Jim Webb’s National Criminal Justice Bill Headed for Senate Vote…and More

Two and a half years ago, Senator Jim Webb proposed some excellent (and low cost) criminal justice reform legislation known as the National Criminal Justice Commission Act. The bill garnered lots of praise at the time but then, last year, after passing through the House and making it out of the Senate judiciary committee, for some reason it stalled.

Now it has been reintroduced and a vote may come up in the Senate on Wednesday to attach it as an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) Appropriations bill (a so-called mini-bus bill).

A long list of organizations support the thing. They range from ACLU to the National Fraternal Order of Police, the National Sheriffs’ Association, International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Narcotics Officer’s Associations’ Coalition, and the International Union of Police Associations, the U.S. Conference of Mayors….and so on, plus over 150 civil rights, and criminal justice organizations.

Webb’s measure is neither complex nor expensive. It would create a blue-ribbon panel to conduct a comprehensive review of the nation’s criminal justice system and report back with recommendations for reform. That’s it.

Oh, yeah, it’ll cost $5 million and will take 18 months.

As for the price, let me put it this way, if California alone cut its recidivism rate back by 10 percent it would save $233 million in one year, right off the bat. And that’s just the savings in one state out of 50.

So, yes, I think we can afford the five million.

Here’s a statement by Webb taken from the floor speech he gave when he first introduced the bill.

Let’s start with a premise that I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world’s population; we have 25% of the world’s known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice.

The Washington Post has more

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9TH CIRCUIT RULES IN TWO TASER CASES THAT OFFICERS’ USE WAS UNCONSTITUTIONAL BUT NOT LAWSUIT FODDER

In a couple of mixed rulings that seemed to annoy and confuse nearly everyone, the 9th Circuit tied themselves in knots opining on the excessive use of tasers.

Here’s a clip from the Sacramento Bee’s reporting on the matter:

To tase or not to tase? That was the question.

But there is no good answer, at least under the law, according to an opinion issued Monday by a 10-judge panel of the highest court in the Western states.

Case law is so muddled, a majority ruled, that even though the use of Tasers by police in two cases before the panel was unconstitutional, the officers have immunity from suit because they could not have been expected to know that.

The bottom line is that, until the law governing the use of these so-called “stun guns” is further clarified on a national scale, police are free to utilize them as they see fit. As of Monday, this is the law in the nine Western states, including California, and two territories over which the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has jurisdiction.

Jayzel Mattos and Malaika Brooks were tased on Aug. 23, 2006, and Nov. 23, 2004, respectively. A Seattle policeman stopped Brooks speeding while driving her son to school and, according to officers, she gave them a lot of trouble. Mattos was embroiled in a domestic dispute and was deemed by Maui officers to be deliberately in the way when they were attempting to arrest her husband.

Given the circumstances, the women’s Fourth Amendment rights to be free of excessive force were violated, a majority of the judges declared. But….

Read the rest here.

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“OCCUPY LAUSD?” SERIOUSLY?

The LA Times’ Howard Blume reports for LA Now in exactly the right tone. Here are some clips:

About 200 protesters gathered near downtown Tuesday to link the nationwide Occupy Wall Street-inspired protests to budgets cuts and layoffs in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Occupy LAUSD” participants took on the district, education philanthropists and charter schools as well as giving voice to familiar themes such as opposing corporate greed and inequality. Many of the demonstrators had marched from the main Occupy L.A. campsite around City Hall, more than a mile away.

[SNIP]

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy blamed UTLA for the protest.

“I wish UTLA could shift its energy from protest as the norm to negotiation for reform,” he said in a statement. He also objected to linking the leadership of L.A. Unified with Wall Street.

“Occupy LAUSD is both misinformed and contrary to the spirit and intent of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy L.A., and the other laudable movements for economic justice that have sprung up around the country and the world over the last month,” he said. “It is an insult for these protesters to equate a school district that during the past four years has experienced a $2 billion loss of dollars in state and federal funding, with policies and institutions that have systematically hurt the poor and middle class.”

Uh, yeah. What Deasy said. Kinda, anyway.

Look, anybody with any sense is chronically enraged with the district, okay? We get it. Protesting against the cutbacks is certainly righteous. But to take LAUSD and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and every charter school in So Cal (many of which have a transformative effect on the kids who attend them) and to try to equate them with giant vampire squids [technical term] like Goldman Sachs that are helping to eliminate the middle class in America….. is just a teensy bit hard to take. So you might want to recalibrate.