THE LASD WILL APPEAL RECENT HIGH $$ JUDGEMENT IN CASE OF DEPUTY SHOOTING OF PALMDALE TEENAGER WITH TOY GUN

Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Spokesman Steve Whitmore said the department now plans to appeal the recent $1.1 million judgement that a jury awarded 19-year-old William Fetters, who was shot by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy, Scott Sorrow, four years ago.

The award, which amounted to $1,127,600, included reembursement for medical bills, plus damages for pain and suffering. [Go here for our previous report on the case.]

On on May 10, 2009, Fetters—then 15-years-old—was riding his bike with his brother and friends, playing “cops and robbers,” on a residential street in Palmdale, when Sorrow said he saw the boy waving what he said he believed was a real gun.

The “gun” was, in fact, a toy cap gun . But, according to Whitmore, it was minus the orange tip that representational-looking toy firearms are required to have, thus making it look real when seen quickly.

[WLA obtained the photo above of Fetters' actual toy gun, taken at the scene.]

According to Fetters, he was riding his bike down the street toward a local baseball diamond, pretending to “shoot” back and forth with his brother and friends as they went. As the boys rode, Sorrow approached in his LASD patrol car and barked at Fetters to get off his bike and drop the gun. Scared, Fetters said he dropped the toy gun instantly, and tried to get off the bike, but the deputy shot him anyway.

Sorrow testified to the contrary that Fetters was brandishing what appeared to be a real gun, which he did not drop at all, but instead pointed it at the patrol car causing the deputy to fear for his life and that of his partner. As a consequence, he fired a single shot at Fetters.

The jury believed Fetters’ version of events.

According to Whitmore, after the incident, Fetters was convicted of the misdemeanor charge of pointing a firearm at deputies. “And, don’t forget, both our internal affairs investigation and the OIR [Office of Independent Review] found the deputy’s actions within department policy.”

Whitmore added, “This is not how anyone wants an encounter with a teenager to end.”

Whitmore also noted that the judge in the Fetters case excluded Fetters’ misdemeanor conviction from coming into court, thus the jury was unaware of it.

By the same token, the jury did not hear of another Palmdale incident also involving Deputy Sorrow that occurred in August 26, 2009, three months after the shooting of Fetters. This second incident resulted in Sorrow and two other deputies being sued by a local apartment manager, Noel Bender, for assault and battery, and civil rights violations. [See this Daily News story for additional details on that lawsuit.]

In the Bender case, the jury also decided in the plaintiff’s favor, awarding Bender $581,000 for “false arrest, battery, Civil Rights violations and intentional infliction of emotional distress,” after acquiting the other two deputies but finding that Sorrow had acted “with malice.”

In Fetters’ case, the jury could not decide whether or not Sorrow had acted “with malice,” thus that part of the matter will be retried later this month, according to Fetters’ attorney, Bradley Gage, who also represented Bender.

LA TIMES URGES “PAY THE DORNER AWARDS”

In an editorial on Sunday, the LA Times editorial board explained why reneging on the $1 million in awards offered for the capture of Christopher Dorner is a very bad idea.

WLA agrees. Here’s a clip:

….some of those who pledged reward money are interpreting the matter as one of contract and are looking for loopholes to withdraw their support. The city of Riverside, for instance, declared that “because the conditions were not met, there will not be a payment of a reward by the city.” That’s penny wise and pound foolish, not to mention a cavalier disregard of public safety. Officials should realize that it will undermine the efficacy of future reward offers if the public senses that the game is rigged. In an effort to save itself a few dollars in this instance, Riverside and others may end up paying dearly in the future when residents, told that a reward is on the table, decide to let police handle it themselves because the money may not be forthcoming.

[BIG SNIP]

Finally, there is this dystopian alternative to consider: If public agencies offer rewards for arrest or conviction and then withhold them in cases in which a suspect dies, they have, in effect, created a financial incentive for police to kill suspects rather than arrest them. That’s a troubling bit of motivation.

HOW MUCH DOES RACIAL BIAS FEED THE “SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE?’

The Christian Science Monitor adds a new and disturbing story to the growing body of evidence that, not only are zero tolerence school discipline policies ineffective and damaging to overall student well-being but, statistically speaking, they are gravely biased when it comes to race.

Here’s a clip from the story by Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, which draws from extensive data gathered by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

Two students set off fire alarms in the same school district. One of them, an African-American kindergartner, is suspended for five days; the other, a white ninth-grader, is suspended for one day.

•An African-American high-schooler is suspended for a day for using a cellphone and an iPod in class. In the same school, a white student with a similar disciplinary history gets detention for using headphones.

•Two middle-schoolers push each other; the white student receives a three-day, in-school suspension, while the native American student is arrested and suspended, out of school, for 10 days.

Civil rights groups have been saying for years that school discipline is not meted out fairly, citing examples like these reported last year from around the country by the US Department of Education.

[SNIP]

Data from 72,000 American public schools in the 2009-10 school year, for example, show that while African-Americans make up 18 percent of the students in this large sample, they account for 46 percent of students suspended more than once, 39 percent of students expelled, and 36 percent of students arrested on campus.

White students, by contrast, represent 29 percent of multiple suspensions and 33 percent of expulsions – but 51 percent of the students.

[BIG SNIP]

Many people might assume the racial breakdown of discipline simply reflects higher rates of misbehavior by some groups of students, perhaps explained by factors such as poverty.

Research has shown that’s not an adequate explanation. “There’s quite a bit of literature that supports the finding that it’s not just about kids behaving badly,” says Russell Skiba, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington and an expert on school violence and discipline.

His recent study of discipline data in one Midwestern state found that even after controlling for types of student behavior and poverty, African-Americans still had 1.5 times higher rates of suspension or expulsion than whites did….

I’m just scratching the surface with the clips. There’s lots and lots more to the story so

read the rest here.

TEXAS USES AN ARCANE LAW TO POSSIBLY—JUST POSSIBLY—HOLD ACCOUNTABLE A PROMINENT FORMER PROSECUTOR, NOW A JUDGE, FOR OBSCURING AND WITHHOLDING EVIDENCE THAT LIKELY WOULD HAVE KEPT AN INNOCENT MAN FROM GOING TO PRISON FOR 25 YEARS

The LA Times’ Molly Hennessy Fiske drew our attention to this story with her write-up
that runs on Tuesday. Here’s a clip:

In emotional testimony Monday, a Texas man told a judge how it felt spending 25 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

“Brutal,” Michael Morton said. “But after a couple decades, I got used to it.”

Morton, 58, who grew up in Los Angeles, was convicted in the 1986 beating death of his wife, Christine, at their home. He was exonerated and released almost a year and a half ago after DNA tests confirmed his innocence. Another man has since been charged in connection with the killing.

