Here’s the newest chapter in the tale of Venice High School teacher, Dennis Danziger, and his student, John Rodriguez, the high school senior whom Danziger flagged as the best writer he had ever had in any of his LAUSD classes in all his years of teaching.

Danziger ought to know the difference. In addition to being a high school instructor, Dennis is a former TV writer, a memoirist, and the author of the very funny new novel, A Short History of a Tall Jew, Plus his wife, Amy Friedman, is a writer.

But as we learned in the last two chapters, now John Rodriguez, the good writer, seemingly good, sensitive kid, has been arrested for attempted murder.

And so, the story continues:

( Read the first two chapters here.)

The Writer: Chapter 3

I remember reading a line, perhaps the opening line in a novel. It went something like this: one gets justice in the afterlife; in this life you get the law. And sadly, you only get the law you can afford.

One would need a lot of money, six figures, a high six figure sum to effectively fight for two brothers who have both been charged with attempted murder. At least I think that’s what they were both charged with. I’m not really sure.

When I think about it, and much of the time I don’t want to think about it, I imagine that everything in John’s life right now seems to be a shade of bad. And grief. And terror.

Here is what I know of his situation. On April 5, 2009 John started the evening saying good-bye to his mom and he calls her six or seven hours later and tells her he won’t be home. For a long time.

As it happens, I know more about lock-up than you’d think. My wife, Amy, was married to a man in prison. In Canada. She had gone inside to write a series of articles about prison; she was a journalist in Kingston, Ontario at the time. Fell in love with an inmate. Doing 13-to-life. For murder. A drug deal gone bad. She encouraged me to stop fretting and to write John.

Which I did.

I asked him what I could do for him.

Write, correspond, let him know I’m there, and send him books. That’s what he wanted and it seemed easy enough. I figured I’d choose a care package of books from my shelf. Then I learned that California prisons and jails only allow books mailed directly from a book store. I was irritated. What if I wanted to order books that my book store didn’t carry? Village Books in the Palisades assured me they would send John any book I wanted. So that’s where I did my jail book shopping.

John wanted Stephen King and John Grisham. I sent him King’s Cujo and Grisham’s The Bleachers. Thick books, good page turner stuff. After they arrived he wrote, “I received your letter and the books. I’ve just finished reading Charm School, the Nelson DeMille novel. It was great. It had so much action and I was turning pages like a mad man. For awhile while I was reading I actually forgot where I was.”

I began sending him a box of paperback volumesvia Village Books every third Sunday. I wanted him to keep his mind active. Focused on writing, reading, something that was mental, positive. Something that would open up his world even while he sat in his cell.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I’m glad someone has written about it.

Tim Rutten calls it government by tantrum —which try as I might not to endlessly criticize the actions of our city attorney, Carmen Trutanich—is about right when it comes to describing his latest escapade with the city’s legal system.

For those playing catch up, Trutanich is on a crusade to bring into line the scofflaw building defacers who ignore the city’s permitting process and wrap giganzoid “supergraphic” posters around multi-story structures that they personally own, in return for a handsome fees.

Good for Trutanich for holding the expensively-suited lawbreakers to answer.

To make it clear that he meant business (also a good idea; don’t put a gun on the table unless you are willing to fire it, so to speak), the city attorney chose to send a message to all the supergraphics law-ignorers by making an example of Pacific Palisades businessman Kayvan Setareh, who had evidently blithely ignored a bunch of warnings from Trutanich’s office, and wrapped an 8-story poster around a building of his located at Hollywood and Highland.

Since Setareh reportedly has other buildings and other supergraphics, this was moral equivalent of waggling his tongue at Trutanich and saying, “Naah-naah-naah-naah-naah-naah! MAKE ME, MO-FO!”

So Carmen Trutanich decided he would, indeed, make Setareh comply. All well and good. If you and I have to obey city regulations or risk icky consequences, so does the Pali-living, multiple-building-owning Setareh. Nuch, we’re behind you all the way in your quest to make the guys in pricey suits obey the law! Go get ‘em!

But here’s where the tantrum came in. Trutanich had Setareh arrested. (Fine.) And slapped him with a million dollars in bail. (Not fine.)

