Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash did a brave and important thing on Friday—and then again on Monday. On Friday he issued a draft order to open the Juvenile dependency courts to the press, allowing fresh air into a system in Los Angeles County that has long been disastrously closed. Then on Monday, he had a hearing on the matter and announced that he planned to make the order permanent.

In case you’ve forgotten, Juvenile dependency courts are the places that hear child abuse and neglect cases.

Nash was originally going to open the courts to the public as well as the press, but he ran into a lot of resistance.

So, according to Friday’s draft order, the courts will remain closed to the public unless a certain set of criteria are met in individual cases. However, the new default position will be that press will be allowed in— unless anyone can show clear cause that having reporters in a hearing will harm a child.

As the order itself states:

Members of the press shall be allowed access to Juvenile Dependency Court hearings unless there is a reasonable likelihood that such access will be harmful to the child‟s or children‟s best interests.

Richard Wexler of the NCCPR—the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform— expressed the view of the many child welfare experts who have been advocating for LA’s court to get some fresh air. Here’s a clip from Wexler’s blog post on the topic:

If Judge Nash proceeds with this order as written, it will be a significant step forward in holding the county Department of Children and Family Services and the courts themselves accountable for what the system does to children and families in Los Angeles. As we explain in our Due Process Agenda, none of the many other state and local systems that have opened these courts has closed them again because all the fears of opponents proved groundless…

Not everyone agrees. Former foster child, Marcy Valenzuela wrote an Op Ed for the LA Times last fall explaining why she felt the courts should stay closed.

Juvenile dependency courts exist to protect children and youths who have been neglected and abused, so it’s shocking that the presiding judge who oversees the Los Angeles County Superior Court’s juvenile division is pushing a plan that puts foster children and youths at risk of further harm.

If Judge Michael Nash’s order stands, vulnerable children, youths and their families, who are already dealing with painful consequences of neglect and abuse, would face the additional burden of proving why the most intimate details of their lives should be kept private.

The primary movers against letting light into the courts, are not child advocates, but the unions for the grown-ups, those who represent the social workers, et al. They have fought hard to keep the hearings secret.

However, Nash is clear on the issue.

There is a lot that is not good [in the dependency courts], and that’s an understatement,” the LA Times reported that Nash said earlier this year at a Sacramento hearing on the issue. “Too many families do not get reunified…. Too many children and families languish in the system for far too long. Someone might want to know why this is the case.”

Exactly.

According to advocates who were present at Monday’s meeting, Nash said he would issue a final order very soon.

AND LEST WE STRAY TOO FAR FROM THE LASD & JAILS…THE LA TIMES EDITORIAL SAYS: YES, LA COUNTY’S JAILS ARE BROKEN, BUT EVERYBODY NEEDS TO THINK BEFORE PRESCRIBING A $1.4 BILLION DOLLAR ONE-DIMENSIONAL, BUILD-A-JAIL FIX

Or words to that effect. Mainly, Monday’s very well written editorial echos what we said last week before and after the board of supervisors meeting, regarding the need to look at the whole picture before rushing off and throwing a billion and a half dollars at jail building.

And by “the whole picture, this includes the suggestions contained in the very lengthy and very smart Vera Institute report on the county’s jail over crowding issue and what to do about it ( a report that was, by the way, ordered and paid for by the county). And it also means waiting to look at the upcoming report on the same issue from jails and prison expert Jim Austin, due in late February.

Anyway, a big thank you to the Times editorial board, who said all of the above more elegantly than we did.

THEN WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF WISE GOVERNANCE….WHAT’S UP WITH GOV. JERRY TRYING TO DO AWAY WITH THE HAYDEN BILL, WHICH HAS PROTECTED CALIFORNIA’S PETS FROM NEEDLESS EUTHANASIA SINCE 1998?

Former California senator Tom Hayden (and current critter owner) explains everything. (See above video.)

Yes, yes, we’ve heard that the legislative analyst says that doing away with this bill will save the state money. Okay, sure. And having no shelters at all will save the state even more money. BUT THAT DOESN’T MAKE IT A GOOD IDEA.

Raise fees. Whatever. But do not even think of trying to vaporize the law that prevents precipitous critter euthanasia—which could, in turn, mean that if by some chance our four-footed family members get lost, get out of the house for an unscheduled walkabout, or get separated from us by some unforeseen force majeure, they could be killed dead before we’ve had the chance to track them down.

No. Not a workable solution, Jerry.

Seriously—Ask yourself, WWSD? What would Sutter do?

Okay, see? I rest my case.

Last week WitnessLA reported (based on the word of multiple inside sources) that Probation Chief Donald Blevins had been informed the week before that his tenure in LA County Probation was over; he was being given the boot.

