Conservatives back sentencing reform legislation

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Co-sponsors of the legislation: Patrick Leahy (D) and Rand Paul (R)

By Alan Bean

It wasn’t too long ago that ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, was shilling for the private prison industry.  Perhaps because that didn’t do much for the group’s reputation, they are now endorsing reforms which, if adopted, could significantly reduce the federal prison population.

Known as the Justice Safety Valve Act, the measure would give federal judges the freedom to depart from mandatory sentencing guidelines in cases involving non-violent offenders.  The idea is that draconian federal sentences should be reserved for the worst of the worst.

Conservatives like this idea because the tax payer foots the bill for unnecessarily harsh prison sentences that do nothing to augment public safety.  Although I have often criticized president Obama for his inaction on the criminal justice reform front, his weak reform record may be a blessing in disguise.  Conservative law makers who instinctively oppose everything the president is for are now free to support this common sense legislation without appearing to endorse one of Obama’s pet projects.

It is nice to see ALEC and FAMM on the same side of an issue.  This is yet another sign that political conservatives are doing far more than their liberal counterparts to further the cause of reform.

I wonder if it would be possible to make this law retroactive?  Ramsey Muniz, an icon of the Chicano movement in Texas, is serving a life sentence because of federal mandatory minimum laws.  Muniz is demonstrably innocent, but you have to spend several hours digging through the arcane details of the case to realize that.  Even those who believe he did the crime must question the justice of keeping a 70 year-old man who can no longer walk without assistance in prison.  And, even if you aren’t offended by the bizarre gyrations the feds used to convict Ramsey, he has never been accused of violent crime.  In short, he is precisely the kind of inmate the Justice Safety Valve Act is designed to help.

Conservative group advocates sentencing reform

A major conservative policy organization has endorsed criminal justice reform, lending further bipartisan support to a bill in Congress that would lessen mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent offenses.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a free-market advocacy group that works with legislators and businesses to craft model legislation, gave its approval to the Justice Safety Valve Act on Monday.

The bill would allow judges to depart from imposing mandatory minimum sentences on nonviolent criminals when they believe different sentences are appropriate.

Such a policy would save money by ensuring that only truly dangerous criminals spend decades in prison on the taxpayer’s dime, wrote Cara Sullivan, a legislative analyst at ALEC.

“This helps ensure lengthy sentences and prison spaces are reserved for dangerous offenders, allowing states to focus their scarce public safety resources on offenders that are a real threat to the community,” she wrote in an email to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “This approach, as opposed to simply throwing more dollars at corrections, reduces prison overcrowding while still holding offenders accountable.”

Many of the people sentenced under mandatory minimums were convicted of selling drugs, and committed no violence. Some were found guilty of breaking federal marijuana laws, even though they resided in states where growing and selling marijuana are legal under state laws.

While many conservative lawmakers once held to a “tough on crime” approach to criminal sentencing, the inefficiency and financial waste of imposing harsh sentences on low-level drug offenders has pushed libertarian-leaning elements of the GOP to embrace the Justice Safety Valve Act. Conservatives are also concerned that federal laws interfering with judges’ abilities to set appropriate sentences — and states’ rights — are just another example of overreach on the part of the Obama administration.

President Obama has not yet taken a stance on the Justice Safety Valve Act, though he previously expressed support for the idea before he became president.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a criminal justice advocacy group, praised ALEC’s decision to add its voice to the call for sentencing reform.

“There is nothing conservative about inefficient, one-size-fits-all sentencing laws that cost billions in tax dollars and offer no public safety benefit in return,” wrote Greg Newburn, Florida project director for FAMM, in an email to TheDC News Foundation. “ALEC’s adoption of a model safety valve reflects the growing consensus among conservative lawmakers that mandatory minimums are ripe for reform.”

The Justice Safety Valve Act is co-sponsored by Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. It also enjoys bipartisan support in the House of Representatives.

For Curtis Flowers, Mississippi is Still Burning

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Thanks to Paul Alexander for getting the Curtis Flowers fiasco before the readers of Rolling Stone.
AGB

For Curtis Flowers, Mississippi Is Still Burning

A death row inmate maintains his innocence in the face of six deeply flawed trials

August 7, 2013 4:40 PM ET

On July 30th, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) held hearings on Capitol Hill entitled “A Conversation on Race and Justice in America” in response to the intense national debate that has resulted from the killing of Trayvon Martin. Racial profiling – “a secret hiding in public,” according to panelist Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center – was discussed, as were Stand Your Ground laws. Less attention was paid to the perilous way the legal system treats some African-Americans who end up in it, especially those with neither the money nor the means to defend themselves.

