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The American Justice System

Prosecutors in Louisiana using peremptory challenges to exclude blacks from juries
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/u...ck&contentCollection=Home Page&pgtype=article

This is nuts.

In Georgia, prosecutors excluded every black prospective juror in a death penalty case against a black defendant, which the Supreme Court has agreed to review this fall.

Still, prosecutors here used peremptory strikes against 46 percent of the black potential jurors who remained, and against 15 percent of others. In 93 percent of trials, prosecutors struck a higher percentage of blacks than of others.

When challenged, Stephen Lanier, the lead prosecutor, offered lots of reasons for the strikes. All the prospects were said to be some combination of confused, incoherent, hostile, disrespectful and nervous. Three did not make enough eye contact. A 34-year-old black woman was too close in age to the defendant, who was 19. (The prosecution did not challenge eight prospective white jurors age 35 or under.)

“All I have to do is have a race-neutral reason,” Mr. Lanier said, “and all of these reasons that I have given the court are racially neutral.” The judge rejected the defense’s objection.

After Mr. Foster was convicted, Mr. Lanier urged the all-white jury to impose a death sentence to “deter other people out there in the projects.” The jury did so.

That did not surprise J. Antonio Florence, a defense lawyer here not involved in the case. “Young black men,” he said, “have absolutely no chance of getting on a jury.”
 
Locked in Solitary at 14: Adult Jails Isolate Youths Despite Risk

Four months later, he was arrested in connection with three house burglaries in which video games were stolen. Again, he signed a confession — this time after he asked for a lawyer, his mother said.

“They told him if he signed it, he could go home,” Ms. Watson said. The prosecutor declined to comment, and the police did not return phone calls.

Ke’jorium has grown nearly six inches, Ms. Watson said, and is now six feet tall and 160 pounds. The 8-by-8-foot cell where he spent most of the last two years, he said, was large enough only for a sink, a toilet and a bed, which was a thin mat on the concrete floor. There was no window.

A surveillance camera hung above the toilet.

He stayed inside the cell for more than 23 hours a day — the standard for juvenile solitary. It was so cold, he said in the interview, that he shivered for much of the day.

But he is still awaiting trial.

In January, more than a year after Ke’jorium’s initial arrest, the public defender filed a motion to dismiss the case, citing the lack of a speedy trial. The motion was denied.
 

In response to those exonerations, the Department of Justice is currently reviewing more than 2,500 criminal cases where testimony of a FBI hair analyst contributed to a conviction. It announced in April that in cases reviewed so far, FBI testimony was erroneous 95 percent of the time.

"Flawed" seems to be a bit kind.
 
A Republican Governor Is Leading the Country's Most Successful Prison Reform

“Unruly children”—the descriptor ascribed to children with status offenses like truancy and violating curfew—are no longer sent to detention centers and instead are classified as “Children in Need of Services” for whom treatment and service plans can be developed by the Division of Family and Children Services, law enforcement, and the Department of Juvenile Justice. In 2014, 49 of Georgia’s 159 counties participated in a nine-month grant program targeting at-risk youth. The program aimed to reduce felony commitments and short-term program placement by 15 percent, but by the grant program’s conclusion in October of that year, felonies and placements were down, instead, by 62 percent.

Overall, since he was elected at the end of 2010, Georgia’s incarcerated population dropped from an estimated 56,432 to 53,383 at the start of this year. That reduction virtually slashed the state’s backlog of inmates in county jails who were waiting to be transferred to a prison or probation detention center. Keeping inmates in local jails typically cost the state $20 million annually. Without the backlog, the cost associated with transferring inmates “plummeted to $40,720,” per the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform February 2015 report.
 
"A 34-year-old black woman was too close in age to the defendant, who was 19. (The prosecution did not challenge eight prospective white jurors age 35 or under.)"

So much for a "jury of your peers."
 
"A 34-year-old black woman was too close in age to the defendant, who was 19. (The prosecution did not challenge eight prospective white jurors age 35 or under.)"

So much for a "jury of your peers."

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Held without bail for stealing $5 worth of food. I don't feel safer because of that.
 
