Seattle University professor's report calls misdemeanor courts "alarming" - Original article from Seattle Times April 28, 2009

Originally published April 28, 2009 at 2:52 PM | Page modified April 28, 2009 at 11:57 PM

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Misdemeanor courts throughout the country — including many in Washington — are in a state of shambles, with people convicted without lawyers, public defenders swamped with impossible caseloads and judges who ignore basic constitutional rights to wade through seas of unnecessary cases, according to a report by a Seattle University law professor.

By Ian Ith

Misdemeanor courts throughout the country — including many in Washington — are in a state of shambles, with people convicted without lawyers, public defenders swamped with impossible caseloads and judges who ignore basic constitutional rights to wade through seas of unnecessary cases, according to a report by a Seattle University law professor.
The upshot is that millions of people nationwide end up harshly punished for minor offenses that could be handled differently, and taxpayers waste millions of dollars to do it, the report says.
"It's stunning; it's alarming; it's staggering; it's overwhelming," said professor Bob Boruchowitz, formerly the director of King County's The Defender Association public-defense firm. "The integrity of the whole justice system is at stake."
But the administrator for one of the courts Boruchowitz criticizes in the report says his examples are dated and improvements have already been made.
"I think it's a little bit exaggerated," said Jill O'Cain, administrator of Lynnwood Municipal Court.
The report, "Minor Crimes, Massive Waste," was published by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and released Tuesday. Boruchowitz and his colleagues spent a year gathering statistics and observing courtrooms in several states, from Florida to Washington.
In general, they said they found a system clogged with nonviolent, nondangerous citizens.
Defendants are encouraged to strike plea deals with prosecutors without consulting defense attorneys. Or fines and jail time are handed out after only minutes of consultation with public defenders who have hundreds of cases to handle at once.
Particularly troublesome is that some courts don't have defense attorneys present at all during crowded arraignment calendars, where some people are enticed to plead guilty on the spot, according to the report.
One key to the problem, the report found, is that in many courts nationwide more than a third of the defendants were charged with the most minor of crimes, especially driving with suspended licenses.
In Washington, Boruchowitz cites Lynnwood Municipal Court for handling more than 100 cases in less than four hours, with only two public defenders present for all defendants.
He said in one Lynnwood case, a defendant had only a couple of minutes in court — "less time than it takes to get a hamburger from a McDonald's drive-through" — before he was sentenced to 10 days in jail and a $500 fine for possessing a small amount of marijuana. H
e also names municipal courts in Bainbridge Island, Burlington, Pasco and a county district court in Franklin County as places where no defense lawyers are present for arraignments.
In Kittitas County, he said, defendants — mainly college students — were facing misdemeanor driving, marijuana and alcohol charges with neither a defense lawyer nor a prosecutor present. A court commissioner was handling everything — and dissuading people from getting lawyers, the report said.
But misdemeanor convictions are no small matter. They can mean large fines and jail time up to a year and can create lifelong problems with employment, school and housing. And lots of otherwise law-abiding citizens can find themselves facing them, the report said.
"Do you want those people who you know and care about to end up in these courts we're talking about?" Boruchowitz said.
O'Cain, of the Lynnwood court, said Boruchowitz's charges are based on past problems that are being addressed. She said his caseload numbers are inflated and she stressed that public defenders always are present. Also, many minor cases, such as driving offenses, are resolved in ways that don't clog the system.
"I think we do a nice job of justice," O'Cain said.
Nationally, Boruchowitz pushes for making minor driving offenses and drug offenses, such as simple marijuana possession, infractions in which tickets are issued instead of court dates. Doing that would alleviate a third of the caseload overnight, he says, and save millions of dollars.
It's not all bad news.
He points to Seattle and King County as "beacons of light" for reform. Seattle, for example, recently started handling minor misdemeanors through diversion programs. Instead of facing more fines they can't pay, defendants are given options such as community service to get their licenses back.
"We're not saying ignore the laws; we're saying treat them in a different way," Boruchowitz said. "In the long run, it strengthens not only the justice system but society as a whole when we respect individual rights."
Ian Ith: 206-464-2109 or iith@seattletimes.com

Michelle Alexander on the New Jim Crow | National Radio Project

If you missed Michelle Alexander live, here is a great opportunity to hear her speak.

Michelle Alexander has struck a chord in so-called ‘post racial’ America. The Ohio State University law professor makes the case that the United States’ current criminal justice system policies can be traced directly back to slavery. Those targeted now, as they were then, are African Americans.

On this edition, Michelle Alexander talks about her book, ‘The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’.
Michelle Alexander on the New Jim Crow | National Radio Project

"Not a genuine black man"

This is an interesting story done on  Brian Copelands solo act titled "Not a genuine black man"

Incarceration Nation

Check out this inforgraphic from the Icelandic online magazine, Good, showing the rate of incarceration in the United States compared to other countries.

As the infographic states, we look like anything BUT the "Land of the Free."

By Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.  The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life.  (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status.  They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

See complete article at: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-alexander/the-new-jim-crow-how-the_b_490386.html

Sentencing study finds racial disparity

March 13, 2010 in Nation/World

Marisa Taylor McClatchy

WASHINGTON – Black and Latino men are more likely to receive longer prison sentences than their white counterparts since the Supreme Court loosened federal sentencing rules, a government study has concluded.

The study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission reignited a long-running debate about whether federal judges need to be held to mandatory guidelines in order to stamp out what might appear to be inherent biases and dramatically disparate sentences.

