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The Big Fix:Reforming the Criminal Justice SystemWhile Twelve Angry Men presents some legal inaccuracies (including a few significant enough to result in a mistrial), it does feature some issues that today interfere with the true purpose of the criminal justice system, and prevent those who have been accused from receiving fair, equitable trials. In the past few years, the criminal justice system has faced increased scrutiny, and calls for reform. This essay asks you to synthesize the information in the following articles to determine the following:Why do we need to reform the criminal justice system?What reforms would address the problems facing the system?In writing your essay, keep the following in mind:Structure: Introduction with hook and thesis; 3 body paragraphs each including 3 specific pieces of cited evidence, and Conclusion explaining the significance of your essay/topicSources: Include at least 2 sources in each body paragraph, and cite a minimum of 4 sources in the essay as a whole. Your sources need to be properly listed on a Works Cited page.Evidence: Use a variety of evidence, including paraphrases and quotes. When using quotes, make sure to integrate them so they are smoothly incorporated into the paragraphs. Provide properly formatted in-text citations with all of your evidence. Format: Properly follow MLA formatting guidelines on all aspects of the essay.Works CitedBaradaran, Shima. "The Right Way to Shrink Prisons." New York Times, Late Edition 31 May 2011: A23. Proquest. . . Accessed 28 March 2017.Lichtblau, Eric. "Death Penalty Reforms Gather New Momentum; Justice: With Dozens of Death Row Inmates Freed, a Cry Rises for Precautions, such as DNA Tests." Los Angeles Times 25 June 2001: A1. Proquest. . Accessed 28 March 2017. Vanden Heuvel, Katrina. "Healing the Rot at the Heart of the Criminal Justice System." The Washington Post 6 May 2014: np. Proquest. . 28 March 2017. ---. “A National Cry for Criminal Justice Reform.” Washington Post 24 February 2015: np. Proquest. . Accessed 28 March 2017.Weinstein, Henry. "Justice System is 'Broken,' Lawyers Say." Los Angeles Times 24 June 2004: A.14. Proquest. . Accessed 28 March 2017.---. "Texas Poised to Reform its Criminal Defense System for Poor." Los Angeles Times 25 May 2001: A.15. Proquest. . 28 March 2017. The Right Way to Shrink PrisonsBy Shima BaradaranLAST week the Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population after finding that the state's penal system was so overcrowded that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. What the court didn't do, however, was provide any guidance about how to do it, giving rise to fears of violent convicts being set free and increasing crime rates.Rather than seek major criminal justice reforms to reduce the prisoner numbers, including scrapping California's harsh "three strikes" sentencing laws, Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed simply moving the surplus state prisoners to county jails. This does nothing to reduce California's disproportionately high incarceration rates and could just transfer the overcrowding to local jails.Fortunately, there is a more lasting solution to overcrowding, one that gets to the heart of exploding inmate populations nationwide: reform the rules governing pretrial detention, in part by using formulas to help judges better determine which defendants are unlikely to commit crimes while on bail. Doing so not only would make the system more fair, but also would significantly reduce the number of people who are unnecessarily jailed and even reduce crime rates.Every year America spends close to $66 billion to keep people behind bars. But almost 500,000 of the 2.3 million prisoners aren't convicts; rather, they are accused individuals awaiting trial.While some defendants are able to pay their bail and go free, most cannot, because many judges, lacking firm insight into what types of prisoners are too dangerous to release, set high bail amounts knowing the accused can't afford them. Though some of these defendants will eventually be found not guilty and go free, keeping them incarcerated before their trials creates a burden on the prison system.What's more, detention begets more detention. Defendants detained before trial are more likely to be convicted if they go to trial, more likely to receive prison sentences rather than probation when sentenced, and, given their weak bargaining power with prosecutors while locked up, are more likely to have longer sentences.A few jurisdictions, however, have begun to think outside the prison cell. In line with recommendations endorsed by the American Bar Association, Miami-Dade County cut costs associated with detention by supervising defendants outside jail at a total cost of around $400 per defendant per year, compared with $20,000 for incarcerated defendants. In Iowa, alternatives to pretrial detention saved the state's Southern District $1.7 million in 2009.These and other jurisdictions have also cut costs using technology, like G.P.S. trackers and ankle bracelets, that allow defendants to remain at home -- with supervision -- while awaiting trial.True, while these solutions may make sense from a budgetary standpoint, critics worry that increasing pretrial releases will present a threat to public safety, especially