A song for May Day, 2012, “Jack of All Trades”

THE FBI HEROICALLY STINGS, THEN LOCKS UP INEPT AND RIDICULOUS ANARCHISTS ON MAY DAY

This is from Alex Pareen at Salon. It will make you very sad for the FBI, very sad for the idiotic anarchists, very, VERY sad for the rest of us who are paying our hard earned tax dollars to fund this nonsense. A clip:

Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you’re not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or “dangerous” “anarchists.”) America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park….

To give you an idea of the…um.. ept-ness of the group: among their discussed strategies to avoid capture was to get tacks to throw in the road behind them in the event of a chase.

The LA Times also reports on the arrest, albeit in a more serious tone.

PEW CENTER FINDS WARM & TRUSTING FEELINGS ABOUT SCOTUS REACH A QUARTER CENTURY LOW

Yeah, now that’s a shocker. (cough) Bush v. Gore, Citizens United (cough, cough).

Actually, the interesting part is that the grim view of the Supremes is shared almost identically by Democrats, Republicans and independents. Moreover the survey was taken right after the health care hearings in the high court. So where ever you fell ideologically on the matter, it seems you were mighty disgruntled. Or at least half of those surveyed were.

Check out the rest here.

ADULT ED: SHOULD LAUSD REALLY TURN ITS BACK ON A QUARTER MILLION STUDENTS?

Former Adult Ed teacher John McCormick challenges the wisdom of eviscerating adult education in Los Angeles in an LA Times Op Ed. Here’s a clip from the center of the essay:

….The repercussions of cutting or losing adult education would extend far beyond the staffs and students at the schools. Many local businesses, such as pharmacies, hire students who have been certified by adult school skill centers. High school dropouts return to adult school to get their diplomas. Eliminating adult schools would diminish the workforce. And people who make less money pay less in taxes, they spend less, and they often have to depend more on government to meet their basic needs.

Closing adult schools would also result in collateral damage to K-12 children. My students often attended the same schools at night that their children attended during the day. Because kids usually pick up English faster than their parents, if the parents don’t learn the language, they become marginalized in their own families. They cannot communicate with teachers, help with homework or even understand what their kids are saying. So instead of being able to help their kids assimilate, parents are more likely to remain isolated.

THE OTHER BIG SUPREME COURT CASE: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin writes about another potentially far reaching US Supreme Court case that we should all be tracking. As usual everything rests on Justice Kennedy. Here’ a clip from Toobin’s story:

As the legal and political worlds await the Supreme Court’s verdict on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the Justices have another case in the near future which may prove nearly as significant. The health-care case will be decided by June, but next fall the Court will return, perhaps for the last time, to the fraught subject of affirmative action in university admissions.

The facts of the new case are straightforward. Abigail Fisher, a white high-school student in Sugar Land, Texas, was rejected for admission to the University of Texas-Austin. The state requires all students in the top ten per cent of their high-school classes to be admitted to state universities, but students who fall just short of that threshold, like Fisher, are admitted according to a formula; race is one factor in the equation. Fisher’s lawsuit is based on a claim that any consideration of race by a university in admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case amounts to a direct challenge to the most famous decision authored by Sandra Day O’Connor during her long and consequential service on the Court. In 2003, the Court held, by a vote of five to four, that the University of Michigan Law School could consider race as one factor among many in determining whom to admit. In Grutter v. Bollinger, O’Connor said that diversity was such an important goal in American life that universities could engage in some level of race-consciousness in screening candidates. But O’Connor’s opinion imposed a time limit:

We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

Now, less than a decade after her ruling, the Court appears poised to throw it out….

“SAVING OUR SONS: A COMMUNITY CONVERSATION” WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT LA TRADE TECH

This is from the press release on the event, which is sponsored by a bunch of good folks:

California Community Foundation invites parents, educators, employers, community, civic and religious leaders, and all concerned members of the public to participate in a historic town hall on the need to change and improve conditions for Black male youth in Los Angeles that are adversely affecting their futures.

Twenty years after the civil unrest in Los Angeles, Black male youth have significant challenges related to their educational and employment prospects. Additionally, while Black male youth make up 10 percent of L.A. County’s youth population, they comprise approximately 33 percent of all youth under probation supervision.

The event on May 2 is supported by Brotherhood Crusade, Community Coalition, Liberty Hill Foundation, Los Angeles Urban league, Youth Justice Coalition, Youth Mentoring Connection, and the Office of the Mayor, City of Los Angeles, and will feature a personal appearance by actor and activist Larenz Tate (TV’s “Rescue Me”, and films such as, “Ray”, “Love Jones”, “Crash”, and “Menace II Society”).

The event will take place on Wednesday, May 2, at 6 p.m., in the North Tent at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College, 1937 Grand Ave., Los Angeles 90015

Photo by David Maxwell, European Pressphoto Agency / May 1, 2012

LYRICS FOR “A JACK OF ALL TRADES”

…after the jump

Read the rest of this entry »

Chronic truancy is a daunting problem in districts all over California, but it’s far worse in the Los Angeles Unified School District where nearly one fourth of the district’s middle-school students are chronically absent from school.

What is even more alarming is that an identical number of LA’s kindergartners— 22.7 percent—are also chronically absent from their classrooms.

(Chronic absence” is defined as missing 10 percent of the school year for excused or unexcused reasons.)

Fortunately, not every school district in the state has those miserably high truancy numbers.

In fact, earlier this week, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced that 11 districts have been designated as models of attendance improvement and dropout prevention by the State School Attendance Review Board. The 11 model districts, which include Alhambra, Montebello, San Bernardino and San Diego, will be given awards at a conference in April.

““There’s a very basic fact that is often overlooked: Even the best teacher can’t help students who don’t make it to school,” Torlakson said in a written statement. “These [districts] are proving that there are highly effective strategies for improving attendance and reducing the dropout rate”

After new research pointed to chronic absence as a key indicator of a kid’s academic future, reducing absenteeism became a major focus for Torlakson’s administration, which is trying to find low coast ways to motivate districts to identify students who are are missing too much school, and then intervene early.

“And by early, that means kindergarten, says David Kopperud, the chairperson of the state’s School Attendance Review Board. “We thought the problem began in middle school and high school,” Kopperud told me. “But it starts way before that. It turns out that even kindergarten is important because that’s when students learn beginning reading skills.” Once kids fall behind in their first three years, he said, the slide can all too easily become cumulative until, by middle school they’re in trouble.

