Kevin Roderick at LA Observed has the gory details of the NOT-Trutanich endorsements in a story titled: Times endorses Jackie Lacey for DA, Daily News says ‘anybody but Carmen’

Here’s a clip or two (but read the rest):

Not a good day on the newspaper editorial pages for City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, who wants to be seen as the frontrunner in the district attorney race. The contest is drawing more interest than usual from the newspapers (and from lawyers) since it is rare for the DA job to actually be open at election time. The choice made by Los Angeles County voters “likely will be their most consequential vote in years,” says an LA Times editorial on Sunday. The Times opinion staff has been intensely covering the race, interviewing the candidates in detail and posting videos online….

[HUMUNGOUS SNIP]

The Daily News really doesn’t like Trutanich anymore: “Lacey and Jackson are the real candidates in the district attorney’s race. They are true prosecutors, not politicians, not liars and not bullies.”

Here’s the Daily News endorsement essay. And here’s the LA Times editorial on the matter.

Interviews with and essays by some of those in the LAPD who were around in 1992, and were forever changed by what they saw, are a good reminder of how far our city’s police department has come.

No, the department ain’t perfect. Then again, neither am I, neither are you. But it is example number one for me when I doubt that change is possible in big public agencies. The Los Angeles Police Department is fundamentally different than the force whose thin-blue-line, us-versus-them arrogance and brutality did much to create the climate that allowed the Rodney King riots to happen, and likely necessitated their occurrence.

Here are a few of the best examples of Riot Anniversary statements by some very good LA cops.

CHARLIE BECK’S TRANSFORMATION

This is from an Op Ed by LAPD Chief Charlie Beck in Monday’s LA Times:

In 1992, I was a young Los Angeles Police Department sergeant assigned to the Internal Affairs Division and had just returned home after a long shift only to see on television the Florence and Normandie assaults, the beating of Reginald Denny and fires spreading all over the city. I was stunned at the absence of any response by my beloved LAPD. I quickly got into my personal car and drove westbound into a sunset that highlighted a city on fire and in crisis.

Reporting to the LAPD Command Post at 54th Street and Van Ness Avenue, I found myself among hundreds of fellow officers of all ranks, all of us waiting for orders. Police cars in long rows sat empty, waiting for a mission. Knowing that the city was burning from arson fires yet sitting idle left me feeling numb. On that first night, the department failed to adequately fulfill its role of protecting and serving.

Over the next six days, I saw terrible inhumanity committed against innocent people, and heroic actions by officers, firefighters and residents alike. As the arson fires burned out and the city began cleaning up the damage, I knew everything had changed. The 1992 civil unrest was a defining point in the history of the LAPD and, for me personally, a life-changing event. I knew in my heart then that we had to completely change the way we policed this city….

ANDY SMITH: THE ONCE LONELY VOICE OF A GOOD COP

This is from a short profile of LAPD Commander Andrew Smith in this month’s Los Angeles Magazine:

….I grew up in a little Midwest town where we treated the police with respect, and they treated us the same. At Newton station I was shocked by guys I worked with, guys with zero respect for the people we policed, guys who have since retired or been fired. I’d apologize to someone on the street or offer help, and another officer would say, “Why do you talk to them like that? These aren’t your friends or neighbors. These are just Newtonites.” During the Rodney King trial, I knew it was going to be bad. I’d go on calls, and every TV was on, everyone glued to the trial. But I think I was alone in my feelings….

PAT GANNON HAS A PLAN

Deputy Chief Patrick Gannon is the head of LAPD’s South Bureau, which covers the areas of South LA that were the riot’s epicenters 20 years ago. This is from Neon Tommy’s Agnus Dei Farrant’s interview with Gannon regarding what he saw and felt on April 29, 1992, and what he is determined to see done differently now:

…Even if Gannon had searched for a preventative plan [in the event of unrest after the King verdicts, he wouldn’t have found one from police Chief Daryl Gates.

“He thought he had a plan,” Gannon said. “He used to wave around this big book and said, here is our plan. It was really not a plan, it was a tactical operations manual that we use in reference to different incidences. A plan is specific to an event and we weren’t ready for that. And nor did he see it coming or he never would have been at a fundraiser [the day the riots began].”

Although he was a sergeant at the time, Gannon took the failures of the police department personally. He was disappointed in himself for not doing enough.

“Whether it was my fault or not, I was just one person in a police department but I really took it as being my problem or my fault.”