When other news outlets, like KPCC, called Probation to confirm our report they were told no such firing had take place. (Never mind that we know that Blevins’ employment situation was as we reported it.)

Now on Tuesday morning, the Supervisors will meet in a closed door session, the purpose being, according to their agenda, for: Interview and consideration of candidate for appointment to the position of Chief Probation Officer.

Last week Spokesperson Kerry Webb did confirm another pesky rumor—namely that last week Blevins left for a vacation that “had been planned months in advance ” reported the LA Times.

There was some muttering in and around some of the supervisors’ offices about the wisdom of the Probation Chief planning a vacation that kicked in just days before Los Angeles was to get an influx of parolees from the state to be overseen by LA County Probation.

But whatever. The beat goes on. More soon.

SINCE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF REALIGNMENT, MORE CITY OFFICIALS ARE PREDICTING DOOM AND GLOOM

The LA Times’ Joel Rubin and Andrew Blankstein report that the LAPD will be additionally burdened by the realignment parolees and that the mayor and others have expressed concern while a Governor’s aide calls all this public worrying political posturing.

Who is correct remains to be seen, although I do notice that, according to the article, the City of LA is predicting a much larger number of parolees to come to LA before the end of the year than the actual CDCR numbers reflect. Not sure what’s up with that.

THOUSANDS OF CALIFORNIA INMATES RENEW HUNGER STRIKE, AND THE CDCR INVESTIGATES TWO STRIKE ATTORNEYS

I’m playing catch up on this story, but the very knowledgeable Michael Montgomery from California Watch
is doing great coverage. Here’s an excerpt from his latest.

Just days after thousands of California inmates renewed a hunger strike, two Bay Area attorneys closely involved in mediation efforts got a surprise: They were under investigation by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for allegations of misconduct and unspecified security threats.

The attorneys – Marilyn McMahon, executive director of California Prison Focus, and Carol Strickman of Legal Services for Prisoners With Children – have been banned from state institutions until the investigation is resolved, according to temporary exclusion orders signed by Corrections Undersecretary Scott Kernan on Sept. 29.

The investigation will determine whether the attorneys “violated the laws and policies governing the safe operations of institutions within the CDCR,” the order states.

The document does not provide details about the allegations.

SANDY BANKS ON SHERIFF LEE BACA AND THE JAILS ABUSE SCANDAL

Yesterday, I missed linking to Sandy Banks’ excellent and very welcome column about Sheriff Baca and the growing jails abuse scandal. If you’ve already seen it, great. If not, it’s a BIGTIME must read. Banks lays it all out for the Sheriff, with no punches pulled. For his sake as well as ours, I hope he is listening.

WHERE TO WATCH TUESDAY’S IPHONE 5 APPLESTRAVAGANZA

YES, it is presumed that the iPhone 5 is launching Tuesday at 10 am Pacific (not just the undramatic iPhone 4s).

And NO this is not a social justice issue.

It’s an Apple cult issue.

So if you too are a cult member, here’s where you can find out where to follow real-time commentary and/or live streaming.

The use of jailhouse snitches has been a notorious sources of wrongful convictions.

On Monday, the state of California just took a large step in correcting that problem when Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that greatly restricts how jailhouse snitches may be used.

The Sac Bee’s Carol Williams wrote this story before Brown signed the bill into law (on the very last day he could do so) but Williams’ reporting lays the issue out nicely. Here are some clips:

No blood, fingerprints, weapon or other physical evidence was ever found to link Thomas L. Goldstein to the 1979 shotgun murder of John McGinest, a Long Beach neighbor he had never met.

Goldstein, then a 28-year-old draftsman, former Marine and part-time engineering student, had moved into a garage apartment near the murder scene just two days earlier and had only a couple of minor run-ins with the law for drunkenness and disturbing the peace to bring him to police attention.

Goldstein would nevertheless lose the next 25 years of his life to imprisonment on a wrongful conviction, secured by prosecutors who cut deals with a notorious jailhouse informant – aptly named Edward F. Fink – to testify that Goldstein had confessed to the murder.

Scandalous misuse of uncorroborated testimony by in-custody informants in the 1980s sent dozens to long prison terms for offenses that appellate courts later determined they never committed. But a bill passed by the state Legislature earlier this month and facing a Monday deadline for Gov. Jerry Brown to sign would prohibit future convictions based solely on the testimony of jailhouse informants, who often have something to gain by lying.

It’s been a long struggle to get the law changed, and the California District Attorneys Association and other tough-on-crime groups remain opposed to the law, which would block convictions in cases without corroborating testimony by uncompromised witnesses or forensic evidence to tie the defendant to the crime.

Williams also notes that Steve Cooley is one of the handful of prosecutors who has already taken steps to curb the use of jailhouse informants. Go Cooley!