“Now they’re too far behind to catch up, and so the next thing is, they start to misbehave.”

School suspensions follow the misbehavior, which means more classwork in missed.

“In a lot of schools,” Kopperud said, “20 percent of their absences are due to suspensions. And we find that schools with high suspension rates, have a high drop out rate.” It’s what other experts call the push out factor. And pretty soon you have this really large population that is lost to law enforcement.”

So what to do?

“We’re learning that the best kind of drop-out intervention, is prevention,” said Kopperud. “But that means analyzing the school attendance data so that you have a good early warning system to tell you when kids are missing too much school, and then intervening aggressively.”

But aggressive and timely intervention requires the personnel to do the intervening—at a time when districts like LAUSD are in a frenzy of cutbacks.

So that’s where the awards come in..

Kopperud said that he and his board members hope that the other districts will look at the honorees and think, hey, if those guys over there can improve , we can too. “So we’re handing out certificates and plaques,” he said.

“It’s a reminder that there are places where, despite the odds, they’re beating them,” said Kopperud. “So it can be done. Even in this economy, it can be done.”

Let’s hope LAUSD takes note. So far what they’ve done districtwide is….not much. (Unless you count paying consultants fat fees to produce this and that report and analysis, without any appreciable follow-up that would change outcomes for actual kids.)

AND IN OTHER KID-RELATED NEWS…… AN OPPONENT OF OPENING OF JUVENILE DEPENDENCY COURT SLAMS LA TIMES COVERAGE OF COURT HEARINGS AS HARMING KIDS

Whittier Law School professor William Wesley Patton evidently slammed LA Times editor-at-large Jim Newton for his coverage of LA’s newly-opened child dependency court in an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Daily Journal (which is hidden behind a hefty pay wall, or I’d link to it).

Newton, who wrote two excellent columns about his visits to court in the weeks since Judge Michael Nash ordered the opening of the long-secret proceedings to the press (here and here), decided not to simply ignore the slam, but to point out its truthiness. Here’s a clip:

The shift from holding almost all Dependency Court hearings in private to declaring a presumptive openness of those proceedings to the press is understandably upsetting to those accustomed to working in private. It is hard to have prying eyes where once there were none.

And yet, what is often lost in the resistance to change is what is most important. The interests of children are, of course, paramount in all of this, but those who side with Patton, in my view, see those interests too narrowly. Secrecy in Dependency Court has protected social workers, lawyers and even judges who perform poorly from being held to answer for their work. We would never tolerate such immunity from scrutiny in our adult and family courts, nor should we when the stakes are even higher — the preservation of an opportunity for children who have done no wrong. In the end, the victims of secrecy in Dependency Court are children whose caretakers are allowed to fail them without consequence; the beneficiaries of a more open system would be children as well.

So far, the experiment in Los Angeles Dependency Court is bearing out that argument. Perhaps that’s why Patton distorts it.

What Jim said.

COMMENTARY AFTER WATCHING SIX HOURS OF HEALTH TESTIMONY AT SCOTUS.….

Dalia Lithwick of Slate sounds stunned and depressed after Wednesday’s round of arguments….

Amid all the three-day psychodrama, it’s easy to get confused about what’s happened and what hasn’t. Court watchers seem to generally agree that the individual mandate is in real peril and will rise or fall with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy. Court watchers also agree that 19th-century tax law—while generally adorable—will not prevent the justices from deciding the case by July. And they also agree that they may have counted five justices who appear willing to take the whole law down, along with the mandate, and the Medicaid expansion as well.

But the longer they talked, the harder it was to say. A lot of today’s discussion started to sound like justices just free-associating about things in the law they didn’t like. That doesn’t reveal all that much about the interplay between the four separate challenges—what happens when they all have to be looked at together—or anything at all about what will happen at conference or in the drafting of opinions. Could the five conservative justices strike down the entire health care law, and take us into what Kagan described this morning as a “revolution”? They could. Will they? I honestly have no idea anymore. As silent retreats go, this one was a lot less enlightening than I’d hoped.

While Adam Teicholz at the Atlantic wonders morosely…but interestingly…. if bloggers killed the health care mandate before it got to court…

Back in early 2010, before the 26 state attorneys general, before the angry protests and the breathless headlines, before the six hours of oral argument at the nation’s highest court, the legal challenge to the individual mandate was greeted with head-scratching skepticism. The constitutional argument was dismissed by many Court-watchers. A week after the first challenge was filed, one liberal scholar suggested the claims were so frivolous that the lawyers could face sanctions.

Now, however, the atmosphere has changed, “and that,” Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, told me last week, is in part “a testament” to the persistence of a small group of conservative and libertarian attorneys. In the last few days, Politico and the New York Times have shone a light on Randy Barnett, the Georgetown Law professor who has taken on the dual role, unusual for an appellate lawyer, of spearheading advocacy both in court and in more public forums.

[BIG SNIP]

Blogs — particularly a blog of big legal ideas called Volokh Conspiracy — have been central to shifting the conversation about the mandate challenges. At Volokh, Barnett and other libertarian academics have been debating and refining their arguments against the mandate since before the ACA was signed. At the beginning, law professor Jonathan Adler fleshed out the approach that came to typify the elite conservative response for the first months of the public debate: the Founders never intended for the Constitution to permit such broad federal power, but given New Deal-era precedent, the mandate, if it became law, would pass muster. Things changed on Volokh around the time that it became clear that an insurance mandate would be part of whichever health care reform package passed into law.

One congressional floor speech seemed to mark a tonal turning point for Volokh, the moment its writers realized their power to shape debate…..

AND IN GOOD LASD NEWS…..A DRAMATIC AIR-5 RESCUE SAVES WOMAN’S LIFE AFTER CRASH

Amid the Aero Bureau controversies, it’s important to remember the great work LASD pilots do day in and day out, both in patrol and rescue. Here’s a KTLA report of the most recent dramatic example of Air-5’s rescue work. (Scroll down for the video.)

A few days ago, human rights lawyer Bryan Stevensen gave a talk at TED’s yearly spring event in Long Beach.

For those of you not terribly familiar, TED is a nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.

Since then it’s expanded to be an international brand for brilliance, innovation and inspiration.

Last week TEDs spring talks took place and Stevensen—who is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that litigates on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders and others whose trials are marked by racism and misconduct—was one of the much-ballyhooed speakers.

At the end of the his 24-minute talk, Stevensen received what was reportedly one of the longest and loudest ovations from the audience in TEDs history.