Today, Gannon is the deputy chief of LAPD’s South Bureau. Being promoted into further positions of authority, it became a personal mission to prevent another LA riot.

“As a police department, we police better. We handled our issues better, we weren’t as aggressive and forceful as we had been. And officers that were, we made sure they were held accountable for what they’ve done. We didn’t do well by that in those days.”

He also makes steps to plan for larger events and quell issues that cause community tension or anger.

“I’m not going to ignore these indicators anymore like some people did in those days. Even the mayor of Los Angeles and the police chief weren’t talking. How do you deal with such a sensitive issue when you’re not even talking?”

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’d known from chatting with KPPC’s Frank Stoltze at this or that event that he’d been working on a profile of Sheriff Lee Baca for a while. Thus when the wide-ranging, intriguing, contradiction-filled and surprisingly poignant two-part profile of Baca ran on successive Madeleine Brand shows last week, along with an accompanying article, I wondered what Frank thought, now that the project was completed.

With this in mind, I asked WitnessLA’s newest reporter, David Lynn, to talk with Stoltze about the interview/profile process—a sort of story-behind-the-story—which you’ll find below.

(We’ll introduce WitnessLA staff additions, David Lynn and Taylor Walker, more properly in the coming days.)

But first, be sure to listen to—and read—the two-part profile (which you can find here). It’s an unusually good reminder about why so many LA people are so very conflicted about the complicated man who is Los Angeles County’s sheriff.

(And please don’t miss the stand-alone sound clips embedded in the text. The clip of Baca talking about his undocumented mother is, by itself, worth the price of admission.)

THE ART OF PROFILING SHERIFF LEE BACA

by David Lynn

Reporter Frank Stoltze covers anything criminal justice-related for Southern California Public Radio Station 89.3 KPCC. When researching his recent profile of the Los Angeles’ County Sheriff Department’s top cop, Stoltze rode along with Sheriff Lee Baca for the better part of a day in order to give Angelenos some insight into a man who, at least indirectly, plays a large role in their lives.

Baca’s LASD has its share of troubles right now-–an ever-widening FBI investigation, a huge, class action lawsuit from the ACLU, a citizens commission appointed to examine the problems in its jails, and now an audit by the county’s auditor-controller into alleged multimillion dollar irregularities in one of the department’s aircraft contracts. Given the controversies, we wanted to know the challenges Mr. Stoltze faced in reporting on the sheriff.

Stoltze said that he wanted to do this story on Baca because, despite his high profile and the recent scandals, the sheriff doesn’t get the amount of press one would expect.

“With the Sheriff under fire, the LAPD still gets more attention. It was a story that was long overdue. Often, even when he’s up for re-election, there’s not much coverage,” Stoltze said.

With all of the problems surrounding the LASD, it’s a tricky time for the Sheriff to be doing interviews. Stoltze made several requests over many weeks before he was finally granted access to Baca in the form of a six-hour ride-a-long.

“We started at an event he was doing for kids at a school. Then he had his driver take us through his old neighborhood. He wanted to humanize himself. He was sitting in the front passenger seat and I was in the back seat with a shotgun microphone attached to my recorder, asking questions,” said Stoltze.

In reading and listening to Stoltze’s profile of Baca one is struck by a sense of paradox surrounding the sheriff who comes across personally as a reasonable and caring man. Yet he is, after all, at the helm of an organization that is under scrutiny for being brutal and corrupt.

“What I tried to do in this piece is to show how, on one hand, you have this thoughtful intellectual who professes deep humanity and caring for the less fortunate, and on the other he has allowed brutality in the jails to the extent that it caught the attention of the FBI,” Stoltze said.

Interestingly, one of the difficulties Stoltze faced in putting the profile together was finding critics of the Sheriff.

“I talked to people like [LASD civilian watchdog Merrick] Bobb and Connie Rice. Bobb may know the Sheriff’s Department better than the Sheriff. He’s been watching them since 1992. Rice is a long time civil rights attorney and sheriff supporter. But groups like ALADS (the LASD union) refused to do an interview,” said Stoltze.

Even some of those who agreed to comment on the Sheriff seemed to have mixed feelings about having their personal thoughts on the record, says Stoltze.

“He’s a powerful politician and people want to be on the right side of him, but I also get the feeling that they are genuinely conflicted. They’ll be critical of him in reports, but when interviewed they’re not as harsh. The same people who grill him at a Board of Supervisors meeting try not to be too hard on him in interviews,” said Stoltze.

