with Taylor Walker

SUPREME COURT COULD OPEN THE DOOR FOR HUGE NUMBERS OF DEPORTED IMMIGRANTS TO HAVE THEIR CRIMINAL CASES RECONSIDERED.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Padilla vs. Kentucky, that a an immigrant who is a permanent legal resident but who, after being charged with a felony, agreed to a guilty plea on the bad advice from a defense attorney without being told that his or her plea will result in automatic deportation, can have that guilty conviction vacated.

Now the court is set to decide this year whether or not Padilla should be made retroactive.

Michael Strickland from UPI has more of the details. Here’s a clip:

Is the U.S. Supreme Court about to open the appeal floodgates for legal aliens who committed crimes in the United States, pleaded guilty but weren’t told they would face deportation under federal law?

Maybe. Argument on the issue will be heard next term, which begins on the first Monday of October.

The genesis of the dispute arose in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in Padilla vs. Kentucky that non-citizens who pleaded guilty to felonies, but weren’t advised by their lawyers they automatically would be deported, were unconstitutionally deprived of their Sixth and 14th Amendment rights to effective counsel.

The vote was 7-2.

Now the Supreme Court has agreed to review whether the Padilla ruling should be made retroactive. In other words, should it be applied to any non-resident who pleaded guilty to a felony without effective counsel from 1996, when the deportation law was passed, to 2010, when the decision was handed down.

How big a universe would be affected is up for speculation….

One thing: although Strickland implies otherwise, a guilty plea does not always mean the person pleading actually committed the crime. Most times it does, of course. But far from always. These days 90 percent of all criminal cases are settled by plea bargain and people take pleas for all kinds of reasons, a common one being someone who has already spent a year or two in jail waiting to go to trial when his attorney tells him if he just pleas out, he will be released for time (already) served. So he takes the plea—whether he committed the crime or not.. And, if he’s a perfectly legal resident, but not a US citizen, he (or she) will be immediately deported for the rest of his or her life.

In any event, this will be an interesting matter to watch.

HORRIBLY ABUSED WOMAN WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN RELEASED AFTER 12 YEARS FOR MANSLAUGHTER, FINALLY GETS OUT AFTER 27

SF woman Wanda Brown was released after serving fifteen years longer than the maximum she should have spent behind bars. Her release was based upon a new retroactive law that allows domestic abuse testimony to be considered in old cases. Getting out also required the work of a young but determined pro bono attorney.

San Jose Mercury News columnist, Scott Herhold has the story:

Here’s how it opens:

Wanda Brown killed Willie Kelley. There was never any question. In a frenzy in 1984, the 22-year-old woman stabbed the San Francisco shopkeeper 64 times with a pocket knife. As lawyers say, it looked like bad facts. She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. A judge gave her 16 years to life.

With no evidence of premeditation, her lawyer, a San Francisco public defender, told her she’d likely be out in eight and a half years. That was the standard back in the mid-’80s.

Then California politics lurched toward an unforgiving stance on crime. More than 27 years later, Wanda Brown was still at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, rejected three times for parole.

On this one, you really do need to read the rest.

SHOULD PROSECUTORS BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE WHEN THEIR MISCONDUCT CAUSES INNOCENT PEOPLE TO LOSE YEARS OF THEIR LIVES?

With more and more innocence cases turning up evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, the fact that prosecutors are legally protected from accountability in most of such cases is becoming an increasingly pressing matter.

The Innocence Project’s Barry Scheck has an essay on the issue in Sunday’s Austin Statesman.

Here’s a clip:

In February, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson affirmed the finding of state District Judge Sid Harle that there was probable cause to believe former Williamson County prosecutor Ken Anderson had violated the criminal laws of Texas by disobeying a court order to disclose evidence pointing to the innocence of Michael Morton, who in 1987 was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. A court of inquiry will now try Anderson on these charges.

The case against Anderson (who is now a state district judge and denies wrongdoing in the Morton case) made national headlines because, as a recent article in the Yale Online Law Review thoroughly documents, our system rarely disciplines, much less brings criminal charges against, prosecutors who have engaged in acts of intentional misconduct. Far too often, prosecutors, who wield enormous power over our lives, aren’t investigated at all, even for intentional misconduct that has led to a wrongful conviction, much less “harmless” intentional misconduct in cases in which the defendant was guilty.

TWO SMALL TOWN NEWSPAPER REPORTERS BRING DOWN A CORRUPT SHERIFF—AND GET DEATH THREATS

Be sure to watch this 60 Minutes story about how a small town newspaper did what even the feds couldn’t manage. (Video link here.)

