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By mentor, August 18, 2010 3:08 pm

On the night of June 11, 21-year-old Trevon Cole and his nine months pregnant fiancé, Sequoia Pearce, were sitting at home in their Las Vegas apartment, settling in for a quiet Friday evening in front of the TV. But Cole didn’t live to see the next day. Instead, he was the target of a drug raid and was shot and killed by a Las Vegas narcotics detective as he knelt on his bathroom floor, hands in the air. (Read our earlier coverage here.)

Trevon Cole, killed in his bathroom by a police officer, had just 1.8 ounces of marijuana

Since then, questions and outrage have mounted as the circumstances surrounding Cole’s death have emerged. A coroner’s inquest, which is done with all fatal shootings by Las Vegas police, is set for Friday. Given the history of such inquests — only one police killing out of 200 in the past 35 years was found unjustifiable — justice is unlikely to be done there.

The affidavit in support of the search warrant targeting Cole gave the impression that police thought they had a major drug dealer on their hands. Detective Brian Yant, the officer who wrote the warrant and who pulled the trigger on Cole, wrote that “almost all” drug dealers keep “sophisticated and elaborate” records and that police expected to find such records, as well as guns and drug paraphernalia. Cole had a “lengthy criminal history of narcotics sales, trafficking and possession charges,” Yant wrote.

Police found no guns. They found no evidence of a “major drug dealer.” They did find a small, unspecified amount of pot (Pearce contends they found no drugs and were angry they could not), a digital scale, a cell phone, and $702 in cash (of which $350 was found to have come from jewelry Pearce pawned days earlier to pay rent). Oh, and a spent .223 caliber rifle cartridge in the bathroom.

The search warrant affidavit also misidentified Cole, confusing him with another Trevon Cole from Houston, Texas. The other Trevon Cole had a different middle name, was seven years, older, is three inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter. His “lengthy criminal history”? Three misdemeanor marijuana possession arrests. The only criminal record the now dead Trevon Cole had was for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle as a teenager.

via Coroner Probing Marijuana Raid Killing of Unarmed Man [FEATURE] | StoptheDrugWar.org.

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By mentor, August 4, 2010 5:37 pm

Yesterday, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act into law. Though this new law retains an unjustifiable federal sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, it is a remarkable criminal justice reform measure. Ten years ago, advocates working to repeal the notorious 100-to-1 sentencing disparity were thought of as naïve. Yet 2010 saw a bipartisan bill aimed at reforming a mandatory minimum actually get through Congress and receive the president’s signature for the first time since the Nixon administration. Yesterday’s passage of the Fair Sentencing Act is one of several recent developments signaling that the political landscape of criminal justice reform truly has shifted — perhaps not seismically, but significantly. The opportunity to cut and reform our bloated, inefficient system is now.

via Vanita Gupta: From Incredible to Inevitable: How the Politics of Criminal Justice Reform May Be Shifting.

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By mentor, July 28, 2010 9:30 pm

Earlier this month the DEA conducted several coordinated raids of California medical marijuana dispensaries and collectives. The federal agents raided a medical marijuana farm in the northern county of Mendocino, as well as a dispensary in San Diego. They destroyed all the marijuana plants and seized the grower’s computer and cash from the property.

Problem is, these DEA raids are in direct opposition to the directive issued by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder last year that designated raids on legal medical marijuana dispensaries to “not be a priority” for the DEA. The places raided by the DEA were not just in total compliance with state and local laws, but the raided farm was the very first to come into legal compliance with local authorities.

via What Part of “Not a Priority” Does the DEA Not Understand? | FDL Action.

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By mentor, June 22, 2010 6:54 pm

With the highest incarceration rate in the world, in 2008 the U.S. puts one out of every 48 working-age men behind bars and spent $75 billion on corrections, the majority of which was spent on incarceration. To make matters worse, a new study released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found that the $40 billion jump in state spending on corrections between 1988 and 2008 outpaced nearly every other state budget item, painting a bleak picture of incarceration in the U.S. and the resulting budgetary strain on the states.