When asked why this attitude of critical reverence towards Sheriff Baca is so prevalent., Stoltze offered some insight.

“Some people thought Darryl Gates was a disaster. Even with all the trouble in the Sheriff’s Department, you don’t hear the same concern about Baca. He’s an intellectual guy who talks about progressive principles, transparency and accountability,” Stoltze said.

So how transparent did Stoltze believe the sheriff was during the interview?

“He was very forthcoming,” Stoltze says of Baca. “The only thing that he seemed particularly reluctant to talk about was his challenging Sherman Block for the office.”

The sheriff was also very forthcoming with his feelings towards the media. Stoltze said the Sheriff took a couple of shots at the media, one of which was directed at Stoltze himself.

“I was asking a series of tougher questions about the jails and politics when he asked, ‘Did someone put you up to these? I thought you were a nice guy.’ I just said, ‘Well, you know how ornery I can get,’” said Stoltze.

Some details of the interview were left out of the finished profile, for editing reasons one of which was Stoltze giving Sheriff Baca some good-natured ribbing over his relatively light security detail.

“The LAPD chief always has a few uniformed guys with him. Baca only has his driver and he’s in plain clothes,” said Stoltze. “Baca doesn’t even carry a gun. I said, ‘You never carry a gun!’ Baca said, ‘No, no, I have a gun. I also have my Sam Browne [police gun belt] and 9mm in the trunk.’”

The pre-fiddled-with photo of Sheriff Baca by Grant Slater/KPPC

People often ask Pulitzer-winning journalist turned author, Raymond Bonner, if his new book, Anatomy of Injustice: a Murder Case Gone Wrong—which took nearly twelve years to reserch and write—is a labor of love.

“Actually, it’s a labor of outrage,” Bonner said, when he spoke on Sunday afternoon at a LA book party given in his honor.

Outrage is only one of the array of emotions evoked by Bonner’s riveting account of the case of Edward Lee Elmore, a 23-year old, dirt-poor black handyman with an IQ of 61, who was arrested, tried and convicted of killing a 76-year-old white woman, a murder he almost certainly did not commit, then sentenced to death for the crime.

Every form of injustice seems to be present in the true crime tale of Ellmore’s legal railroading: prosecutorial misconduct, racial prejudice, planted and withheld evidence, staggeringly callous and disinterested defense attorneys, a lying jailhouse snitch coached by the prosecution (but who years later suffered an attack of conscience and confessed to his perjury)… and more.

In choosing this particular case to deconstruct, Bonner got a cast of great characters that give the story near-novelistic richness. Most prominent among them is a remarkable heroine in the form of Diana Holt, a law student working as an intern for the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center (who had her own traumatic personal story) who took up Elmore’s cause after several failed appeals by other attorneys, and whose obsession with seeing justice done for Elmore never wavered after she passed the bar and became a crack appeals lawyer. It was Holt’s dogged work and determination that eventually got him off death row.

Yet still he remained in prison That took a withering ruling by the 4th circuit court of appeals vacating his conviction, along with the publication of Bonner’s book to finally persuade a prosecutor to cut a deal that allowed Elmore his freedom earlier this month, after 30 years behind bars, most of those years spent fighting the threat of execution.

As the reader follows Elmore’s almost unbearably painful journey through the justice system, Bonner gives us an informative and deeply disturbing look at the issue of capital punishment in general by taking us deep into the workings of the legal machinery to see all the ways matters can and do go awry, then showing us how nearly impossible it is to set things right, once an injustice has been rendered—even in the face of factual innocence.

The event for Bonner was hosted by Laurie Becklund, and her husband Henry Weinstein, both former reporters for the LA Times. (Beckland is now an author and Internet publisher, while Weinstein, who is also an attorney, is teaching at UC Irvine’s law school. )

Guests who had come to meet Bonner included such criminal justice types as Judge Arthur Alarcon, formerly of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the co-author of last year’s study looking at the yearly cost of the death penalty in California, and .

There were also two exonerees at the book party, Thomas Goldstein, who served 24 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and Gloria Killian, who served 17 years before her conviction was set aside, and who now runs, The Action Committee for Women in Prison and who has her own book coming out soon.