And here’s a clip from the written version:

Prescription drug abuse has become an epidemic in America. Few places have been hit harder than Kentucky, a state that has also been ravaged by addiction to crystal meth. In Whitley County, Kentucky – in the heart of Appalachia — matters were made worse when the man suspected of being at the center of the drug trade was the county’s top law enforcement officer, Sheriff Lawrence Hodge.

There had long been suspicions that Sheriff Hodge was dirty, but nobody – not even federal agents – could prove it.

That’s when two local journalists — both in their 20s — launched their own investigation. And they soon discovered poking into the affairs of a powerful county sheriff can be risky business.

Adam Sulfridge: You know you’re 20 years old, and you’re taking a shower one day and getting ready for class and you get a call from a federal agent because there’s a credible threat against your life. Everything about it is just so surreal. You know. You don’t– you don’t think a whole lot about it. Then later that night you start thinking, you’re like, “Geez, somebody wants to kill me. That’s a little odd.”

And it’s the sheriff. The sheriff wants to kill you.

Read and or watch the rest.

CAN CANDY SALES TRANSFORM LIVES? CRITICS AREN’T SO SURE

Ex gang-leader-turned-pastor Jesse Sanchez’s Coachella Valley group home requires hours of candy sales by parolees and recovering addicts without providing any rehabilitative programs for the residents.

The Desert Sun’s Rebecca Walsh has the story. Here’s a clip:

At Victory Life, treatment for as many as two dozen men seems to consist of days of chocolate-selling punctuated by church services Sunday morning and Tuesday evening. There is no counseling, no job or life skills training. Residents simply beg, day in and day out, for their upkeep.

“That would never happen in any of our programs,” says Bill Sessa, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “Where a parolee goes to find comfort with a church is their business. But that is very different from what we consider rehabilitation.”

Read on. It’s an interesting tale.

LAPD SAYS IT WILL HAVE SEPARATE AREA FOR TRANSGENDERED INMATES IN POLICE LOCK-UP

Last Thursday night, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck announced a newly crafted, and hearteningly enlightened policy toward transgender people—including a separate LAPD lock-up, the first in the nation. The new policy takes a hugely significant step in healing the problem-laced relationship between the transgender community and the criminal justice system in general.

(According to a study by UC Irvine commissioned by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, nearly 60 percent of transgender inmates in California lock-ups reported being sexually assaulted by other inmates, a rate 13 times higher than for a random sample of the general inmate
population.)

The LA Times’ Sam Quinones has the story. Here’s how it opens.

Responding to incidents of violence against transgender arrestees, the Los Angeles Police Department plans to open a segregated lockup for biologically male and female suspects who identify themselves as members of the opposite sex, officials said.

By early May, a 24-bed transgender module will open at the LAPD women’s jail downtown, the first such police lockup in the nation, according to Capt. Dave Lindsay, the jail division commander.

“This is a major change,” Lindsay said. It will allow for “an environment that’s safe and secure, as there’s been a history of violence against transgender people.”

City jails are for holding people only until they are arraigned in court on the charges on which they were arrested, typically a maximum of three days; then they are transferred to the Los Angeles County Jail, run by the Sheriff’s Department. The county jail will not be affected by the changes.

Go, Chief Charlie. This is a very good thing.

HOWEVER, AFTER YOU READ THE TRANSGENDER STORY, READ THIS BY THE LAT’S JOEL RUBIN ABOUT HOW THE POLICE COMMISSION IS CRUCIALLY AT ODDS WITH PART OF BECK’S DISCIPLINE POLICY

SCOTUS WILL HEAR ARGUMENTS THAT THE FAIR SENTENCING ACT—REGARDING THE CRACK AND POWDER DISCREPANCY—SHOULD BE RETROACTIVE, AT LEAST IN PART

ON Tuesday the US Supreme Court will hear arguments regarding whether or not the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 should be, in any way, retroactive If you’ll remember, the FSA is the law that (mostly) rectified the horrific 1-100 sentencing discrepancy between the prison terms handed down for powder cocaine sales convictions and sentences for convictions for crack sales. (The FSA changed the ratio to 1-20-ish.) The problem is that the new law implied —but did not implicitly say— that it would retroactively apply to crimes committed before the act was passed—but sentenced after the act was passed.

The twinned cases of Dorsey v. the United States, and Hill v. the United States are about that retroactivity issue.