And it wasn’t just that they stood and clapped and clapped and clapped. They wouldn’t sit down.

One of the cases that Stevenson’s group, the Equal Justice initiative, is presently representing is that of Anthony Ray Hinton, who has been on death row in Alabama for more than 25 years.

It seems the whole case against Hinton rests on four bullets. No one saw Hinton at the crime scenes, there’s no other evidence linking him, and there is compelling reason to believe he was at work at the time the shootings took place.

The state said the bullets, recovered at the two crime scenes, matched the gun that was recovered at Hinton’s mother’s house. During the appeal, three different forensic experts—including the FBI’s main expert on firearms markings—said that the bullets did NOT come from Hinton’s gun….

Anyway, there’s more on the story plus links to multiple newspaper articles on the case here.

ANOTHER CASE OF INNOCENCE DISREGARDED WITH EDWARD LEE ELMORE…

The case of Edward Lee Elmore, which was hideously mishandled by police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the judiciary, is documented with riveting precision in Pulitzer Prize–winner Raymond Bonner’s brand new book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong.

Then less than a month after Bonner’s book was published Elmore was released from prison but, as Bonner writes in this NY times op ed, the victory was bittersweet. Here’s how his essay opens:

EDWARD LEE ELMORE turned 53 in January. For more than half his life, the soft-spoken African-American who doesn’t understand the concept of north, south, east and west, or of summer, fall, winter and spring, was in a South Carolina prison, most of it on death row.

On Friday, Mr. Elmore walked out of the courthouse in Greenwood, S.C., a free man, as part of an agreement with the state whereby he denied any involvement in the crime but pleaded guilty in exchange for his freedom. This was his 11,000th day in jail.

Mr. Elmore was convicted in 1982 for the sexual assault and murder of an elderly white widow in Greenwood. His trial lasted only eight days, including two spent picking the jury. The state concealed evidence that strongly pointed to Mr. Elmore’s innocence and introduced damning evidence that appears to have been planted by the police. For three decades lawyers for Mr. Elmore, who were convinced of his innocence, sought to get him a fair trial.

Headlines and news stories about men being released from death row based on DNA testing suggest that this happens often. But it doesn’t. Once a person has been convicted, even on unimaginably shaky grounds, an almost inexorable process — one that can end in execution — is set in motion. On appeal, gone is the presumption of innocence; the presumption is that the defendant had a fair trial. Not even overwhelming evidence that the defendant is innocent is necessarily enough to get a new trial. “Due process does not require that every conceivable step be taken, at whatever cost, to eliminate the possibility of convicting an innocent person,” Justice Byron R. White wrote for the majority in a 1977 case, Patterson v. New York.

In other words, innocence is not enough….

RACIAL DISCREPANCIES FOUND IN SCHOOL DISCIPLINE

According to new data from the Department of Education, black students are far more likely to be disciplined harshly in public schools. Tuesday’s New York Times has the story. Here’s how it opens.

Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.

One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. …

WILL SEATTLE PD’S 2004 CASE OF TASING A PREGNANT WOMAN IN A TRAFFIC STOP GO TO THE SUPREME COURT?

If the LA County Police Chiefs Association has any say in the matter, the Supremes will hear an appeal brought by three Seattle police officers who repeatedly used a Taser on a pregnant woman during a 2004 traffic stop, reports the Seattle Times.

Here’s a little of the back story, as reported a year ago by the Seattle Weekly.

Malaika Brooks was driving her 12-year-old son Jahrod to the African American Academy on Beacon Hill one morning in 2004 when a Seattle cop pulled her over. It was the beginning of a traffic infraction that has so far cost city taxpayers $345,000 in legal fees, and which left the then-pregnant Brooks with Taser scars and the determination to pursue an alleged police-brutality case for what appears to be a record seven years and counting.

Officer Juan Ornelas, who’d caught Brooks on radar, came to her window and said she’d been doing 32 in a 20-mph school zone. Brooks denied it, explaining he must have mistaken her vehicle for the black Honda that had been racing along in front of her. Brooks, then 34, handed her license to Ornelas as her son got out and walked on to school. Ornelas wrote the ticket and handed it to Brooks for her signature. She declined. Signing it, she mistakenly thought, would be an admission of guilt. Ornelas told her that if she didn’t sign the traffic ticket, he would issue a criminal citation for refusing. She could then be arrested and taken to jail.

Brooks said she wasn’t signing anything, but would accept the ticket otherwise. Ornelas then called Sgt. Steve Daman to the scene. Officer Donald Jones also showed up. When Brooks told the sergeant she wouldn’t sign, Daman told Ornelas and Jones to “book her.” Brooks was asked to step from the car. She refused. Jones then displayed a Taser stun gun and asked if she knew what it could do to her. Brooks told the officers she was pregnant. “How pregnant?” one asked. Her baby was due in two months, she said. She refused to step out.

After a discussion among the officers, Ornelas opened the driver’s door, reached in and grabbed Brooks by the left arm as Jones put the device to Brooks’ thigh in touch-stun mode and shocked her with 50,000 volts. She began honking her horn, screaming for help as she resisted. Jones quickly administered another shock to Brooks’ arm, and she stopped blowing the horn. Then he shocked her a third time, in the neck, and Brooks fell over, unable to move.

The case eventually worked its way up to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which then decided that the tasing was the use of excessive force—meaning that the way was cleared for Malaika Brooks to sue the officers in state civil court (but not in federal court).

It’s this ruling that the LA Police Chiefs—a group that includes both Chief Beck and Sheriff Baca—and the National Tactical Officers Association both found unpalatable, hence their push for an appeal, reports the Seattle Times.

The national and Los Angeles police organizations, in their brief, argued that the 9th Circuit ruling creates an “inflexible” and “unworkable” rule, “because it ignores the infinite variety of situations police officers confront on a daily basis.

KFI HOSTS JOHN AND KEN TO MEET WITH A DIVERSE GROUP OF MEMBERS OF LA’S AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY ABOUT ON AIR “CRACK HO” REMARKS

The meeting with KFI 640 station management and John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou of the “John and Ken Show” to discuss their calling of Whitney Houston a “crack ho,” and making other creepily disparaging remarks after her death, will take place at 2 pm Monday, with a press conference afterward.

