FAMILIES AND ADVOCATES GATHER TO CELEBRATE FOSTER MOTHERS
This past Sunday, the non-profit organization Foster Care Counts hosted the Fifth Annual Foster Mother’s Day event in LA, home to the nation’s largest foster care system. Fifteen-hundred foster moms and their families gathered to celebrate Mother’s Day and National Foster Month with food, family activities, and entertainment.
We received some excellent photos of the festivities, like this foster mother with her sweet baby…
…and this happy group of kids getting ready to play some carnival games:
As journalists, we so often cover the tragedy and letdowns in foster care, it’s nice to take a moment and recognize the many decent folks who are giving kids homes.
WILL LAUSD VOTE TO BAN SUSPENSIONS FOR “WILLFUL DEFIANCE?”
Tuesday, the LAUSD Board of Education will vote on a resolution authored by LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia to ban suspensions for “willful defiance,” and to provide new guidelines for school discipline. (For more on the resolution, hop over to our April post.)
The LA Times’ Teresa Watanabe has the story. Here’s how it opens:
Damien Valentine knows painfully well about a national phenomenon that is imperiling the academic achievement of minority students, particularly African Americans like himself: the pervasive and disproportionate use of suspensions from school for mouthing off and other acts of defiance.
The Manual Arts Senior High School sophomore has been suspended several times beginning in seventh grade, when he was sent home for a day and a half for refusing to change his seat because he was talking. He said the suspensions never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind.
“Getting suspended doesn’t solve anything,” Valentine said. “It just ruins the rest of the day and keeps you behind.”
But Valentine, who likes chemistry and wants to be a doctor, is determined to change school discipline practices. He has joined a Los Angeles County-wide effort to push a landmark proposal by school board President Monica Garcia that would make L.A. Unified the first school district in California to ban suspensions for willful defiance.
BROOKLYN D.A. REVIEWING FIFTY MURDER CONVICTIONS INVOLVING RENOWNED NYPD DETECTIVE
The Brooklyn D.A.’s office has ordered a review of around fifty closed homicide cases involving retired NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella. The review comes after the release of wrongfully convicted David Ranta, who was locked up for twenty-three years on a false confession obtained by Scarcella. It was also triggered by the findings from an NY Times review of a dozen other cases.
We urge you to read the entirety of this wild and alarming tale.
The New York Times’ Frances Robles and N. R. Kleinfield have the story. Here’s a clip:
The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella, a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.
The development comes after The New York Times examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing. At the same time, defense lawyers, inmates and prisoner advocacy organizations have contacted the district attorney’s office to share their own suspicions about Mr. Scarcella.
The review by the office of District Attorney Charles J. Hynes will give special scrutiny to those cases that appear weakest — because they rely on either a single eyewitness or confession, officials said. The staff will re-interview available witnesses, and study any new evidence. If they feel a conviction was unjust, prosecutors could seek for it to be dismissed.