A LARGE-SCALE BIPARTISAN FEDERAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM EFFORT TO BE REVEALED
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are expected to unveil a major bipartisan criminal justice reform plan at 10:00a.m. this morning.
The criminal justice overhaul plan is spearheaded by Republican Senator Charles Grassley, along with other members from both parties, and reportedly has the support of the Coalition for Public Safety (Koch Industries, the ACLU, and others).
But while the plan includes more sentencing discretion for judges with non-violent offenders, as well as adding good-time credits for prisoners who complete treatment and education programs, the bipartisan plan will also generate new mandatory minimums.
We’ll keep you updated.
NPR’s Carrie Johnson has more on the plan. Here’s a clip:
Senior members of the Obama administration, including the second in command at the Justice Department, also have been nudging senators on the sentencing plan, viewing the proposal as one of the capstones of a legacy on criminal justice issues for this president. Barack Obama famously became the first sitting president to visit a prison in July.
An unusual left-right coalition formed earlier this year to drive action in Congress and in statehouses across the country. The Coalition for Public Safety, which includes Koch Industries, the American Civil Liberties Union and others, is said to support the goals of the proposal as well, a third source said.
The proposal will not go as far as some reform advocates may like, the sources say. For instance, the plan would create some tough new mandatory minimum sentences, after pressing from Grassley. It stitches together proposals that would allow inmates to earn credits to leave prison early if they complete educational and treatment programs and pose a relatively low risk to public safety along with language that would give judges some more discretion when sentencing nonviolent offenders.
NEW HUGE HEALTH DEPARTMENT AIMS TO BRIDGE HEALTH CARE GAPS FOR LA COUNTY’S MOST VULNERABLE POPULATIONS
On Tuesday, the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to meld three major county health departments into one mega-department, in an effort to bridge departments struggling to with interagency communication and give people receiving community health care services better care.
Issues the new Department of Health Services’ priorities will include mental health diversion, improving the level of care kids in the probation and foster care systems receive, addressing over-stuffed psychiatric emergency departments, and linking homeless people with housing assistance.
Critics worry that the mega-health department will be too big (those three departments were actually broken off from one department years ago for that reason).
The LA Times’ Abby Sewell has the story. Here’s a clip:
A patient who arrives at a county hospital emergency room with a broken arm faces a bureaucratic maze. If he needs follow-up physical and mental health service, as well as substance abuse counseling through the county system, he might have to fill out different sets of forms at three different clinics. And his health professionals in one department won’t have access to health records maintained by the other departments.
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The consolidation has sparked concerns in some quarters about whether such a massive bureaucracy will work and whether certain specialized services — or broader programs dealing with issues such as environmental health — will suffer from neglect. They noted that all three departments were once unified, but then separated in reforms intended to ensure that the county’s huge system of hospitals and medical clinics didn’t pull too much money and attention from other health programs.
But board members said Tuesday that it was time to try a more connected system.
The goal is “better patient care, better outcomes for communities,” Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said. “The systems will talk to each other effectively. That hasn’t been the case.”
The new health agency will be given the task of addressing an expansive range of issues, some of which fall outside the traditional healthcare realm. The priorities approved by the supervisors include connecting homeless patients to housing programs, improving health services for foster children and youths in the juvenile probation system and reducing overcrowding in psychiatric emergency departments at county hospitals.
The board has already assigned the Department of Health Services a major new responsibility: managing the diversion of mentally ill inmates from county jails and into treatment programs.
The Department of Health Services currently runs the county’s four hospitals and 19 health centers, serving about 670,000 patients a year, while the mental health department provides treatment to 250,000 people a year in clinics, board and care facilities, juvenile halls and camps, and other facilities. Public health is responsible for a wide range of programs, including substance abuse treatment, HIV prevention programs, inspecting restaurants and nursing homes, and investigating disease outbreaks.
Some critics say that the new agency is taking on too much and won’t be able to effectively manage the vast range of programs.
OK DEATH ROW INMATE, RICHARD GLOSSIP, GETS ANOTHER STAY OF EXECUTION–THIS TIME BECAUSE OF EXECUTION DRUG PROBLEM
On Wednesday, the day Richard Glossip was scheduled to be put to death, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin granted the death row inmate a 37-day stay of execution, giving the state time to review drug protocol—namely, whether potassium acetate is an acceptable lethal injection drug.
“Last minute questions were raised today about Oklahoma’s execution protocol and the chemicals used for lethal injection,” said Gov. Fallin. “After consulting with the attorney general and the Department of Corrections, I have issued a 37 day stay of execution while the state addresses those questions and ensures it is complying fully with the protocols approved by federal courts.”
Two weeks ago, the OK Court of Appeals granted a 14-day stay of execution (just hours before he was scheduled to die) to give Glossip’s legal team time to present evidence from two new witnesses casting doubt on Glossip’s already shaky murder conviction.
But this past Monday, the appeals court decided not to let a state trial court consider the new evidence. Thus, Glossip was only saved this time because of a question about execution drugs.
The New Yorker’s Lincoln Caplan has some interesting things to say about why, if capital punishment is abolished, Richard Glossip’s case will likely be referenced as a prime example of the fallibility of the death penalty. Here’s a clip:
Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to execution. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the first conviction, holding that his lawyer’s “conduct was so ineffective that we have no confidence that a reliable adversarial proceeding took place.” After that ruling, the prosecution stipulated that no physical evidence linked Glossip to the crime scene. He was convicted again based largely on Sneed’s testimony, although his account of Glossip’s alleged involvement diverged from what he said at the first trial, which diverged from his original confession to police. According to Glossip’s lawyers, Sneed has given eight “very different” accounts.
Last January, the Supreme Court stayed Glossip’s execution so that it could hear a challenge that he and other death-row inmates had made to the use of the drug midazolam as the anesthetic in a three-drug lethal-injection procedure, before the other drugs were administered to paralyze the inmate and then to stop his heart. The challenge came after Oklahoma’s gruesome execution of an inmate in 2014, when the state used midazolam and it failed to fully anesthetize him, causing him searing pain.
Three months ago, at the end of the recent Court term, the Justices upheld the use of the drug by 5–4. They said that Glossip’s lawyers had not shown that the state had a better option than midazolam or that the use of midazolam with the other drugs was “sure or very likely to result in needless suffering.”
The first reason that the Glossip case is likely to be a point of reference is the widely commented-on dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer, who, “rather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time,” devoted forty-one pages to arguing “that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment”—that is, the constitutional clause prohibiting the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments.” Breyer’s dissent laid out his reasons: “(1) serious unreliability, (2) arbitrariness in application, and (3) unconscionably long delays that undermine the death penalty’s penological purpose. Perhaps as a result, (4) most places within the United States have abandoned its use.”
The Glossip case doesn’t illustrate all of these reasons, but it provides a case study in the unreliability of the application of the death sentence. Glossip’s current lawyers have raised serious doubts about his guilt, which make his conviction dubious and his death sentence unjust. His counsel in his first trial was reprehensibly bad. His counsel in his second trial exceeded the very low standard for ineffective counsel, but did a poor cross-examination of Sneed, the main witness against Glossip. From the decision to charge Glossip with a capital crime to some unsavory tactical moves in the second trial, the prosecution was overzealous and may have crossed the line into misconduct.