Those meeting with Kobylt and Chiampou include:

Blair Taylor, President and CEO of the Los Angeles Urban League
L. C. “Chris” Strudwick-Turner, Vice President of Marketing & Communications for the Los Angeles Urban League
Jasmyne Cannick, public affairs and communications strategist
Najee Ali, community activist
Kevin Ross, host of the syndicated television program ‘America’s Court with Judge Ross’, former KABC and KFI host
Kevin Ross, 20-year radio veteran and the editor of Radio Facts
Lee Bailey, 30-year radio broadcasting pioneer, founder and CEO of the Electronic Urban Report
Isidra Person Lynn, former morning show host of KACE
Dominique DiPrima, talk radio veteran and on-air personality

May some raised consciousness and a better calibrated sense of decency come out of the meeting.

FEDS SHOULD PUSH TO OPEN PROSECUTORS’ FILES SAYS THE NY TIMES

And we agree.

To explain, here’s how the NY Times Sunday editorial opens:

Prosecutors have a constitutional duty to disclose significant evidence favorable to a criminal defendant. But too often that duty, as laid out by the 1963 Supreme Court decision Brady v. Maryland, is violated.

To help ensure compliance, some prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers and legal scholars have sensibly concluded that prosecutors’ files, as a general rule, should be made open to defendants. In cases where turning over evidence might endanger a witness, for example, a judge could allow an exception.

A small number of state and local governments have adopted open-file policies that require prosecutors to make available well before trial all information favorable to the defense, without regard to whether such information is likely to affect the outcome of the case. North Carolina and Ohio and places like Milwaukee have found that such policies make prosecutions fairer and convictions less prone to error. The Justice Department should join this movement and set a national example. But instead, it continues to take half-measures in response to its own failures to meet disclosure requirements.

When it is left up to prosecutors to determine what evidence is material, in too many instances Brady is violated—in what has become a highly adversarial justice system. We know this because of the frequent discoveries over the past few years of evidence withheld by prosecutors, the withheld material only coming to light after aggressive investigative work in the course of innocence cases.

Since, unlike the defense, the first obligation of the prosecution is to seek justice—not to win at all costs—the feds should have no problem fully supporting a no-holds barred embrace of the 1963 Brady decision.

it is, as the NY Times said, an important standard to uphold.

TRIED AS ADULT FOR MURDER AT AGE 12 PAUL HENRY GINGERICH TURNS 14 IN PRISON

The then Indiana 6th grader participated in a ghastly crime—specifically the murder of the step-father of a 15-year old friend, who was reportedly being abused by the step-dad. In any case, the two boys shot the man dead, with a third 12-year-old waiting outside the house.

He was sentenced to 25 years in adult prison-–an outcome that a number of attorneys and supporters hope to eventually manage to change.

USA Today has the story, which originally ran in the Indianapolis Star:

Paul Henry Gingerich awoke on the morning of his 14th birthday to the sound of a voice — his prison guard. “Happy birthday,” she said.

It was 6 o’clock. Paul would just as soon been given a few more minutes to sleep. But in a place where he must ask permission to go to the bathroom, where he eats every meal under close surveillance and where birthdays aren’t much different from any other day, it was a nice gesture for one of the state’s most controversial inmates.

Paul Gingerich is believed to be the youngest person in Indiana ever sentenced to prison as an adult. He was still 12 years old when he arrived here at the Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility, the state’s maximum security prison for children. He had such a small frame and such a baby face that one of his new teachers — the prison has a school — asked: “What is a 7-year-old doing in our facility?”

Yet Paul was also a killer. He had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder after he and a friend fired four bullets into the friend’s stepdad. Each boy received 25 years, with the possibility that, for good behavior, they could get out in about half that time. They would still be young men, but young men who had grown up in prison.

In Paul’s case, that means living in a cell with a steel door and bare block walls in a remote corner of Pendleton. Home consists of a mattress on a concrete slab, a small desk and a chair and a window spliced with thick bars. Paul’s view is of a small patch of grass, a tall fence and rolling wave of razor sharp concertina wire.

Here, in this place, Paul has grown nearly 3 inches to about 5-foot-8, sprouted peach fuzz, popped his first pimples, had his voice change and — now — marked two birthdays. It is also a place that — should his lawyer pull off an epic reversal — Paul hopes to soon leave.

If you’re thinking that the photo of Meryl Streep backstage at the Oscars, by Al Seib of the Los Angeles Times, has exactly zero to do with any of the criminal justice stories….you’re quite right of course. But it was, after all, Academy Awards night, Sunday night, and Streep’s win was one of the few surprises of an otherwise predictable evening, since equally stellar and deserving Viola Davis was considered the frontrunner.

DIGITAL SELF INCRIMINATION

So, let’s say you’ve been arrested, and you’ve been told by the cops (or the assistant district attorney, or whomever) that you have to decrypt the hard drive of your laptop, which law enforcement has been unable to hack. Let’s also say that you know that the material on said hard drive will not be….um…helpful to your legal situation (not that any of you would ever find yourself in such a nasty dilemma; we’re speaking hypothetically here). Anyway, would you have to do it—legally speaking?

Or does that fall in the category of self incrimination, thus you cannot be made to do the decrypting?

On Thursday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, located in Atlanta, GA, said nope. You cannot be forced into digitally confessing your sins.

Joe Palazzolo of the Wall Street Journal has more.

In a ruling that could have broad ramifications for law enforcement, a federal appeals court has ruled that a man under investigation for child pornography isn’t required to unlock his computer hard drives for the federal government, because that act would amount to the man offering testimony against himself.

The ruling Thursday appears to be the first by a federal appeals court to find that a person can’t be forced to turn over encyption codes or passwords in a criminal investigation, in light of the Fifth Amendment, which holds that no one “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”

The Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals of the 11th Circuit ruled that “the Fifth Amendment protects [the man’s] refusal to decrypt and produce the contents of the media devices,” which the government believes contain child pornography.

The ruling could handcuff federal investigators, as more data are secured behind sophisticated encryption software. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SHERIFF BACA JOINS CHIEF BECK IN SAYING YES TO LICENSES FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Robert Faturechi, Joel Rubin and Paloma Esquivel report for the LA Times:

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said he supports the idea of allowing illegal immigrants to have driver’s licenses as long as they have been in the United States for a number of years without committing other crimes.

Baca’s comments Thursday come as Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has also expressed support for driver’s license for illegal immigrants.

Baca said such licenses should only be issued after illegal immigrants fill out comprehensive applications, similar to those for citizenship. The sheriff also said the licenses should be up for renewal annually, and be noticeably different than those issued to citizens.