Lyle Denniston over at SCOTUSBLOG has a very complete rundown of the finer points of the cases and the law. While he may be a little on the wordy side for non-wonks, his post is quite fascinating and informative if you take the time.

Here are some clips:

Blacks more often got punished for buying or selling the “crack” or “rock” variety of cocaine, which can be easily processed into a smoked version; conviction carried a much heavier prison sentence. Whites more often got punished for dealing in the “powder” or “blow” version, which can be snorted; conviction carried a far more lenient sentence.

[Snip]

For cocaine, that [1986 Anti-Drug Abuse] Act required judges to punish an individual convicted of a crack crime 100 times more severely than one convicted of trafficking in the powder form. In other words, every gram of crack was treated as the same, for punishment purposes, as 100 grams of powder.

[The Fair Sentencing Act] adopted a ratio that works out to about 18 to 1, crack to powder. A crime involving 28 grams of crack would draw a five-year minimum sentence, as would a crime with 500 grams of powder. A crack crime with 280 grams would be sentenced to ten years, as would a powder crime with 5000 grams. The Justice Department has explained the choice of 28 grams as the bottom amount of crack for sentencing on the premise that wholesale distribution of crack usually involves one-ounce quantities — that is, close to 28 grams.

Although only one lawyer will appear Tuesday for the two Illinoisians, the lawyers for each have filed their own merits brief. The brief for Corey Hill (whose lawyer will be arguing) put its main emphasis upon congressional intent in 2010: “Once Congress completed its historic overhaul of crack sentencing policy,” the brief said, Congress “wanted those amendments to apply immediately….The clear implication….was that the new mandatory minimums should take effect rapidly so that the Guidelines would have a model against which to ‘conform’ and be consistent.”

[Snip]

The Dorsey-Hill cases almost certainly will revive within the Court the long-running dispute over how to read federal statutes — to stay focused only on their language, or to look at legislative history, too. If the Court were to use the former approach, it would seem that the Court-appointed amicus has the better of the argument. The 1871 law is quite specific in requiring Congress, if it wants a new criminal law to have retroactive effect, to say so explicitly; Congress did not do that in 2010. But if the Court were to take the latter approach, there is much that went on during the process of passing the 2010 law that suggests that Congress did want retroactivity to the extent being advanced by the government and counsel for the two Illinois men — not least, the removal of the anti-retroactivity provision from the bill.

BALTIMORE POLICE ABOUT TO JOIN OTHER DEPARTMENTS WHO VIDEOTAPE INTERROGATIONS

The Baltimore PD, which is the 8th largest department in the nation, plans to begin videotaping interrogations in serious cases like shootings and murders. Criminal justice advocates across the country have been pushing for the move due to the now recognized prevalence of false confessions in innocence cases. Baltimore PD’s dithering—and their determination to make the change—is emblematic of similar policy shifts taking place in agencies all over the U.S.

Justin Fenton of the Baltimore Sun has the story. Here’s a clip:

The department, the eighth-largest in the country, recently began using video as part of a series of reforms of its sex-offense unit. Now officials are exploring equipment options and the policy impact of videotaping homicide and shooting interrogations. Detectives are being trained on subtleties such as where to stand and how their demeanor will play to a jury.

I’m committed to doing this, and I have a bunch of really smart guys working on getting this done,” said police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who has studied videotaping since he was chief of detectives. “But it’s not as simple as going to Radio Shack and bolting a camera into the wall.”

[SNIP]

Hundreds of jurisdictions across the country now videotape interrogations, and it is required by law in several states and the District of Columbia. The shift has been spurred by increasing affordability, as well as by questions of coercion and false confessions as DNA testing has led to the release of scores of inmates.

In Harford County, the sheriff’s department says it has long recorded interviews in major cases and recently got funding to add interrogation rooms to neighborhood precincts.

“It’s pretty much a standard for progressive law-enforcement agencies,” Sheriff L. Jesse Bane said. “People are finding out that the things Hollywood portrays really don’t take place.”

STRANGE, IMPRACTICAL MARRIAGE FOR LAPD? OR CONVENIENT HOOK-UP?

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is expected to propose a merger between the LAPD and the General Services’ Office of Public Safety cops in his budget, to be presented Friday. The rather curious melding of the officers who guard libraries and courthouses with the LAPD may be a cost-efficient way for Villaraigosa to uphold his promise to add 1,000 officers to the LAPD ranks by the end of his mayoral term—or not.

Here’s a clip from the Daily News’ Dakota Smith’s report:

As part of his budget being released Friday, Villaraigosa is proposing to shift the Department of General Services’ Office of Public Safety into the Los Angeles Police Department, according to City Council members familiar with the proposal.