Now the man who prosecuted Morton, Williamson County District Judge Ken Anderson, faces an unprecedented “court of inquiry” about 30 miles north of Austin in which a judge will decide whether the then-district attorney lied and concealed evidence that could have cleared Morton.

It is the first time the state has convened such a hearing for prosecutorial misconduct. Although part of Texas law since 1965, the court of inquiry has typically been used to consider allegations against elected officials. Some hope this week’s hearing will lead to a greater examination of alleged misconduct by prosecutors not just in Texas, but nationwide.

However, it is Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff whose reporting we must follow on this story. Last fall, Colloff wrote a stunning two-part series on Morton and his case.

Now she is following the unusual court proceedings examining the actions of former prosecutor Ken Anderson.

She writes:

Starting on Monday, Anderson will be the subject of a “court of inquiry,” an arcane legal procedure unique to Texas that can be used to investigate wrongdoing, most often on the part of state officials. It has never been used before to probe allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. The unprecedented legal proceeding will try to determine whether Anderson withheld critical evidence from Michael’s defense attorneys which would have helped Michael prove his innocence more than a quarter-century ago.

Anderson is now a state district judge. That a former prosecutor, much less a sitting judge, will face such intense scrutiny is remarkable. Prosecutorial misconduct rarely results in even disciplinary action from the Texas bar. But if the presiding judge in the court of inquiry finds probable cause to believe that Anderson broke the law, he will face criminal charges and a warrant will be issued for his arrest….

It is not just that prosecutors are rarely held accountable in Texas; they are rarely held accountable anywhere. If a surgeon is careless in an operation and thus paralyzes you, there are legal remedies. But if a prosecutor deliberately withholds crucial evidence that would almost certainly have cleared you, and instead your family is shattered, your young son is raised by someone else, and you go to prison for life, lose 25 years, then by wonderful luck you are released through work by the Innocence Project —there is no legal way to hold the prosecutor to answer.

However, this week in Texas, perhaps there is a way. If so, perhaps, as Molly Hennessy-Fiske suggested, it will have resonance beyond the lone star state’s boundaries.

IS IT LEGAL FOR CALIFORNIA’S LOCAL MUNICIPALITIES TO BAN MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES? THE CALIFORNIA SUPREMES WILL DECIDE

This article by the always excellent Howard Mintz, Legal Affairs guy for the San Jose Mercury News, lays out this interesting issue in lively and informative terms. Here’s a big clip from the story’s opening:

California’s experiment with medical marijuana has sparked a hazy version of the old Not-in-My-Backyard syndrome.

From Hollister to Antioch, from Scotts Valley to Petaluma, from Seaside to Moraga, city after city has banned medical marijuana dispensaries, sending a message that even the sickest of patients must go elsewhere for that state-permitted dose of prescribed medical weed.

But on Tuesday, this fear-and-loathing approach to outlawing medical pot providers will face an unprecedented test in the California Supreme Court. The seven justices are to hear arguments on whether local governments can ban the dispensaries in view of the state’s 1996 voter-approved law legalizing pot for medical use.

The case involves the Inland Empire Patients Health and Wellness Center, which more than two years ago sued to block Riverside’s dispensary ban, arguing that cities and counties cannot bar activities legal in California. A state appeals court sided with Riverside, and now the Supreme Court, faced with similar legal tangles across the state, has jumped into the fray.

The stakes are high in California’s ongoing struggle pitting medical marijuana advocates against cities worried about problems associated with some of the dispensaries, such as lax control over the distribution of a drug that remains illegal under federal law.

“The Riverside case is a fascinating example of our ‘laboratories of democracy’ in action,” said Julie Nice, a aw professor at the University of San Francisco, where the Supreme Court will hear the arguments. “It illustrates the difficulties created when each level of government … stakes out a different regulatory position on a controversial subject….”

Read more here. And naturally, we’ll be keeping an eye out for the Cal Supremes’ ruling on this question.

TOO MANY MENTALLY ILL IN STATE AND COUNTY LOCK-UPS

One topic on which justice reform advocates, custody experts and county sheriffs tend to agree, is that a large portion of those incarcerated in California’s jails and prisons are mentally ill, and that this is not a good thing. Put more plainly, in most cases, jails and prisons are the most costly and the least effective places for the mentally ill to be.

As we look at reforming our budget-draining and problem-plagued incarceration systems in ways that balance public safety and basic justice, one of the areas that requires a hard look is the intersection between jails and prisons and mental illness.

Monday’s Huffington Post’s Alana Horowitz has a good overview of the issue. Here are some clips from her story:

….A 2006 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that over half of all jail and prison inmates have mental health issues; an estimated 1.25 million suffered from mental illness, over four times the number in 1998. Research suggests that people with mental illness are overrepresented in the criminal justice system by rates of two to four times the normal population. The severity of these illnesses vary, but advocates say that one factor remains steady: with proper treatment, many of these incarcerations could have been avoided.

“Most people [with mental illness] by far are incarcerated because of very minor crimes that are preventable,” says Bob Bernstein, the Executive Director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. “People are homeless for reasons that shouldn’t occur, people don’t have basic treatment for reasons that shouldn’t occur and they get into trouble because of crimes of survival.”

Bernstein blames these high rates on a lack of community mental health services. In the past three years, $4.35 billion in funding for mental health services has been cut from state budgets across the nation, according to a recent report. Because of the cuts, treatment centers have had to trim services and turn away patients.

State hospitals have also been forced to reduce services. A report by the Treatment Advocacy Center even found that there are more people with severe mental illness in prisons and jails than in hospitals.

[SNIP]

Once people with mental illness are incarcerated, Bazleon’s Bernstein says, it becomes a tough cycle to break.

“Most people are there for minor crimes but then they deteriorate,” he explains. “They can’t follow the rules there and so they stay a long time, and they become difficult to release.”

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report, most inmates with mental illness don’t receive treatment while in prison.

Patti Jones’ nephew Tony Lester was sent to state prison in Tucson, Ariz., for aggravated assault. Like Armando Cruz, Lester heard voices. He told his aunt that before he was incarcerated, he had only heard two voices. After he was admitted, there were seven.

Lester was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was prescribed medication but didn’t always take it while in prison, Jones said. Lester was placed among the general prison population with little treatment available.

His symptoms grew worse….

OAKLAND WILL VOTE ON CONTROVERSIAL CHOICE TO HIRE BILL BRATTON TO HELP ITS TROUBLED POLICE DEPARTMENT

Next week, the Oakland City Council will vote on whether or not to pay former LA Police Chief Bill Bratton $250K to help it straighten out its problem-ridden PD, a possibility that has triggered a storm of controversy among Oaklanders—which is fascinating for us Bratton-experienced folks in LA to watch.