“There’s enough potential for Chief Beck’s idea for it to be explored,” Baca said Thursday.

The sheriff has expressed openness to illegal immigrants being issued driver’s licenses before. In 2002, he supported a proposal to allow the licenses, but to imprint them with a special marker such as the letter “I” for immigrant so police could determine immediately if they were dealing with someone in the country illegally.

At the time, the sheriff was the head of a task force helping then-Gov. Gray Davis craft a plan to allow certain unlawful immigrants to get licenses, a proposal that eventually was scuttled.

Baca emphasized then that many illegal immigrants were already driving without having passed a driver’s test or buying auto insurance.
“At some point in time, we will allow illegal immigrants to have a driver’s license as long as they are trustworthy and non-criminal people,” Baca said at the time.

Good for the Sheriff. Now if the state legislature would just show some common sense and understand that this is less about immigration policy, than it is about public safety.

The Times editorial board put it well when it wrote:

….critics will argue that granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants condones their presence in this country and makes it easier for them to stay. That makes sense in theory but not in practice. The reality is that undocumented immigrants are already here, and they are already driving to jobs taking care of children, mowing lawns and working in factories, among other things. Doesn’t it make sense to ensure that every driver, regardless of immigration status, is trained, capable and insured?

As Beck wisely points out, California’s push to keep undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses hasn’t reduced the problems on the road

SCOTUS APPEARS TO BE HEADED TOWARD AFFIRMING THE STOLEN VALOR LAW

The New York Times’ Adam Liptak has a good summary of what went on in the court when the Supremes heard the Stolen Valor case. Here’s a clip (that includes in back story, in case you’re not up to speed:

Over the course of an hourlong argument on Wednesday, the Supreme Court seemed gradually to accept that it might be able to uphold a federal law that makes it a crime to lie about military honors, notwithstanding the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees. The justices were aided by suggestions from the government about how to limit the scope of a possible ruling in its favor and by significant concessions from a lawyer for the defendant.

The case arose from a lie told in 2007 at a public meeting by Xavier Alvarez, an elected member of the board of directors of a water district in Southern California.

“I’m a retired Marine of 25 years,” he said. “I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy.”

That was all false, and Mr. Alvarez was prosecuted under a 2005 law, the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to say falsely that one has “been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the armed forces of the United States.” Mr. Alvarez argued that his remarks were protected by the First Amendment.

But for the personality of the SCOTUS discussion go to the report from Slate’s Dalia Lithwick, in which she details the kinds of lies that worry each of the justices.

Here’s a clip:

Most interesting to me is what judges think people lie about. So, for instance, amid the flurry of opinions written as the 9th Circuit tried to decide whether to review the Stolen Valor decision as a full court came this gem from Judge Alex Kozinski:

So what, exactly, does the dissenters’ ever-truthful utopia look like? In a word: terrifying. If false factual statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as “I’m working late tonight, hunny [sic],” “I got stuck in traffic” and “I didn’t inhale” could all be made into crimes.

In so doing, Judge Kozinski launched a weird little judicial Rorschach test one might call Lies Federal Judges Worry About. Entries fly fast and furious this morning.

On Tuesday morning, there was mostly ebullience. However, by afternoon the significance of Tuesday’s Proposition 8 decision by the 9th Circuit was being examined from every angle.

The majority opinion for the 2 to 1 ruling was, after all, written by the most liberal justice on the most liberal appellate court in the nation. Yet it was a narrow opinion, a fact that has been criticized by some as not being the history-making ruling it could have been. Still others claim that the very narrowness of the opinion will make it easier for SCOTUS to back, should they agree to take the case next fall.

THE OVERVIEW

NPR’s Talk of the Nation has a great multi-part segment on the decision that gives a good overview.

SOME SAY THE 9TH COULD HAVE MADE HISTORY, BUT DIDN’T: WAS THE 9TH WISE OR GUTLESS?

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate is somewhat critical of the 9th Circuit for not making a more historic decision, but argues that it may be a smart one.

Here’s a clip:

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the (“liberal”) 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, led by the (“very liberal”) Stephen Reinhardt, struck down the state’s ban on gay marriage as unconstitutional. Prop 8, passed by referendum in November 2008, had already been thrashed to a pulp by a (“gay”) judge in August 2010, and when the federal appeals court heard the case in December 2010, it was manifestly clear that they were struggling to find some plausible rationale for a ban on gay marriage that made sense. And given that a lot of folks always thought the fix was in at the 9th Circuit, the real shocker today isn’t that a liberal panel delivered a liberal decision. Rather, what’s so surprising is that they delivered a far more moderate decision than anyone would have predicted.

Consider what a dismal job the proponents of Prop 8 did at trial in this case, proffering mediocre witnesses who proffered mediocre evidence that gay marriage would harm children and imperil heterosexual marriage. (Who can forget Prop 8’s star witness David Blankenhorn’s admission that he knew of no study that proved children reared by gay couples fared worse than those raised by heterosexual parents.) Then, recall the almost painfully meticulous findings of fact (80! 80 findings of fact!) produced by Judge Vaughn Walker to support his conclusion that Proposition 8 violated not just the constitutional promise of equal protection, but also a fundamental right to marry the partner of one’s choosing. Against this dramatic backdrop, today’s 2-1 decision is downright modest, corralling the ruling to apply only in California, and only because of the indignity of Prop 8, which “eliminated” a right that had already been granted same-sex couples. Confronted with massive constitutional questions, the majority wrote, “We need not and do not answer the broader question in this case, however, because California had already extended to committed same-sex couples both the incidents of marriage and the official designation of ‘marriage,’ and Proposition 8’s only effect was to take away that important and legally significant designation, while leaving in place all of its incidents.”

Today, the most liberal judges in the most liberal state on the most liberal appeals court had an opportunity to make history. Instead, they opted to do far less.

Read the rest though, because her analysis goes much farther.

AND FOR THOSE WANTING HANDICAPPING ABOUT HOW THIS RULING WILL FARE IN THE FUTURE WHEN IT COMES TO SCOTUS…..

60 Minutes legal analyst, Andrew Cohen, who also writes for the Atlantic, points to all the ways that Tuesday’s ruling was carefully tailored to address the legal sensibilities of Anthony Kennedy, who will almost certainly be the Supreme Court’s swing vote on the matter, should they decide to take the case.

