Is The NYS Criminal Justice System Beyond Help?
One of the greater political mysteries to me in NYS has been the degree to which progressive reform of our criminial justice system has been elusive. Other than a very modest improvement in the bizzarre Rockefeller Drug laws (which mandate very long incarceration terms for narcotics offenders) Criminal Justice reform in NYS has been a political non-starter.
I listened, therefore with great interest to the remarks made by Dallas (Texas) District Attornery Craig Watkins, Monday morning. He laid out his progressive law enforcement agenda to a packed Drum Major Institute forum. Those proposals had gotten him elected in red-state Texas over a knee-jerk tough on crime GOP candidate. He advocates and thinks he's making progress on issues like proper evidence gathering and preservation, trials that are fair for defendants, review of past cases to correct wrongful or wrong convictions. (DMI has posted an account of that meeting at their DMI Blog . My post is not a full account of that interesting event. If you want to know more, go there.) If Watkins can do this in Dallas, why are we not doing similar work in NY?
Well, Senator Eric Schneiderman, the progressive Democrat from the UWS of Manhattan and Riverdale, attributed the lack of progress this past term to our governor and to the GOP majority in the State Senate. While the Gov's program bill was not good, the Assembly bills which, sponsored by Assembly Member Joseph Lentol, passed. (As it happens these were all Lentol bills in only one sense: as chair of the Assembly Codes Committee, he greenlighted them. One of the bills, on preservation of DNA evidence, is his. Read it here here . Others were sponsored by other assembly members. I'll round them up later.
Everybody, he said, predicted a deal could be reached until the Governor and Mr. Bruno decided to stop working together. Others including Lentol confirmed the suggestion that -- the key thing standing between substantial reform (in their view the Lentol bill) and improved law is a Democratic Majority in the NY State Senate. (Myself, I am not so sure. I suspect that one reason that Democrats made only a half-hearted attempt in 2006 to capture control of the State Senate, is that the need a fall guy. They need Joe Bruno to kick around some more. Will 2008 be different?
The The Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School (led by Panelist Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld) has just issued a really smart, must-read report on the failings of law enforcement and criminal justice in NYS . We might all do well to read more about Mr. Lentol's bills. Full disclosure: I had never heard about them or the fight to pass them before today. I pay a moderate amount of attention to criminal justice issues. If I hadn't heard, I will bet dollars to doughnuts that no one else has either. Indeed, Assembly Member Lentol, who was sitting accross the table from me, was visibly surprised when Westchester DA Janet DiFiore offered to work with him -- a sign to me that even the most modest outreach had not been done. I will post about it soon.
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Crime | Barry Scheck | Craig Watkins | Drum Major Institute | Eric Schneiderman | Janet Difiore | Joe Lentol
Re: Our problem
Submitted by Dan Jacoby on 29 October 2007 - 2:48pm.
You call Denise O'Donnell an "also ran" because...?
Could she be an "also ran" because she couldn't defeat the political juggernaut that elected Andrew Cuomo? Please! Lots of excellent people get run over by the machine; the key is to get up and move forward. She has moved forward. Good for her.
Sometimes as we calculate the angles we miss the human impact.
Submitted by Daniel Millstone on 29 October 2007 - 7:24pm.
Barry Sheck, in the course of his comments, introduced Alan Newton, an impeccably dressed, impossibly young man who spent twenty-one years in prison following a 1985 rape conviction. Accidently preserved and discovered DNA samples exonerated him. When bad eyewitness identifications, coerced confessions and junk-forsenic science fool juries into convicting innocent people, we're all the poorer for it. Assembly Member Lentol -- when explaining why GOP Senators had no interest in a fair process report the comments of a Republican Senator as "If Newton didn't commit that crime, I'm sure he's done something else." Actually the quote is even better, Check out the DMI Link to a YouTube snippet here
How, do you think, can we move an agenda of fairness in a way that doesn't play into right-wing characterization of "Hug-a-thug" (To use the phrase of DA DiFiore)?
Warmed-over Pataki
Submitted by Terry O'Neill, Esq. (not verified) on 30 October 2007 - 2:41pm.
I wouldn't be posting a criticism if Ms. O'Donnell were giving us something other than warmed-over Pataki programs like Operation IMPACT. http://www.legislativegazette.com/read_more.php?story=2694.
And, with respect to the 26,000 prison inmates that are released and returned to the communities from which they were deported to the prison system every year, the idea that a bunch of bureaucrats are holding meetings on the subject is not particularly encouraging, although it did inspire the following:
ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD
(On the Interagency Inmate Re-Entry Task Force)
Here we sit all doing time with nothing much to do.
They’ve taken all the college books and cable TV, too.
If all the world has changed a lot, it’s nothing we would know.
Accordingly, when we get out, we won’t know where to go.
Once upon the corner did we stand and deal some crack.
That option is still open for the day when we come back.
Good thing, too, for in the joint, we haven’t learned a thing
To help us earn an honest buck for bacon home to bring.
We’re sorry for our girlfriends and we’re sorry for our kids.
We’re sorry that we’ll likely do a few more prison bids.
We’re sorry that the state still thinks that we’re not worth a dime.
The only thing we’re good for is to earn cops overtime.
But now there’s hope. There’s bureaucrats from fifteen different places
All sitting ‘round a table shooting breeze and stuffing faces
With donuts and with croissants, with Danishes and bagels.
They talk and chat and bloviate, give lectures and finagle.
Our problems are now theirs to solve? Well, let’s not hold our breath.
Whenever did a bureaucrat not talk a thing to death?
Long ago did Newton say that what goes up, comes down.
Who spends some time in prison sure will end up back in town
And find that there is nothing here to keep him from repeating
The errors of the past and all that conduct self-defeating.
And so the cycle goes around. It’s now three generations
Since Rocky threw the book at us, our neighbors and relations.
Why is it that folks have not yet well and truly found
What goes around will come around and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round?
Our problem
The problem we have in New York at the state level is that Governor Spitzer's top criminal justice person is an also ran.
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=634196&category=STATE...