Here, for example, are a few of the pros and cons of bringing Bratton to Oakland that are being discussed:

The East Bay Express points out that Bratton is likely to recommend some version of CompStat for Oakland, the data driven strategy which the UN-data-savvy OPD could use as it seeks to lower its spiking crime rate that claimed 131 lives in 2012.

The Express also notes that Bratton favors geographic policing, putting more officers in hot zones, plus some version of community policing to bolster better relationships with crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Oh, yeah, and Oakland has a lousy clearance rate for crimes. Bratton likes good clearance rates—all of which the Express views at the “pros.”

In terms of “cons,” Express worries that Bratton will bring in the kind of stop-and-frisk policy, which has drawn a raft of criticism (and accompanying lawsuits) in NYC.

We think this is unlikely, since Bratton’s savvy enough to realize that such a policy would enrage Oakland residents. Moreover, the OPD has too few officers (600) to pull it off anyway, even if Bratton wanted to (which he won’t)..

Tammerlin Drummond of the Oakland Tribune points out that even if Bratton has great ideas, he’s just a consultant so cannot actually put any policies in place without the cooperation of Oakland’s notoriously quarrelsome political structure. (Good point.)

The bay area’s Indymedia is the most critical of the proposed Bratton hire, basically painting Bill as the “Supercop” antichrist who ruined New York and LA. To wit:

Bratton-style policing has proven over and over to cause more long-term damage than not, to atomize and antagonize poor people and people of color, and to ignore creative, community-led solutions.

We disagree. In Los Angeles, relationships between the cops and the city’s poorest communities actually improved under Bratton who, while not perfect, was refreshingly unafraid to talk about race during his LA tenure. (But such pesky facts ruin the drama, we realize.)

In any case, if Oakland does indeed hire Bratton, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

LA TIMES JIM NEWTON SEES A SMALL BIT OF GOOD NEWS IN THE FIRST YEAR OF NEWEST DCFS CHIEF

Thank goodness for the work of LA Times columnist Jim Newton, who in the past year has turned his reportorial light on LA’s embattled foster care system, whenever he can.

For instance, in this week’s column, Newton looks at the hope-producing attitude of the latest in a string of “new” heads of LA’s troubled Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), a guy named Phillip Browning. Newton also acknowledges how complicated the whole thing is and how, even with the best of intentions, things can go terribly wrong.

Here’s a clip from the column:

…One profoundly important shift has been Browning’s approach to children. In recent years, the department has stressed the importance of keeping families together whenever possible. Browning argues that a child’s safety should trump all other concerns, even when it means taking children from their parents.

“If we think the child is safe, we leave the child with the biological parents,” he explained in the soft Southern accent that causes some to underestimate his toughness. “Sometimes, of course, that’s just not possible.”

Browning’s more stringent approach has meant an increase in the number of children removed from their homes. Last year, the agency filed 14,785 petitions, most of them in connection with detaining children, an increase from 13,481 the year before. What that means in raw terms is that the county last year removed a child from his or her home more than 200 times a week on average.

The hope is that children are protected once they’re under the county’s care, but the sad truth is that they face a capricious future. Some land with capable foster families, and perhaps will be adopted. Some are returned home to families that have recovered from the initial incident and will go on to raise them well. Others, however, are shuttled from one foster home or group facility to another, and grow up without any sense of coherent, dependable family. Some are physically or sexually abused. Some die….

NOBEL LAUREATE IN ECONOMICS EXPLAINS WHY IT’S TIME TO FACE UP TO THE TERRIBLE COSTS OF THE LOST WAR ON DRUGS.

Over the weekend, the conservative-leaning WSJ ran a strongly worded essay by Nobel laureate in economics, Gary Becker, and economics law prof, Kevin Murphy, stating unequivocally that the war on drugs is “a failed experiment,” and “the human cost has become too high,” and that it’s time to decriminalize.

Here’s a clip:

President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing—and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best.

The direct monetary cost to American taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, the court personnel used to try drug users and traffickers, and the guards and other resources spent on imprisoning and punishing those convicted of drug offenses. Total current spending is estimated at over $40 billion a year.

These costs don’t include many other harmful effects of the war on drugs that are difficult to quantify. For example, over the past 40 years the fraction of students who have dropped out of American high schools has remained large, at about 25%. Dropout rates are not high for middle-class white children, but they are very high for black and Hispanic children living in poor neighborhoods. Many factors explain the high dropout rates, especially bad schools and weak family support. But another important factor in inner-city neighborhoods is the temptation to drop out of school in order to profit from the drug trade.

After that, Becker and Murphy do a cost/benefit analysis that is fascinating, so read on.

WHEN DEATH ROW LAWYERS SCREW UP, IT’S THE CLIENTS WHO TAKE THE HITS

In Tuesday’s NY Times Adam Liptak has a story filled with cautionary tales about lawyers disastrously screwing up in death row cases and the horrifying unwillingness of appeals courts to remedy the situations.

Here’s a clip from the opening:

Twice in recent years, the Supreme Court rebuked the federal appeals court in Atlanta for its rigid attitude toward filing deadlines in capital cases. The appeals court does not seem to be listening.

A few days after Christmas, a divided three-judge panel of the court ruled that Ronald B. Smith, a death row inmate in Alabama, could not pursue a challenge to his conviction and sentence because he had not “properly filed” a document by a certain deadline.

As it happens, there is no dispute that the document was filed on time. But it was not “properly filed,” the majority said, because Mr. Smith’s lawyer did not at the same time pay the $154 filing fee or file a motion to establish something also not in dispute — that his client was indigent.

Nor did the majority place much weight on the fact that the lawyer himself was on probation for public intoxication and addicted to crystal methamphetamine while he was being less than punctilious. In the months that followed, the lawyer would be charged with drug possession, declare bankruptcy and commit suicide.

Mr. Smith is almost surely guilty of murdering a convenience store clerk in 1994 in Huntsville, Ala. But it is not clear that he deserves to die for his crime.

His jury, by a vote of seven to five, determined that the murder did not warrant the death penalty, recommending instead that Mr. Smith be sentenced to life in prison….

Read on.

Now that we know that the US Supreme Court will, indeed, consider the issue of California’s Proposition 8 (along with the Defense of Marriage Act case, the United States v. Windsor), the handicapping has begun as to what the Supremes might decide and why.

With Prop 8 the justices have at least three possible choices:

1. They could elect to reverse the 9th Circuit’s ruling that Prop. 8 is unconstitutional and, in so doing, outlaw same sex marriage in California by letting Prop 8 stand.

