Chief Justice Warns Sequestration Cuts Already Threatening Public Safety

Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, in his annual Year-End Report on the State of the Federal Judiciary, blasted the 2011 Budget Control Act’s automatic “sequestration” federal spending cuts and warned that the cuts to the federal court system’s budget “pose a genuine threat to public safety.”

Roberts, appointed to the Supreme Court in 2005 by President George W. Bush, listed “adequate funding for the Judiciary” as the “single most important issue facing the courts” and offered a Dickensian look at the federal judiciary past, present, and future.

Conceding that balanced budgets are important, Roberts blasted the Draconian sequester — cuts that came after nearly a decade of belt-tightening by the judicial branch. Because they had previously reduced costs significantly, the $350 million in new across-the-board cuts have already made it difficult for justice to be protected, Roberts argued, noting that “because virtually all of their core functions are constitutionally and statutorily required,” the courts have little discretion over what they spend:

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Ten Travesties Of Justice In 2013

Every year, stories emerge that serve as a reminder that the American system of justice means injustice for too many, with some receiving little or no punishment for egregious offenses, while others receive harsh or faulty punishment for much less. Here are some of the worst injustices of 2013:

1. An Alabama blogger is still sitting in a jail cell for exercising his First Amendment rights

Blogger Roger Shuler drew the ire of the powers that be when he continued to write about the alleged extramarital affair of a prominent lawyer rumored to be running for Congress. The lawyer and son of former Alabama governor Bob Riley, Robert Riley, Jr., won a temporary restraining order that prohibited Shuler from writing anything about Riley’s alleged extramarital affair and other related stories. The order itself was almost certainly a violation of First Amendment law. But Alabama officials took the dispute a step further when they pursued him for a traffic stop and arrested him for contempt. In spite of advocacy from the ACLU and others, Shuler has now been in a jail cell for two months for his journalism.

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Our data, our laws

Over the past six months, the steady stream of disclosures from former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has revealed a massive surveillance infrastructure that seemingly touches all Internet and telephone communication across the globe.

While the issue has generated robust debates in many countries, the Canadian political response has been relatively quiet. In an effort to address the lack of oversight over Canadian surveillance activities, Liberal MP and former public safety minister Wayne Easter recently introduced Bill C-551, which would establish a National Security Committee of Parliamentarians.

The bill is a welcome move towards providing greater transparency and accountability for Canadian intelligence agencies, yet attention to oversight is not enough. We also need to address the legal framework under which these agencies operate, and the privacy protections granted to Canadians under the law.

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Monday morning massacre at L.A. Sheriff's Dept.

Any lingering doubt about whether there are deep-seated problems of abuse at Los Angeles County jails should be put to rest by Monday's arrests following the unsealing of formal charges against 18 current or former sheriff's deputies. Any inclination to pass off more than two years of news reports and official probes detailing inmate beatings as simply the result of a few rogue deputies should be shelved.

Some of the allegations are familiar, involving inmates suffering unwarranted abuse and beatings. One of the challenges in coming to grips with civil rights violations perpetrated against convicted criminals is that the victims receive little sympathy from most of the voters and taxpayers who put the sheriff in office and who pay his department's bills; after all, the thinking goes, criminals deserve punishment.

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This is an LA Times editorial.  Tom

From Courts to Communities: The Right Response to Truancy, Running Away, and Other Status Offenses

When Teresa was 14 years old, her mother died. Feeling overwhelmed by the loss and estranged from her father who was grieving in his own way, she began sneaking out at night to be with a 20-year-old man she considered her boyfriend. Teresa’s father disciplined her harshly, which only made life at home even rockier. One morning, Teresa went to school and didn’t come back. Worried about his daughter, Teresa’s father called the police. When the officers found her, they took her to a respite shelter where she would be safe, but would also have some time away from home.

 

 Almost immediately, a crisis counselor began working with Teresa and with her father, and after three days,Teresa was ready to go home and her father had some new ideas about how to talk to his daughter. The counselor also referred Teresa and her father to a therapist nearby who specializes in grief. 

 

Teresa and her father live in Florida, where a statewide network of nonprofit organizations helps families in crisis. Florida developed the network years ago as part of a larger effort to keep troubled teens likeTeresa out of the juvenile justice system. But what would the outcome be for Teresa if she lived in a state without the family crisis network

 

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This is from the Vera Institute.  Tom

Toronto police officer sentenced to 45 days prison for 2010 G20 assault of Adam Nobody

A Toronto police officer convicted of assaulting a protester during the G20 summit has been sentenced to 45 days in prison.

Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani was convicted in September of assault with a weapon for using excessive force during the arrest of protester Adam Nobody on June 26, 2010.

The Crown had called for a “short, sharp sentence of imprisonment” to send a message that those who abuse their positions of public trust and authority “will be dealt with severely.”

Andalib-Goortani’s lawyer, Harry Black, had asked for the officer to receive an absolute discharge.

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Delbert Tibbs, Who Left Death Row and Fought Against It, Dies at 74

It is not easy:

you stand waiting for a train

or a bus that may never come

no friend drives by to catch a ride

cold, tired:

call yourself a poet

but work all day mopping floors and looking out for thieves.

Those lines, describing the experience of an innocent man on death row, are from a poem by Delbert Tibbs, who in 1974 was convicted in Florida of a rape and a murder that he had nothing to do with, it was later found. He spent nearly three years in prison before the State Supreme Court reversed his convictions, vacated his death sentence and freed him. 

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Mark Kleiman, pot's go-to guy

Come New Year's Day, in Washington state and Colorado, marijuana will be legit, courtesy of two ballot initiatives. How do you create a legal business out of an illegal one? After 13 years of Prohibition, the country at least had an earlier legal liquor market to refer to. That's where Mark Kleiman comes in, the go-to expert on these matters. A UCLA professor of public policy and author and coauthor of books like "Marijuana Legalization," he's heard all the jokes about "hemperor" and "your serene high-ness." He was consulted by Washington state's liquor control board, which has to come up with the nuts and bolts for the new law and which asked him for, well, the straight dope.

What did Washington want to know?
They really wanted numbers from us: How big is the market? How do we allocate stores across the counties? What impurities should be tested for? What are the environmental impacts of cannabis production? If we limit the amount produced, what should we use as the basis? Ounces? Grams? Production space?

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Reorganizing Crime Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia

• Looks at the phenomenon in Georgia of 'Thieves-in-law' (vory-v-zakone in Russian), career criminals belonging to a criminal fraternity originating in the 1930s from Soviet prison camps
• Poses questions surrounding criminal resilience to state attacks on organized crime and explores why the Georgian thieves-in-law had particularly weak resilience
• Based on extensive fieldwork and utilizing unique access to primary sources of data such as police files, court cases, archives and expert interviews collected over a two year period

Arising from Soviet prison camps in the 1930s, career criminals known as 'thieves-in-law' exist in one form or another throughout post-Soviet countries and have evolved into major transnational organized criminal networks since the dissolution of the USSR. Intriguingly, this criminal fraternity established a particular stronghold in the republic of Georgia where, by the 1990s, they had formed a mafia network of criminal associations that attempted to monopolize protection in both legal and illegal sectors of the economy. This saturation was to such an extent that thieves-in-law appeared to offer an alternative, and just as powerful, system of governance to the state.

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