As this Dispatch will outline, U.S. incarceration rates have far outpaced the growth in the population because inflexible policies from “truth in sentencing” to mandatory minimum laws have meant non-violent offenses crowd prisons without probation and parole being used to end the budgetary costs of keeping all of them in prison.

Partly due to recognition that filling prisons with non-violent offenders is a waste of human potential and partly because of the current budget crisis, states are beginning to reform their prison and sentencing policies to reduce bloated incarceration rates. Some states are engaging in emergency cuts in prison populations while others are more systematically cutting back or eliminating entirely the mandatory minimum and other rigid sentencing rules that fill prisons in the first place.

States are also directing some of the funds that will be saved from lower incarceration rates to helping ex-felons integrate back into the communities which they will be returning after prison. Such reentry programs recognize that investing in communities can replace the costs of incarceration with jobs and productive activity that actually generate economic development, tax revenues and a safer environment for all residents.

via Alternatives to Incarceration Can Save Millions for Cash-Strapped States | Progressive States Network.

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By mentor, June 10, 2010 8:48 pm

The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. We calculate that a reduction in incarceration rates just to the level we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards) would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year, with the large majority of these savings accruing to financially squeezed state and local governments. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.

These cost savings could be realized through a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of exclusively non-violent offenders, who now make up over 60 percent of the prison and jail population.

via The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration.

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By mentor, March 9, 2010 10:59 am

LOS ANGELES — James Gray once saw himself as a drug warrior, a former federal prosecutor and county judge who sent people to prison for dealing pot and other drug offenses. Gradually, though, he became convinced that the ban on marijuana was making it more accessible to young people, not less.

“I ask kids all the time, and they’ll tell you it is easier to get marijuana than a six-pack of beer because that is controlled by the government,” he said, noting that drug dealers don’t ask for IDs or honor minimum age requirements.

So Gray — who spent two decades as a superior court judge in Orange County, Calif., and once ran for Congress as a Republican— switched sides in the war on drugs, becoming an advocate for legalizing marijuana.

“Let’s face reality,” he says. “Taxing and regulating marijuana will make it less available to children than it is today.”

via Slowly, states are lessening limits on marijuana – USATODAY.com.

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By mentor, March 4, 2010 10:11 am

The United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has about one-quarter of its prisoners. As you noted, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Over 2.4 million persons are in state or federal prisons and jails – a rate of 751 out of every 100,000. Another 5 million are under some sort of correctional supervision such as probation or parole (PEW 2008). The US remains the last of the post-industrial so-called First World nations that still retains the death penalty, and we use it often. Nearly 3,500 inmates await execution in 35 states and at the federal level. It was not until the early 21st century that the US abolished capital punishment for juveniles and those with IQs below 70.

During the past 40 years there has been a dramatic escalation in the US prison population – a ten-fold increase since 1970. Between 1987 and 2007 alone, the prison population nearly tripled. The rate of incarceration for women escalated at an even more dramatic pace. The increased rate of incarceration can be traced almost exclusively to the War on Drugs and the rise of lengthy mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug crimes and other non-violent felonies.

A similarly repressive trend has emerged in the juvenile justice system. The juvenile justice system has shifted sharply from its original stated goals of rehabilitation and therapy, into a “second-class criminal court that provides youth with neither therapy or justice” (Feld 2007). Throughout the 1990s, the federal government and nearly all states enacted a series of legislation that criminalized a host of “gang-related activities.” This lowered the age at which juveniles could be referred to adult court, widened the net of juvenile justice, and made it easier, and even mandatory in some cases, to try juveniles as adults.

Recently scholars, educators and activists have raised concerns about the growing connection between schools and the prison industrial complex. The growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions, primarily via “zero tolerance” policies, and tracking them directly and/or indirectly into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems is variously referred to as the “school to prison pipeline,” the “schoolhouse to jailhouse track,” or as younger and younger students are targeted, the “cradle to prison track” (NAACP 2005; Advancement Project 2006; Children’s Defense Fund 2007). In part, the school to prison pipeline is a consequence of schools which criminalize minor disciplinary infractions via zero tolerance policies, have a police presence at the school, and rely on suspensions and expulsions for minor infractions.

t r u t h o u t | The Racialization of Crime and Punishment.