2. Alterately, there is the best case scenario: the court could find that Prop 8 violates the U.S. Constitution. And that’s the ball game; same sex marriage will be legal throughout the nation.

3. There is, however, a third option, a sort of trap door that lets SCOTUS out having to make one of the two blanket decisions on constitutionality. With option 3, they could reach in and rule, not on the issue, but on whether the Prop 8 defenders have the “standing” to have appealed the lower court ruling that declared Prop 8 unconstitutional. If the Supremes go for option 3, then wedding bells may ring in California, without affecting the rest of the nation one way or the other.

One of the more upbeat essays analyzing the various possibilities is this op ed in the Sunday LA Times by Harvard Law prof, Michael Klarman, in which Klarman basically says that the most likely options are #2 and #3, that even the most conservative justices can see the way the wind is blowing culturally in the U.S., and they’re not likely to want to have to explain in 10 years to their grandchildren why they voted on the resoundingly wrong side of history. Thus, if they’re not ready to open the doors to marriage rights, nationwide, they’ll kick it back to the states.

Here’s how he ends it:

….Many state legislators have explained their votes in favor of gay marriage on the ground that they wanted to be on the right side of history and to have their children be proud when reflecting on their parent’s legislative record. Judges authoring opinions in support of gay marriage have frequently invoked examples of courts being on the right side of history. Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, the author of Massachusetts’ pioneering gay-marriage ruling, has compared it to that court’s 1790s ruling that barred slavery under the very same constitutional provision. Similarly, the California Supreme Court’s decision in favor of gay marriage proudly invoked its landmark 1948 ruling that invalidated a state ban on interracial marriage.

In 1954, the court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which invalidated racial segregation in public schools, split the nation in half. Within two decades, however, it had become iconic. A high court ruling in favor of marriage equality would similarly divide the nation in 2013. Yet, given how quickly public opinion is evolving, within a decade or so such a decision would probably also be almost universally applauded. What justice would not be tempted to author the opinion that within a few short years likely would become known as the Brown vs. Board of Education of the gay rights movement?

However, Adam Liptak is not nearly as chipper in his outlook in Monday’s New York Times.

Here’s a clip:

…The cautious move for the justices would have been to hear just one of the cases they were asked to consider, the one posing the relatively modest question of whether the federal government can discriminate against same-sex couples married in the places that allow such unions.

But the court went big on Friday, also taking the case from California filed by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies. Their case seeks to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in the remaining states, almost all of which have laws or constitutional provisions prohibiting it.

“We are now literally within months,” Mr. Boies said Friday, “of getting a final resolution of this case that began three and a half years ago.”

The speed with which the court is moving has some gay rights advocates bracing for a split decision. The court could strike down the federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, saying that the meaning of marriage is a matter for the states to decide. At the same time, it could reject the idea that the Constitution requires states to allow same-sex marriage, saying that the meaning of marriage is a matter for the states to decide.

That may be why supporters of traditional marriage sounded pretty cheerful on Friday.

“I’m ecstatic,” said Brian S. Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage. “Taking both cases at the same time exposes the hypocrisy on the other side.”

It is entirely possible, then, that the votes to grant review in the California case came from the court’s more conservative justices. They may have calculated that they had a shot at capturing the decisive vote of the member of the court at its ideological center, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, at least in the California case.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC, HERE ARE the coolest photos of the first wave of same sex couples getting married in Washington.

CHICAGO IS THE FALSE CONFESSION CAPITAL OF THE NATION: 60 MINUTES SHOWS SOME OF THOSE WHO WERE PRESSURED TO FALSELY CONFESS

60 Minutes has an excellent and disturbing story about the prevalence of false confessions, particularly in Chicago, and about two groups of teenagers, now adults, who were pushed into confessing to murders they didn’t commit.

Here’s a clip from the transcript:

Why would anyone confess to a crime they did not commit? It happens so often in Chicago, defense attorneys call the city the false confession capital of the United States. Chicago has twice as many documented false confession cases as any city in the country. One reason may be the way police go about questioning suspects. And 60 Minutes has learned the Chicago Police Department is now the subject of a Justice Department investigation into its interrogation practices.

Two cases we examined involve several teenage boys who were arrested and they say forced or tricked into confessing to violent crimes they never committed. Each spent nearly half their lives in prison. They are free now, and told us their story together for the first time.

Terrill Swift: We all of us got one thing in common. We did an extensive amount of time in jail for something we didn’t do. And that’s the bottom line.

They each would serve sentences that ranged from 15 years to life. Terrill Swift, Michael Saunders, Vincent Thames, and Harold Richardson were convicted in one rape and murder. James Harden, Robert Taylor and Jonathan Barr, in a different one. All were found guilty based solely on confessions.

YELLOWSTONE’S MOST FAMOUS WOLF IS KILLED BY HUNTERS

The latest instance of a tagged and monitored wolf that are part of Yellowstone’s wolf study program being killed makes clear that some better system needs to be designed that protects these wolves during hunting season.

The New York Times’ Nate Schweber has the story about the shooting of 826F—popularly known as ’06, the rock star female wolf.

Yellowstone National Park’s best-known wolf, beloved by many tourists and valued by scientists who tracked its movements, was shot and killed on Thursday outside the park’s boundaries, Wyoming wildlife officials reported.

The wolf, known as 832F to researchers, was the alpha female of the park’s highly visible Lamar Canyon pack and had become so well known that some wildlife watchers referred to her as a “rock star.” The animal had been a tourist favorite for most of the past six years.

The wolf was fitted with a $4,000 collar with GPS tracking technology, which is being returned, said Daniel Stahler, a project director for Yellowstone’s wolf program. Based on data from the wolf’s collar, researchers knew that her pack rarely ventured outside the park, and then only for brief periods, Dr. Stahler said.

This year’s hunting season in the northern Rockies has been especially controversial because of the high numbers of popular wolves and wolves fitted with research collars that have been killed just outside Yellowstone in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming….

Photographer Jimmy Jones has photos of ’06 here.

A lot of people have good stories on SCOTUS’s Friday pleasantly amazing decision to hear both the Edie Windsor DOMA case and…..the big one, Prop 8. However, I recommend the following (in no particular order):

David Savage of the LA Times for a good California-centric take

Adam Liptak of the NY Times for the overview.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog, for the wonky take.

And then the smart emotional take belongs to Emily Bazelon at Slate, whose story is titled “The Civil Rights Case of Our Generation: The Supreme Court has agreed to consider the constitutionality of gay marriage. This is going to be big.”

Yep.