Consider Curtis Flowers. Today, he sits on Mississippi’s death row, where he has been for 16 years. Tried six times on the same murder charges – the only known person in American history to endure that fate – he has never hedged in proclaiming his innocence, even refusing plea bargains. “I’m not going to say I killed someone when I didn’t,” he said in 2010. “I would rather be executed and go to Heaven and know I did the right thing than to be in this world if I have to admit to something I didn’t do.”

Flowers’ ordeal began in July 1996 on the morning Bertha Tardy and three of her employees were killed execution-style in her furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. They were shot with such precision that it took only five bullets to kill four people. Two weeks earlier, Flowers worked for Tardy for about three days. He said he quit; others said he was fired. Regardless, Doug Evans, the local district attorney, zeroed in on Flowers as a disgruntled employee and made him the prime suspect. (more…)

Is America an idea or a culture?

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Samuel T. Francis in his prime

By Alan Bean

Is America an idea about “liberty and justice for all” that can be embraced by an endless assortment of people from a wild array of cultures; or is America a uniquely White Western cultural phenomenon that only works when White Westerners are in control of the process?

Shortly before his death in 2005, Samuel T. Francis was asked to compose a statement of principles for the Council of Conservative Citizens, an unabashedly racist organization created in 1985 from old White Citizen’s Council mailing lists.  Francis had been an editorial writer and columnist with the Washington Times between 1986 and 1995, but lost his job after criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention’s apology for slavery.  This bold stand transformed Francis into a standard bearer for Lost Cause stalwarts in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.  By the time he authored a statement of principles for the CCC, Francis was terminally ill and didn’t pull any punches.  For example, here’s his take on immigration:

We believe that the United States derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and the European people and that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.

The Council of Conservative Citizens claims that its racist vision is shared by a majority of White people in America.  I hope they are wrong.  Everything hinges on our definition of America.  Are we primarily an idea to which anyone can ascribe, or are we a distinct culture that will always be alien to non-white people with roots in the non-Western world? (more…)

Why an innocent man has been prosecuted six times for the same crime?

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Tardy Furniture looking north to Coast to CoastBy Alan Bean

Doug Evans investigation and prosecution of the infamous 1996 Tardy murders have elicited some strong statements over the years.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has opined that Evans’ desperate attempt to exclude Black people from the jury is the most flagrant example of racially biased jury selection they have ever witnessed.

Robert Johnson, former chief of the Jackson, Mississippi police department, called the investigation that led to Mr. Flowers’ arrest “the worst investigation I have ever seen.”

Curtis Flowers has now been tried six times for the same crime with the state using the same evidence, the same witnesses and the same strategy every time.  Three guilty verdicts have been reversed by the Mississippi Supreme Court because of gross prosecutorial misconduct.  On two other occasions, juries split along racial lines.  In the fourth trial, for instance, all five Black jurors voted to acquit while all seven White jurors were willing to convict.

Prosecutor Doug Evans, has a case he can sell to white jurors.  But Black jurors aren’t buying.

How do we account for this gap in perception?

From the moment four bodies were discovered in a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi,  this case has been driven by racial, social and political anxiety.

Doug Evans was looking at four victims and no murder weapon.  This meant trouble and he knew it. (more…)

Low student performance is all about poverty

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Diane Ravitch

By Alan Bean

The pioneer and perfecter of the current passion for evaluating teachers on the basis of student performance on standardized tests can be laid at the feet of Eric Hanushek, a Stanford professor.  Hanushek believes that bad teachers beget bad students.  Ergo, if you want successful students, fire bad teachers.

No one questions that good teachers are better than bad teachers; but is testing an effective way to tell the difference.  As Diane Ravitch explains below, good teachers who work in poor schools test badly.  Since schools in affluent areas have fewer disciplinary problems and higher rates of student achievement, teachers find them desirable.  Poor schools get teachers with an unusually keen sense of mission or, more often, teachers who were passed over by principals in more affluent schools.