Rutten explains the unfineness of Nuch’s bail action perfectly. (I said something similar, although not as well articulated or in as much detail, in an email to a student who is also planning to write about the issue. It will be interesting to see what he finds out.)

The problem is that even scofflaws are entitled to due process. Trutanich found a feeble-willed judge who was willing to set the landlord’s initial bail at $1 million. By having him arrested on a Friday, the city attorney essentially gave Setareh a choice: Pay the nonrecoverable $100,000 a bail bondsman would have charged to write the bond, or spend the weekend in jail, because it takes three to four days to secure release by putting up your own real property as surety. (The bail was subsequently reduced to $100,000.)

Putting aside the question of whether there’s any ethical proportionality in demanding $1 million bail for three misdemeanor charges, are we really supposed to believe that Setareh — with all his holdings in Los Angeles — is a flight risk? Bail is not a punishment; it simply is a way of enforcing a defendant’s promise to appear in court. In this case, though, Trutanich essentially imposed a choice between jail time or a $100,000 fine on a defendant who’d never had a minute — let alone a day — in court and is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Trutanich has explained why the guy with the misdemeanors got a higher bail than most child molesters and attempted murderers by muttering something about public safety and how when there are lots of people on Hollywood Blvd. at night, why that nasty graphic could blow off fall on people and, oh, the horror! doncha know!

Or something like that.

This was even less effective as an excuse than the weak tea offered by that other recent government bully, whom Rutten also writes about, namely Washington, Sen. Jim Bunning and his appalling use of the one-man fillbuster to, until Tuesday night, prevent passage of an extension of aid to the nation’s recently jobless.

OKAY SO HERE’S A FRIENDLY NOTE to City Attorney Trutanich, Senator Bunning and all the others who have signed on to this new “Because I can!” way of holding office:

We elected you to be our representatives, to do a job in the name of the people, not to be our hired thugs.

Got it? Thank you. I’m glad we had this little talk.

I just read the AP’s story on 30-year-old John Albert Gardner III, the 30-year-old convicted sex offender who may or may not be responsible for raping and killing 17-year-old Chelsea King.

(Devastatingly, as of this writing, Chelsea King’s body appears to have been found.)

Here’s the part of the story AP that I found of note:

Gardner of Lake Elsinore pleaded guilty in May 2000 to molesting a 13-year-old female neighbor. Prosecutors said he lured the victim to his home with an offer to watch “Patch Adams,” a 1998 movie starring Robin Williams

The girl was beaten before escaping and running to a neighbor.

Gardner served five years in prison after prosecutors rejected a psychiatrist’s advice to seek stiffer punishment, court documents state.

Prosecutors said in 2000 that Gardner’s lack of a significant prior criminal record justified less than the maximum sentence. They also said they wanted to “spare the victim the trauma of testifying.”

Gardner had faced a maximum of nearly 11 years in prison under terms of his plea agreement. Prosecutors urged six years — the sentence later ordered by a judge.

In their 11-page sentencing memo, prosecutors said Gardner “never expressed one scintilla of remorse for his attack upon the victim” despite overwhelming evidence.

Psychiatrist Dr. Matthew Carroll wrote in sentencing documents, “There is no known treatment for an individual that sexually assaults girls and does not admit to it in any way.”

Let me simply those facts: Gardner lured a 13-year-old to his house, then molested her, there beat her.

And here’s how the LA Times described the attack:

In 2000, Gardner picked up an eighth-grader at a bus stop in San Diego County and assaulted her at his house, punching her several times after she tried to prevent him from pulling her pants down.

Gardner “was suffocating me. He had his hand on my mouth, and I couldn’t breathe, and I got pretty fuzzy after he hit me, and I’m not sure if I blacked out,” said the victim, according to the sentencing memorandum.

Moreover, although a psychiatrist strongly advised against it,, stating that Gardner would likely attack others when he had the chance, he was given the lowest possible term the judge and the DA could manage, six years, of which he did five.

The DA said that Gardner had “no significant prior criminal record.” (Define “significant,” would you please?) In other words, Gardner was then a 20-year-old pleasant-looking white guy, living in a nice condo with his nice, up-street mother, and so why give him the full 10-years?

After all, he just sexually assaulted and beat a little girl. And showed zero, zip remorse for it.