Here’s a clip:

The only serious question, in the 552 days between the trial court’s ruling and today, was how far the 9th Circuit would travel, doctrinally, in declaring Prop 8 to be an unconstitutional violation of the due process and equal protection rights of same-sex couples. Would it follow the logic and reasoning of U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, the Republican appointee who presided over the trial in this case and then had to defend himself against allegations that he was biased because he is gay? Or, would the 9th Circuit strike out on its own?

In the colossal wake of Perry v. Brown, 133 pages of fur and teeth, the best answer I can offer today is that the federal appeals court’s majority sought to thread a needle between recognizing the constitutional rights of certain same-sex couples to stay married and respecting the current equal protection jurisprudence of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Republican appointee and native Californian, whose vote everyone agrees ultimately will decide the fate of Prop 8 and therefore the fate of same-sex marriage in America.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling is much narrower than was Judge Walker’s ruling and clearly aimed at Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence in cases involving discrimination based upon sexual orientation

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images via the Hollywood Reporter

UPDATE: Today is a very good day for human beings.

No reporting can speak quite as eloquently to the point as the opening of the ruling itself, the majority opinion, written by Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

You can find it here.

But here’s one line that sums up all:

Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to opposite sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for “laws of this sort.”

The opinion (with minority commentary) goes on for another 128 pages.

But that’s the heart of the matter. Straight up.

The court’s decision, had it’s light moments, which in a back door way also spoke deeply to the issue.

As The wrap reports via Reuters:

The appellate court judges who ruled Tuesday that California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, mentioned Jumbotrons, Frank Sinatra, movies and Marilyn Monroe along with Supreme Court precedents in their decision.

“Had Marilyn Monroe’s film been called ‘How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire,’ it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different,” the judges wrote.

The judges wrote that in society, “We are excited to see someone ask, ‘Will you marry me?’, whether on bended knee in a restaurant or in text splashed across a stadium Jumbotron. Certainly it would not have the same effect to see, ‘Will you enter into a registered domestic partnership with me?’.”

They even invoked Groucho Marx, William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln — all in one paragraph:

“Groucho Marx’s one-liner, ‘Marriage is a wonderful institution … but who wants to live in an institution?’ would lack its punch if the word ‘marriage’ were replaced with the alternative phrase. So too with Shakespeare’s ‘A young man married is a man that’s marr’d.’ Lincoln’s ‘Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory,’ and Sinatra’s ‘A man doesn’t know what happiness is until he’s married. By then it’s too late.’”

The Court mentioned Shakespeare a few times:

“We emphasize the extraordinary significance of the official designation of ‘marriage,” the decision says. “That designation is important because ‘marriage’ is the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults. A rose by ay other name may smell as sweet, but to the couple desiring to enter into a committed lifelong relationship, a marriage by the name of ‘registered domestic partnership’ does not.”

The ruling by the 3-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is due to be announced at 10 am, Tuesday.

Fingers crossed.

One day we’ll look back on this crazy period in which some among us were not allowed to marry the people they love because of the whacked notion that those unions, no matter how devoted, would do harm to the concept of marriage as a whole—and we’ll wonder what in the world we could possibly have been thinking.

Howard Mintz at the San Jose Mercury News has a good break down of the possible outcomes. Bob Egelko of the SF Chron also has a clarifying take.

SCOTUS REVERSES MURDER 1995 CONVICTION OF NEW ORLEANS MAN—ANOTHER CASE OF BAD PROSECUTOR BEHAVIOR

NY Times’ Adam Liptak has the story involving another Deputy DA who decided it wasn’t all that necessary to turn over all the evidence in the then-high profile murder case.

Here’s a clip:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed the conviction of a New Orleans man, saying prosecutors there had withheld important evidence that his lawyers could have used in his defense.

The decision, by an 8-to-1 vote, was the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions suggesting a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct in the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

Tuesday’s case concerned Juan Smith, who was convicted of killing five people in 1995, when a group of men burst into a house in search of money and drugs. They ordered the occupants to lie down and opened fire.

Mr. Smith was the only person tried for the killings. He was convicted based solely on the eyewitness testimony of a survivor, Larry Boatner. Prosecutors presented no DNA, fingerprints, weapons or other physical evidence.

But Mr. Boatner’s testimony proved sufficient.

“He’s right there,” Mr. Boatner said at Mr. Smith’s trial, pointing at the defendant. “I’ll never forget him.”

It later emerged that prosecutors had failed to disclose reports of interviews with Mr. Boatner. In one, hours after the killings, Mr. Boatner said he could not describe the intruders except to say they were black men. Five days later, he said he had not seen the intruders’ faces and could not identify them.

Leave it to Clarence Thomas to be the only person dissenting in a 17-page masterpiece of illogic.

Law professor Brandon Garrett looks at Thomas’s maddening—and scary—dissent in an essay for Slate.

Here’s a clip:

A “single witness” linked Juan Smith to the five murders for which he was convicted in New Orleans in 1995. The Supreme Court reversed Smith’s conviction yesterday, dwelling on that single witness in the 8-1 opinion it handed down. The justices had been “incredulous” at oral arguments at the conduct of New Orleans prosecutors. So it was an easy case, decided early in the season, with seven justices joining Chief Justice Roberts’ short and sweet three-and-a-half page opinion. But sometimes it is the easy decision that disguises insidious problems. The head prosecutor in New Orleans at the time, Harry Connick Sr., was nowhere to be found in the court’s opinion.

Before we get to him however, it is noteworthy that the court nowhere called the single witness who identified the culprit in this case the “single eyewitness.” Was he even really an eyewitness? At trial, the witness said he saw the attacker face to face and was sure Smith was the one. He said he had “[n]o doubt.” That sure sounds like the testimony of an eyewitness.

Everything in this case hinged on that single witness. The police explained that “[a]s amazing as it may seem,” no fingerprints matching Smith were found. And jurors place great stock in the testimony of a confident eyewitness. This was a terrible mass murder, where men stormed into an apartment, demanded money and marijuana, told everyone inside to lie on the floor, then shot five people. Smith was sentenced to life without parole.

The problems in the case emerged only during state habeas proceedings. That’s when Smith obtained for the first time notes from the detective stating that the eyewitness said on the night of the murder that he “could not … supply a description of the perpetrators other then [sic] they were black males.” Again, five days after the crime, the ostensible eyewitness said he “could not ID anyone because [he] couldn’t see faces” and “would not know them if [he] saw them.” The detective wrote these statements down—and then wrote down “Could not ID.” It’s understandable that the eyewitness was, as he later said, “too scared to look at anybody” under the circumstances. But usually police know that a person who didn’t see a face is not an eyewitness at all.