Held without bail for stealing $5 worth of food. I don't feel safer because of that.
That is what BKF would call a "criminal". Had that man not been a "criminal" he would probably still be alive.
 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...48a40f8_story.html?postshare=8761441545294631

The Orleans Public Defenders are facing a million-dollar deficit as a result of statewide budget cuts. For a small office like ours, that’s devastating. To avoid layoffs, the entire staff will see the equivalent of four unpaid weeks per year in furloughs, increased caseloads and a hiring freeze — and the submission to the Louisiana Public Defender Board of a plan to cut services to the people of New Orleans. We are already stretched thin: Our office represents 85 percent of the people charged with crimes in Orleans Parish but has an annual budget about a third the size of the district attorney’s. The American Bar Association recommends that public defenders not work on more than 150 felony cases a year. In 2014, I handled double that.

The United States accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of the global prison population. The vast majority of people in prison are indigent: The Justice Department has estimated that 60 to 90 percent of criminal defendants nationwide cannot afford their own attorneys and that in 2007, U.S. public defender offices received more than 5.5 million cases.
 
John Oliver on public defenders
 
Seattle city council to vote on ending youth detention

The resolution comes amid a years-long community-led movement to prevent a new juvenile detention center from being constructed. Organizers of the movement argue that there are significant racial disparities in the way that youth detention is used. Official data shows that African-American children in Washington are detained at a rate four times higher than the average, according to the text of Resolution 31614.

The resolution’s actions were recommended by the Seattle Office for Civil Rights, a city governmental body that found racial inequalities in arrest rates, detention, sentencing and prison population in the King County Children and Family Justice Center — the youth detention facility.

City Council member Mike O'Brien, who sponsored the resolution, says it has strong support and is likely to pass. Assuming it does, Seattle will then begin developing policies aimed at keeping kids out of jail with the help of local social justice and anti-racism groups, O'Brien added. The measure will be voted on in the Public Safety, Civil Rights and Technology Committee Wednesday and if passed will move forward in a final vote on Monday, O'Brien said.
 
What Happens When Inmates in Solitary Confinement Blow the Whistle on Their Abuse?

As Keys and his fellow whistle-blowers heard Sanchez's screams of pain, they knew they had to get in contact with the outside world. But filing grievances had proved to be a rigged game. According to James E. Robertson, a professor of corrections at Minnesota State University, "Retaliation is deeply engrained in the correctional office subculture; it may well be in the normative response when an inmate files a grievance." The inmates and their lawyers said guards punished those who filed grievances by slapping them with misconduct charges. In Pennsylvania, a prison has 15 business days to respond to a grievance, but a misconduct charge against an inmate nets an immediate punishment—often a stay in the hole.

The men immediately regarded the charges against them as retaliatory. The only way to make sense of them was that the inmates were being punished for blowing the whistle on the abuse of Isaac Sanchez. "It is surprising to me that a district attorney would find it a priority to prosecute a nonviolent protest conducted in the privacy of one's solitary confinement cell," said Carol Strickman, a staff attorney at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. "In California, to my knowledge, there were no criminal prosecutions related to the 2011 and 2013 mass hunger strikes that had over 30,000 people participating." The six inmates were facing serious prison time for what they had intended to be a peaceful protest, and for the next five years they would be caught in a legal limbo of trials, appeals and delays, plea bargains, denied parole, and tested principles. The men, who called themselves the Dallas Six, would try to remain committed to bringing their prison's abusive conditions to light, even in the face of being confined there longer.

Cell extractions are a standard, barely questioned part of mass incarceration that take place many thousands of times a year. Though an old tradition, they started to happen more frequently during the rise of super-maximum-security prisons in the 1980s and 90s. Guards became warriors—armed, armored, briefed in military jargon. Few rules regulate their use, and according to Jeffrey Schwartz, a corrections consultant, only about 20 percent of those carried out are necessary. Though common, injuries sustained by inmates during cell extractions aren't tracked by any government agency. In 2010, an inmate at a maximum-security prison in Tennessee suffocated to death from the force applied by restraints during an extraction. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, but no criminal or disciplinary charges were brought against the correctional officers.
 
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