Yet, let a 15-year-old—non-white boy—from a poor background, with “no significant prior criminal record” climb into the backseat of the wrong car, with older guys who do a drive by, and he’s looking at 25-to life—even if no one was killed or seriously injured.

But of course, these are cases where the DA manages to attach a gang allegation—deserved or not. In those case, throwing away the key is just fine. Because somehow we view 15-year olds who get in cars with gang members as less redeemable, less important, less somehow human, than 20-year-old upper-middle-class guys who beat and molest little girls.

And while we’re on the subject of our disregard for the well-being of our law-breaking young—as long as they aren’t affluent lawbreaking young—Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Richard Winton of the LA Times, have just posted the latest chapter in their ongoing story on abusive staff within the county’s juvenile probaton facilities.

It seems that of 170 employees of the Los Angeles County Probation Department were determined to have committed misconduct —around half of those cases of excessive force or abuse involving the kids in their care— but all 170 have “so far escaped punishment because there is not enough staff to mete out discipline,” the Times reported.

Right. We’re just too busy to have discipline our staff who have been found to be abusing the probationers.

So we just leave them on the job.

You’ll be happy to know that, according to Winton and Hennessy-Fiske, the LA County Supervisors have now launched an “independent review of the agency’s discipline and internal affairs operations.”

And, why exactly, dear County Sups, did it require the Times’ revelations before it occurred to anybody over at your house to see if this $700,000 agency under your control—that, as the reporters pointed out, “has been the subject of federal investigations in recent years for failing to prevent, report and document child abuse in its juvenile facilities”—was managing to appropriately protect the 3000 kids under its care?

Nevermind. Don’t answer that. There is no good answer.

When we last left off, Venice High School teacher Dennis Danziger, had just learned the reason his student–a kid named John who had a stupendous talent for writing—had been missing from school.

John had been arrested and charged with attempted murder.

Here’s Chapter Two.

(NOTE: Dennis Danziger’s very funny new novel, A Short History of a Tall Jew, has just been released. Check it out.)

“Attempted murder.”

Those were not the words I expected from Jorge. I had braced myself and imagined I would hear, “John got jumped.”

Or “John’s home got broken into.”

Or “John’s girlfriend broke up with him and he’s too depressed to crawl out of bed.”

I’ve taught for 17 years in the LAUSD system, and I’ve heard a wide variety of excuses, many of them shocked me:

“I was absent because My mom broke up with her boyfriend and he went crazy and broke everything in the house. I’ve been home for three days cleaning up.”

“Umm, I, uh, got picked up for carjacking over Christmas break and it, uh, got a little rugged for me behind bars.”

”I’ve been diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome. That’s why I’m always twitching.”

(No, I am not making that last one up.)

Surprising excuses Upsetting excuses. But never attempted murder.

Jorge could provide no other details except that John and his brother were locked up in an LA County jail near Magic Mountain, not in a juvenile detention facility.

I knew John was six weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday at the time of his arrest. He must have been charged as an adult. I thought. Did they house underage boys with men if they had been charged as adults? I didn’t know.

Jorge said he hoped to visit John within the week.

After Jorge left, and I was again alone in my classroom, I thought about what I had learned and concluded that there must be a mistake. Attempted murder? No way.

I knew this kid. At least I thought I did. I’d certainly invested more time in him than any of the other 185 students on my roll sheet. Talent like this didn’t come around very often. Talent like this more than caught my attention, made me want to focus on it, nurture it, use the talent has a bridge to a better education and a better life.

Sure, there were other students whose talents were also off-the-charts. James, a self-described Rastafarian, who I taught at Crenshaw could turn anything into an instant rap.

Once, as an experiment, I asked James’ classmates to shout out words—any words appropriate for class—and I scribbled them quickly on the board. Then Kalfani, who sat next to James, put down the beat and in a flash, James created a rap interweaving every word on the board into an instant poem. It was stunning.

So was John’s writing. I could not bring myself to believe that John’s next piece of writing would be about life behind bars.

My next thought turned to his older brother, Damion. Recently John read a new essay to the class. In the essay he grows bored hanging out at home watching TV and so leaves the house and heads to the nearest Burger King for a cheeseburger. Along the way three African American teens drive by and one taunts him, “What you looking at?”

John senses trouble and ignores the other boy, but the car stops and the one guy jumps out. Fists fly.