There’s more, so if the case—and the issue—interests you, click through as Garrett’s points are worth reading.

MISSISSIPPI GOV. HALEY BARBOUR AND THE MATTER OF THE 215-ISH PARDONS

So….in the last few days, outgoing Republican Governor of the state of Mississippi Haley Barbour has caused a massive uproar with his 200 or so 11th hour pardons, a bunch of them given to people who were convicted of murder or manslaughter. (Everyone seems to have a different total for the Barbour pardons because, in the last few days, )

Some of the pardons he issued leave even bleeding hearts like me muttering in dismay.

Barbour’s Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat, was appalled at the pardoning frenzy and asked for an injunction against the inmates’ releases, telling reporters he thinks some of the pardons may have violated the state constitution in that Barbour began madly issuing the things without giving adequate public notice, particularly to the families of some of those killed by those whom Barbour has now pardoned.

A whole host of folks have the story, but you can start with this ABC report and go from there.

AMENDING 3 STRIKES WOULD SAVE STATE $100 MILLION, SAYS LEGE ANALYST REPORT

Ryan Gabrielson from California Watch has the story.

Here’s a clip:

Prisoners serving long sentences under California’s “three strikes” law are so expensive that legislative analysts say releasing some of them early could eventually save the state $100 million.

A proposed ballot measure, called the Three Strikes Reform Act of 2012 , would amend the landmark sentencing law that brought jail terms of 25 years to life to criminals convicted of three offenses.

Major savings to California taxpayers are central to proponents’ pitch for the measure. But if it passes, the big reduction in state prison spending is not guaranteed.

The measure would narrow courts’ authority to sentence “third-strikers” to 25 years or more in prison unless their new offense is serious or violent in nature. Secondly, it would allow a select group of third-strikers serving a decades-long sentence for a minor crime to apply for a reduced term.

MONTEREY COUNTY RANKS #1 IN CALIFORNIA FOR YOUTH HOMICIDE RATE

Monterey County’s young are victims of murder at a rate that leads all California counties and is nearly three times the overall state rate for the same age range (10-24), according to “Lost Youth: A County-by-County Analysis of 2010 California Homicide Victims Ages 10 to 24.” The study, released this week by the Violence Policy Center (VPC), and funded by The California Wellness Foundation, offers a wealth of information about the sad business of the affect of violence on California kids.

This week there was yet another instance of a teachers union using disinformation and fear tactics to try to intimidate parents who want to have an effect on their kids’ school.

See, it’s this sort of thing, by the way, that causes liberals, who are generally very pro union (and who are always pro teacher), to start feeling mighty grumpy toward California’s teachers unions—both the statewide union, CTA (California Teachers Association), and its branches, and such local unions as UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles)—all of which appear to have become so power-drunk by their decades-long vice grip on CA’s education policy that they actively want to assassinate any other person or group that has the nerve to want also to sit at the decision-making table (and sip a teensy bit of the wine of power too).

(By the way, I mean the word “assassinate” mostly in the metaphorical sense. Operative word: mostly.)

The most recent instance of attack-trained union behavior is occurring in Lynwood, where a group of local elementary school parents have organized as a “parents union” under the banner of the Parents Revolution, which is the group that was instrumental in getting passed the Parent Trigger law.

The Parent Trigger Law is the statute that gives parents the right to “trigger” reforms in schools that are chronically failing to meet minimum state improvement standards (chronic meaning for 4 years or more). In other words, these are the California schools that, year after year, for whatever reasons, give the kids in their care a substandard education. According to the law, when a school screws up to that degree, if at least half of the school’s parents sign a petition, the local school district must adopt one of a handful of reforms: 1. shut down school and let the students enroll in a higher-performing campus nearby; 2. convert the school to an independent charter, 3. fire half the teaching staff and replace the administration; 4. extend school hours and revise the curriculum under a federally recommended turnaround plan; or 5. adopt an “alternative governance” model, which is an option that has a lot of leeway.

In other words, the parent trigger law for the first time gives parents real power to advocate for change in behalf of their sons and daughters—power that previously was held only by the district and the unions, which for the past several decades have seemed more interested in maintaining their respective power bases—-than thinking about what might actually benefit…..you know….kids.

Wow! Bummer! Parents having a place at the bargaining table too! We certainly don’t want THAT!

As it turns out, other states DO want it, and the Trigger law has been spreading, as this Sept. 2011 MSNBC story outlines.

The fact that the dreaded parent-leaning statute might be catching on outside California caused the antipathy toward the Trigger Law to reach such a fever pitch that, this past summer, the American Federation of Teachers put out a power point presentation of how to undermine the law in California and in any other state where it might crop up. The document—which is a must read—openly talks about how the union’s goals are helped by the “Absence of…parents from the table.” (The Orange County Register has more on that shameless move.)

Since the Parent Revolution had its genesis during the rise of the LA charter school powerhouse, Green Dot, the unions have painted such parent groups as clueless dupes of charter school advocates, who cannot make their own decisions and are generally easily influenced idiots who certainly don’t know what their kids need.

The Lynwood union branch of CTA has reportedly used many of FTA’s tactics when they put out flyers and, more recently a newsletter to to try to squash any moves by frustrated Lynwood parents who are tired of sending their children to a school that doesn’t adequately educate them.

The LA Weekly has done a great job of reporting on this issue—both the Lynwood battle that has heated up this week, and an earlier battle over a Compton school, that blew up a year ago.

Here’s a clip from the Weekly’s Simone Wilson’s story on the press conference held Wednesday by Lynwood parents, who are pushing back against union pressure:

Education reformers in California have called Lynwood “ground zero for parent empowerment throughout the entire state.” For whatever reason, parents in the southeast L.A. County town have banded together with an extra sense of urgency, demanding a basic level of respect and competence from their kids’ teachers and administrators that should certainly, by now, be the standard statewide.

But even demands as basic as theirs have now, it seems, been twisted by the local teachers union into some kind of attack on public education as a whole.

Sigh. Fixing this state’s crap school system would sure be a lot easier if we could quit politicking and start discussing the needs of our children like civil human beings.

Uh, yeah. What she said.