since judges are typically left to make bail decisions based simply on a gut feeling.The risk of release can be largely reduced by arming judges with more data to inform their decisions. Frank McIntyre, an economist, and I recently examined data from over 100,000 felony defendants over a 15-year period, and we found very clear trends regarding which defendants are more likely to commit crimes while free on bail.For example, judges often detain too many older defendants (people over 30), defendants with clean records and defendants charged with fraud or public order offenses -- in other words, people who are less likely to commit crimes while out on bail. On the other hand, judges release too many young defendants with extensive records, people who are more likely to break the law while awaiting trial.This data could be used to create a set of guidelines that would give judges a better sense of which defendants to release. Of course, judges must use individual discretion and carefully consider local data with pretrial detention decisions. However, our models indicate that such guidelines could safely lead to the release of up to 25 percent more defendants -- and a significant reduction in prison costs and crime rates.Given eye-popping local, state and federal deficits, it's unlikely that California will be the only state to face the tough choices involved in reducing its prison population. With the right data on pretrial defendants, though, judges can help make that task a lot easier.SHIMA BARADARAN is an associate professor of law at Brigham Young University and the chairwoman of the American Bar Association Pretrial Release Task Force.Death Penalty Reforms Gather New MomentumBy Eric LichtblauOne was a numbers runner from Boston who was set up by the mob. Another was a Central Valley welder whose lawyer failed to do even basic defense work. A third was a mildly retarded Chicago man who spent 17 years in prison for murder and was let go only after someone else confessed.The three men are among nearly 100 former convicts who share a numbing notoriety: All were freed from death row and released from prison, some just hours before execution, because of questions about their guilt.Amid a remarkable flurry of recent debate about who society executes and why, the freed convicts are Exhibit A in a controversial push by Democratic congressional leaders beginning this week to reform death penalty procedures nationwide.Backers say the $50-million measure protects the innocent by ensuring that prisoners have access to DNA testing and adequate lawyers. Opponents attack it as a back door to "abolishing" the death penalty through procedural hoops, making it all but impossible to enforce.What all agree is that the Democrats' stunning takeover of the Senate earlier this month now means a much higher profile and a legitimate shot at success for the proposal, which Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) has made one of his priorities.And that has death penalty supporters worried."The death penalty is certainly under attack. It's under a well- funded and virulent attack, and much of it unfortunately is based on misinformation," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, a conservative group that supports capital punishment.No one on either side of the debate thinks the United States will return any time soon to the climate of the mid-1970s, when the U.S. Supreme Court banned execution as cruel and unusual punishment.But even death penalty advocates such as Scheidegger detect a "softening" in recent attitudes, with debate often centering less on the morality of capital punishment than on how it is applied."I think the growing national consensus on the death penalty is that if we're going to have the death penalty, it has to be fair," said Stephen Bright, a prominent death penalty opponent in Atlanta who will testify Wednesday at a Senate hearing that kicks off what promises to be vigorous debate on Leahy's proposed Innocence Protection Act.Recent polls show that, while a majority of Americans still favor the death penalty, the numbers are shrinking. California saw a particularly sharp drop, with support declining from 78% in 1990 to 58% last year, according to a Los Angeles Times Poll.The pace of executions also appears to be slowing. There have been 37 executions in the nation so far this year, down from 85 for all of 2000 and 98 in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.The steady stream of death row inmates declared innocent, including a Florida man acquitted less than three weeks ago of murdering a Tampa couple, has alarmed many people. Illinois has exonerated so many inmates facing execution--13 in 13 years--that Gov. George Ryan declared a death penalty moratorium last year.With about 3,700 prisoners nationwide sentenced to death, officials in some parts of the country have rejected calls for moratoriums. But a series of recent developments has revitalized the debate, testing the resolve of death penalty backers and emboldening critics.Consider the events of just the last three weeks.* In Indiana, the federal government carried out its first two executions in 38 years amid intense controversy. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh's execution was postponed for a month after the government admitted it failed to give the defense 4,000 pages of documents. Lawyers for Juan Raul Garza, a drug kingpin convicted in three murders, argued that the deck was stacked against him as a Latino in Texas trying to avoid a death sentence.* In Washington, D.C., Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft declared just days before Garza's execution that there was no ethnic or geographic bias against federal death row inmates. Criminal trends, not discrimination, explain why about 80% of the federal inmates facing death are minorities, he said. Ashcroft's findings enraged critics, who attacked his data as suspect and incomplete.* In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush signed a bill preventing the execution of mentally retarded convicts, a move in step with recent decisions in other states. In Texas, the Legislature did the same in an effort to soften the state's notoriety for executing people, but Gov. Rick Perry vetoed the measure.* In Alabama, the electrocution of a man with an IQ of 69, convicted in the killings of his ex-wife and two others, was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court after his attorneys argued that mentally retarded convicts should not be put to death. (Mental retardation is usually defined as having an IQ below 70.) The high court is expected to consider that question in another case involving a North Carolina defendant.* In Europe, where most nations ban the death penalty, President Bush told reporters that "we should never execute someone who is retarded," a seeming shift from his position as governor of Texas that sent White House aides scrambling to clarify his remarks.* And in France, opposition to capital punishment forced the United States to forgo the death penalty against James Charles Kopp, accused of killing an upstate New York abortion provider, before the French would agree to extradite him following his March arrest."What I think we're seeing," said Elisabeth Semel, director of the American Bar Assn.'s Death Penalty Representation Project, "is that this country is undergoing a reexamination of the death penalty."We haven't reached the point where we can say the death penalty has been rejected, but the doubts and the discomfort and the dissatisfaction are becoming very pronounced," she said.So pronounced that many death penalty supporters believe that the debate has tilted too far toward protecting the rights of the accused and away from protecting the rights of the victims.In the view of some law enforcement groups and supporters of the death penalty, Leahy's proposed Innocence Protection Act risks pandering to the guilty.The bill seeks to ensure convicted offenders access to DNA testing and to prevent the premature destruction of biological evidence.It also would provide $50 million for a national commission to establish standards for ensuring that death row inmates have competent lawyers to defend them. States that do not meet the standards could lose substantial federal funds for prisons and other projects.Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, said incompetent defense attorneys extend well beyond a few lawyers in Texas who were caught napping during capital punishment trials."The quality of legal defense in this country is just horrible," he said. "People are being processed through the courts like an assembly line. It's just not justice."While all agree that the goals of the legislation are noble, opponents counter that the vast majority of inmates are ably defended. Joshua K. Marquis, a prosecutor in Oregon who is a board member of the National District Attorneys Assn., said the ill- advised reforms contained in the legislation could wreak havoc on the criminal justice system.DNA isn't a "magic bullet" that can instantly determine the true culprit in any crime, Marquis said. He maintained that the Leahy bill allows so much "wiggle room" in determining who gets DNA testing that it invites abuse by criminals who have no legitimate prospects of getting out of prison."As drafted, I'm concerned that this would basically be a functional abolition of the death penalty, and it would create an enormous logjam" of forensics tests, he said. "There's a great deal here that would make the death penalty virtually impossible to enforce."Marquis testified against an earlier incarnation of Leahy's bill last year, when a competing plan from Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), with much less expansive DNA requirements, helped kill Leahy's proposal.But a lot has changed since then.Eleven more death row inmates have been freed since January 2000. And with the Democrats' takeover of the Senate, Leahy has replaced Hatch as the influential chairman of the Judiciary Committee.Passage of Leahy's measure is considered far from a done deal. Although it has more than 200 co-sponsors from both parties in the House and Senate, it faces a potential threat from a fellow Democrat: Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.Feinstein has offered a compromise that would limit those defendants eligible for DNA testing. Her version also would use financial inducements, rather than penalties, to encourage states to meet national standards for defense attorneys.Whichever version wins out, "Leahy deserves credit for making this a huge issue," said a senior aide to another Democrat."This is an issue that people didn't