Hanushek is celebrated because he ignores poverty.  You can’t improve public education by throwing money at the problem, he believes.  Students don’t do badly because they come from poor neighborhoods; they perform badly because they have bad teachers.  Fire the worst 10% of any given faculty and the achievement gap between poor and affluent kids disappears. (more…)

Stupid things we still believe about poverty

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By Alan Bean

Emily Badger clearly doesn’t live in Texas.  Her take on “stupid things we used to believe about poverty” are still going strong in the Lone Star State and in the great American heartland generally.  While the charts below indicate that progress has been made in the last couple of centuries, the last three decades have seen the creation of a dramatic wealth gap that is commonly presented as a necessary condition of economic health.  Get too concerned about the guy at McDonald’s toiling for minimum wage and the big boys would be out of business.  Then where would we be?

Meanwhile, poor people are still demonized as a matter of course.  Any suggestion that poverty is “constructed” or that a link exists between unemployment and crime is rejected out of hand (in places like Texas, at least).  We commonly face the myth of false alternatives: either criminals bear the full responsibility for their choices or society is to blame.  The idea that social pressures and bad decisions might be mutually reinforcing never comes up for discussion. (more…)

I was right–the Zimmerman jury was out of its depth

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Juror B-29

Moments after the verdict in the George Zimmerman case came down I argued that a jury without a single African American lacked the social knowledge to get it right.  To understand this case, in other words, you had to be able to view Zimmerman’s actions through the eyes of Trayvon Martin.  You have to be open to the possibility that the young Black man was standing his ground when confronted.

Most Black people instinctively get this; most White people don’t.

As you might expect, I took a lot of heat.  When the post appeared on the Associated Baptist Press blog, half of the comments were deleted as offensive or overly personal.

Readers were particularly offended by my assertion that the jurors in this case were out of their depth.

Now we have interviews from one juror who believes that George Zimmerman’s heart was in the right place when he left his vehicle in pursuit of Trayvon Martin; four jurors who say they strongly disagree with that sentiment and, most recently, revelations from Juror B-29, the only non-White juror.

Two of Juror B-29’s comments are noteworthy; but only one is getting a lot of attention.  First, she told ABC that, in her view, Zimmerman “got away with murder.”

Secondly, and more significantly, she explained why the jury hadn’t convicted on the lesser charge of manslaughter. “What we were trying to figure out was, manslaughter,in order to be charged, we had to prove that when he left home, he said, I’m gonna go kill Trayvon Martin.”

Dozens of news outlets have reported on the “he got away with murder” comment, but hardly anyone noticed Juror B-29’s appraisal of manslaughter or realized that she is dead wrong.  The jury was wildly off the mark on manslaughter, because, as I initially surmised, they were out of their depth.

When jurors asked the judge for clarification of the manslaughter charge they were met with silence.  It had all been explained in the final instructions to the jury.  If they didn’t catch the definition the first time, too bad.

Here’s how manslaughter was defined to the jury:

In order to convict of manslaughter by act, it is not necessary for the State to prove that George Zimmerman had an intent to cause death, only an intent to commit an act that was not merely negligent, justified, or excusable and which caused death.

The state didn’t have to prove that Zimmerman was negligent when he pulled his gun or when he pulled the trigger; merely creating a scenario in which a dangerous physical altercation was a likely outcome was sufficient.

Unfortunately, the prosecution made no attempt to make this case.  Murder 2 was a hard sell.  It forced jurors to guess how things played out between the two men leading up to the discharge of the weapon, and we simply don’t know enough to fill in the blanks.

So why didn’t the prosecution make a case for manslaughter–the only charge supported by the facts?  Because to do that they needed to talk about racial profiling and they clearly didn’t want to go there.

White public opinion is split on the profiling question.  Some think Zimmerman was justified in profiling Martin because everybody knows how those Black thugs are.  And there are those who don’t think the aggressor in this story profiled Trayvon at all.  He left his vehicle because he needed a breath of fresh air or wanted to take in the scenery and just happened upon the man who, moments earlier, prompted his 9-1-1 call.  No wonder prosecutors didn’t want to mess with race–White jurors hate that kind of talk.

Public opinion surveys suggest that Black people were three times as likely as Whites to have a problem with the outcome in this case.  It all comes down to the issue of profiling and whether you identify emotionally with Zimmerman or Martin.  That’s why jury composition means everything in this kind of case.  It should come as no surprise that the only juror who thinks Zimmerman dodged a bullet is non-white.