Under the proposal, some or all of the city’s 250 security officers and sworn officers who guard the city’s parks, zoo, and City Hall would move under the command of the LAPD.

City budget chief Miguel Santana is expected to release a report on the costs, advantages, and risks of moving the department to the LAPD next week.

Additionally, the LAPD is doing its own feasibility study on absorbing the department.

“There’s a lot of homework to do before this can occur,” said City Councilman Dennis Zine, adding he has questions about the plan.

For instance, Zine said the OPS and LAPD officers have different salaries and pension plans.

In any case, at this point, it’s far from a done deal.

The L.A. Times also reported on the issue.

CAN AN UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANT WOULD-BE LAWYER GET ADMITTED TO THE FLORIDA BAR?

Rafael A. Olmeda of the Sun-Sentinel has the intriguing story. Here’s a clip:

Can an immigrant without a green card get a Florida Bar card?

Aspiring lawyer Jose Godinez-Samperio, 25, a Tampa-area resident, is hoping the answer is yes.

A native of Mexico who entered the United States legally with his parents 16 years ago on a tourist visa, Godinez-Samperio is a graduate of the Florida State University College of Law, the valedictorian of the Armwood High School class of 2004, an Eagle Scout — and an undocumented immigrant.

The Florida Board of Bar Examiners, which grants membership to the Bar, has asked the state Supreme Court to determine whether it can accept someone who is not in the country legally. The Supreme Court flagged the case as “high profile” last week.

Similar cases are pending in NY and California.

Original illustration by Scott McPherson

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.

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.

Eighteen years ago, three West Memphis teenagers were falsely accused of the 1993 murders of a trio of 8-year-old boys, even though there was no physical evidence to tie them to the killings. All the prosecution had was a coerced then recanted confession from one teen, Jessie Misskelley, a trailer park boy with an IQ of 70—and the fact that another of the teens, Damien Echols, listened to heavy metal music and was considered weird by the grown-ups. Nevertheless, the three were convicted a year later, and Echols, supposedly the Satan-worshiping ringleader, was sentenced to death.

Then, through an extremely unlikely confluence of events that involves two flukey HBO documentaries that, in turn, drew to the case a string of determined advocates, some of them famous, the so-called West Memphis 3 were released this summer. However, in order for their increasingly obvious innocence to recognized, they had to plead guilty to the killings they didn’t commit.

The story of the three—Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols—appears in the December issue of GQ magazine, written by GQ correspondent, Sean Flynn.

It is a deeply troubling tale of justice miscarried, made even more disturbing because the confluence of events that needed to produce freedom for the threesome was so unlikely.

Here’s a clip—but do be sure to read the rest of this exceptionally well-written story:

Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers disappeared on the evening of Wednesday, May 5, 1993. The next afternoon, their bodies, naked and bound ankle-to-wrist with shoelaces in the same way a hunter ties a dead deer, were found submerged in a drainage ditch in a patch of woods bordered by the boys’ neighborhood, an interstate highway, and a twenty-four-hour truck wash. All of the boys had been beaten. Byers’s penis was missing.

Weeks passed. Terror of a sadistic sex killer quickly spiraled into panic. By early June, under enormous pressure to make an arrest, the West Memphis Police picked up Jessie, Jason, and Damien. They would seem to have been unlikely suspects. To begin with, though they became known as the West Memphis Three, they weren’t all really friends. Jessie, a short and wiry high school dropout with stripes shaved into the side of his head, knew Damien but didn’t spend any time with him. “I like to go out in the sun and stuff, and he don’t,” Jessie told me. “He likes to come out at night, when I want to go to bed. I don’t like to go out at night. That’s where the trouble is.” He was friendlier with Jason, whom he’d known since Jason moved to Marion in the sixth grade, but not much. “The first time I met Jessie,” Jason told me in September, “he tried to beat me up.”

Jason and Damien, on the other hand, were best friends, though in some ways a mismatched pair. Damien was a high school dropout with a history of mental illness and minor delinquency. But he was also intelligent and shy, the kid who read books other people in his Bible Belt town didn’t and listened to music other kids didn’t like and wore clothes other people found odd. “He looked like one of the slasher-movie-type guys—boots, coat, long stringy black hair, though he cut it short sometimes,” the local juvenile officer told Mara Leveritt, an Arkansas journalist, for her 2002 book, Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three.Jason, a slight boy of 112 pounds with small, crooked teeth and matchstick arms, went to school every day, got good grades, was a talented artist, and never did anything more sinister than shoplift a bag of chips. “I had a mullet,” he jokes now, as if to confess the worst of his sins.