Other guests included LA Times columnist and editor at large, Jim Newton, and his wife, LA Times legal counsel, Karlene Goller, along with Geneva Overholser, the director of USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism, and actor Mike Farrell who is also president of Death Penalty Focus and his wife, actress, Shelley Fabares.

As luck would have it, on Sunday Bonner’s book was reviewed glowingly on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Here’s a clip:

This much we know to be true: On a cold winter weekend in early 1982, somebody murdered 76-year-old Dorothy Edwards. Apparently she knew the perpetrator, since she let him into her handsome home on a quiet side street in Greenwood, S.C. The crime itself was horrific. She was beaten with a blunt object, stabbed repeatedly — one ear was almost severed — probably sexually assaulted; her body was stuffed into a bedroom closet, where it was discovered on Monday afternoon, Jan. 18. The next day the police arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a 23-year-old handyman whom Edwards had recently hired to do a few odd jobs around the house. He was formally charged with first-degree murder on Jan. 21, tried in the second week of April, found guilty by a jury that deliberated for two and a half hours, and sentenced to death.

We know this as well: As of this writing, there have been 1,283 executions in the United States since 1976, when the Supreme Court ended its four-year moratorium on capital punishment. There have also been 134 death row exonerations, almost half of them since 1999. In his mesmerizing new book, “Anatomy of Injustice,” Raymond Bonner, a onetime prosecutor and a former investigative reporter and foreign correspondent at The New York Times, makes a persuasive case that Elmore ought to be added to the list of the innocent. Instead, he spent nearly 30 years in the South Carolina state penitentiary, most of that time on death row, trapped by a complex of forces that too often warp the legal process, even when a man’s life hangs in the balance.

I raced through Bonner’s un-put-down-able book about Elmore in less than 48-hours, slowed down only by such pesky needs as working, eating, running with the dog, and sleep.

LATER THIS WEEK I’LL HAVE NEWS ABOUT OTHER MUST-READ BOOK, JUMPED IN BY JORJA LEAP.

Jumped In is part memoir, part an academic researcher’s journey that takes us deep into the causes of—and solutions to—gang violence, with with highly-regarded-researcher and violence reduction expert Leap as our guide.

In the meantime, you can hear Jorja discuss her important new analysis of Los Angeles gang life on Tuesday night 7:30 at Skylight books.

See you there!

PS: All Leap’s proceeds from the book will be donated to Homeboy Industries.

Skylight Books
7:30 pm
1818 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, California 90027

PPS: Here’s Leap talking with Larry Mantle at KPPC.

THE ADULT EDUCATION DRAMA CONTINUES AS SUPT. DEASY MEETS WITH ADULT ED PRINCIPALS ON MONDAY

LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy has called a meeting with the principals of the district’s adult education schools, as Deasy continues to leave adult ed on the chopping block.

LAUSD has 35 adult education centers, which include 24 community adult schools, six regional occupational centers, and five skills centers, all of which have been threatened by Deasy’s proposed cuts.

Adult ed instructors as well as the approximately 300,000 Los Angeles residents who take the classes in the program, are waiting nervously to hear what news comes out of the closed door meeting.

Meanwhile there is no word about why Ed Morris, the man who was head of the Adult Ed program until last Wednesday was put on administrative leave on Wednesday afternoon as WitnessLA reported last week.

Expressions of dismay at his abrupt ouster continue to be expressed by those who worked with and around him.

MORE DEMONSTRATIONS PLANNED

The Adult Ed teachers and administrators, plus hundreds of students, have held a series of demonstrations since the threat of cutting the program altogether became public.

Sources tell us that district officials like Deasy and some of the school board members, have been stunned by the organizational skill with which the Adult Ed-ers have managed to turn people out again and again for demonstrations.

MAYOR HAS YET TO TAKE A STAND ON ADULT ED

One of the next pressure points the Adult-Ed-ers intend to hit is that of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa whom they hope to pressure/educate/cajole into becoming an ally.

The mayor has often told the story of how he nearly dropped out when he was a high school student and how a devoted teacher saved him. As of 2010, LAUSD had the second worst graduation rate in America and, as one former schoolboard member put it, “Adult ed is the single best dropout remediation program in the county. Period.”

It also offers a wide array of job training and skills classes, which help unemployed or under employed LA residents get back to work. Fees for courses range from $20 to slightly over $100, for certain kinds of higher level certification programs. So it is job training that is affordable for those who have lost their regular paychecks—making adult ed the best game in town when it comes to retraining and/or rebooting one’s skills soas to get back in the labor force.