I generally ignored the Zimmerman trial unless it happened to be on at the gym while I was lifting weights.  Having twice been at the center of media feeding frenzies, I am no fan of the phenomenon.  As the coverage of Jurors B-37 and B-29 demonstrates, most reporters have more interest in the killer quote than uncovering the social significance of the stories they cover.  Journalists love to talk about race and crime, but they are after the heat of warring talking points not the light of discovery.

The Zimmerman trial matters because of what it says about the impact of racial experience on the criminal justice system.  The media has little interest in understanding the news or helping us understand the events unfolding around us.  If you missed Marty Kaplan on Moyer’s and Company a couple of weeks ago, check him out.  Scary stuff; but he’s bang on target.  When the media simply repeat the talking points of political hacks (or attorneys) they aren’t giving us the news, they are being used.  And so are we.

Flowers appeal is devastating

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By Alan Bean

Just over three years after Curtis Flowers was convicted for murdering four people at a Mississippi furniture store in 1996, his attorneys have filed an appeal.  You may wonder how it could take three years to compose an appeal brief, especially in a case so open-and-shut that a jury took only 29 minutes to render a guilty verdict.

This wasn’t Curtis Flowers’ first courtroom rodeo.  In fact, he has gone to trial on these charges six times, more than any other capital defendant in the history of American jurisprudence.

Convictions in Flowers 1 and 2 were reversed by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to gross prosecutorial misconduct (primarily arguing facts not in evidence) and racially biased jury selection procedures.  Other trials ended in hung juries, largely because DA Doug Evans, fearful of another reversal, didn’t take heroic measures to keep African Americans off the jury.  In the most dramatic case, five Black jurors voted to acquit while seven White jurors found Evans’ case convincing. (more…)

Learning from Juror B-37

Aside · · 5 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

A week ago I wrote two posts related to the composition of the jury in the George Zimmerman case.  In the first, I said that common sense suggested that the defendant would be found guilty of manslaughter.  The prosecution had only Zimmerman’s description of the altercation between the two men to work with and that made Murder 2 a tough sell.  But the fact that none of the six jurors looked like the victim in this story troubled me.  My fear was that the jurors would understand why Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin’s presence in the neighborhood suspicious and potentially dangerous.  A single Black juror would have challenged this identification and argued for another way of reading the story.

My second post (which also appeared in the Associated Baptist Press) argued that the jury, though conscientious and well-intentioned, lacked the social experience and the cultural competency to sift through a blizzard of legal considerations.

Most readers who bothered to comment were unimpressed. Some felt that race had no bearing on this case, so the racial composition of the jury didn’t matter. Others insisted that Zimmerman received what the Constitution guarantees: a jury of his peers.

As Bill Stuntz observed shortly before his death, Black jurors are commonly tried by predominantly White juries who are inclined to side with authority figures like police officers and prosecutors and subject to racial bias. (more…)

Holder on Stand Your Ground laws

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Attorney General Eric Holder addressed Stand Your Ground laws in his remarks to the NAACP convention.  Here is the core of his position:

Separate and apart from the case that has drawn the nation’s attention, it’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods. These laws try to fix something that was never broken. There has always been a legal defense for using deadly force if — and the “if” is important — no safe retreat is available.

But we must examine laws that take this further by eliminating the common sense and age-old requirement that people who feel threatened have a duty to retreat, outside their home, if they can do so safely.  By allowing and perhaps encouraging violent situations to escalate in public, such laws undermine public safety.  The list of resulting tragedies is long and — unfortunately — has victimized too many who are innocent. It is our collective obligation — we must stand our ground — to ensure that our laws reduce violence, and take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.

We must also seek a dialogue on attitudes about violence and disparities that are too commonly swept under the rug — by honoring the finest traditions established by generations of NAACP leaders and other nonviolent advocates throughout history; and by paying tribute to the young man who lost his life here last year — and so many others whose futures have been cut short in other incidents of gun violence that pass, too often unnoticed, in our streets: by engaging with one another in a way that is at once peaceful, inclusive, respectful — and strong.

As we move forward together, I want to assure you that the Department will continue to act in a manner that is consistent with the facts and the law.  We are committed to doing everything possible to ensure that — in every case, in every circumstance, and in every community — justice must be done.