WFFaithful
Well-known member
This should go here as well
Judge Berates Domestic Violence Victim—and Then Sends Her to Jail
Mother of a one year old child is jailed for three days for not showing up to testify against her abuser.
Under the agreement, about one-quarter of the state’s 4,000 prisoners in solitary confinement will be placed in less isolated housing. New York will also reduce the use of solitary for future inmates by limiting both the reasons they can be placed in it and the time they spend in it. Some of solitary confinement’s more troubling aspects will also be curtailed: Prison officials will no longer be allowed to use food as punishment, and pregnant inmates won’t be placed in solitary “except in exceptional circumstances.”
The suit follows a declaration on Monday by the Orleans Public Defenders office that it would begin to refuse some felony cases — including attempted murder, some kinds of rape and armed robbery — because it was underfunded and overloaded with cases.
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The other glaring problem, Mr. Dixon said, is the unreliable stream of money from parking tickets. He said that the Legislature does provide a yearly appropriation, but that a fee attached to parking tickets and other violations constitutes the bulk of the funding for local indigent defense.
In 2012, Mr. Dixon said, the Legislature agreed to increase the fee that the offices receive from parking tickets and other violations to $45 from $35. But the number of tickets has plummeted since 2009. As a result, he said, 12 of the state’s 42 public defender districts have taken steps to deal with budget shortfalls and case overloads. The steps, which vary from office to office, include instituting waiting lists and hiring freezes, and refusing some new cases.
The reliance on fees, Mr. Bunton said on Friday morning, “is inadequate, unreliable and unstable.”
Creighton who is now in his late twenties, was only 17 when he was sent to Rikers to await trial. He was arrested in 2006 when, prosecutors say, a witness inside a mini-mart on E. 168th Street in the Morrissania section of the Bronx, saw him pass a gun to his brother Dior Creighton, who fatally shot someone outside the store.
In 2012, after his brother finally pleaded guilty to the shooting, the Bronx district attorney's office dismissed Creighton’s charges, saying the case was based on only one witness and that witness "could not be located."
“Kenny wasn’t even in the bodega at the time,” said Spruell as he watched security video obtained from inside the store.
“This is me in the striped shirt, it was my favorite shirt, and Dior is right here in the black hoodie,” explained Spruell. “Here, I pass the gun to Dior.”
When asked if police ever interviewed Spruell, he answered “Never, not once did they question me, nothing. “
Spruell was even identified by another witness, according to court papers. This witness gave a written statement to an investigating detective from the 42nd Precinct and identified Spruell’s picture from a photo array.
Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate in the country, no longer provides public defenders to all its people accused of crimes; within months over half its public defender offices are expected to become insolvent.
Not everyone agrees that people charged with murder should stay in jail awaiting their day in court. The Pretrial Justice Institute is a technical consultant to the Safety and Justice Challenge. Its executive director, Cherise Fanno Burdeen, said what happened to Baldwin, from the violence she suffered at the hands of her abusive ex to her three years’ incarceration, was “absolutely horrible.” She said that Baldwin’s job, family ties, lack of substance abuse, and young child should have been considered risk-mitigating factors that would assure her appearance in court and lack of threat to public safety.
“Where was she going to flee to? She had a 19-month-old child, other family members, and a job,” she pointed out.
(America employs two-and-a-half times more corrections officers per person than the global average, but 30% fewer police).
Duval is one of the few counties in America in which the number of death sentences hasn’t decreased—a significant outlier during a decade of nationwide decline. One in four Florida death sentences comes from Duval, even though it has less than 5 percent of the state’s population; per capita, it’s the highest in the nation. Corey’s top homicide prosecutor, Bernie de la Rionda, is known for seeking the death sentence even when circumstances seem to weigh against it. For example, Michael Shellito was convicted of homicide and sentenced to death in the 1990s, when he was 19. There is extensive evidence that Shellito was suffering from severe mental illness and has a low IQ. The Florida Supreme Court overturned the death sentence, yet de la Rionda, acting at Corey’s behest, filed an appeal in the decision. One recent case is that of James Xavier Rhodes, a now-24-year-old man who is facing a death sentence for shooting a young woman at a MetroPCS store. Darlene Farrah, the victim’s mother, has asked Corey to grant her daughter’s killer a plea deal for a life sentence—to no avail.
During her first year in office, Corey doubled the number of felony cases in which minors were tried as adults. According to Human Rights Watch, the Fourth Circuit sends 75 percent of the young people charged as adults to prison or jail—the highest rate in the state. (By contrast, Miami-Dade County weighs in at around 12 percent.) This suggests that Corey is less likely than other state attorneys to consider alternatives to prison time.
Angela Corey was terrible. Also ousted yesterday in Duval was Public Defender Matt Shirk. He hired two shot girls and then fired them when his wife found out. This was only after sending them both texts about taking shots in his office and then hopping into his shower in his office (a shower he had added without telling anybody during a massive reconstruction project).
Today he fired a bunch of his staff that testified as part of an ethics investigation against him.