There was no physical evidence connecting any of the three to the killings. At the time of the arrests, the police had only Jessie’s rambling statement and the general consensus that Damien was a weirdo. So in order to paper over the lack of reputable facts in their case, the police and prosecutors created a motive: satanic worship.

Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky made the 1996 documentary Paradise Lost and a 2000 sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. Without these films, the three men would never have gained their supporters, never have been released. The filmmakers’ third documentary on the case, Paradise Lost: Purgatory, is scheduled to debut on HBO on January 12

The stories of innocent people being released after serving years or even decades behind bars have become old hat now. We hardly bother to get excited.

When handsome and articulate Francisco “Frankie” Carrillo was released in Los Angeles this past March after spending 20 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, there were some short articles here and there, but nothing big. His is a great story, that will likely become a book. But the 37-year-old’s circumstances are no longer unusual.

To date, there have been 271 post-conviction DNA exonerations in United States history. There are piles of other cases where DNA strongly suggests innocence but does not conclusively prove it. And then there are all the cases, like Carrillo’s, where no DNA is involved, but new evidentiary facts come to light and/or prosecutorial misconduct is uncovered, that results in exoneration.

So how many innocent people are right now still languishing in our American prisons?

That question is the subject of an excellent article by Radley Balko in the July issue of Reason Magazine.

Here are a few clips:

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the Seton Hall law professor Michael Risinger looked at cases of exoneration for capital murder-rapes between 1982 and 1989, compared them to the total number of murder-rape cases over that period for which DNA would be a factor, and estimated from that data that 3 percent to 5 percent of the people convicted of capital crimes probably are innocent. If Risinger is right, it’s still unclear how to extrapolate figures for the larger prison population. Some criminologists argue that there is more pressure on prosecutors and jurors to convict someone, anyone, in high-profile murder cases. That would suggest a higher wrongful conviction rate in death penalty cases. But defendants also tend to have better representation in capital cases, and media interest can also mean more scrutiny for police and prosecutors. That could lead to fewer wrongful convictions.

In a study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 2005, a team led by University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross looked at 328 exonerations of people who had been convicted of rape, murder, and other felonies between 1989 and 2003. They found that while those who have been condemned to die make up just 1 percent of the prison population, they account for 22 percent of the exonerated. But does that mean capital cases are more likely to bring a wrongful conviction? Or does it mean the attention and scrutiny that death penalty cases get after conviction—particularly as an execution date nears—make it more likely that wrongful convictions in capital cases will be discovered?

[ SNIP]

Even if we were to drop below the floor set in the Risinger study and assume that 2 percent of the 2008 prison population was innocent, that would still mean about 46,000 people have been convicted and incarcerated for crimes they didn’t commit.

[BIG SNIP]

Whatever the total number of innocent convicts, there is good reason to believe that the 268 cases in which DNA evidence has proven innocence don’t begin to scratch the surface. For one thing, the pace of these exonerations hasn’t slowed down: There were 22 in 2009, making it the second busiest name-clearing year to date. Furthermore, exonerations are expensive in both time and resources. Merely discovering a possible case and requesting testing often isn’t enough. With some commendable exceptions, prosecutors tend to fight requests for post-conviction DNA testing. (The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2009 that there is no constitutional right to such tests.) So for now, the pace of genetic exonerations appears to be limited primarily by the amount of money and staff that legal advocacy groups have to uncover these cases and argue them in court, the amount of evidence available for testing, and the willingness of courts to allow the process to happen, not by a lack of cases in need of further investigation.

It’s notable that one of the few places in America where a district attorney has specifically dedicated staff and resources to seeking out bad convictions—Dallas County, Texas—has produced more exonerations than all but a handful of states. That’s partly because Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins is more interested in reopening old cases than his counterparts elsewhere, and partly because of a historical quirk: Since the early 1980s the county has been sending biological crime scene evidence to a private crime lab for testing, and that lab has kept the evidence well preserved. Few states require such evidence be preserved once a defendant has exhausted his appeals, and in some jurisdictions the evidence is routinely destroyed at that point.

“I don’t think there was anything unique about the way Dallas was prosecuting crimes,” Watkins told me in 2008. “It’s unfortunate that other places didn’t preserve evidence too. We’re just in a unique position where I can look at a case, test DNA evidence from that period, and say without a doubt that a person is innocent.…But that doesn’t mean other places don’t have the same problems Dallas had.”