SLEWS OF MARIJUANA PROSECUTIONS DROPPED IN WASHINGTON

Although the Washington State marijuana law won’t kick in for another month, both law enforcement and prosecutors decided, as one county prosecutor put it, “There is no point in continuing to seek criminal penalties for conduct that will be legal next month.”

Jonathan Martin of the Seattle Times has the story. Here’s a clip:

Prosecutors and police in Washington moved Friday to swiftly back away from enforcing marijuana prohibition, even though the drug remains illegal for another month.

On Friday, the elected prosecutors of King and Pierce counties, the state’s two largest, announced they will dismiss more than 220 pending misdemeanor marijuana-possession cases, retroactively applying provisions of Initiative 502 that kick in Dec. 6.

In King County, Dan Satterberg said his staff will dismiss about 40 pending criminal charges, and will not file charges in another 135 pending cases. Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist said he will dismiss about four dozen cases in which simple marijuana possession was the only offense.

“I think when the people voted to change the policy, they weren’t focused on when the effective date of the new policy would be. They spoke loudly and clearly that we should not treat small amounts of marijuana as an offense,” Satterberg said.

Although it is unclear how the newly passed Washington State and Colorado laws will fare in the long term, given the fact that the are in conflict with federal laws. But they are a welcome step in beginning to address the illogic of crowding our jails and prisons with people arrested on marijuana possession charges—arrests that, by the way, cut disproportionately against minorities [See WLA post here for most recent FBI figures on marijuana arrests.]

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF DRUGS, LET’S TALK ABOUT THE RASH OF PRESCRIPTION DRUG DEATHS

Scott Glover and Lisa Girion of the LA Times have a an important story about the uptick in prescription drug overdose deaths in the US, and the fact that, in Southern California, nearly half of those drug deaths were caused by medications that were legally prescribed by a physician.

In their exceptionally well-researched and alarming story, Glover and Girion examine the unusual number of deaths attributed to one particular Huntington Beach physician.

Here’s a clip from the story that gives some of the relevant stats:

….Prescription drug overdoses now claim more lives than heroin and cocaine combined, fueling a doubling of drug-related deaths in the United States over the last decade.

Health and law enforcement officials seeking to curb the epidemic have focused on how OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and other potent pain and anxiety medications are obtained illegally, such as through pharmacy robberies or when teenagers raid their parents’ medicine cabinets. Authorities have failed to recognize how often people overdose on medications prescribed for them by their doctors.

A Los Angeles Times investigation has found that in nearly half of the accidental deaths from prescription drugs in four Southern California counties, the deceased had a doctor’s prescription for at least one drug that caused or contributed to the death.

Reporters identified a total of 3,733 deaths from prescription drugs from 2006 through 2011 in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and San Diego counties.

An examination of coroners’ records found that:

In 1,762 of those cases — 47% — drugs for which the deceased had a prescription were the sole cause or a contributing cause of death.

And how many people died from marijuana in So Cal during that same period? I mean, just on average? (crickets.)

(NOTE: LAT staffers Hailey Branson-Potts and Anh Do contributed to the story.)

DAVID BOIES PREDICTS WIN FOR PROP 8 AND SAME SEX MARRIAGE AT SUPREME COURT

David Boies, who along with Ted Olson, is representing the challenge to California’s Prop. 8, was unusually optimistic when on Friday at an awards event he answered some questions on how he thought the high court would respond to the request to hear the case, and to the case itself.

The Mercury News has the story. Here’s a clip:

David Boies, a lawyer for two couples challenging California’s Proposition 8, predicted in San Francisco Friday that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the case and will eventually rule in his clients’ favor by a greater than 5-4 majority.

“I believe we will get more than five votes,” said Boies, speaking of a possible future decision by the nine-member court on the state’s same-sex marriage ban.

“This is a civil rights case of the same importance as Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia,” Boies said. The two cases were the court’s unanimous decisions outlawing school segregation in 1954 and striking down a ban on interracial marriage in 1967.
“I think the justices have a history of coming together and rising above their personal views to enforce the Constitution’s guarantees of equality,” he said.

Boies, of Armonk, N.Y., spoke in an interview shortly before receiving an award from the University of San Francisco Law School’s Public Interest Law Foundation in a Friday evening ceremony.
Boies and Theodore Olson, of Washington, D.C., are the lead attorneys for a lesbian couple from Berkeley and a gay couple from Burbank who filed a federal lawsuit in 2009 to challenge the ban enacted by state voters in 2008 as Proposition 8.

The two lawyers were on opposite sides of the Bush v. Gore presidential election recount battle in 2000, with Olson representing Bush and Boies representing Gore.

EDITOR’S NOTE: While we keep an eye on the safety and well being of our family and friends on the east coast who are wrestling with Sandy, here are a few criminal justice stories from this end of the world.

AFTER A DECADE IN PRISON FOR MURDER, MARIO ROCHA CELEBRATES 4TH YEAR OF FREEDOM

As of Monday, Oct. 29, it has been four years that 33-year-old Mario Rocha finally knew he was really and truly, no kidding —- free. His double life sentence was overturned in March of 2005 after Mario had spent 10 1/2 years in prison for murder and attempted murder. But although he was out of lock-up, it wasn’t clear for how long. While Rocha had been released, he had not been cleared. The judge had merely determined that the young man had received unconscionably lousy legal representation by his asleep-the-wheel lawyer. This meant the DA’s office had the option of refiling charges. And while the hot shot lawyers who had taken on his case pro bono believed he was factually innocent, the prosecutor didn’t. Or, said he didn’t, at the very least. It is worth noting that the LA DA’s office has been notoriously loath to admit it may have screwed up on a case, and put away an innocent person.)

The legal battle that ended four years ago, had its genesis on the night of February 16, 1996, when Rocha was sixteen-years-old and attended a keg party in Highland Park where a bunch of high school kids were celebrating a win for Cathedral High School’s basketball team.

Here’s a clip from WLA’s coverage at the time:

There was drinking at the party, and eventually a fist fight broke out. An extremely well-liked 17-year-old honors student named Martin Aceves, tried to break up the fight, but matters escalated fast. Two kids had guns. Aceves was shot and killed. Another kid was shot in the hand.

A week later, police burst into Mario’s bedroom, guns drawn, yelling: “Don’t move! Hands up! Get down!”

Mario Rochas was tried as an adult and, although the case against him rested on the word of one eyewitness, he was defended by an attorney who spent little time on his case, and failed to call other witnesses who had exculpatory evidence. By the trial’s end, although Mario had no previous record or gang affiliation, he was convicted of murder and attempted murder, together with two other party goers—gang members who had been seen to flash weapons in the crowd.