BURL CAIN, THE BIBLE-WIELDING KING OF ANGOLA PRISON
Veteran journalist James Ridgeway writes for Mother Jones about Louisiana’s Angola prison and its near-mythic warden, Burl Cain.

It’s quite the story.

A trio of legal and justice stories that you shouldn’t miss:

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JERRY BROWN’S APPOINTMENT OF GOODWIN LIU TO THE CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT

In his Sunday column, the Sac Bee’s Dan Morain has an interesting take on why Governor Jerry Brown’s recent appointment of Goodwin Liu to the California Supreme Court is important—to him and to us.

Here’s how it opens. But read the whole thing, because Morain develops his thesis in steps.

Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to make amends for missteps he made in his youth.

Brown nominated Goodwin Liu to the Supreme Court last week, hoping he has found a justice in the mold of a giant in California’s legal history, Roger Traynor.

Like Liu, Traynor was a 40-year-old UC Berkeley law professor with limited courtroom experience when Gov. Culbert Olson appointed him in 1940. Brown’s father, Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, elevated Traynor to chief justice in 1964.

For three decades, Traynor was integral to a court that expanded civil rights and pioneered what are now basic concepts of civil law. In Brown’s view, Traynor is the most distinguished justice ever to serve this state……

THE MESS WE’RE IN: FIVE STEPS IN TRANSFORMING PRISON CULTURE

Law professor Lynn S. Branham is an expert in sentencing and incarceration policy, and has written a very interesting paper for the Indian on how to—not just reform—but transform the dysfunctional prison culture that we have in most states, but most notably in California.

Here’s a clip from the abstract:

…..the more fundamental question is whether prisons can be, not just improved, but transformed. Transformation in this context means deep and sustained changes in the ethos of those who work and live in prisons. That ethos would reflect at least four precepts: (1) hope as an imperative; (2) the viability of renewal; (3) the catharsis that attends personal responsibility and accountability; and (4) the duty and call, extending to prisoners and correctional employees alike, to respect human dignity.

This article rests on the proposition that such “culture busting” in prisons is possible and describes five key steps that need to be taken by each state and the federal government to effectuate the envisioned transformation in their prisons.

US IMMIGRATION LAW GOVERNING ASYLUM CUTS AGAINST THOSE THREATENED BY MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS

US asylum law was written during the cold war and was aimed mainly at people who were being persecuted by their government. However, now we have a whole new class of asylum seekers at our borders, mainly those fleeing the violence of the Mexican drug cartels.

This story in the El Paso Times explains the problem. Here’s a clip:

….To obtain political asylum, a person must prove that there’s a well-founded fear of persecution on account of the person’s race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

An individual must also show that he is being persecuted by his government or that authorities in his country are unable or unwilling to protect the applicant from persecution by another group.

Former immigration attorney Edgar Holguin said the problem for many political asylum cases from Mexico is that current asylum law — contained in the Refugee Act of 1980 — was drafted to offer protection in a Cold War setting.

“What I tell my clients is that asylum law was designed to help people fleeing from the other side of the Iron Curtain,” he said. “It worked really well for people who were openly practicing Christian faith in a communist country. But in Mexico’s case, it’s difficult to pigeon someone into it. The law was written for a different era and different circumstances.”

San Francisco immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks, head of the national immigration judges’ union, said that the law predates some of today’s problems, such as gangs in Guate mala and cartels in Mexico, so there are fewer precedents on how the law should be applied.

“These are newly emerging situations, so case precedents do not squarely address them,” she said.

While the law can be stretched to accommodate cases from foreigners seeking relief from gang or drug violence, such arguments often don’t fit traditional interpretations of the law, immigration experts said…..

(Thanks to my pal and immigration policy guru Dan Kowalski for the heads up on this story.)

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

THE BULLIES AND ROGUES OF THE COMPTON UNIFIED SCHOOL BOARD

The drama of the hoped for “Parent Trigger” transformation of Compton’s McKinley Elementary School was covered quite well by Patrick Range McDonald at the LA Weekly late last year and early this year.

In case you don’t know, the so-called parent trigger gives parents the power to decide how to change or restructure failing California schools by petitioning the relevant school district to “trigger” one of four possible strategies: firing the school principle, shutting down the school altogether (allowing students to transfer to nearby school), starting over with a new staff, or converting the school into a charter.

Parents at Mckinley Elementary School in Compton petitioned to go the charter route. But the Compton school board was unwilling to relinquish control.

The LATimes Jim Newton is doing a series of op eds on education, and in Monday’s paper, he takes on the Compton/parent trigger fight, and does so with a fury. Here’s how it opens:

The struggle for equal educational opportunity is the great civil rights imperative of our time. It pits those who demand a decent education against an educational establishment that often blithely ignores them. The victims are overwhelmingly poor minorities, and the clash is nowhere more important than here in Los Angeles. Next week, I look forward to profiling some of the heroes of this struggle, the inspiring young women and men brought together by Teach for America; first, however, a look at the defenders of a corrupt status quo and the lengths to which they will resort to defend their position at the expense of poor children, most of them black or Latino.