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By mentor, February 25, 2010 4:42 pm

It has not been a good week for the famed Miranda warning at the hands of the Supreme Court.

In decisions issued on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Court ruled that confessions should be admitted at trial even when police interviewed suspects in circumstances that lower courts viewed as Miranda violations.

The Court on Wednesday issued Maryland v. Shatzer, establishing new, more permissive rules for police who want to question a suspect for a second time after the suspect invokes Miranda's right to remain silent.

The Maryland case came down a day after the justices decided Florida v. Powell, in which a 7-2 majority Court said that Florida's alternative wording of the Miranda warning is acceptable, even though it does not explicitly state that a suspect has a right to have a lawyer present during questioning.

Stanford Law School professor Jeffrey Fisher said the rulings continue the Court's trend of “extreme hostility toward constitutional rules that require the exclusion of evidence — especially confessions and the product of illegal searches — from criminal trials.” Fisher, who heads a National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) committee that files amicus briefs at the high court, said, “In short, this Court sees the costs and benefits of rules designed to curb police overreaching entirely differently than the Court did a generation ago. ”

Sidley Austin partner Jeffrey Green, who also assists NACDL and other defense lawyers in high court arguments, added, “At this rate, what's left [of Miranda] will be only what we see on TV.”

via ‘Miranda’ dealt one-two punch by high court.

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By mentor, February 8, 2010 11:24 am

MEXICO CITY – For months, the leaders of Tancitaro had held firm against the drug lords battling for control of this central Mexican town.

Then one morning, after months of threats and violence from the traffickers, they finally surrendered.

Before dawn, gunmen kidnapped the elderly fathers of the town administrator and the secretary of the City Council. Within hours, both officials resigned along with the mayor, the entire seven-member City Council, two department heads, the police chief and all 60 police officers. Tancitaro had fallen to the enemy.

Across Mexico, the continuing ability of traffickers to topple governments like Tancitaro’s, intimidate police and keep drug shipments flowing is raising doubts about the Mexican government's 3-year-old, U.S.-backed war on the drug cartels.

Far from eliminating the gangs, the battle has exposed criminal networks more ingrained than most Americans could imagine: Hidden economies that employ up to one-fifth of the people in some Mexican states. Business empires that include holdings as everyday as gyms and a day-care center.

And the death toll continues to mount: Mexico saw 6,587 drug-related murders in 2009, up from 5,207 in 2008 and 2,275 in 2007, according to an unofficial tally by the respected newspaper Reforma.

Cartels have multiplied, improved their armament and are perfecting simultaneous, terrorist-style attacks.

Some analysts are warning that Mexico is on the verge of becoming a “narco-state” like 1990s-era Colombia.

via Drug cartels tighten grip; Mexico becoming ‘narco-state’.

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By mentor, January 22, 2010 12:15 pm

Leslie Chew spent his childhood working long days next to his father on the oil rigs of southern Texas. No school meant he never learned to read or write. Now in his early 40s, he’s a handyman, often finding a place to sleep in the back of his old station wagon.

But he got by — until one night in December 2008 when the station wagon got cold, and he changed the course of his life.

“Well, I stole some blankets to try to stay warm,” he says quietly. “I walked in and got them and turned around and walked right back out of the store. [The security guard] said, ‘Excuse me, sir, come here. Are you planning to pay for these’ I said, ‘No, sir. I don’t have no money.’ That’s when he arrested me right then.”

When I first spoke to Chew last summer, he’d been inside the Lubbock County jail since the night he was arrested: 185 days, more than six months.

Chew is like one of more than a half-million inmates sitting in America’s jails — not because they’re dangerous or a threat to society or because a judge thinks they will run. It’s not even because they are guilty; they haven’t been tried yet.

They are here because they can’t make bail — sometimes as little as $50. Some will wait behind bars for as long as a year before their cases make it to court. And it will cost taxpayers $9 billion this year to house them.

via Bail Burden Keeps U.S. Jails Stuffed With Inmates : NPR.