Unlike most young men in such a position, Mario turned out to be lucky. When he was in Eastlake Juvenile Hall awaiting trial, he participated in a new writing program called “Inside Out,” that had been set up by juvenal hall chaplain, Sister Janet Harris. Although Mario had not been an underachiever during his time in high school, he was clearly very bright, with an intellectual bent and a real talent for writing—all of which the writing class at juvie seemed to bring out in him.
After reading some of his writing, Sister Janet became interested in Mario’s personal story. Although she meets kids on a regular basis who swear they are innocent, the more she looked into Mario’s case, the more convinced she became that Mario was the real deal. She couldn’t imagine he would be convicted. When he was, she said she was too stunned to cry.

“With Mario it was so egregious,” she told ABC News much later, “so horrible that I said to myself whether I win or lose, I am going to fight for justice,” Sister Harris said. “His life was stolen by a system that’s flawed. A system where we need to look out and say: Have we lost our moral compass?”

A slender woman in her 70′s with enough nervous energy to light several medium-sized cities, Sister Janet began working on Mario’s case on her own. She reviewed thousands of pages of trial transcript, and tracked down new witnesses. Armed with what she’d found, Sister Janet managed to interest others in Mario’s case, including the high-powered LA legal firm of Latham & Watkins, whose lawyers agreed to take the case pro bono after Mario passed a polygraph, and a review of case documents, plus Janet’s personal discoveries, indicated that his original attorney did not pursue evidence that indicated Mario was innocent….

Here, also, is a link to Jack Leonard’s 2008 story for the LA Times about the DA’s decision not to retry Mario for the crime.

Mario Rocha’s ordeal was portrayed in an award-winning and deeply affecting documentary, that you can check out here.

Right now Mario Rocha is a social justice activist living in Washington D.C. while he gets his degree in organization science from George Washington University. He will graduate in 2013.

ONE WEED ARREST EVERY 42 SECONDS

On Monday, marijuana activist organizations like L.E.A.P. (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) latest FBI stats show that there were 1.2 million reported drug arrests in the U.S. in 2011.

Of those arrests, according to the FBI, 81.8% were for possession only. And of those possession arrests, by far the largest portion (just under half, or 49.5% to be exact) were for marijuana.

Seriously.

Does this seem smart?

This is from LEAP’s Monday announcement:

“Even excluding the costs involved for later trying and then imprisoning these people, taxpayers are spending between one and a half to three billion dollars a year just on the police and court time involved in making these arrests,” said Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore narcotics cop who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “That’s a lot of money to spend for a practice that four decades of unsuccessful policies have proved does nothing to reduce the consumption of drugs. Three states have measures on the ballot that would take the first step in ending this failed war by legalizing, regulating and taxing marijuana. I hope they take this opportunity to guide the nation to a more sensible approach to drug use.”

A-a-a-aaannnd we wonder why we have overcrowded jails and prisons.

FACTS R GOOD: STANFORD GETS MAJOR GRANTS TO FUND ITS RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTS OF CALIFORNIA’S PRISON REALIGNMENT

So, beyond all the political rhetoric on CA’s prison realignment and the often lousy reporting on same (with some bright spot exceptions like Rob Greene on the LA Times Editorial Board and Michael Montgomery for KQED), it is refreshing that the Department of Justice and a list of other folks have forked over some bucks to Stanford’s stellar Criminal Justice Center in order for them to assess, measure, and analyze how this whole realignment thingy is really working, county by county. In other words, the SCJC folks are gathering the facts of the matter.

Whatta concept.

Here’re are some clips from the announcement from SCJC:

Realignment puts the onus back on counties to make decisions about how they wish to punish their local convicted offenders,” said Joan Petersilia, Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. “Counties can decide to expand jail capacity. They can expand drug treatment programs or mental health courts. They can hire new staff. They can expand the ranks of probation officers or sheriff’s deputies. We want to know what approaches are working best in California counties and why.”

[SNIP]

“California has the largest prison system in the country,” said Robert Weisberg, Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. “And California Realignment represents the biggest change in sentencing and corrections in the last six decades. Through our research, we want the data to tell us exactly what the effects are of shifting responsibility and discretion from the state to the county— how that impacts rates of incarceration versus probation supervision versus community programs, and so on. We want our research to help California get Realignment right.”

…..

Well, yeah.

$650,000 is not a lot for this kind of painstaking work. And the SCJC team is absolutely the best in the business, beginning with the amazing Dr. Joan Petersilia, who is the Center’s co-director.

It is essential, when the state (or the county or the city) makes a big policy change like the prison realignment program that the new systems be evaluated by competent outsiders (who know what they’re doing and can be trusted to keep politics out of it).

Fortunately, thanks to these grants and some others like them, that’s precisely what the SCJC is doing.

BACA SAYS THAT THE JAILS COMMISSIONS RECS ARE FINE, BUT THE HARSH FINDINGS BEHIND THEM….UH…WELL, MAYBE NOT SO MUCH

Sheriff Lee Baca gave an interview to KPCC’s Larry Mantel on Thursday. The transcript is worth reading carefully. And….it’s not heartening.

In answer to questions from Mantle Baca characterizes the proposed Inspector General as basically someone who does little more than ferry communication back between the department and the Board of Supervisors, but certainly not any one with any…you know…. real power.

The most alarming moment of the interview is the sheriff’s contention that while the Jails Commissions recommendations are very swell, the findings underlying recommendations were “accusations” not fact.

Here’s a clip from a couple of the most relevant exchanges:

Did you [err] in trusting those under you to manage the jails?

“No, I think the findings of the commission were accusations but there were no probative investigations of the accusations. I have investigated some of them and I’m getting contradictive evidence.”

So are you taking issue with the findings of these commissions?

“I questions the facts that make the findings…I will go out and find out whether the facts support the finding… but the recommendations are sensible sound many are things I had been trying to do but I need support and funding to do them. The raggedness of the findings is not my biggest concern, but no I’m not convinced that the individuals being blamed for the problems are the cause of the problems….

Read the rest.

FBI ORDERED TO PAY S.F. JOURNALIST $470,000 AFTER WITHHOLDING FOIA-REQUESTED RECORDS

What a cheering bit of news, after the incredibly vexing Public Records Act-related judgement by the CA Fed Judge earlier this month.

Vivian Ho at the SF Chron has the story. Here’s the opening clip:

A federal judge this week ordered the FBI to pay a San Francisco journalist almost half a million dollars for withholding records he requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
Seth Rosenfeld, a former reporter at The Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, won $470,459 in attorneys’ fees for two lawsuits he filed – one in 1990 and another in 2007 – while researching the 1960s protest movement in Berkeley.

