Benites 13-year-old brother, Jose Cano, was stabbed to death this past summer. According to Long Beach Press-Telegram’s Tracy Manzer, an excellent reporter who’s been covering the story, Benites was incarcerated in a juvenile facility at the time of his baby brother’s murder so couldn’t go to the funeral.

So when he got out, he went crazy. He tried to get his gang, the East Side Longos, to retaliate for his brother’s death, but they didn’t—perhaps in part because those alleged murderers were locked up awaiting trial for the crime. (The story of the younger brother’s death is its own strange and tragic drama. Here’s Manzer’s account.)

Thus fifteen-year Eric Benito got his friend Jason Trejo, and the two of them allegedly got guns and, incredibly, decided to shoot at Eric’s own gang (an all but suicidal act)—which also happened to be his brother’s gang. They hit Florentino Rivera, a kid who it appears was not in a gang at all ,but had the tragically bad luck to be standing with gangsters.

Tracy Manzer was in court today when the two kids were charged. She told me afterward that Benito and Trejo were drowning in the adult sized jail sweatshirts, the sleeves pooling around their skinny arms. “Trejo doesn’t even look fourteen,” she said.

After talking to neighbors and friends of the two alleged shooters, Tracy said that both boys seemed to have less than ideal home lives. No dads on the scene, moms with a string of kids from different men. “I heard Benito’s mom would brag about how tough her sons were,” Tracy says. “The mom would say, ‘Esta cabron.’ ” He’s an S.O.B, a badass. And records show that the now dead younger kid, the 13-year-old, hadn’t been in school since he was 11.

Okay, so let’s go over our tally: We have two kids dead and three angry, damaged kids likely going away for the rest of their lives. (The sixteen year old who allegedly stabbed the 13-year old is being tried as an adult too.)

And the middle-aged, middle class white lady does six years. Sure. That works. Some lives are evidently just a little more worth saving than others.

‘

Bookmark to:

Much to the dismay of death penalty court watchers, myself included, today the Georgia Supreme Court denied Troy Anthony Davis a new trial in a 4-3 decision. Davis was to be executed this past July for the murder of a Savannah off-duty police officer, Mark Allen MacPhail, in a Burger King parking lot in August of 1989. Seven of the nine witness who originally identified Davis have since recanted or changed their testimony saying they were pressured by police to positively ID Troy Davis. Of the remaining two witnesses, one—Sylvester “Redd” Coles— is now accused by several new witnesses of being the actual shooter.

One new witness says that self-styled tough guy, “Redd” Coles, threatened her to keep her quiet, but with Davis’ impending execution she felt she had to come forward.

Interestingly, it was Coles who initially drew police attention to Davis. Hours after the shooting, he and his lawyer went to the police and said he saw Davis pull the trigger. Police never looked at Coles for the crime, according to a two part series in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Three other new witnesses stepped forward after the trial to say that Coles confessed to the murder and bragged that he’d pinned it on another guy, reports the AJC.

There was no physical evidence linking Davis, a former coach in the Savannah Police Athletic League who had signed up for the Marines, to the crime, and the murder weapon was never found. A lawyer for Davis has admitted that, because of severe budget cuts, he did not have resources needed to properly defend his client.

Two of the original jurors who convicted Davis have signed sworn affidavits saying that based on the recanted testimony, he should not be executed. “In light of this new evidence,” wrote one juror, “I have genuine concerns about the fairness of Mr. Davis’ death sentence.”

Part of the reason Davis has not received a new trial has to do with a set of legal technicalities, explained Time Magazine in this July 2007 article.

William S. Sessions, former federal judge and Director of the FBI, was one of those who expressed deep dismay over today’s decision. “There are few more serious violent crimes than the murder of a police officer who selflessly risks everything to protect his community,” said Sessions. “However, justice can only be done if we are absolutely certain that the right person has been convicted of the crime, and a number of important questions about whether Troy Anthony Davis is actually guilty have been asked - and deserved answers. Today’s decision by the Georgia Supreme Court is a missed opportunity to reaffirm the state’s commitment to honest justice.”

