criminal law

California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill that would have allowed judges to inform juries when a prosecutor has intentionally withheld evidence, according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, sponsor of the bill, said in a statement "we need this bill to stop the few prosecutors whose zeal for convictions lead them to cut corners on justice. We can’t wait decades to free the innocent while the true perpetrators run free.” Brown said he was vetoing the bill because it would intrude upon the judiciary's role in instructing juries.

New York's approval rate for parole applications has been sliced in half since 2005, falling from 52 percent to 24 percent between 2005 and 2013, City Limits' Bill Hughes wrote earlier this month.

Jim Murphy, a former county legislator in Schenectady County and a longtime volunteer with the New York chapter of CURE, Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, said he has been plugging parole board statistics into spreadsheets and "he believes he will soon be able to show a pattern emerging that can predict which parole board commissioners are more or less likely to grant or deny parole. 'A good number of these people—not all of them—but a good number seem to be making their decisions based on the politics of the case,'" Murphy told City Limits.

Criminal justice advoces said that "crimes that receive a disproportionate amount of media attention are judged more harshly by parole boards than similar offenses that are off the public radar."

The U.S. Supreme Court will be getting an education on "the rhythmic, slangy — sometimes violent — poetry of rap music" as it considers the standard by which violent speech can be judged as a true threat this term, The National Law Journal's Tony Mauro reports. Elonis v. United States, which is set for argument December 1, "asks whether the online posting of threatening language like that found in rap lyrics violates a federal law against transmitting 'any threat to injure the person of another' across state lines," Mauro further reports. Anthony Elonis was convicted of threatening law enforcement, his spouse and others from the rap-like posts he made on Facebook. Elonis argues that pure speech must be judged by a subjective intent standard, but the government says it only needs to prove that a reasonable person would view speech as a true threat.
 

The Washington Post investigated 400 seizures from when police stopped drivers under a practice called "highway interdiction" and seized cash, having "their departments share in the proceeds through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Police can also make seizures under their state laws." Many drivers "had to engage in long legal struggles to get their money back after officers made roadside judgments about one of the most fundamental of American rights — the right to own property," the Post further reports. Advocates say that the practice has resulted in abuses of power in which the innocent suffer because their cash is seized even though they were not arrested.

Dallas County is backing off on a plan to ban in-person visits with jail inmates, the Dallas Observer reports: "Dallas County commissioners are asking for new bids on a controversial contract for the management of visitation and phone services to jail inmates, after County Judge Clay Jenkins and inmate advocates objected to a proposal that would have ended face-to-face visits while letting the county profit off families visiting their jailed loved one via video. The original version of the contract with Securus, a local technology company, would have obligated the county to cut off in-person visits to promote remote video visits, from which both Securus and the county would reap payments."

Clay Calvert, a communications professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, writes in the Huffington Post about the case of a Kentucky man who was arrested for allegedly making terroristic threats and supposedly threatening to kill students when he posted lyrics by the metal band Exodus on his Facebook page. According to the band, the song with lyrics like '"student bodies lying dead in the halls, a blood splattered treatise of hate'" was inspired by the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho and was not meant to endorse mass shootings. As Calvert notes, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear a case this fall involving Anthony Elonis, who was sentenced to federal prison for his violent postings on Facebook. Elonis said they were therapeutic rap lyrics, but a jury found an objectively reasonable person could view them as threats.

MintPress News' Christine Graef reports on how a revised Violence Against Women Act is putting tribal authorities in charge of cases of abuse and violence against American Indian women: "The reauthorized act extends tribal jurisdiction to non-Native Americans who commit acts of violence or sexual assault against their Native American spouse or partner. While such incidents often go unreported, the amount that are reported reflect a disproportionate number of Native American women will be raped, stalked or physically assaulted compared to their non-Native American peers." According to the Indian Law Research Center, more than 88 percent of violent crimes committed against American Indian women are committed by non-American Indians over which tribal governments lack jurisdiction.

The amendment goes into effect next March.

There are limitations to the amended law. Tribes must have a criminal justice system that provides legal counsel to defendants, provide non-American Indians in a jury pool and inform defendants of their right to file federal habeas corups petitions, Graef writes. Federal prosecutors will continue to prosecute crimes for tribes that don't have their own justice systems. And jurisdiction only applies to cases in which the perpetrator and the victim were in a relationship.

The Guardian, the Oklahoma Observer, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Oklahoma have filed a lawsuit seeking to allow journalists and other witnesses to executions to "see everything that happens from the moment an inmate enters the execution chamber," the Washington Post reports. The lawsuit cites the fact that witnesses were not allowed to see the entirety of the execution of Clayton Lockett, whose botched killing left him writhing and grimacing before he finally died.

After a needle was inserted into Lockett's groin, his vein collapsed and the lethal-injection drugs did not get absorbed into his bloodstream, according to officials. When things went awry, correctional officials lowered the blinds and never lifted them back up, the Post reports. Lockett's final moments were not observed by the public.

As the investigations and civil turmoil continue after Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Mo., a 25-year-old U.S. Supreme Court case will shape the paramaters on how the officer will be judged, the Associated Press reports: "The Supreme Court case, decided at a time when violence against police was on the rise, has shaped the legal standards that govern when police officers are justified in using force. The key question about [Brown']s killing on Aug. 9 is whether a reasonable officer with a similar background would have responded the same way."

The case is Graham v. Connor. The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote that '"the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.'"

I am really struck that, through public records, The Arizona Republic was able to learn that Arizona death row inmate Joseph Wood was injected 15 times with drugs midazolam and hydromorphone over a two-hour period before he was finally pronounced dead. It was supposed to just take two doses to kill him. The Associated Press reported he "gasped more than 600 times over the next hour and 40 minutes." But before Wood was executed he lost his First Amendment fight to find out the details of the state's methods for lethal injections, including where it obtains its supply of the drugs or the executioners' medical qualifications. While the Ninth Circuit put his execution on hold, according to the AP, the Supreme Court lifted the stay. So Wood couldn't get access to information before his execution. But it can be obtained after the fact.