LAUSD PAID $40 GRAND TO SETTLE WITH MIRAMONTE TEACHER MARK BERNDT, BUT PUT BLOTCH ON RECORD OF INNOCENT MIRAMONTE TEACHERS. REALLY.
KPCC’S Tami Abdollah with Shirley Jahad broke the $40 K settlement story and the opening paragraph pretty much says it all:
The Los Angeles Unified School District agreed last June to pay about $40,000 to settle its dismissal case against former Miramonte Elementary teacher Mark Berndt, who has since been charged with 23 counts of lewd conduct, including spoon-feeding his semen to children.
It turns out that it doesn’t matter if Berndt is convicted of all 23 counts, he still gets his pension, health care benefits for the rest of his life, and presumably the 40 grand—according to his unbreakable union contract.
Read and/or listen to the whole thing.
Then in Friday’s LA Times, Howard Blume, Angel Jennings and Richard Winton, follow up on the Berndt settlement story, and take it farther by delving into the unbelievably careless way the non-semen spooning Miramonte teachers were treated.
Here’s one clip from their story, but there’s lots more:
“When teachers were told that they were being transferred, dozens of teachers were in tears,” union President Warren Fletcher said. “They are part of the fabric of this community.”
The union accepted the transfers, Fletcher said, on the understanding that the move was temporary and that no innocent teacher’s employment record would be marred. L.A. Unified, he said, broke both promises, by categorizing the teachers’ relocation as an administrative transfer. Such paperwork frequently results from a disciplinary action…..
WHO ARE LAPD’S RESERVE POLICE? AND ARE THE EFFECTIVE? SO-CAL CONNECTED TAKES A LOOK
Here’s So Cal Connected’s summary of the segment, which airs tonight, Friday:
They look the same, dress the same, get the same training and wear the same badge, but they’re not full-time cops, and they’re not even paid. Meet the members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Reserve Corps, the regular citizens who back up the city’s 10,000 cops and whose numbers are on the rise.
AS CRIME RATES DROP, PRIVATE PRISONS ARE NO LONGER CASH COWS—UNLESS WE CAN LOCK UP MORE PEOPLE (WHICH—P.S.— IS NOT A GOOD SOLUTION)
Okay, did anyone really think that private prisons would not end up presenting weird and creepy conflicts of interest if crime went down and we started having more sensible sentencing laws?
Llewellyn Hinks-Jones for the Atlantic Monthly has the story.
Here’s a clip:
Over the last 30 years, Texas built over 90 prisons, quintupling the number of detention centers in the state and earning the title of highest state incarceration rate in the process.
As much as Texas ended up an outlier, it was by no means alone. All across the U.S. during the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, depressed villages and hamlets in need of an industry, from the Mississippi Delta to the Appalachian Coal Belt, signed up to build oversized detention facilities on the outskirts of town, surrounded by barbed wire and klieg lights, in the hopes of bolstering the local economy with taxes, jobs and associated retail.
But ever since the nation’s crime rate began leveling off in the late 1990s, with the total state prison population decreasing for the first time in 40 years, there haven’t been enough inmates to populate these new-found penitentiaries….
THE PROP 8 CHALLENGE: IS IT TOO EARLY?
David Cole, an expert in Constitutional law, has written an essay for the New York Review of Books about whether or not the Prop 8 challenge, that will now go to the Supreme Court (presuming that SCOTUS takes case), was premature.
There was much discussion of this issue when Ted Olson and David Boies first talked about taking on this case. Olson and Boies argued that this was exactly the right time.
In any case, Cole’s essay on the issue is worth reading. Here’s a clip:
…..gay rights organizations have stayed away from the federal court system. They have instead sought to obtain legal rights for same-sex couples state by state, going first through the legislatures and only thereafter through the courts; and even then, only in the state courts, relying on arguments based on state law that could not be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The strategy has proved quite successful. Since 2004, six states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York) and the District of Columbia have recognized same-sex marriages. On February 8, Washington’s state legislature passed a bill that will make it the seventh such state once the governor signs it. Twelve more recognize some sort of partnership status that gives same-sex couples all or most of the benefits and obligations associated with marriage..
Yet many other states have moved in the opposite direction. By June 2011, 29 states had banned gay marriage by constitutional amendment, and another twelve by state statute. (Some states, like California, have both recognized same-sex civil unions and banned same-sex marriage.) In short, we are far from reaching any national consensus on the issue….
Photo by the AP