“IT’S ONCE AGAIN IT’S THE ALLEGED RAPE VICTIM WHO IS ON TRIAL, SAYS LAT’S SANDY BANKS
As the cable channels blared out the details of Dominique Strauss-Kahn being released from home confinement largely because his alleged victim turns out to have a less than squeaky clean life, the LA Times’ Sandy Banks found she has something to say about what the reversal means. Here’s a clip:
And Dominique Strauss-Kahn — a potential French presidential candidate — was a wealthy bully with a history of sexual faux pas, accused of attacking her while she cleaned his suite in a luxury hotel. In May, he was charged with attempted rape and sexual assault, and held on $6-million bond.
Then suddenly, on Friday, Strauss-Khan was set free. His accuser, it appears, is a liar and cheat.
She lied on her taxes and asylum application — claiming a child she didn’t have and a gang rape in Guinea that never happened. Her bank records and a taped phone conversation with her jailed fiance suggest she consorts with criminals linked to drug-dealing operations.
Does that prove that she wasn’t attacked and forced into sex by Strauss-Khan? No. But it does mean that his high-priced lawyers would tear her apart on the witness stand…..
2 VIEWS OF 3 STRIKES AND ITS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Tracey Kaplan of the San Jose Mercury News and Andy Furillo of the Sacramento Bee each have stories that have bearing on the future of the Free Strikes law. (Both Kaplan and Furillo are a part of the Three-strikes Fellowship that I covered here.)
Kaplan writes about 3-striker Kelly Turner whose future could have an impact—for good or ill— on the 3-strikes initiative that is expected to be on the ballot in fall 2012.
Here’s how it opens:
The luckiest woman in California may not be the Alameda secretary who recently won $93 million in the lottery, or the Marin woman who survived a Maui shark attack.
By some accounts, she’s Kelly Turner, a 42-year-old former thief once doomed by the state’s “three strikes” law to spend 25 years to life in state prison for writing a bad check for $146.16. Retired Santa Clara County Judge LaDoris Cordell, now San Jose’s independent police auditor, got the courts to release her after Turner spent 13 years locked up. She’s believed to be the only female “third-striker” to get out early.
“She’s turned her life around,” Cordell said.
But if Turner so much as steals a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, it’s not just her new life in a Central Valley town that could unravel. Also at risk could be an effort by a group of Stanford law professors to put an initiative on the ballot to temper the “three strikes” law, the strictest such sentencing law in the nation.
That’s because Turner’s behavior — and the conduct of all third-strikers, including the few who have been freed early and the thousands still inside — will take center stage if the measure qualifies and goes to voters next year, political experts say.
“The only thing voters will see when they get behind the curtain are their faces,” said Democratic political consultant Bob Mulholland, referring to the third-strikers. “Voters will vote with their gut or heart, not their thought process…..”
Furillo of the Sac Bee shows how the use and enforcement of Three-strikes has changed since its passage in 1994.
Furillo’s story explores the evolution of prosecutors’ attitudes toward the law and, in particular, highlights the manner in which LA District Attorney Steve Cooley led the way among prosecutors to a more proportionate application of Three Strikes.
Here are some clips;
Fifteen years after passage of the state’s landmark “three strikes” sentencing law, prosecutors in Sacramento and throughout California have become far more selective in applying the full force of the statute, reducing the number of lifetime prison terms being sought for third strikers to a relative trickle.
While it used to obtain the maximum sentences anywhere from 50 to nearly 100 times a year, the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office now asks for life terms for third strikers fewer than 20 times a year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The office obtained 16 such sentences in 2010 compared with a high of 94 in 1996.
The trend bears out from Del Norte to Imperial counties. District attorneys across the state used to collectively pack off criminals on maximum three-strikes terms by the hundreds – more than 1,700 in 1996 alone. In the past three years, the numbers have dropped to well short of 200 annually. California prisons housed 8,727 three-strike lifers as of Dec. 31.
[SNIP]
Prosecutors have always had discretion under the law to reduce potential life terms to lesser sentences, but many didn’t exercise it. Los Angeles County prosecutors, in particular, refrained from “striking strikes,” or dismissing prior serious or violent convictions for the purpose of lowering prison terms.
The approach changed when Steve Cooley was elected L.A. County district attorney in 2000. Elected largely on a platform of refining the law’s application, Cooley took the lead in putting a new policy in place. He reserved the heavier sentences for defendants with serious or violent third strikes, but built in exceptions to target offenders with horrific pasts even if their latest charge wasn’t so serious.
Cooley said over-application of the law by some California prosecutors – hitting people for third strikes for minor felonies such as drug possession and pizza theft – prompted a public backlash. A 2004 statewide ballot measure that would have dumped three strikes altogether came within three percentage points of winning.***
“If you have a good law, and you abuse it, you will predictably lose it,” Cooley said at a recent symposium on the three-strikes law in Los Angeles. “If somebody has a rock (of cocaine) in his sock, you give him 25 to life? Give me a break.”
***NOTE: Furillo has this one fact wrong. The 2004 ballot measure, Prop. 66, would not have done away with Three-Strikes altogether, but would have modified the law. People like Cooley, who is not at all averse to some modifications, felt Prop. 66 went too far.
HAMLET IN PRISON
Even non-Shakespeare fans know that a large part of the play of Hamlet features the play’s leading guy musing about whether or not he should kill Claudius. Okay, then, what if the play was performed by actors who actually had killed a person or persons?
The radio show This American life attempts to answer the question.
Reporter Jack Hitt spent 6 mos reporting on the casting, rehearsal and performance of Hamlet by maximum security prison inmates for TAL.
Jack Hitt begins his story about a group of prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center who are rehearsing and staging a production of Hamlet. The man who plays Hamlet gets in character by recalling times he’s wanted to hurt people, like the crime that sent him to prison, in which he shot two people and left them for dead. Big Hutch, who plays Horatio, explains how it would work if you set Hamlet in a prison, and why it would actually improve a flaw in the plot.
I love this show. Listen when you possibly can.
ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S DEATH LA TIMES DAVID ULIN ASKED HIMSELF WHY “PAPA” MATTERED
As LA Times book critic Ulin goes about answering the question, he writes a terrific essay. A must read for anyone with a love of literature and writing. It helped me sort out my own hot/cold feelings for Papa and his writing.