The lawsuits were two of five he filed against the FBI and the Justice Department starting in 1985. He requested a variety of records pertaining to the FBI’s covert operations at UC Berkeley and its secret relationship with former President Ronald Reagan.

Rosenfeld used the information he received from the FBI in articles for The Chronicle and the Examiner, as well as in his book “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power,” which was released in August.

Rosenfeld said the FBI had failed to turn over all of the documents he requested, and that it wasn’t until he engaged them in a series of legal battles that the agency released thousands of pages.

Justice Department attorneys, who represented the FBI, argued that the agency would have released the documents even if Rosenfeld hadn’t filed suit. They said “bureaucratic difficulty, not recalcitrant behavior” slowed the releases.

Oh, poor, poor FBI. The dog ate its ability to adequately search.

As it happens, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen was not in the least sympathetic. The awarded $$ will go to the First Amendment Project of Oakland, and two the law firm of Bryan Cave, which represented Rosenfeld pro bono.

THE NEW YORKER WRITES ABOUT THE MYTH OF VOTER FRAUD

This New Yorker story by award winning-investigative journalist Jane Mayer about the issue of voter fraud, is one step away from our usual criminal justice subject matter, but in the current elections season, it is very much worth your time.

Here’s how it opens:

Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack Obama and Mitt Romney almost even in the state. Every vote may matter, including those cast by the seven members of the Sharp family—Teresa, her husband, four grown children, and an elderly aunt—living in the Millsdale Street house.

The letter, which cited arcane legal statutes and was printed on government letterhead, was dated September 4th. “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector,” it said. “The Hamilton County Board of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 a.m. . . . You have the right to appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel.”

“My first thought was, Oh, no!” Sharp, who is African-American, said. “They ain’t messing with us poor black folks! Who is challenging my right to vote?”

The answer to Sharp’s question is that a new watchdog group, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, which polices voter-registration rolls in search of “electoral irregularities,” raised questions about her eligibility after consulting a government-compiled list of local properties and mistakenly identifying her house as a vacant lot…

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IRANIAN PRISON CELL & THE PELICAN BAY SHU? WINDOWS.

The December 2012 cover story of Mother Jones Magazine is by former Iranian hostage Shane Bauer, one of the three American hikers imprisoned in Iran for more than two years. A journalist, Bauer had to reboot his career after the trauma of his his imprisonment. He was looking for a project and decided he wanted to investigate California prisons and their use of solitary confinement.

But, unlike most reporters, Bauer knew a thing or two about solitary. Here’s a big clip from the beginning of the story:

“…So when you’re in Iran and in solitary confinement,” asks my guide, Lieutenant Chris Acosta, “was it different?” His tone makes clear that he believes an Iranian prison to be a bad place.

He’s right about that. After being apprehended on the Iran-Iraq border, Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and I were held in Evin Prison’s isolation ward for political prisoners. Sarah remained there for 13 months, Josh and I for 26 months. We were held incommunicado. We never knew when, or if, we would get out. We didn’t go to trial for two years. When we did we had no way to speak to a lawyer and no means of contesting the charges against us, which included espionage. The alleged evidence the court held was “confidential.”

What I want to tell Acosta is that no part of my experience—not the uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of other prisoners—was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated? Would he believe that I once yearned to be sat down in a padded, soundproof room, blindfolded, and questioned, just so I could talk to somebody?

“There was a window,” I say. I don’t quite know how to tell him what I mean by that answer. “Just having that light come in, seeing the light move across the cell, seeing what time of day it was—” Without those windows, I wouldn’t have had the sound of ravens, the rare breezes, or the drops of rain that I let wash over my face some nights. My world would have been utterly restricted to my concrete box, to watching the miniature ocean waves I made by sloshing water back and forth in a bottle; to marveling at ants; to calculating the mean, median, and mode of the tick marks on the wall; to talking to myself without realizing it. For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back. Its slow creeping against the wall reminded me that the world did in fact turn and that time was something other than the stagnant pool my life was draining into.

Here, there are no windows.

The rest of Bauer’s report, which was supported by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, is a deeply disheartening account of solitary confinement policies, particularly California’s, which are crying out for additional investigation.

Bauer reports, in particular, about the allegedly often whimsical process by which one gets “validated” for association to a prison gang thus qualifying one for the SHU.

This “validation” protocol, which can profoundly affect an inmates life in prison, is seemingly devoid of anything resembling what we know as due process. In fact it’s “validation” that was one of the key issues that triggered last year’s hunger strikes.

None of the gang validation proceedings, from the initial investigation to the final sentencing, have any judicial oversight. They are all internal. Other than the inmate, there is only one person present—the gang investigator—and he serves as judge, jury, and prosecutor. After the hearing, the investigator will send his validation package to Sacramento for approval. The chances of it being refused are vanishingly small: The department’s own data shows that of the 6,300 validations submitted since 2009, only 25 have been rejected—0.4 percent. “It’s pretty much a rubber stamping,” ]Former San Quentin Warden Daniel] Vasquez says.

“That is a system that has no place in a constitutional democracy,” says David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. He says California’s policy is “a form of guilt by association that is completely foreign to our legal system. Prison administrators have absolute power, and that is a recipe for abuse and violation of rights.”

There’s lots more, including Bauer’s diary from he was in solitary, so read on.

(Bauer also had an Op Ed in the LA Times that ran on Thursday, so read that too.)

CA’S PRISON GANGS, SOLITARY, AND THE “CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES”

Certainly, California’s prison gangs have wreaked a dark havoc inside our state lock-ups, and do great damage on the streets as well. But an increasing number of credible voices and organizations are saying that this does that give us the right to inflict what those who have experienced it—like Bauer, or Senator John McCain—unequivocally agree is torture.

And while we’re on the subject of prison gangs, in mid August, a group of inmates in Pelican Bay’s SHU known as the “Short Corridor Collective” signed an Agreement to end Hostilities between racial groups—in other words, between the prison gangs and the racially grouped inmates they are able to control. (The text of the agreement is here.) Among the signers are some fairly high up members of most of the main prison gangs, some of whom also were the organizers of last year’s widespread prison hunger strikes.

The actual end to hostilities were to have ended was last week, on Oct. 10. While we haven’t written about the agreement until now, we’ve been tracking the matter with interest, and we’ll report back when we have a better idea of how it is playing out.

Thus far a week-long hunger strike kicked off on the day of the “Cessation.” The hunger strike stopped on Thursday, yesterday, as abruptly as it began.

The San Francisco Bay View is one of the best places to watch for updates.

NEW YORK’S SECOND CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS RULED THAT DOMA VIOLATES EQUAL PROTECTION AND IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL

On Thursday, a 3-judge panel of New York’s 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. Next stop the U.S. Supreme Court.