This particular band of obstructionists is, in one sense, an unlikely group of civil rights villains: They are the members of the Compton Unified School District board, every one of whom is black. But they are rogues nonetheless, as witnessed by their stunning unwillingness to heed the call of parents who want nothing more than to improve the lives of their children.

The clash in Compton is between the board and the parents of McKinley Elementary School, a tragically underperforming school just off Rosecrans Avenue. At McKinley, parents, guided by the pro-charter reform group known as Parent Revolution, took advantage of the state’s so-called parent trigger law to try to help their children. Under that law, when a majority of parents at a school defined as “failing” sign a petition, a district is required to replace staff or teachers, close the school or give it over to a charter operator. In this case, the parents of 275 of McKinley’s 442 students signed petitions asking for a charter.

The Compton school board could have acknowledged the aspirations of those families and heeded their pleas, or it could have defensively retrenched. Guess which it did?

WOULD JERRY BROWN’S NEW PROPOSED CONTRACT WITH THE PRISON GUARDS’ UNION HAND OVER HUGE AMOUNTS OF POWER TO THE CCPOA?

A Sunday editorial in the Sacramento Bee takes a very harsh and sobering look at Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed contract renewal with the state’s most powerful union— the CCPOA. If it is as the Sac Bee suggests, then Brown has some serious explaining to do, and the state legislature should separate this contract out for close review and refuse to let it move forward without huge changes.

Here’s how the editorial opens:

While he was governor, Gray Davis approved a plum contract for the state’s 30,000 prison guards that effectively gave the California Correctional Peace Officers Association management control over the state’s prison system.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked to wrest back control of the prisons from the CCPOA. But now that he is governor, Jerry Brown is reversing those hard-earned reforms on behalf of a major campaign contributor.

If this were a movie, we’d call it “Contract Giveaway: The Return of Gray,” starring Jerry Brown.

Given that the state’s corrections system is a major driver of state spending, the stakes are immense in any new contract for prison officers. Yet the Brown administration has released a 218-page proposed 2011-13 contract document that is loaded with barely legible handwritten notes and cross-outs. Whole swaths of the corrections system, such as parole, remain to be negotiated. Estimates of costs are woefully inadequate. The Legislative Analyst’s Office admits that its one-week review of this “extraordinarily complex” document is not enough to determine full costs to taxpayers.

Read the details here.

REPORTER FINDS HERSELF COMPELLED BY THE FAMILY STORY BEHIND A VERY ORDINARY DEPORTATION HEARING

The proceedings in the removal of Jose Raul Cardenas from the United States began at 9:37 a.m. on Tuesday of last week in a Denver Immigration Court. it is an ordinary illegal immigration case that is duplicated many times over each day in Southern California immigration courts as well.

This time, however, Denver Post reporter Linda Griego was in the courtroom and found herself emotionally affected by the case.

Here are a couple of representative ‘graphs from her story:

About 30 supporters sit behind the family. Twenty are Unitarian Universalist Church clergy who left a retreat to attend the hearing. “People are in denial that our system could possibly be unfair,” one of the ministers tells me.

As I sit among them, I realize that in all the years I’ve been writing about immigration, I have never been in immigration court. I’ve never been witness to a decision that might separate a father from his children, a wife from her husband. For the life of me, I cannot see what such a thing has to do with justice.

Read the rest.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The newest and bloodiest front in Sacramento’s ongoing budget battle is around the issue of redevelopment agencies or RDAs—and whether to abolish them, at least for the time being.

In essence, RDA’s redirect local property taxes toward a variety of economic development programs. The state makes up the $$ difference for each city. This is known as “backfilling”

Given the severity of the state’s money problems, Jerry Brown wants to yank back the $5 billion that the state backfills to the various city redevelopment agencies, effectively doing away with the RDAs.

For the last month, cities have been howling that this will have a crippling effect on jobs and business and the various cities’ ability to, you know, build football stadiums.

Brown’s office has countered that, given the choice between cutting another gazillion out of the state’s already slashed educational budget, and delaying the construction of a new football stadium in Escondido or San Diego, well, dudes, the schools are going to win that little moral battle without breaking a sweat.

The RDA’s case was not helped when, this Monday, State Controller John Chiang issued a report revealing that redevelopment agencies all over California had illegally shortchanged schools by at least $40 million last year.

To make matters worse, the agencies failed to track jobs that they had supposedly created, AND with the money the RDAs were supposed to spend to improve “blighted areas,” many cities’ agencies routinely redefined “blighted” in a manner that was not altogether …..honest.