IN OTHER NEWS…..ANOTHER CASE OF PROSECUTOR WITHHOLDING EVIDENCE IN TEXAS PUTS MAN IN PRISON FOR 31 YEARS

The Dallas Observer has the story of Rickey Dale Wyatt who was freed on Wednesday after serving 31 years on a rape that Innocence Project head, Barry Scheck says Wyatt did not commit. (The LA Times also reports.)

It seems that although the actual rape victim described a man much larger and taller than Wyatt, and also clean shaven, unlike the then-bearded Wyatt, prosecutors withheld the evidence that likely would have cleared the man.

Although Wyatt’s sentence has been vacated, he has not been declared innocent. He must next appear at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals where Scheck says he is confident that Wyatt will be cleared.

It is important to note that Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins has been instrumental in a string of such dramatic releases in Texas because, rather than fighting defense attorneys at every step, Watkins and his office has opened Dallas County Conviction Integrity Unit, which has in many instances opened up files to the Innocence Project and others.

BILL BRATTON AND OTHERS TALK ON NPR ABOUT WHY THE CRIME RATE CONTINUES TO DROP IN THE U.S.

Oh, just listen. It’s a good story, even if Bratton has an ego the size of Wyoming.

CITY CONTROLLER WENDY GREUEL GOES AFTER FREE-SPENDING HOUSING AUTHORITY’S HIDDEN NON-PROFIT MONEY SOURCES

KCET’s local news show So-Cal Connected has done a killer job digging into the appalling spending excess mess running rife through the Los Angeles Housing Authority—HACLA.

However at first, City Controller Wendy Greuel was a little slower off the mark than we’d have liked in investigating HACLA aggressively (as the LA Weekly’s Simone Wilson points out here). But now the Controller has shifted into high gear—as evidenced by her announcement Tuesday that she has expanded her probe of HACLA to include the Housing Authority’s non-profit ventures, which she notes produced a tidy $15 million a year in net income—money that HACLA execs evidently thought was their own personal expense fund to raid at will for $2000 staff lunches, rampant high ticket travel junkets, endless limo use, personal gifts, “employee incentives” in the form of ipods and ipads, and more—all with seemingly no accountability.

Now Greuel aims to go deeper, her office said in Tuesday’s statement:

In a letter to HACLA’s interim President and CEO Doug Guthrie, Greuel indicated that her probe will expand to the enterprise activities run by the Authority that together produce a profit of more than $15 million a year. These activities include rental income for the 2,500 units owned and managed by HACLA’s nonprofits as well as the activities of the LOMOD Corporations and their subcontractors, which oversee the administration of HUD contracts.

This second phase of Greuel’s audit of HACLA follows last month’s announcement which revealed that HACLA officials were involved in wasteful spending, double dipping and irresponsible expenditures coupled with news of a $1.2 million payout to recently ousted Housing Authority CEO Rudolf Montiel.

NOTE: The video above, courtesy of Ron Kaye, show’s HACLA’s second ousted directer in a row, Ken Simmons, offering a retch-producing explanation of how all that lunch and limo money taken out of the agency’s non-profit earnings wasn’t, like, really stealing from the taxpayers or anything….

Yeah. Sure. Whatever you say, dude.

Go Wendy!

THE STATE OF MONTANA’S SUPREMES CHALLENGE SCOTUS’S INFAMOUS 2010 “CITIZEN’S UNITED” RULING ON CAMPAIGN SPENDING

See, this is yet one more reason to love Big Sky country:

Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal has an article on the matter but it’s hidden behind their pay wall, so go here to get it from Google News.

Here’s how the article by Jess Bravin opens:

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2010 striking down federal limits on corporate and union political spending doesn’t apply to similar state laws, the Montana Supreme Court has found, renewing a legal debate over how sweeping the high court intended its ruling to be.

In a decision released late Friday, the Montana court held that the state’s Corrupt Practices Act, a century-old voter initiative banning corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates or parties, complies with the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.

The justices voted 5-4 in Citizens United that corporations and unions had First Amendment rights to spend as they wished to favor or oppose candidates, regardless of the government’s view that such expenditures could corrupt elections for Congress and the presidency.

That last part about corrupting elections was what the Montana Supreme Court disagreed with. Corporate spending had, in fact, corrupted elections in the state, the MT Supremes ruled. And they had a list of instances to prove the point.

Their ruling will, of course, likely be appealed—to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Eugene Volokh has more—and he predicts that SCOTUS will agree to hear the case, then reverse the MT ruling.

AS THE NEW YEAR DAWNS, A LIST OF STATES TALK ABOUT THE HIGH COST OF THE PRISON BOOM

Doug Berman at Sentencing, Law and Policy has compiled a list of articles from around the country in which the states’ newspapers talk about the need for sentencing and corrections reforms.

Below, for example, is a snippet of what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has to say:

Stepping away from a lock-em-up philosophy might have been the equivalent of political suicide in the 1990s, but that’s hardly the case today. Many leading conservatives — including Newt Gingrich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and many others — support an approach that de-emphasizes prison for non-violent offenders.

Texas was among the first states to change course. In 2007, facing the need to spend $540 million to build new prisons expected to cost another $1.5 billion to run, the state decided to spend a fraction of the anticipated prison costs on alternative programs for non-violent offenders. Since the change, both the crime rate and the incarceration rate have declined.

In 2010, South Carolina adopted a reform package after lawmakers found that prisons were packed with repeat and non-violent offenders. The changes, projected to save up to $175 million in prison construction costs and $66 million in operating costs over five years, are designed to improve public safety. North Carolina also adopted sweeping legislation last year that will reduce spending on corrections with the goal of increasing public safety through programs that should cut repeat offenses.

[Georgia Gov. Nathan] Deal said changes enacted in other states will give Georgia models to consider. And so far, he said, he is hearing positive responses from lawmakers of all stripes. “As members of the General Assembly continue to see demands placed on them to appropriate more money for incarceration and see the numbers of inmates continue to rise substantially every year,” Deal said, “I think they’re certainly willing to embrace these changes.”

Yoooo-hooo, California lawmakers..…?! Why are you letting all these other more conservative state legislators move ahead of you, while you crouch behind your collective desks with your fingers in your ears, humming—hoping no one will notice?

I got news: We’ve noticed.

NOTE: PART 4 OF WLA’S DANGEROUS JAILS REPORT BY MATT FLEISCHER WILL APPEAR NEXT WEEK.

In the meantime, many, many thanks to those of you from the LASD—both actively working and recently retired—who have been giving us excellent tips, fact-checking help, guidance and encouragement as we continue to report. Please keep it coming.