If the rest of the country has an actual (but undetected) wrongful conviction rate as high as Dallas County’s, the number of innocents in prison for felony crimes could be in the tens of thousands.

There’s lots more. So please read the rest of this very good—and sobering—story.

PS: In reading this story, I remembered that, just in my own circle of friends and acquaintances, I know two people who have had life sentences overturned after many years in prison. One is Frankie Carrillo, whom I have just met recently. The other is Mario Rocha, who like Carrillo, was convicted as a teenager, and served 12 and a half years for a murder he didn’t commit.

On the flip side of that coin, I know one person, Danny Cabral, who is serving a life sentence for a murder I am completely positive he didn’t commit.

I also know a second LA man, Hector Salgado–another lifer— who, as I delve more deeply into his case, I am coming to believe is too innocent.

Each of the men has been locked up for nearly 20 years. Both are hoping that one of the Innocence Projects will take their cases.

Both of them haunt me.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF SENTENCING, A DANISH PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY IS “HORRIFIED” THAT ITS DRUG IS BEING USED FOR AMERICAN EXECUTIONS

This story is from the Wall Street Journal, which has tucked it behind a pay wall in the last few hours, but much of it is here at Doug Berman’s site.

Below is a clip.

Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck A/S said Wednesday it’s urgently seeking ways to stop prisons in the U.S. from using one of its epilepsy drugs being used for executions. The company’s Nembutal medicine, designed to treat epileptic seizures, is increasingly being used in prison executions in the U.S. even though it wasn’t meant for that purpose.

“We are horrified at this fact and are looking at ways to prevent prisons from getting this drug, including tougher conditions on distribution,” Lundbeck spokesman Mads Kronborg said Wednesday. The drug, acquired when the Danish company bought U.S.-based firm Ovation in 2009, is of no strategic importance to Lundbeck and represents less than 1% of the Danish drug maker’s overall sales.

“At first we considered stopping production of this product but there is a medical need for it and hospitals pleaded with us not to cut off the supply. It is the mother of all dilemmas for us,” Mr. Kronborg said.

John Thompson was convicted and sentenced to death for a 1984 murder he did not commit. He served 18 years in prison, 14 of those years on death row. He was saved from execution by four hot shot young attorneys who worked pro bono on his case for more than a decade.

What they discovered in the course of 10 years of trying to prove Thompson’s innocence was the fact that the prosecution had deliberately hidden 10 different pieces of exculpatory evidence from the defense—from witness accounts to blood evidence—in order to convict a man who had zero to do with the crime.

After he was released, Thompson sued the New Orleans prosecutors and a jury awarded him $14 million in damages. Last week, the Supreme Court reversed that decision in a 5/4 ruling.

It would be hard to find a worse decision this year. Justice Ginsberg wrote an unusually scathing dissent, all but pleading with congress to step in with a new law that rectifies the situation.

Nina Totenberg’s NPR report tells you most of what you need to know about the rest of the story.

Then Law professors Bennett L. Gershman and Joel Cohen rip the decision limb from limb on the Huffington Post.

And the LA Times’ David Savage quotes plenty of people who are rightfully appalled at the Thompson decision.

For instance:

Advocates for the wrongly convicted denounced the decision. Prosecutors have “enormous power over all of our lives,” said Keith Findley, president of the Innocence Network, yet “no other profession is shielded from this complete lack of accountability.”

In Thompson’s case, at least four prosecutors knew of the blood test, eyewitness reports and other evidence that, once revealed, showed they had charged the wrong man.

“When this kind of conduct happens and it goes unpunished, it sends a devastating message throughout the system,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, a University of Maryland law professor. “It means more of these incidents will happen.”

Oh, yes, and in a separate but concurring opinion, Atonin Scalia wrote that the here is no duty under the Constitution for prosecutors to turn over test results “which might have exonerated the defendant.”

(Please don’t say any more, Atonin, you’re scaring us. And about the matter of the Constitution and the framers’ intentions, you might want to reread the 5th Amendment, specifically the line near to the end about that due process thingy.)

Oh, yeah, and in a really fun related item, the LA Times’ Jack Leonard reports that the No Cal Innocence Project has found 102 cases statewide, 31 from Los Angeles County, in which prosecutors engaged in misconduct. (You know, things like withheld evidence, intentionally misled jurors.)

You may find the cheering details here.

Photo by Patrick Semansky/AP

OUT OF THE FIRST 239 EXONERATIONS PROVEN BY DNA TESTING 175 involved mistaken eyewitness identifications.