even want to touch a few years ago. I mean, competent counsel for defendants? That's considered being weak on crime," the official said. "Leahy has already moved this issue a lot further along than anyone really thought it could go."Healing the Rot at the Heart of the Criminal Justice SystemBy Katrina Vanden HeuvelAt 6:23 p.m. last Tuesday, as many Americans sat down to eat dinner, Clayton Lockett lay down to die. More accurately, an Oklahoma prison official strapped him to a gurney, sedated him and then injected him in the groin with an untested mix of two more drugs--one to stop his breathing, the other to stop his heart.Quickly, it became clear that the coldly clinical execution -- what the head of the Oklahoma American Civil Liberties Union called "a human science experiment" -- had gone horribly awry. At 6:36 p.m., despite being pronounced unconscious, Lockett's head lifted off the bed. He began moving and mumbling. At 6:39, convulsing, he uttered the words, "oh, man." By the time the director of prisons announced that there had been a vein failure and issued a stay of execution, it was too late. At 7:06 p.m., Lockett suffered a massive heart attack and breathed his last -- 43 excruciating minutes after the execution began.While Lockett was undoubtedly guilty of heinously raping a young woman and shooting and burying alive another, his state-administered death -- just the latest in a horrific series of botched executions -- serves as a stark reminder that the death penalty has been a moral, economic and practical failure. According to a new study, 1 out of every 25 people sentenced to death between 1973 and 2004 -- around 300 people -- were likely innocent. Many of these wrongful convictions stem from a well-documented racial bias in the criminal justice system -- 55 percent of death row inmates are black or Hispanic, and those who kill whites are far more likely to receive the death penalty than killers whose victims are black. Keeping the country's 3,000-plus inmates on death row costs us billions -- California alone spends $184 million annually on capital punishment -- all for a system that experts agree has never been proven to be a succesful deterrent.But while incidents like Lockett's illuminate one corner of the bleak cell that is the American criminal justice system, we cannot ignore the larger rot at the heart of the enterprise. As of 2012, 2.2 million Americans were in jail or prison -- by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. Roughly 60 percent of prisoners are minorities, prisoners of what the legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls "The New Jim Crow." Many are victims of the "war on drugs," which, through mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws and gaping sentencing disparities, has swept up millions of nonviolent drug offenders. We spend $80 billion per year on our prison system -- and state spending on prisons has grown six times faster than its spending on higher education.What have these draconian detention policies bought us? Higher rates of violent crime than European countries that have more moderate sentencing policies. Revolving-door recidivism that sees more than 40 percent of released prisoners rearrested within three years. Promising young lives destroyed by the possession of a few ounces of drugs that are now legal in several states. We call it a criminal justice system, but justice is increasingly hard to come by.Fortunately, we're beginning to see an encouraging shift -- driven, in no small part, by a surprisingly transpartisan coalition of liberals and libertarian-leaning Republicans.The 2008 financial crisis forced states to confront their "addiction to incarceration," says Vanita Gupta, the ACLU'sdeputy legal director, while historically low crime rates have created a space "for a more rational conversation about . . . what works and doesn't work in the criminal justice system." As reforms have caused incarceration rates to fall and the sky has not fallen with it, Americans are increasingly supportive of such measures.States including California and New York have enacted reforms such as moving to curb solitary confinement, while Michigan has eliminated most mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and implemented a statewide initiative to improve post-reintegration services. But it's not just blue states that are rethinking criminal justice policies.Texas passed a series of reforms to reduce incarceration, and since 2007 the percentage of Texans in prison has fallen by 20 percent -- compared to 5 percent nationally -- and crime is at its lowest rate since 1968. In 2010, South Carolina eliminated mandatory minimums for a number of drug offenses and saw its incarceration rate drop 4 percent in a year.At the federal level, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and tea party darlingMike Lee (R-Utah) have introduced legislation that would give judges greater discretion in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders. In a landmark speech in February, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced a series of steps to reduce the prison population and add greater fairness to sentencing and rehabilitation efforts. Even support for the death penalty -- still at 60 percent -- is at a 40-year low, with six states abolishing capital punishment since 