CALIFORNIA WOMAN FORCED TO PAY HER ABUSIVE HUSBAND SPOUSAL SUPPORT? REALLY?

What is this judge thinking? ABC news has the report. Here are the details:

She was forced to have sex with him, and now she’s being forced to pay his bills.

Crystal Harris of Carlsbad, Calif., had been financially supporting her unemployed, abusive husband Shawn Harris for years. But after he sexually assaulted her in 2008, she took him to court.

The jury heard a damning audiotape of the attack secretly recorded by Crystal Harris, and her husband was convicted of forced oral copulation.

Even so, in 2010, the year their divorce became finalized, he requested spousal support. The judge awarded him $1,000 a month, and also asked Crystal Harris to pay $47,000 of her ex-husband’s legal fees from the divorce proceedings.

JAIL OVERCROWDING PLUS REALIGNMENT MAY FORCE INCARCERATION ALTERNATIVES

Sheriff Baca says the County’s Jails could be full in a month, so some prisoners may serve half sentences. He also said he will look at community-based alternatives to incarceration for some offenders (a strategy that other states have employed successfully, and CA should have embraced years ago).

The LA Times Andrew Blankstein and Robert Faturechi have the story.

Here’s a clip:

The state’s new prison law, which establishes a practice known as realignment, is expected to send as many as 8,000 offenders who would normally go to state prisons into the L.A. County Jail system in the next year.

Currently, defendants awaiting trial account for 70% of the jail population, but Sheriff Lee Baca said that might need to drop to 50%. The department is studying a major expansion of its electronic monitoring and home detention programs to keep track of inmates who are released.

Baca said the department is also developing a new risk-assessment system designed to better identify which inmates are the best candidates to leave the jails.

Additionally, the department is looking at ways to channel more offenders into education and substance abuse programs rather than jail.

In the panic over releasing inmates, did anyone notice the small, interesting fact embedded in this story: namely that 70 percent of those in jail are not there because of convictions, but because they are awaiting trial. And a big chunk of the folks who make up that 70 percent are locked up, not because they’re a hideous threat to public safety or a ghastly flight risk, but simply because they don’t have the money or the collateral to make bail. In other words, the issue isn’t so much criminogenic as it is fiscal.

So-o-oooo, instead, of keeping all those economically-challenged folks in the county lock-up, for those who qualify, we could use electronic monitoring or some related ATI (alternatives to incarceration) system, which other jurisdictions have been employing with good results. (But, hell, why be logical and forward thinking when hysteria is SO much more fun!)

WHERE ARE REPUBLICANS ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Steve Yoder writing for the Crime Report suggests that some Republicans have come farther on sentencing reform and other criminal justice reforms than Democrats.

Here’s a clip:

To understand the distance that the Republican Party has traveled on criminal justice, observe the record of Texas’ longest-serving governor.

In 2001, just after Rick Perry assumed the job, he vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice of arresting those suspected of class C misdemeanors—fine-only crimes that don’t require jail time, such as traffic offenses.

But fast-forward to 2007. That year, he signed a law allowing police officers to issue citations instead of making arrests for certain class A and B misdemeanors, including marijuana possession. Perry’s reversal came about in part because the state faced a projected shortfall of 17,000 inmate beds.

In Texas and other red states, formerly law-and-order GOP lawmakers are taking the lead in reforming criminal justice systems.

In other words, yes, California’s Democratic legislature does lag behind Rick Perry’s Texas (among other states) in terms of many criminal justice reforms. Explain that one, Sacramento!

Not that the public, the press and the local officials are any better: Just notice the ongoing freakout that realignment is causing. (See above.) I mean, realignment may force us to have to back into some much-needed sentencing and pre-trial systems reform. OMG!!! The horror!!!

On Thursday, July 28, LA City Controller Wendy Greuel hosted the fourth of what she calls her Women’s Dialogues. This “Dialogue” took place downtown in the City Council chambers, and involved a bunch of surprisingly forthright (and often funny) conversation.

Each one of these women’s gatherings is themed. Last Thursday the theme was Women and the Law, and it featured Attorney General Kamala Harris, along with Rachel Moran, the Dean of the UCLA School of Law (who was reportedly on Jerry Brown’s short list for the California Supreme Court), Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Teresa Sanchez-Gordon, plus three heavy hitter women attorneys—Carla Christofferson of O’Melveny & Myers, Los Angeles office, Kaylynn L. Kim, Terra Imperium Global Advisors, and Areva Martin of Martin & Martin.

The whole notion of organizing these women’s chat sessions is not unique to Greuel. Former Controller Laura Chick began the practice with her own similar gender-specific events.