For Francisco Carrillo, who was released on Wednesday after 20 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit, there was no DNA evidence. He was convicted of the Jan. 18, 1991 drive-by shooting murder based on the testimony of six teenage boys who were standing with the victim. Carrillo was 16 at the time he was arrested.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge overturned the conviction this week after the victim’s son, plus four other witnesses, recanted their identifications.

The LA Times’ Jack Leonard has the rest of the story.

For two decades, Francisco “Franky” Carrillo insisted he was innocent.

After his arrest at age 16, he recalled, he was desperate to prove to a jury that he had nothing to do with the fatal drive-by shooting he was charged with. Then came the guilty verdict and a life prison sentence.

Carrillo was behind bars when his father died in 1999. His son, born shortly after his arrest, grew to manhood outside prison walls. During a phone call, Carrillo promised his son that he would one day be released so that he could be with him.

On Wednesday afternoon, two days after his murder conviction was overturned, Carrillo made good on his vow, walking out of Los Angeles County Jail and into the arms of his supporters and attorneys who had helped win his freedom.

Wearing jeans and a striped shirt provided by jail staff upon his release, Carrillo said he harbored no bitterness for the time he spent incarcerated and was focused instead on enjoying his new life. His immediate priority: shave, shower and grab lunch.

“I’m, personally, not angry,” he said. “I don’t want to carry that heavy load.”

(Illustration from Psychology Today)

TEACHERS & PROGRAM DIRECTORS FROM HAMILTON HIGH PERFORMING ARTS MAGNET MAY GET AX

There have been some hideous moves made in the course of LAUSD’s budget slashing, but this one’s at or near the top.

Hamilton High School’s performing arts magnet is one of the true jewels in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It quite literally changes kids’ lives with its excellent of teachers and stellar arts programs.

And now LAUSD is gutting the magnet school?

Really???

A big thank you to Steve Lopez for doing a column on the issue. Here’s a clip.

The news rippled across the campus Friday morning, and students were falling apart. They texted their parents and sought out one another to see if it could all be true.

“I saw kids crying in the quad,” said Portia Amofa, student body president at Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles.

The students were finding out that some of their favorite teachers were among roughly 7,000 in L.A. Unified who had gotten layoff notices. In addition, the directors of two enormously popular and successful Hamilton programs, the humanities magnet and the music magnet, had been told by L.A. Unified that their positions were being eliminated.

It’s still early in the game, and some teachers who got layoff notices may keep their jobs in the end. But things don’t look good, given anticipated funding cuts from Sacramento. Like school districts across the state, L.A. Unified has had to prepare for the worst and send out “potential” notices.

Students at Hamilton aren’t waiting around for the adults to mess things up any more than they already have in a state that ranks near the bottom in national spending per pupil. They’re on the warpath, trying to save something they believe in.

THE PRESSURE BUILDS FOR A SCOTUS CODE OF ETHICS

This issue isn’t going away.
The NY Times is the latest entry into the discussion with a new editorial.

Here’s how it opens:

Supreme Court justices have life tenure to assure their independence and impartiality. The court’s lack of a recusal policy leaves each justice to decide whether he or she is meeting that standard. That plainly violates the age-old legal principle: Nemo iudex in causa sua — no one should be a judge about his or her own case. It damages the justices’ credibility and the court’s authority.

The court is still not addressing the issue despite months of questions about possible cozy friendships, suspected political biases and family ties….

THIS WEEK SCOTUS DECIDES WHETHER A MAN EXONERATED OF CAPITAL MURDER CAN SUE THE PROSECUTOR WHO HID EVIDENCE TO CONVICT HIM

John Holloway at Slate has the sobering tale behind the case involving John Thompson, who was nearly executed for the crime of capital murder, his conviction based on paid-off “witnesses,” and evidence made to vanish, all under the watch of a dapper New Orleans district attorney and sometimes singer named Harry Connick Sr. (And, yes, the DA’s son is that other Harry Connick.)

Here’s one of the better paragraphs from the Holloway story.

How is new evidence uncovered? This is how: a private investigator hired by lawyers looking for a miracle charms her way into a lab and flips through thousands of pieces of microfiche looking for a blood test whose existence has been repeatedly denied by the DA’s office. She doesn’t blink, or wander, or doze off at the wrong time. And when she finds it, she makes several copies of it and gets the hell out of Dodge to call the lawyers.

Tenacity, boobs, and luck.

The Supremes will hear arguments in Connick v. Thompson, on Wednesday.