The lawsuit that precipitated the ruling was brought by 83-year-old Edie Windsor, whose partner of 44 years, Thea Spyer, died from multiple sclerosis in 2009…

WitnessLA posted about Edie’s case here.

Timothy Williams at the NY Times has more on Thursday’s ruling

A federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled on Thursday that the federal statute defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman unlawfully discriminates against same-sex married couples by denying them equal federal benefits.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is the second federal appeals court to reject a central portion of the federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, following the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, which handed down its ruling in May.

But this decision on Thursday is the first time that an appeals court has subjected the law to a relatively tough test for constitutionality that, in effect, elevates issues of sexual orientation to the constitutional level of cases involving sexual discrimination.

The Supreme Court may take up the issue as soon as the current term.

Two of the three judges on the Manhattan court ruled in favor of Edith Windsor, an 83-year-old woman whose case challenged the 1996 statute, saying it violated the Constitution’s equal-protection clause because it recognizes the marriages of heterosexual couples but not those of same-sex couples, even though New York State law makes no such distinction.

9TH CIRCUIT PANEL SEZ THE LAPD CANNOT SNATCH AND TRASH PROPERTY OF LA’S HOMELESS

Okay, yes, of course, it’s complicated—as most things are. But ever since the city—with the LAPD as its agent—began working to clean up Skid Row, a long list of homeless have complained that when they left their belongings for a short period to, say, take a shower (or make other uses of bathroom facilities) and similar necessary errands, that they would return to find that all of their stuff had vanished.

The trashed stashes often included crucial medication, family momentos and other items that you and I would be unhappy to lose. For a homeless person, who has next to nothing, the loss becomes more fundamental.

With this in mind, seven Skid Row residents brought suit against the city of LA.

The AP’s Christina Hoag reports on this week’s judicial response. Here’s a clip:

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision that found the city’s confiscation of homeless people’s bundles violated their Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizure.

One of the three judges dissented, agreeing with the city that unattended personal property can be seized in the public interest of health and safety.

Chief Deputy City Attorney William Carter said the office would evaluate whether to continue the appeal by requesting a review by the full appellate court, but noted the city is complying with an injunction issued by U.S. District Court Judge Philip Gutierrez in June 2011.

Under that ruling, the city must store items taken from sidewalks for up to 90 days and leave a notice directing property owners to the storage site so they can retrieve them. The city is permitted to discard hazardous items and trash.

Here’s the slightly more technical report from Tim Hull of the Courthouse News Service:

The “most basic reading” of the Constitution prohibits Los Angeles from unreasonably seizing and destroying the personal property of homeless residents, the 9th Circuit ruled Wednesday.
Nine homeless residents of Skid Row sued the city for violations of their Fourth and 14th Amendment rights after police confiscated the property they left on the sidewalk. They say their legal papers, family pictures and other possessions were immediately destroyed.
Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles is home to one of the nation’s largest homeless populations. The men and women who dwell there say they left their property unattended but not abandoned while eating, showering or using the bathroom.
U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez issued a narrow injunction barring the practice in cases where the items did not pose a public hazard. A divided panel of the federal appeals court in Pasadena affirmed Wednesday.
Los Angeles had claimed that the Fourth Amendment does not protect the property in question since there can be no expectation of privacy for those who leave personal belongings unattended on a public sidewalk.
“The city has … asked us to declare that the unattended property of homeless persons is uniquely beyond the reach of the Constitution, so that the government may seize and destroy with impunity the worldly possessions of a vulnerable group in our society,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the panel majority. “Because even the most basic reading of our Constitution prohibits such a result, the city’s appeal is denied.”

NPR TALKS TO THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORKER STORY ON CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANTS.

Last week we drew your attention to an excellent New Yorker story by Sarah Stillman, about the use of young confidential informants by law enforcement and how some of them had gotten killed as a result of their cooperation with the cops, who did not appear to adequately protect them. However the story was hidden behind a pay wall so, unless you suscribe to the New Yorker, you couldn’t read the full story.

Neal Conan talks to Stillman and others about the story and the issue in Wednesday’s Face the Nation. It’s long and good, and makes for very interesting listening. Here’s a clip from the transcript:

...I spoke to, you know, the family of one of the convicted murderers, who told me that essentially they’d never been planning a drug deal in the first place. What they were actually planning was to take the massive – I believe it was $13,000 that Rachel was bringing to the bust, because, you know, it was quite huge.

It was, you know, 1,500 ecstasy pills and cocaine and a handgun that she was sent to purchase.

CONAN: And they found the wire on her?

STILLMAN: Exactly. They opened up her purse, because the wire had actually been placed in her purse, which was against, you know, standard procedures there, but it had all been done in a bit of haste, and she’d been sent off with the wires in her purse. And, you know, it’s a bit unclear exactly what occurred because, you know, no one was there to witness it, but the understanding was that they took her purse and found the wire, and she was shot.

CONAN: And the police, how did they lose track of her? There was aircraft involved.

STILLMAN: Exactly. Well, it was a series of really – you know, a series of both poor planning and coincidence. You know, one big issue was that it was in a very wooded area. The location was changed a number of times, and the DEA had offered a surveillance plane. But it turned out the drug deal went down in a location that was covered in this tree canopy.

I mean, I saw it. It was thick and dripping with Spanish moss and not the kind of place that a plane had any hope of seeing the transaction.

CONAN: Your piece in The New Yorker is titled “The Throwaways,” and it’s your contention that in fact in their eagerness to get drug busts, the police do not pay anywhere near enough attention to the safety of their informants, and to some degree, in some cases, their attitudes may be pretty cavalier….

AIRPORT EVACUATIONS AND LIFE

As you can see, the posting is a little light today. This has much to do with the fact that, yesterday evening, I found myself stuck for hours in the San Jose airport due to a cancelled flight followed by the full evacuation of the airport’s large, new terminal B.

It seems that someone spotted smoke in an elevator shaft at the far end of the terminal.

The good news was that, in fairly short order, the firefighters determined the smoke was caused by overheating hydraulic fluid, and ably handled the situation. The bad news was that well after the supposed fire threat was over, for reasons that the San Jose police airport officials insisted on evacuating everyone—which looked like a couple thousand of us—and then turning us right around and running us, in a preposterously time consuming fashion, back through the TSA check. A pile up of grounded flights resulted, creating a scheduling snarl for air traffic controllers and so on.

Thus, as I said, posting will be a little light.

(I was in Santa Clara County looking at two remarkable programs for kids who break the law to help them get on the right track, both run by Santa Clara’s juvenile programs. You’ll be hearing more about these and other programs around the state in the coming months.)