Organizers intend to begin a Call Villaraigosa campaign today, Monday March 5.

Photo by Edwin Folven/Park La Brea News

Dear Daily News Editors, a gentle request: the next time we break a story, and you use our points outright as you did here in the first five paragraphs of the lead of your own story (posted a day and a half later), either change it up a little more so it isn’t quite as obvious, or be polite and give us some kind of shout out.

Thanks in advance.

WITNESSLA VERSION,

(Posted on Feb. 29, 1:19 a.m.)

1. We have heard that Los Angeles Unified School District Adult and Career Education director, Ed Morris, was fired on Tuesday afternoon.

2. According to our source, Morris received the news around 4 pm from Deputy Superintendent of Instruction, Jaime Aquino, who is Morris’ direct supervisor.

3. There is no word yet on why Morris was let go.

4. The news came on the same day that WitnessLA reported statements made by Morris (and to a lessor degree, Deasy) in an interview with an NPR reporter, in the course of which Morris harshly denigrated the value of the GED test.

5. Adult Ed teachers found the remarks particularly egregious in that GED prep classes have long-been considered an important part of the Adult Ed curriculum—the budget for which is on the chopping block, its fate scheduled to be voted on by the LAUSD board in mid March

DAILY NEWS VERSION

(posted March 1 8:40 pm (with earlier version at 5:38 pm)

1. Assistant Superintendent Ed Morris has been ousted as head of LAUSD’s popular, yet embattled, Adult Education Division, the Daily News has learned.

2.. Morris was notified of the decision about 4 p.m. Tuesday by Deputy Superintendent Jaime Aquino, sources said.

3. A district spokesman said Morris had been placed on administrative leave and that no additional information would be provided. Morris could not be reached for comment.

4. The action came just days after Morris was quoted in an National Public Radio interview questioning the long-term value of earning a GED or high-school equivalency certificate, one of the programs offered by his division.

5 “If I were prepared today with a GED, and that’s what I had as an 18-year-old, I’d be scared to death of the future,” he said in the Feb. 18 story, in which Superintendent John Deasy also raised concerns about the adequacy of a GED.

You can read the rest of the DN story here.

Cat stamp design from the Licorice Tree.

The cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is a profile of Judy Clark, one of a group of militant radicals who, in 1981, tried to rob a Brinks truck and ended up killing two police officers, and one of the Brinks guards, before getting caught. Clark was one of the getaway drivers for the group. As it turned out, she was an inexperienced and untalented driver and so managed to smash the car in which she and two of her crimeys were escaping into a concrete wall, at which point she and they were arrested.

Clark compounded her mistakes by insisting upon representing herself in trial and hectoring the jury with phrases like “Revolutionary violence is necessary, and it is a liberating force.”

As a consequence, she was sentenced to 75 years in prison—more than several of her co-defendants, most famously, Kathy Boudin, who let her private attorney do the talking. Boudin got 20 to life, and is already out, while Clark has thus far done 30 of her 75-year sentence.

The NYT Mag story on Clark and her subsequent “transformation,” written by former Village Voice investigative reporter, Tom Robbins (not to be confused with the novelist), is clearly intent on making the case for Clark’s release, without actually saying as much. Robbins, who knew Clark in her pre-Brinks robbing days, is much too smart a journalist to be that obvious (even if the NY Times editors would go along with it, which they wouldn’t). Instead, he makes the case that she has changed profoundly. And certainly by all accounts Clark seems to be a very positive force at Bedford Hills, the maximum security women’s prison where she has been for the past three decades.

(Read the article for the details.)

As Robbins notes, Clark has drawn to herself a long list of people pleading for clemency in her behalf, several of whom are very persuasive.

Speaking personally, however, I find I have a slew of mixed feelings about this matter.

Sure, I believe the warm looking, grey-haired, school-teacherish white lady has likely done enough time. Moreover, many of the prison officials who know her well describe her potential as a positive force who could better contribute to society on the outside, rather than being locked up on the public’s dime.

And the truth is, we incarcerate way too many people in this country for way too long. It is a practice is corroding our collective soul as well as our state budgets.

But—again just speaking personally—there are quite a number of people I’d put on the clemency list ahead of Clark. Yet none of them happens to be a cozy-smiled, well-educated, white woman.

They are instead former gang members whom we are content to put on the throwaway list.