“After a minute of this brawling we both jump back and take a breather,” he wrote. “I look towards the other two black teens heading towards me. Their faces say it all. They want to fight me.”

Before it can be three on one. John pulls out his cell phone, hits a number. The blows begin to reign down on him again. As he is being pummeled, he sees his brother “at the bottom of the hill, walking up.” Back up. The other teens glimpse the hard-eyed brother, stand up and sprint to their black Honda Civic and speed off.

As John’s essay ends, he is walking back into his house and feeling, for the first time, he writes, “I never thought I would sense brotherly love. Now I know what it means.”

After he read the essay in class, I asked if anyone cared to comment.

Karla raised her hand. “Johnny’s brother is my baby’s daddy.”

Huh?

Read the rest of this entry »

Judge Alex Kozinski, the chief judge for the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is mighty pissed off at the 9th circuit’s refusal to hear a 4th Amendment warrant case.

As the San Diego City Beat writes:

The other judges decided not to consider an second appeal by a San Diego man whose house was searched, without a warrant, by police who had arrested him outside his home. That, Judge Alex Kozinski says, erodes the protections against unlawful search and seizure that Americans hold dear. And he goes so far as to suggest police lied to the court.

Here’s a snippet from Kozinki’s dissent. Actully the whole thing is worth reading. Plus I’m impressed wtih Kozkinski’s use of “bupkis” in a Federal Court ruling.

This is an extraordinary case: Our court approves, without blinking, a police sweep of a person’s home without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion and without exigency—in other words, with nothing at all to support the entry except the curiosity police always have about what they might find if they go rummaging around asuspect’s home. Once inside, the police managed to turn up a gun “in plain view”—stuck between two cushions of the living room couch—and we reward them by upholding the search.

Did I mention that this was an entry into somebody’s home, the place where the protections of the Fourth Amendment are supposedly at their zenith? The place where the “government bears a heavy burden of demonstrating that exceptional circumstancesjustif[y departure from the warrant requirement.” … The place where warrantless searches are deemed “presumptively unreasonable.”

Government encroachment into the home, which I lamented three years ago in United States v. Black, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc), has continued, abetted by the creative collaborators of the courts. This is another example:
The panel goes to considerable lengths to approve a fishing expedition by four police officers inside Lemus’s home after he was arrested just outside it. The opinion misapplies Supreme Court precedent, conflicts with our own case law and is contrary to the great weight of authority in the other circuits. It is also the only case I know of, in any jurisdiction covered by the Fourth Amendment, where invasion of the home has been approved based on no showing whatsoever. Nada. Gar nichts. Rien du tout. Bupkes.

Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment after Black is now gone. The evisceration of this crucial constitutional protector of the sanctity and privacy of what Americans consider their castles is pretty much complete.

Welcome to the fish bowl.

No kidding.

Read the rest of Kozinski’s opinion. It’s scathing.

The original majority decision may be found here.

Based on what Kozinski says, one is left to wonder how our city’s law enforcement agencies can be expected to train their young officers to respect the Constitutional rights of those with whom they deal—when the court appears to be saying that such nicities aren’t all that important.

For the next two days, I’ll be in the midst of a series of meetings and the like that will take me away from the computer, so blogging will be light.

Nevertheless, oday, I want to bring to your attention to several stories about the world of confidential informants.

ICE MEN

Late last week, NPR began an intriguing and alarming series on C.I.s, in particular the informants being used by ICE. So Cal based NPR reporter Carrie Kahn spent months researching the series.

Part I tells of an ICE informant who runs amok, in a story that sounds like it comes straight out of noir crime fiction.

Part II gives the critics’ view of the very legally and morally slippery slope that is the shadowy world of C.I.s

Part III tells the story of a C.I who says he got burned badly by the government.

BAD DEAL

Then, also this past weekend, AP reporter, Helen O’Neill tells an appalling story of an immigrant brother and sister who say they were promised legal residency in the U.S. by ICE on the condition that they work undercover as informants. Yet at the end of the agreed upon time—if they are telling the truth—they were used and, it appears, thrown away by their ICE handlers.

It’s quite at tale.

Here’s a clip:

According to Mills the deal was straightforward: In exchange for working as informants, ICE would help the Mayas get coveted S visas, which, in rare instances, are awarded to immigrants who help law enforcement.