The report analyzed sentences meted out since the January 2005 U.S. v. Booker decision gave federal judges much more sentencing discretion.

For years, legal experts have argued over the disparity in sentencing between black and white men. The commission found that the difference peaked in 1999 with blacks receiving 14 percent longer sentences. By 2002, however, the commission found no statistical difference.

After the Booker decision, “those differences appear to have been increasing steadily,” with black men receiving sentences that were up to 10 percent longer than those imposed on whites, the commission said.

Using another method of analyzing the data, the study found black men received sentences that were 23 percent longer than white men’s.

Latino men, meanwhile, received sentences that were almost 7 percent longer than white men’s. Immigrants also got longer sentences than U.S. citizens did.

The report also found that defendants with some college education consistently have received shorter sentences than those with no college education, but the differences in sentence length remained about the same after the decision.

The commission warned that its report should be read with caution and may not mean that race or class is influencing judges when they hand down longer sentences.

“Judges make decisions when sentencing offenders based on many legal and other legitimate considerations that are not or cannot be measured,” said the commission, an independent body of the federal judiciary. “The analysis presented in this report cannot explain why the observed differences in sentence length exist but only that they do exist.”

For example, a judge who’s sentencing two offenders who were convicted of similar crimes might impose a longer sentence on the offender with a more violent criminal past, information that wasn’t available to the study’s authors.

Nonetheless, opponents of looser sentencing guidelines pounced on the commission’s study, saying it demonstrates that the rules are needed.

“People who commit similar crimes should receive similar sentences,” said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. “Unfortunately, without sentencing guidelines for courts to follow, some individuals have received harsher penalties than others despite committing similar crimes.”

The report’s release late Thursday came as the House of Representatives and the Senate consider legislation that would reduce disparities in sentencing guidelines between powder cocaine and crack cocaine.

Defense advocates have argued for more than 20 years that the more severe sentences given for crack cocaine offenses, compared with those handed down for crimes that involve powder cocaine, were unfair to black defendants. A majority of crack cocaine defendants are black, while most powder cocaine defendants are white.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission recognized the disparity and recommended lighter penalties in crack cocaine cases, prompting judges to review the sentences of prisoners across the country.

View original text here: spokesman.com

Image of the Black Athlete: ESPN townhall meeting

This is an interesting series ESPN put together during Black History Month 2011. It was a unique perspective for myself to watch these videos, as I am a white male addicted to sports, and I did not think hard previously about media perceptions portrayed within the sports market. Take a look, what are your comments?

Task Force on Race and the Criminal Justice System - next meeting February 17th at Seattle University

Task Force on Race and the Criminal Justice System

The first meeting of the Task Force on Race and the Criminal Justice System took place on November 4, 2010, at Seattle University School of Law.  The meeting was convened by the Honorable Steven C. Gonzalez, Chair of the Washington State Access to Justice Board and King County Superior Court judge, and by Robert S. Chang, Professor of Law and Director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law.
Prompted by the remarks of two sitting justices on the Washington Supreme Court, the meeting was called to discuss racial bias in the criminal justice system in Washington state.  The meeting was attended by representatives from the Washington State Bar Association Board of Governors, Washington State Access to Justice Board, the Washington State Commission on Gender and Justice, the Washington State Commission on Minority and Justice, the Loren Miller Bar Association, the Latina/o Bar Association of Washington, Washington Women Lawyers, QLaw, the Asian Bar Association of Washington, the Vietnamese American Bar Association of Washington, the Korean American Bar Association, Filipino Lawyers of Washington, the Middle Eastern Legal Association of Washington, the King County Prosecutor's Office, The Defender Association, faculty members from the three Washington law schools (Gonzaga University, Seattle University, and the University of Washington), and various community and advocacy organizations.
At the meeting, we articulated a set of goals and developed working groups to move the project forward.  The first phase involves developing informational resources on racial bias in the criminal justice system.  The second phase involves bringing into conversation all levels of the criminal justice system and to develop a set of recommendations to address racial bias at the systemic level.  The third phase involves working to implement the recommendations.  Throughout, we will develop educational projects to reach judges, the bar, law enforcement, students, and the public.
We have met two more times.  The Working Groups have convened and have begun their work.  Further information about the meetings can be found in Meeting Notes.  The next meeting is scheduled to take place on Thursday, February 17, 2011, from 7:30am-9:00am at Seattle University School of Law.  Please return to the below link for updates.
http://www.law.seattleu.edu/Centers_and_Institutes/Korematsu_Center/Race_and_Criminal_Justice.xml

Harry's Law

We are starting to see glimmers of hope in mainstream media.  If you have not seen the pilot episode of Harry's Law, you can view a full episode here.  (There may be a better link out there, but we had trouble finding it.)

In this episode Harriet Korn, played by Kathy Bates, argues to keep Malcolm Davies (Aml Ameen) out of prison.  To keep Malcolm out of prison, get him treatment for his addiction to cocaine, and allow him to continue going to college, Harry uses many of the arguments we have presented here on our blog.

Although the series depends a little too heavily on stereotypes in its character development, it is refreshing to see arguments agains mass incarceration making their way into mainstream media.

Check it out and let us know your thoughts.

Life In Prison: A Project Envision Documentary

This 30-minute documentary explores the cost of California’s "tough on crime" legislation. It gives you an inside look into three state prisons, including the California Medical Facility. CMF houses the oldest and sickest inmates in the state.