(I’d wager that most working public defenders have their own special shortlist of former clients they’d put on the clemency list. Ditto prison chaplains, and so on.)

One more thing: I’d have felt a lot more comfortable with Robbins’ article if he and the Times’ editors thought to spend just a paragraph or two on the three victims: Edward O’Grady, Waverly Brown, and Peter Paige—all of whom had kids.

I’m just sayin’.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF RACIAL DISPARITIES IN INCARCERATION….LEGAL SCHOLAR MICHELLE ALEXANDER EXPLAINS THE NEW JIM CROW

In the last two years, Michelle Alexander’s important book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has been the #1 must read for criminal justice advocates.

Monday, NPR’S Fresh Air ran an interview with Alexander for Martin Luther King Day. The broadcast is worth listening to in its own right. And, by happy coincidence, it is also a good contextual framework with which to view the NY Times Judith Clark story.

Here’s a clip from Fresh Air’s write up on the show.

Under Jim Crow laws, black Americans were relegated to a subordinate status for decades. Things like literacy tests for voters and laws designed to prevent blacks from serving on juries were commonplace in nearly a dozen Southern states.

In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs. She says that although Jim Crow laws are now off the books, millions of blacks arrested for minor crimes remain marginalized and disfranchised, trapped by a criminal justice system that has forever branded them as felons and denied them basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens.

Just listen.

…THEN ON THE ISSUE OF PEOPLE GETTING OUT OF PRISON IN GENERAL…..

Former Daily News editor of the Daily News, Ron Kaye, wrote an Op Ed for the Glendale News Press about his friend Nyabingi Kuti, a community organizer and activist with the MLK Coalition, who is working to bring together reentry services and programs for those getting out of prison.

Here’s a clip:

…..the governor’s “realignment” plan that started Oct. 1,…has a lot of people worried that it will trigger a huge surge in crime after years of decline. After all, without effective rehabilitation programs re-entry into society is tough, which is why we have a 70% recidivism rate.

Many local politicians and law enforcement officials figure are howling for more money to hire more cops and build more county jails.

But others like Nyabingi {Kuti] are working hard to develop alternatives to jail and tough policing to actually turn realignment into a creative opportunity to bring resources together to help the “formerly incarcerated” — a preferred term for ex-convicts — stay out of trouble and lead productive lives.

Right—which is exactly what realignment can be—a creative opportunity. Let us hope more people in the city and county see fit to similarly rise to that challenge.

AND…LAST BUT NOT LEAST: THE LA TIMES CALLS FOR A CHRISTOPHER COMMISSION FOR THE COUNTY JAILS

It’s good that an LA Times editorial calls for a thorough review of the situation in the LA County Jails by the new Citizen’s Commission—a la the Christopher Commission.

(I believe that’s what WitnessLA called for early last March, but okay, why quibble?)

But then the Times editorial goes on to say….nothing new. They say that the commission “….could determine whether the deputy culture inside the lockups is part of the problem. It could consider whether rookie deputies, whose first job out of the academy is as jailers, receive appropriate supervision. And it could identify the shortcomings that allow excessive use of force to go unpunished….”

Y’think??? What the Times fails to mention, and what WitnessLA has repeatedly pointed out, is that the root elements that have allowed all of the above problems to flourish begin well upstream of the symptomatic issues that the Times ticks off.

Fortunately, I think there are at least a couple of people on the commission who know where and how to look beyond the symptoms.

Photos of Judith Clark: (right) Nan Goldin for The New York Times. (left) Associated Press.

For vast numbers of Americans who have been convicted of a felony, the punishment has no end point.

This essay in the New York Times by Carnegie Mellon professor, Alfred Blumstein, and University of Maryland criminologist, Kiminori Nakamura, gets to the heart of this issue that we as a nation can simply no longer afford to ignore.

Here’s a clip from their story:

IN 2010, the Chicago Public Schools declined to hire Darrell Langdon for a job as a boiler-room engineer, because he had been convicted of possessing a half-gram of cocaine in 1985, a felony for which he received probation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Langdon, a single parent of two sons, had been clean since 1988 and hadn’t run into further trouble with the law. Only after The Chicago Tribune wrote about his case did the school system reverse its decision and offer him the job.