“It was very clear,” Mills says. “That was the deal they thought they had made.”

Five years later, the Mayas insist they held up their end of the bargain, risking their lives in hours of undercover work, wearing wires and using fake names. But for reasons they do not understand, ICE agents abruptly turned against them – and they now face imminent deportation.

Just under two months after he was granted bail in his third bail hearing, Alex Sanchez was actually released from jail to rejoin his family on Friday, February 5.

Since his release, money has been issue for Sanchez, as there are still some additional bail fees to pay and he has been locked up without income since June. Alex is not allowed to go back to work as the executive director Homie Unidoes since one of the conditions of his parole, is no association with anyone who might be a gang member, former or active—which means he can’t really set foot inside Homies Unidos, much less run it.

Friends have done some fundraising to help out, but that strategy can only be a stopgap measure. He will have to find some other form of income and/or employment as he works with his lawyer on his case,

As a followup to Alex Sanchez’ release, , L’Opinion’s Assistant Editor and Columnist, Gabriel Lerner has written a very long column for the Huffington Post about Sanchez and his case.

For those of you interested in Sanchez’ legal situation, it is recommended reading. While I do not agree with every single word that Lerner has written, his portrait of the emotional reactions to Sanchez arrest and subsequent court hearings provides an informative perspective. Moreover, Lerner’s views and perceptions are very representative of the feelings of those in the communities who know Sanchez best—and should not be too easily discounted.

He also points out that, pretty much without exception, the English language newspapers, when they have reported on the Alex Sanchez case at all, have done little more than regurgitate, unchallenged, the official versions of the case. Whereas Spanish language media has acted as if there are two possible sides to the story.

Here’s a big clip from the column:

As Roberto Lovato points out, while charges against the other 23 defendants were backed by hard evidence, charges against Sánchez were based on “a series of phone conversations” in which he allegedly participated and discussed the killing of the Mara Salvatrucha member in El Salvador.

The tape of the conversation, which was played in court, is not conclusive and is prone to interpretation.

Those who defend Sánchez believe the legal campaign against him has broad social and political ramifications, and threatens to de-legitimize the social justice approach to the problem of gangs. That perception is widespread. “If they demonize this population – with whom we work around here – then it’s a short hop to demonize the people who work with them,” said Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries, one of the most successful gang intervention programs in Los Angeles, pointing to himself in an interview. “I think that’s what happened to Alex”.

This case could thus be a wake up call for those ex-gang members who now work in prevention and intervention and, to be effective use the gang’s language, appearance, and set of values (i.e. respect, family, homies). They are, like Sánchez, in many cases, ex-gang members, who now fear that they too will be mistakenly accused of maintaining ties with those still committing crimes.

So, the arrest became a daunting reality for many young Blacks and Latinos in the inner city who for years have struggled to escape the reach of gangs. If Alex Sánchez was still considered a gangbanger after all these years, after all he did, goes the narrative, how will they redeem themselves, be able to escape that environment? Will they be able to make the transition, be allowed to study, work and thrive?

The direct effect of seeing an ex-gang member who has made the transition, Sánchez said, is crucial. “Nobody can do it except somebody who’s been there. All the kids who looked up to me because of the bad things that I was doing; now they seek change and want to do good in the neighborhood”. This example, seeing someone make that all-important transition, is now in jeopardy.

Most of the coverage of the arrest tilted heavily in crediting chief Bratton, the FBI, the US Attorney, the grand jury and others for the charges in the indictment, assuming this was sufficient evidence. It failed to separate the severe accusations against the other defendants and the weaker ones against Sánchez, who is, by far, the most important target of the 3-year-investigation….

Here’s the rest.

Photo from Cuéntame photo and video collection

The state of Texas may be one of the toughest when it comes to capital punishment, but it been positively enlightened of late when it comes to Criminal Justice reform—at least in comparison to California. And it’s getting results.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation has just published a look at the matter in this January 2010 report titled, Texas Criminal Justice Reform:Lower Crime, Lower Cost

It opens like this:

In recent years, Texas has strengthened alternatives to incarceration for adults and juveniles, achieving significant reductions in crime while avoiding more than $2 billion in taxpayer costs that would have been incurred had Texas simply constructed more than 17,000 prison beds that a 2007 projection indicated would be needed. Similarly, juvenile crime has markedly declined at the same time Texas has reduced the number of youths in state institutions by 52.9 percent. By building on these successes in a challenging budget environment, policymakers can continue delivering improved results for public safety and taxpayers.

