Here are three justice stories. One is about a lawsuit challenging bad prison policy, one about bad sentencing policy we hope will soon change, the third is about bad things being required of our LAPD officers.
And speaking of the LAPD, today is the service for Deputy Chief Kenny Garner—which makes it a sad, sad day.
It should also be noted Frank Rich wrote a great column Sunday (in which he improbably quotes from Thorton Wilder’s Our Town), and we’re all furiously keeping an eye on whatever plea deal Bernie Madoff may be likely to get.
Okay, now to the stories:
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COPS UNION STILL FIGHTING FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE (GO LAPPL!)
Thursday before last, February 26, The Los Angeles Police Protective League got bad news regarding their fight against financial disclosure. A federal appeals court ruled unanimously that, according the terms of the federal consent decree (under which the LAPD has been laboring for, what is starting to seem like the better part of a millennium) the LAPD may demand that all gang and narcotics officers fork over all their financial records for review.
The idea of the disclosure requirement is to prevent corruption blad-de-blah, although no one can come up with one instance where corrupt officers were caught through irregularities in their check, savings or IRA accounts. Just take my word for it, this is a stupid, punitive idea. I have plenty of back story on the issue here and here and here, should you not be familiar.
The cops are very much against this unneeded invasion of privacy for, among other reasons, the fact that the LAPD can’t seem to keep confidential information all that confidential.
Recently, for instance, there was the incident last week where around 250 officers’ disciplinary records were posted (oops!) accidentally online. (Worse, the had been investigated and exonerated of misconduct allegations.)
Then there was the issue of the leaked photo of the bruised-faced Rhianna that wound up in TMZs hands.
Still and all, everyone pretty much thought the court decision would be the end of it. The LAPPL had fought a good fight against the odious provision. Now, however, there was no choice but to go along.
But the union and the rank and file it represents, ain’t going for it.
“We are prepared to challenge this in court as far as we can go,” said LAPPL Prez Paul Weber in a statement released late Friday.
Good for them.
PS: In reading the LAPPL’s release, I noted that among their arguments, they cited the fact that the measure is opposed “…by many observers, including the Los Angeles Times and WitnessLA creator/journalist Celeste Fremon, a frequent critic of the department.”
Well….yeah.
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THE BLACK/WHITE REALMS OF ROCK AND SNOW
Willie Mays Aikens, who once hit four home runs for the Kansas City Royals in the 1980 World Series, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for trying to sell 64 grams of rock cocaine—around a quarter of a cup. For him to get that kind of sentence for selling power coke—from which crack or rocks or whatever you want to call the cooked version—one would have had to sell a bucketful.
Pointing to Aikens as an example, Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, appropriately and righteously calls for the Obama administration and Congress to eliminate the crack/power disparity once and for all. Exactly no one benefits from these outsized sentences. No one. But many suffer. Truth be told, we all suffer indirectly.
Here’s a clip:
Aikens’ case exemplifies all that’s gone wrong because of these federal sentencing laws: The focus on petty crimes. The distortion of priorities in the war on drugs. The lopsided impact on African Americans – the 83 percent of federal crack defendants who are black, though a federal health survey found most crack users are white.
The problems have been documented for years. Now it’s time for a change.Finally, key congressional members seem to be in a negotiating mood, and the Obama administration wants the crack/powder disparity eliminated. In the last session of Congress, then-Sen. Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill introduced by then-Sen. Joe Biden to do just that.
The same bill is on the table again. HR 265, introduced in the House by Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, would increase federal penalties for big-time trafficking while reducing them for possession or dealing in trivial quantities of crack – offenses that should be left to state prosecutors or public health officials.
Read the rest. There are more stories, and more illustrations of the sad illogic of this policy.
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SOLITARY CONFINEMENT GOES TO COURT
NPR has the story of Ernesto Lira who was caught with three grams of meth, and he was sentenced to 8 years. It was not his first conviction. Lira had been convicted of other low level nonviolent crimes.
But when he went to prison for the meth, he was sent into isolation in Pelican Bay’s SHU—Security Housing Unit where he stayed in a windowless 8-by-10 cell, and could have no phone calls, no family visits, no programs of any kind.
The California Department of Corrections decided that Lira was a member of Northern Structure, a subsidiary of sorts of La Neustra Familia, the powerful Northern California prison gang.
Although there was no tangible evidence that Lira had been involved in any gang activity at all (a snitch fingered him as a gang member and he had sketched a drawing that they thought suspicious), the CDCR’s classification system decided he was a prison gangster and that was that. No amount of good behavior or appeals made any difference. After five years in isolation, Lira felt like he was going mad.
Now out, he suing in Federal prison. (Here’s a brief for the case.) At first Lira wanted damages. But he has since decided simply to go having his gang validation expunged and a ruling that he was wrongfully placed in solitary.
The idea is to get the case before the court in order to challenge the validity of the system itself.
Certainly, the state needs ways to separate out the truly bad guys and the trouble makers. But too often I’ve seen the triage be whimsical at best.
(My friend, the former prison warden, who flagged this story for me, had his own stories of wrongly classified guys sent to the SHU.)
And the results of years in the SHU are anything but whimsical. They are deeply corrosive to the soul and spirit.
And of course, once we’ve broken the guy down in the SHU, we parole him into the community—and then wonder why he doesn’t do well. Smart.
This will be a case to watch.