A stunning number of young people are arrested for crimes in this country, and those crimes can haunt them for the rest of their lives. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Crime Commission found that about half of American males could expect to be arrested for a nontraffic offense some time in their lives, mostly in their late teens and early 20s. An article just published in the journal Pediatrics shows how the arrest rate has grown — by age 23, 30 percent of Americans have been arrested, compared with 22 percent in 1967. The increase reflects in part the considerable growth in arrests for drug offenses and domestic violence.

The impact of these arrests is felt for years. The ubiquity of criminal-background checks and the efficiency of information technology in maintaining those records and making them widely available, have meant that millions of Americans — even those who served probation or parole but were never incarcerated — continue to pay a price long after the crime. In November the American Bar Association released a database identifying more than 38,000 punitive provisions that apply to people convicted of crimes, pertaining to everything from public housing to welfare assistance to occupational licenses. More than two-thirds of the states allow hiring and professional-licensing decisions to be made on the basis of an arrest alone.

Employers understandably want to protect their employees and customers from risk. Yet at the same time, there is a growing public interest in facilitating job opportunities for those who have stayed crime-free for a reasonable period of time. The weak economy and a rethinking of the logic of mass incarceration — driven in large part by budget pressures — have also brought attention to the situations of ex-offenders like Mr. Langdon, who face the collateral consequences of conviction long after their involvement with the criminal justice system has ended. Federal authorities are beginning to pay attention. Last April, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. urged state attorneys general to review laws and policies “to determine whether those that impose burdens on individuals convicted of crimes without increasing public safety should be eliminated.”

Read the rest. to find out what Blumstein and Nakamura suggest as solutions.

PS: A former California prison warden friend of mine who originally drew my attention to this story, pointed out that the one aspect of this issue that the authors don’t mention is voting rights. “The United States is the only country that permits permanent disenfranchisement of felons even after completion of their sentences,” he wrote in an email.

This causes around two million Americans to be forever disenfranchised. However, each state has different rules. In California, thankfully, while voting rights are not restored upon release from prison, once someone is off parole or probation, they may register to vote again.

Neck deep in another project so late and light in posting.

Check back.

UPDATE: See, I really was GOING to post later today, but those “Other Project” thingies kept hanging around.

HOWEVER, a good story about LA County Probation—and the Feds—is coming tomorrow.

AND MORE ON THE SHERIFF’S DEPT. AND THE JAILS….later this week.

So stay tuned.

AMERICAN FAMILIES LIVING IN CARS

More than 16 million American kids are living in poverty right now, one out of every four, the highest rate since 1962. And because unemployment has stayed so high for so long, in recent months an increasing number of those kids and their families are sliding past poverty and into homelessness. In a new trend, almost third of the country’s homeless now live in cars. They are often those who are the recently homeless, the newbies still reeling from shock and denial.

On this past Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley talks to four such families whose home is now their vehicle.

This 60 Minutes story is a Must Watch. Period. You can find the show here.

SUPREMES AGREE TO TAKE ON 2 CASES THAT TEST WHETHER OR NOT THE LAW CORRECTING THE 100 TO 1 SENTENCING DISPARITY BETWEEN CRACK AND POWDER COCAINE SHOULD BE RETROACTIVE.

In catching up on a bunch of significant appeals cases, I direct you first to this story Tuesday’s New York Times by Adam Liptak on an issue that has affected many lives. Basic fairness would seem to dictate one outcome for this case, but when one looks at the legal questions involved, things ain’t quite that simple.

Here’s a clip from Liptak’s story.

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to resolve a question that has vexed the lower federal courts since Congress enacted a law to narrow the gap between sentences meted out for offenses involving two kinds of cocaine.

Selling cocaine in crack form used to subject offenders to sentences 100 times as long as those for selling it in powder form. The new law, the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, reduced the disparity to 18 to 1, at least for people who committed their offenses after the law became effective on Aug. 3, 2010.

But what about people who committed their offenses before the statute came into force but were not sentenced until afterward?

For such defendants, Judge Terence T. Evans wrote in one of the pair of cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear, the law “might benefit from a slight name change: The Not Quite as Fair as it could be Sentencing Act of 2010 (NQFSA) would be a bit more descriptive.”

The usual rule is that new laws do not apply retroactively unless Congress says so, Judge Evans wrote, and here Congress said nothing….

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF MANDATORY MINIMUMS, HERE’S SOMEONE THE PRESIDENT MIGHT WANT TO PARDON (NOW THAT HE’S BELATEDLY GOTTEN HIS PARDONING SELF IN GEAR).

Syndicated columnist Debra Saunders thinks that President Obama needs to keep on pardoning, now that he’s finally started, and she’s got someone whom she feels should be first on the list.

Here’s a clip from Saunders’ column:

I have an even worse criminal-justice horror story. In 1993, Clarence Aaron received three sentences of life without parole as a first-time nonviolent drug offender. Aaron broke the law and earned time in prison. But he received a longer sentence because he didn’t know enough to turn on the bosses behind two large cocaine deals. He foolishly pleaded not guilty and lied under oath. Because the buyer had planned to convert the powder cocaine into crack, his sentence was extended.

Like attorney Means, Molly Gill of Families Against Mandatory Minimums believes Eugenia Jennings is an “extraordinary case.” But also, Gill says, Obama should be “bold” and “unafraid” to do more. “This isn’t political scandal, it’s just doing justice.”

Aaron has taken responsibility for the actions that put him in prison. He has a good prison record, and he’s ready to start leading a normal life among a supportive and anxious family.

Readers of this column know how tough I can be on violent career criminals. Vicious crimes deserve serious time. But career criminals aren’t doing hard time, their small-time subordinates are.

Besides, it is obscene that a young African-American man will spend the rest of his natural life in prison for a nonviolent, first-time offense committed when he was 23 years old.

Next month, Aaron will have spent 18 years in prison. As his commutation application notes, Aaron shows promise to be a law-abiding citizen, but he “continues to serve his life sentences, while all those who testified against him are now out of jail.”

President Obama should free him.

IN AN UPCOMING CASE THE SUPREMES MAY ASK: WWLCD? WHAT WOULD LOUIS AND CLARK DO?

I love this case—in part, admittedly, because it originates in the state of Montana—but mostly because it deals with the fine print embedded in an intriguing and potentially precedent-setting question: Who owns a state’s rivers? The answer it seems depends on whether or not the river or rivers in question were navigable at the time of statehood.

However, it is in the definition of the word “navigable,” that there turns out to be a bit of a rub.

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post reports on the coming case. Here’s how Barnes opens:

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. got a laugh last term when he posed a hypothetical historical inquiry that he said could hold the key for some in determining whether it was constitutionally kosher to ban the sale of violent video games to minors.

“I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games,” Alito said during oral arguments.

An upcoming case on the court’s docket about who holds claim to the nation’s riverbeds may depend on what appears to be a more discoverable answer to another historical question:

What did Lewis and Clark think?

PPL Montana v. Montana asks the court to decide who owns the lands below three Montana rivers and pits the state against a company that operates three hydroelectric dams along the waterways. Both sides say the outcome could affect the control of riverbeds throughout the nation, especially in the West.

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE NEWT GINGRICH WANTS DEATH PENALTY FOR DRUG KINGPINS (OH-KAY.)

Whatever his other quirks, Newt Gingrich’s involvement in the Right on Crime Campaign has been heartening. For instance, as recently as earlier this year, Gingrich co-wrote a terrific New York Times Op Ed on prison reform.

However, as his numbers have risen in the Republican presidential primary race, Newt has begun playing to the cheap seats—criminal justice-wise— with his latest pronouncement about executing drug cartel leaders who bring their product into the US.

As he told The Daily Caller, “.. we need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we’re going to have drugs in this country.”

Yes, that would be good. But threatening drug cartel kingpins with execution ain’t it.

Now, admittedly, if there is one figure in American culture whom we can all agree upon reviling, it would be the drug cartel kingpin. Really, there’s just very little one can say to recommend such a person. As wreakers of havoc, they’d give your average brutal dictator a run for his money.

However, the notion that a change in American death penalty laws is going to make these cartel dudes, “radically less likely” to hawk their wares in our fair nation…..Well, good luck with that one, Newt.

Best to look for something else as a campaign slogan.

SCOTUS EXPLORES THE UNCERTAINTY OF WITNESS IDENTIFICATION

Laura Beil has the story for the New York Times. here’s how it opens:

Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story.

For scientists, memory has been on trial for decades, and courts and public opinion are only now catching up with the verdict. It has come as little surprise to researchers that about 75 percent of DNA-based exonerations have come in cases where witnesses got it wrong.

This month, the Supreme Court heard its first oral arguments in more than three decades that question the validity of using witness testimony, in a case involving a New Hampshire man convicted of theft, accused by a woman who saw him from a distance in the dead of night….

Read on; it’s a good case about something important.