SECOND SUICIDE IN LA COUNTY JAIL IN TWO DAYS

What in the worlds is going on? Here’s a link to the LA Times story.

An inmate killed himself Tuesday at Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, the second suicide at the facility in as many days.

In Tuesday’s incident, the 29-year-old was pronounced dead at the jail after he was discovered around 5:20 a.m., the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said.

The man, described as a gang member, pleaded guilty last year to assault with a deadly weapon and received a 21-year sentence. He was also found guilty of robberies and carjacking and was scheduled to be sentenced Friday for those crimes, the department said. His name was not released…..

These back-to-back jail suicides call to mind a July 2010 report by the Office of Independent Review, which noted there was an uptick in suicides in the county’s jail system and, while many suicides were prevented by deputy vigilance, the OIR documented a terrible case of neglect and falsified records that arguably allowed a young man named John Horton to kill himself last year, when it was well known he was at risk.

It is hard to know what if anything these two suicides signify. But the issue bears watching.

LA TIMES ENDORSES COOLEY FOR AG AND MAKES AN INTERESTING CASE AS TO WHY.

The endorsement is here. As much as have disagreed with Cooley on certain issues, I think they have a point.

NY TIMES’ DAVID CARR WRITES ABOUT A “BANKRUPT CULTURE” AT ZELL’S TRIBUNE CO, AND BOOB-GAWKER, RANDY MICHAELS, FIRES BACK WILDLY AT THE MESSENGER

Okay, first the opening of David Carr’s devastating story about the Tribune Co, which runs in Wednesday’s NY Times (and which many say shows only the tip o’ the iceberg in terms of the cringe-making craziness of Zellworld):

In January 2008, soon after the venerable Tribune Company was sold for $8.2 billion, Randy Michaels, a new top executive, ran into several other senior colleagues at the InterContinental Hotel next to the Tribune Tower in Chicago, David Carr writes in The New York Times.

Mr. Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, had been handpicked by Sam Zell, a billionaire who was the new controlling shareholder, to run much of the media company’s vast collection of properties, including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, WGN America and The Chicago Cubs.

After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, “watch this,” and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.

“Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew,” said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer. “I have never seen anything like it.”…

Now read Randy Michaels’ whacked-out preemptive memo about the Carr story, courtesy of LA Observed.

CALIFORNIA SUPREMES HEAR FIGHT OVER UNDOCUMENTED STUDENTS AND STATE TUITION

The SF Chronicle has the story:

The issue of benefits for illegal immigrants landed at the state Supreme Court on Tuesday, as out-of-state students challenged a law allowing anyone who has graduated from a California high school to pay in-state tuition at a public university, regardless of immigration status.

The 2002 law, intended to encourage youngsters to attend college, enables undocumented students to pay the same lower fees as other state residents – at the University of California, $11,300 instead of $34,000 a year.

A lawyer for 42 non-Californians who pay the higher fees at UC, state university and community college campuses argued that the statute is discriminatory and violates federal immigration law…..

LA MAG HOSTS LAW & ORDER’S DICK WOLF FOR EARLY MORNING SALON/CHAT

I meant to be at this event but was horridly cold ridden so didn’t go at the last minute. Fortunately, Kevin Roderick has a report.

Los Angeles moved its periodic breakfast series to Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills for this morning’s session with the creator of “Law and Order: Los Angeles.” Wolf regaled the likes of City Council president Eric Garcetti, exiting Bon Appetit editor Barbara Fairchild and NBC correspondent Josh Mankiewicz with behind-the-scenes stories from the show….

DOES TEA PARTY = POT PARTY?

Josh Harkinson from Mother Jones says it does.

Here’s a clip:

Last month in the nation’s capital, Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico and outspoken critic of big government, took the podium at Glenn Beck’s 9/12 rally to talk up economic issues. He warmed up the crowd of tea partiers with tales of how he’d fended off unnecessary state spending through liberal use of the veto stamp, and how he’d boosted educational competition through charter schools. Then Johnson dropped a bomb. “Half of what we spend on law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons is drug related,” he proclaimed. “I suggest that legalizing marijuana will make this country a better place.”

The crowd erupted in a clash of boos and applause—evidence, Johnson told me later, that the tea party is ripe for debate on the issue. “What the tea party talks about is wise spending,” he said, adding that the war on drugs was certainly no better a deal than Social Security or Medicare. The tea party’s libertarian elements, he noted, have already led to the unthinkable: “You find more Republican candidates right now espousing legalization of marijuana than you do Democrats.”