But Greuel has continued it with gusto, reaching out to women in various professions for get-togethers in which a panel of powerhouse females from a particular profession answer questions lobbed by Wendy, and by the wide variety of women who have come to participate as audience members.

The women in last Thursday’s audience included lawyers (of course), LAPD officers, staffers from the mayor’s and the city attorney’s offices, a gaggle of couple of extremely bright pre-law undergrads from USC, and at least one other judge.

indeed, the women leaders in the room were, by no means, limited to the panel; I ran into former LAPD Inspector General Nicole Bershon (recently turned Court Commissioner) who told me how really glad she was to able to make it to the event, a sentiment that most I talked to echoed.

A big part of the appeal was the candidness of the Q’s and A’s, a process that Greuel was unusually skilled at facilitating. For example, in addition to the expected “How did you get where you are and what obstacles did you face?” questions, at some point she asked the panelists how they dealt with the “are you tough enough” issue—noting (and I am paraphrasing here) that if a woman was perceived as being the wrong kind of tough she got labeled…..the B- word.

When necessary Greuel pushed her panelists until she got good answers. Yet very little pushing was required. The panelists themselves worked hard to be candid. Carla Christofferson the very pregnant, 44-year old bombshell blond who is the managing partner from O’Melveny said with a deadpan expression that when men begin questioning her toughness, “…the fact that can tell them I bow hunt and kill things, gives me an advantage.” Then Christofferson added in a more serious tone, “We all have things in our personal narrative that we can use, that can help us.”

At one point the exchange got informatively girly as the women talked about the intricacies of their wardrobe and accessory choices. Most advocated for less tamped down styles that flaunted some kind of personal expression. For example, Ariva Martin wore a blazingly yellow dress and said she favored red footwear. UCLA dean Rachel Moran, had on large, very pretty and decidedly unbusiness-y rhinestone earrings and Judge Sanchez-Gordon wore platform heels that were on the refreshingly racy side.

“And see,” said one woman afterward, “what you should or shouldn’t wear to be taken seriously is the kind of thing that every woman I know thinks about but nobody ever talks about.”

Another thing that no one mentioned overtly was the fact that, since Wendy Greuel has declared herself to running for mayor when Villaraigosa terms out, the good will that she is gathering by organizing women’s events like this one cannot help but be to her advantage.

Yet watching Controller Wendy Greuel’s delight in getting smart women to talk to each other about the some of the rarely mentioned textures of their respective lives strongly suggested that any political advantages Greuel happens to gain from these sessions is very well earned.

You can watch the Women in Law dialogue at City View here. (Look to your right and choose the top Women’s Dialogue Series.)

Alright. Let’s begin at the beginning. The whole kerfuffle started on Tuesday when my pal Erin Aubry Kaplan caused something of a stir with the cover story she wrote for Salon. The article, you see, was about Michelle Obama’s…um….well… her butt.

Here are some clips:

“…..There is a certain freedom in the moment – as in, we are all now free from wondering when or if we’ll ever get a black president. Congratulations to all of us for being around to settle the question.

But what really thrills me, what really feels liberating in a very personal way, is the official new prominence of Michelle Obama. Barack’s better half not only has stature but is statuesque. She has coruscating intelligence, beauty, style and — drumroll, please — a butt. (Yes, you read that right: I’m going to talk about the first lady’s butt.)

[BIG SNIP]

Lord knows, it’s time the butt got some respect. Ever since slavery, it’s been both vilified and fetishized as the most singular of all black female features, more unsettling than dark skin and full lips, the thing that marked black women as uncouth and not quite ready for civilization (of course, it also made them mighty attractive to white men, which further stoked fears of miscegenation that lay at the heart of legal and social segregation). In modern times, the butt has demarcated class and stature among black society itself. Emphasizing it or not separates dignified black women from ho’s, party girls from professionals, hip-hop from serious. (Black women are not the only ones with protruding behinds, by the way, but they’re certainly considered its source. How many gluteally endowed nonblack women have been derided for having a black ass? Well, Hillary, for one.)

But Michelle is bringing those two falsely divided minds together in a single presentation — finally, unity for the real world!

The rest is a happy and appreciative hallelujah written with a lovely sense of exuberance and humor. It is also an intelligent essay on issues of body image, race and women, all done with a light touch. Erin is and always has been a good writer. And this kind of political-meets-the-highly-personal is where she particularly excels.

At least that’s what I thought when I read it.

To say that not all Salon’s readers had such an upbeat reaction would be to understate the matter considerably.

Many in the crowd were quite aghast.

“This article was stupid, vapid, and demeaning and not even funny, nor ironic in any sense of the word,” wrote an outraged reader in what turned out to be one of the tamest of the comments.

But the angry response to Erin’s boo-tay bantering did not limit itself to Salon.

Read the rest of this entry »