Yooooo-hooooo, California legislature…….? A-a-a-aaare you listening….?

My friend Joe Domanick is part of a new online criminal justice journal called The Crime Report.” It should be an every day destination for anyone who is interested in the many-faceted world of criminal justice.

This week Joe has a two-part story about the drop in crime in America-–and about what has, and what has not, caused it.

In Part I he looks at the role of smart policing and at the change in gang culture in California, including the tighter grip that the prison gangs have on the gangs in the street.

In Part II he talks to an A-list lineup of experts who nearly to a person agree that the one strategy that cannot be credited with the crime drop, is the ramping up of incarceration.

Here’s how the story begins:

During the 1990s, the favorite solution to reducing crime was incarceration. That is, mass incarceration: mandatory minimums and 25-to-life three-strikes sentences for stealing a slice of pizza. The consequence today is more than two million people behind bars, the world’s largest per capita incarceration rate. No one among the experts I spoke with, however, suggested that as a factor in 2009’s crime drop.

Quite the opposite.

“The dramatic increases in incarceration did contribute to the crime decline in the 1990s,” says Richard Rosenfeld, of the University of St. Louis-Missouri. “The bulk of the evidence shows that. But from 2000-2009, the rate of incarceration slowed. In New York, for example, it’s flat or in decline. So the current decline can’t be ascribed to incarceration.”

John Jay Professor David Kennedy agrees. Recent incarceration rates have been marginal,” he says, while decreases in crime have been dramatic; so any new increases “are likely to be grabbing low level [criminals]. Anything going on is taking place at the margins in terms of incarceration, and is not very powerful.”

Carnegie Mellon University Prof. Al Blumstein also dismiss incarceration as a factor. “We’re close to equilibrium in terms of changes in incarceration,” he says. On the average, the inflow is roughly equal to the outflow. We’re way down to less than one percent increase [in imprisonment], whereas for most of the ’80 and ‘90s the rate was going up by 6 to 8 percent a year.“

Meanwhile, Todd Clear, a noted criminologist from John Jay College, points to mass incarceration’s corollary: lengthy prison sentences. “The length of stay in prison in England and hasn’t changed that much and England’s violent crime rate has gone down very similarly to that of U.S; same with Canada,” he says. “The increasing length of prison stay in the US has been a pattern for about 20 years, so I’m not persuaded that that’s a big cause of the current decline.”

Read on.

Here’s a video of CDCR’s Secretary Matthew Cates’ Monday press conference in which he briefly explained the new programs that began this week, and answered questions about same. (You’ll hear my questions asked via the phone near the end.)

Those criticizing the program would do well to listen just so you’re operating from a fact-based position rather than responding to the rumor mongering and unfounded hysteria that seems to be running rife through the countryside at the moment.

UPDATE: A case in point: Tuesday afternoon I received a copy of the letter that Paul Weber, the president of the LAPPL sent to LA residents in which he wrote: ” …yesterday was also the same day that the state began its program to release over 6,500 prisoners from state prisons…”

NO, PAUL, IT WASN’T. Nothing of the kind happened. And, with all respect, if you don’t know that, you aren’t bothering to check the facts that are available for checking.

AND IF YOU DO KNOW IT, that statement of yours is deliberate and mendacious. Which is not okay. We expect better.

I just got off the phone 2 minutes ago with the CDCR’s Gordon Hinkle to find out if there was any crazed or pretzeled way that Weber’s statement could have any shred of truth behind it. There wasn’t.

So, what’s the deal? Facts no longer matter? If the falsehood gets you what you want, then what the heck, go for it?

Paul Weber’s letter is intended to get residents to pressure their city council members to vote for money to hire more police officers. Hell, I’m for hiring more police officers. But, here’s the thing: I don’t need to be told an hysteria-promoting lie to in order to get me there. (When someone resorts to such tactics, one tends to distrust everything they say.)

A CHALLENGE TO PAUL WEBER: Either stop trotting out that 6500 early release figure—or prove it.