Sessions is a member of a bipartisan Death Penalty Committee,sponsored by the Constitution Project (which includes supporters as well as opponents of capital punishment). The committee unanimously concluded in its report that “[s]tate and federal courts should ensure that every capital defendant is provided an adequate mechanism for introducing newly discovered evidence that would otherwise be procedurally barred, where it would more likely than not produce a different outcome at trial, or where it would undermine confidence in the reliability of the sentence.”

Reasonable people would think so. Or are we really quite so comfortable executing someone who may be innocent?

Bookmark to:

The LA Times and others have been trying to get LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to say whether or not he’d be willing to go with Laura Chick’s much contested suggestion that the city’s gang intervention and prevention programs—and budget—be consolidated under the mayor’s office. But Antonio and his spokespeople have danced away from any kind of answer…..for a variety of political reasons. (Naturally.)

And so who finally got an answer out of AV as to whether he’d be willing to have LA’s gang efforts run out of his office?

Nope, it wasn’t the LA Times or the Daily News.

It was smart USC Annenberg grad student, Deborah Stokol.

Debbie isn’t my student. She’s in LA Citybeat news editor Alan Mittelstadt’s graduate journalism class.

The way she managed to snag an interview with Antonio was by showing up for the mayor’s regular once-a-week trip to City Hall on the metro.

It worked. You can read Debbie’s whole article after the jump, but here’s the section with the money quote:

Until now, the mayor has made equivocating noises regarding his true stance on the matter, saying he agreed with Chick but not indicating whether he really wanted the responsibility or not. But in between stepping off the bus and hopping onto the train, he announced he felt ready and willing to bear the burden of stopping gangs through the use of strict organization, financial investment and mentorship and rehabilitation programs.

“First of all, I support Controller Chick’s work,” he began. “I do think we need to consolidate and coordinate these programs, and I’m willing to accept the jurisdiction for these programs.”

Wooo-hooo! Brava Debbie for getting Antonio to actually say he’d was willing to let the gang programs live at his house.

Here’s the rest of Deborah Stokol’s story about her ride with the mayor:

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

Today the much-talked about new book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author, Harvard professor, Linda Bilmes, is hitting the book stores. It’s called The Three Trillion Dollar War and it explains how the Iraq war, a war that was originally billed as a conflict that would all but “pay for itself,” has already has cost the U.S. Treasury $845 billion out of pocket but, according to Stiglitz, will cost at minimum three trillion dollars in real costs, says Reuters in its article on the Stiglitz book.

What we could have bought with that money.

Contrast those numbers with the last segment on Sunday’s 60 Minutes broadcast, a story about what happened when an non-profit medical relief organization brought its huge, portable medical clinic to Knoxville, Tennessee, for a weekend, and offered free medical check-ups, mammograms, dental and eye care to anybody who showed up.

In the past, the organization, called Remote Area Medical, or RAM, used to airlift medical relief to isolated regions of the Amazon. Now RAM is doing 60 percent of its work in rural America because, says the organization’s founder, the need here is just so great.

In the weekend that 60 Minutes covered, RAM treated 920 visibly stressed and desperate people who waited for hours in 27 degree weather in the hope of getting in, some driving over 200 miles to seek care. Most were working poor, people who had done what America had asked of them yet were unable to afford basic medical care for themselves and their families. Many who came had insurance, but couldn’t pay the deductible their insurance required. When the weekend was over, and the RAM docs finished speeding as many patients as humanly possible through medical, dental and ophthalmological treatments, at least 400 additional people were turned away.

If you watch the 60 Minutes video, as I suggest you do (it’s a painful but, in its own way, heroic story), or if you watch the night’s first segment on the Ohio primary where Ohioans talk about the pain of lost jobs due to plant shutdowns and a sinking economy, just remember….

…three trillion bucks.

And for what?

Bookmark to:

This article in today’s New York Times speaks for itself. If this doesn’t alarm you, check the batteries on your humanity-meter….or your pulse.

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 is behind bars, but that one in 100 black women is.

The report’s methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department’s methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars.

Either way, said Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director, “we aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration.”

“We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response to crime,” Ms. Urahn continued. “Being tough on crime is an easy position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have the money in the ’80s and ’90s.”

Now, with fewer resources available to the states, the report said, “prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.” On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bond issues and from the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion

Read the rest here.

Bookmark to: