AT SWEARING IN AG KAMALA HARRIS ENTERS NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE AND POLICE SHOOTINGS
Despite the trouble that NY Mayor Bill de Blasio has been having for his remarks regarding the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, California Attorney General Kamala Harris waded fearlessly into the national discussion regarding race and law enforcement practices in the speech she gave following her swearing in for her second term. Considered a bright political star on the rise, the topic was one of many that Harris discussed in her post-swearing in address.
The AP’s Don Thompson has the story. Here’s a clip:
California’s attorney general stepped into the national debate over the recent slayings of unarmed civilians by police on Monday, calling for a review by her agency and promising to lead a public dialogue.
Kamala Harris, the first minority to hold the state’s highest law enforcement office, made the pledge as she was sworn in to a second and final term in the office she now holds. However, she is widely expected to be preparing for a run for governor or the U.S. Senate.
“As law enforcement leaders, we must confront this crisis of confidence,” Harris said. “We must acknowledge that too many have felt the sting of injustice.”
She ordered a review within 90 days of how her Department of Justice trains special agents on bias and the use of force. Harris also said she will work with the state’s law enforcement agencies and communities in coming months to strengthen mutual trust.
Her comments come after the killings of two unarmed black men this summer by white police officers in Missouri and in New York.
Harris, a Democrat, is the daughter of a black father from Jamaica and a mother from India. She referred to herself in her inaugural speech as “a daughter of Brown vs. Board of Education and the civil rights movement.”
Harris said that as a career prosecutor, she has learned “one central truth: the public and law enforcement need each other to keep our communities safe.”
START OF PRISON TERMS DELAYED FOR 7 FORMER LA COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT MEMBERS CONVICTED OF OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE
The six members of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department convicted last July of obstruction of justice in connection with their interference in an FBI investigation into brutality and corruption by members of the LASD were originally directed to surrender on January 2, 2015, to begin their respective prison sentences.
Deputy James Sexton, who was tried twice before being convicted of similar charges last September, was to have surrendered on February 16.
Now, it seems, all seven of the surrender dates have been postponed pending the response of the The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to the seven’s various applications for bond—in other words, bail.
This has to do with the fact that each of the seven have appealed their convictions. Thus if the Ninth Circuit grants any of the bond applications, it will be a signal that the court means to at least hear that particular appeal.
As to what the odds are that the appellate court will decide to listen to any or all of the appeals….none of the attorneys, nor any of the feds, are willing to hazard a prediction.
“But not even the prosecutors want anyone to start a sentence, then be yanked out,” said a source close to the cases.
And so the surrender dates are delayed while everyone waits.
More news as we know it.
YES, YES, EVERYONE AGREES THAT LA COUNTY’S DREADFUL MEN’S CENTRAL JAIL MUST BE REPLACED. BUT REPLACED WITH WHAT? A DUMB OR A SMART PLAN? HMMMMM. TOUGH ONE.
Over the weekend, the LA Times editorial board made the point rather eloqently that the question isn’t whether or not Men’s Central Jail should be replaced; the question is whether the replacement should be big and expensive? Or something, say, smaller, smarter, and less costly.
As it stands now, the board is committed to a $2 billion plan that, as the Times points out, was one “among several presented by Vanir Construction Management Inc., a firm in the business of building such facilities. The price tag makes the construction project the most expensive in county history.”
Moreover the plan, writes the LAT board, “remains rooted in questionable estimates and bygone practices.” It completely ignores the research-backed conclusions of a 2011 jail population study by the Vera Institute—which the board commissioned—showing ways that MCJ’s population could be safely and appropriately reduced, thus requiring a smaller replacement facility.
Nearly everything in the editorial is something that the Times—and we at WLA—have said before, multiple times. But, unfortunately, it bears repeating….and repeating…for as long it takes the LA County Board of Supervisors to hear it and act accordingly.
Here’s a clip from the Times’ essay:
In pushing forward with a new jail that could keep as many people locked up as were, say, two years ago, the Board of Supervisors is in effect making an astounding policy statement: The current jail population is the correct one, despite the theoretical embrace of mental health diversion, the ability to authorize some no-bail, pretrial releases, and the recent reduction of sentences for some crimes. And the $2 billion — or perhaps twice that, when including bond interest — should all be spent on incarceration rather than more effective, and cost-effective, alternatives.
Such a statement is both incorrect and potentially self-fulfilling: If they build a jail, they will fill it. In other words, the supervisors won’t have the incentive — or the money — to build out the county’s capacity for more just, more efficient and more effective community-based programs to end the cycle of recidivism.
Supporters of the Vanir plan point out that Men’s Central Jail is so over-capacity that inmates serve only 20% to 40% of their sentences. They argue that the space freed up by mental health diversion and all the other ways of reducing the jail population should be used to ensure that inmates serve their full time. But even if they do, the potential reductions would outpace the need for jail space.
Men’s Central Jail should be demolished. But again, replaced with what? A jail that will house just as many people as the current one, or a scaled down version that permits smarter use of limited resources?
And, yes, like the Times, we once again vote for the latter—the smart plan—over the non-research-based, dumb and insanely expensive model. Silly us.
GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN’S LATEST WORD ON CALIFORNIA’S SYSTEM OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Among the six or so major topics that Jerry Brown emphasized in his State of the State speech following his swearing in on Monday morning to his fourth term as governor, was the issue of whom the state of California locks up, and for how long. For your reading pleasure, here is the text of that section of his speech:
Another major state responsibility is our system of crime and punishment. And here too, I will refer to my father’s 1959 address. He worried then about California’s “dangerously overcrowded prisons.” He talked about identifying “those prisoners who should never be released to prey again on an innocent public,” but he also said, “we should also determine whether some prisoners are now kept confined after punishment has served its purpose.”
We face these same questions today: what purposes should punishment serve and for how long should a person be confined to jail or prison – for a few days, a few years or for life?
In response to a large increase in crimes beginning in the 1970s, the Legislature and the people – through ballot initiatives – dramatically lengthened sentences and added a host of new crimes and penalty enhancements. Today, California’s legal codes contain more than 5,000 separate criminal provisions and over 400 penalty enhancements, an arcane and complex mix that only the most exquisitely trained specialist can fathom. And funding has grown proportionately: during the 1970s we had 12 prisons holding fewer than 30,000 prisoners and corrections spending was only 3 percent of the budget; our system then grew to a peak of 34 prisons, with an inmate population of 173,000, eating up more than 10 percent of our budget dollars.
Four years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that our prisons were unconstitutionally overcrowded and imposed strict capacity limits, far below the number of inmates that were then being held.
Clearly, our system of crime and punishment had to be changed. And through the courts, the Legislature and the voters themselves, a number of far-reaching reforms have been enacted. The biggest reform is our realignment program, which places tens of thousands of lower-level offenders under county supervision. More recently, a federal three-judge panel ordered further measures to reduce prison overcrowding. And the voters, through Propositions 36 and 47, modified our criminal laws to reduce the scope of the Three Strikes law and change certain felonies into misdemeanors.
All these changes attempt to find less expensive, more compassionate and more effective ways to deal with crime. This is work that is as profoundly important as it is difficult, yet we must never cease in our efforts to assure liberty and justice for all. The task is complicated by our diversity and our divisions and, yes, by shocking disparities. Since time immemorial, humankind has known covetousness, envy and violence. That is why public safety and respect for law are both fundamental to a free society.
SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDAL IN IDAHO KIDS’ PRISON
Another case of kids behind bars being sexually victimized by staff, this time in Idaho. The Wall Street Journal’s Zusha Elinson has the story. Here’s a clip:
When a local nurse’s son was sent to the juvenile corrections center here at age 15, she was upset, but relieved that he would be away from drugs and gangs. The single mother said that the “night he went in, I felt bad, but I could sleep because he was safe.”
But within months, the head of security at the state juvenile corrections center in Nampa struck up a sexual relationship with the teenager, according to police reports. Julie McCormick admitted to having sex with him three times in 2012 while he was incarcerated, the reports said.
Ms. McCormick, 29 years old at the time, told detectives that she fell in love with the boy nearly half her age. She pleaded guilty in 2013 to lewd conduct with the minor and was sentenced to five to 20 years in prison in 2014. A lawyer who represented Ms. McCormick declined to comment.
“You hear about the Boy Scouts, you hear about the Catholic Church—those kids can walk away from it,” said his mother. “My son couldn’t.”
The scandal is an instance of an issue plaguing juvenile facilities nationwide.
RESEARCHER ON A MISSION FINDS MORE THAN 50 GRAVES OF KIDS WHO DIED—MANY KILLED—AT OLD FLORIDA REFORM SCHOOL
Ben Montgomery writes for the Tampa Bay Times a fascinating and chilling tale about kids who came to the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, often for minor infractions, and ended up dead. Now a university researcher is determined to put things right 80 years later, despite opposition. Here’s a clip:
By the time she came for them and brought them up from the earth and spread them on tables in a basement lab on Maple Drive in Tampa, they were in hundreds of pieces, some as small as a fingernail. All that remained of some of them could fit inside a lunch box.
It took imagination to remember that they were boys once, before their childhoods ran out at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, before they were buried without the dignity of headstones, before they were lost to time. All 55 of them were, in the cold language of forensics, unidentified human remains.
Erin Kimmerle wanted to give them their names back.
She’d been working 14-hour days through January, February and March, stressing about finding time for teaching and advising on top of leading this massive project. She’d been missing her family, too. When her cell phone rang, the word BABE popped onto the screen — Mike, her husband. “Hey, babe,” she’d sing, and walk out of earshot to get updates on school activities and runny noses.
When she started the project in 2012, her goal had been to map the cemetery on the reform school campus so that family would know where their relatives were buried. It would take a year, tops. But when ground penetrating radar showed 50 graves, 19 more than the state had said, and when families wanted the remains of their boys back, it became a mission.
Now she was in her third year. Now she had 55 sets of remains. Now she was trying to piece the boys back together, bone fragment by bone fragment, to figure out who they were and, she hoped, how they died.
She needed the bones to speak.
WHEN JUDICIAL DETACHMENT ISN’T ENOUGH
A heartbreaking first-person tale for the Marshall Project in which a judge ponders the value of empathy versus that of the law in the case of a disturbed young veteran he had recently sentenced.
Here’s how it opens:
Alone at my chambers desk late in the day, I find myself staring blankly at Tyler’s death notice in the online Billings Gazette, and I am stunned. There are many who come to spend a few trial days in my courtroom and remain opaque and unreadable. This was never the case with Tyler, who, from the first, I had seen as wearing both his admirable strengths and his pitiable weaknesses as if they were medals on display. The notice’s bland statement that this 27-year-old man had “passed away unexpectedly on Dec. 1, 2014” strikes me as so distant, so bloodless, so inadequate…
Eventually my eyes drift to the daily “Hot Topics” banner at the top of the page where references to child molestation and prison sentences scroll side-by-side. Linking to current news stories, it turns out these headlines have nothing at all to do with Tyler. Still, it somehow seems apt that they have been woven into the fabric of this page where I have landed in search of confirmation of what has been so hard for me to take in.
The last I’d seen Tyler Williams was just before Thanksgiving when he appeared in my Seattle courtroom for the setting of a post-conviction appeal bond. Upon posting a modest $10,000 security, he would be free of the obligation to surrender in two weeks to begin serving the 15-month prison term I had ordered. Much of our discussion that day centered on whether it would be wiser to get the incarceration out of the way while his life was lacking in direction or to postpone it in the hopes that an appeal might be successful.
While trying to helpfully explain his options, I made it clear that I could not advise him from the bench on legal matters – such as whether I had committed reversible error from which he might benefit on appeal. But, characteristically, I didn’t hesitate to offer a recommendation of Phil Klay’s “Redeployment,” which had won the National Book Award for fiction the previous day. Consciously prodding him to look beyond his depressed and depressing present, I was pleased when Tyler asked me to repeat the author’s name and seemingly intended to follow through.
I wish he had. Reading it might have brought him to a deeper realization that he was not alone in struggling with the after-effects of his honorable military service in Iraq. As difficult as the soldiers in Klay’s stories find being sent to Iraq, many of them – like Tyler – find it even tougher when it comes time to separate from the “band of brothers” and be deployed back home. As former Marine Lieutenant Klay has observed, the experience of war is “too strange to be processed alone.
”But now Tyler was dead, having met his end in a manner quintessentially and chillingly alone.
That’s a shame that these Convicted Deputies are not in jail yet. They betrayed the public trust and need to go to jail for crimes in which they were convicted.
It is a shame you do not respect the Constitution. Bill of Rights allows for a person to put the Government to task.
If you didn’t have an overbearing judge, a malicious AUSA, and a FBI squad that would not pursue a made up crime, you might actually see people goto prison….
Maybe the people who actually beat inmates, abused executive positions, and cheated campaign finances should be indicted. I don’t know about you, but I know a few people who fit that bill, but then again they got to retire and seek public office. God forbid we let anybody but cops try to find justice.
First, an overdue thank you to WitnessLA for their coverage of this case. I’ve learned to check here first for good information and analysis.
Thank you for the fantastic news about the delay of the prison sentences for the seven deputies. The longer this case is delayed, the more people will realize what a farce and waste of taxpayer money this case has been to date. The signs are there already. A jury representative being apologetic for convicting six of them. A judge saying he didn’t want to trivialize the case – why would he say that unless the case was trivial ? And the months long, and now who knows how much longer delay of the start of sentences? And of course the always asked and never answered question of when actual decision makers will be held accountable.
Kamala Harris is a disgrace and a racist. Law enforcement should stand as one and turn their back on her. In California, that solidarity amongst Law Enforcement doesn’t exist. Too many individuals hanging around just for a paycheck. Thank god the convicted Deps are still out. My heart goes out to them. Again, a bunch of individuals choose to condemn these people. At one time I wanted to leave this liberal State and work NYPD. 30 years later, I regret I didn’t. A reminder to all those line personnel blogging on here, the idiots that claim to be current or former management were/are part of the problem. Being a line person for 30 years, you get a different perspective in regards to management. You see all the backstabbing, camp jumping, and all the lies. Note to line folks, this is not the LASD I once, knew. We are in no way family. Management has made sure of this. Don’t be afraid to stand up to them. They are only men/women who probably have less experience than the average FTO.
Though I have deep gratitude and respect for Witness LA’s tireless efforts to get the word out regarding all that was troublesome with LASD during the Baca/Tanaka years, I take issue with a couple of points portrayed in the article about California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a bright lady who is following her party line. Ms. Harris is a politician — she wants to please and inspire her base and lets that drive what she selected to speak of at her swearing in.
If the Attorney General were so brave and visionary, so novel and revolutionary in her thinking, so “fearless,” why wouldn’t she consider speaking about realities instead of party-line talking points? If she was as smart as she would like everyone to think, she would have learned from Mayor de Blasio’s blatant missteps in NY. How about, instead of pandering to a segment of the population to people-please them, to assist them and encourage them in perpetuating their inane thinking, she lays out the reality that a uniformed law enforcement officer has a duty to do his/her job. When contacting members of the public, he or she is concentrating on behavior and the totality of present circumstances, not race! When the officer approaches you (regardless of his and your race), and he lawfully directs you to cease walking down the middle of the street and to walk to the curb, you should comply and not ignore his commands or try to use your physical advantage (standing position to his seated, individual personal size) to initiate pummeling the officer’s face while attempting to prevent him from his drawing his firearm to defend himself when your actions cause him to fear he will disarmed and have his service weapon used on him. When an officer advises you that you are doing something illegal and either directs you to cease your activity, or directs you to place your hands behind your back, comply with his/her lawful commands. Should you decide to ignore lawful commands given you by a police officer, he/she may need to use force on you and bad things can and will happen to you.
Fearless would be Ms. Harris telling people the reality — Al Sharpton and his ilk are misguiding you, endangering you, and failing you. Be a responsible member of society and stop acting like a bully and a thug because you can. In a state where the vast majority of voters installed Ms. Harris, she is failing her constituents by encouraging them to wade into unnecessary physical confrontations with LE officers. By doing so, she joins the legion of Sharpton, de Blasio and Malik Zulu Shabazz.
@Interested Party ;Very well thought out and stated, Would that main stream media had the same stones . Thank you.
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