2006.And last week's horror drove President Obama to direct a Justice Department review of the death penalty's application -- a small but encouraging move."I think we're witnessing a sea change in this country around criminal justice," Gupta says. "It's really unprecedented . . . and we need to be able to seize the moment."After all, a country where millions of its citizens languish behind bars cannot call itself "the land of the free."A National Cry for Criminal Justice ReformBy Katrina Vanden HeuvelOn the heels of the Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin tragedies -- and in light of more recent injustices like the fatal shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an unarmed Mexican national whom Pasco, Wash., police officers saw fit to shoot multiple times despite his apparent surrender -- there's plenty of reason to despair the sorry state of our criminal justice system and the havoc it wreaks on the lives of too many innocent victims and their families.But these days, there is some reason for hope. In the wake of so much cop-on-civilian violence, we're beginning to hear a national rallying cry for criminal justice reform -- and not just from protestors and progressives, who have been leading the charge for decades, but also from unlikely allies, including the Koch Brothers and Newt Gingrich. This is an issue that unites the ACLU and Americans for Tax Reform, the Center for American Progress and FreedomWorks. And given this broad-based enthusiasm behind fixing our criminal justice system, it's time we paid attention to a critical component that's been missing from the conversation: the crisis in our nation's local jails.Although we hear plenty about increasing rates of mass incarceration within state and federal prisons, we hear much less about the role played by local jails. This silence should be startling, as there are 11.7 million local jail admissions every year in the United States -- twice as many as there were 20 years ago -- compared to 631,000 state and federal prison admissions. The problem looks especially stark -- and constitutionally troublesome -- when you consider that, at any given moment, some three-fifths of the 722,000 prisoners in America's local jails have not been convicted of the alleged crime for which they're being detained. Many, in fact, are simply too poor to post even a small bail to get out while their cases are being processed.A recently released report from the Vera Institute of Justice paints a disturbing picture. It found that nearly 75 percent of local-jail admits are suspects who have committed nonviolent crimes like traffic, property, drug, or public-order offenses -- people, in other words, who rarely pose a significant risk to public safety and who don't need to be incarcerated. Further, the report found that social cost of the rapid growth of incarceration in local jails has been compounded by its enormous monetary cost to taxpayers. From 1982 to 2011, the cost of building and running jails increased by nearly 235 percent. "Of the more than $60 billion spent annually on correctional institutions," the report says, "$22.2 billion is spent by local jurisdictions." What's more, the racial disparities that define so many aspects of our criminal justice system -- from stop-and-frisk to mass prison incarceration -- are fixtures of local jails, too. While blacks and Latinos comprise nearly a third of the overall prison population, they represent half of prisoners in local facilities.Making matters worse, unlike with prisons and penitentiaries, there is no single federal level fix to jails. Local jails in America comprise a patchwork of systems that are run independently, operate under different punitive philosophies and face different practical challenges. Put differently, there are more than 3,000 sherrifs in charge of our local jails, each contributing uniquely to the problem in his or her own unique way, from New Orleans's Marlin Gusman, who presides over the "worst city jail in America," to Maricopa County, Ariz.'s Joe Arpaio, whose alleged abuses of Latinos boggle the mind and sicken the stomach.In the face of such a daunting challenge -- and in addition to the political willpower needed to both push reform forward and roll failed "tough on crime" tactics back -- we need real resources to help cities and counties develop alternatives to incarceration and to end our overreliance on local jails. The MacArthur Foundation has committed $75 million to do just that. The Safety and Justice Challenge is an initiative that will focus "where over-incarceration begins," supporting up to 20 jurisdictions in their work to reduce the population of local jails. Framed as a competition, the challenge encourages jurisdictions to think creatively and to derive evidence-based solutions to the problem. The competition is open to any jurisdiction -- state, county, city, district or tribal -- that maintains at least 50 beds in its jail system.There are already promising examples on the ground.In response to overwhelming evidence that shows how jails often serve as the last stop for mentally ill people who can't find other community resources, the police department in Portland, Ore. , now provides special training for all officers to help them better manage people with mental illnesses. The department also runs a mobile crisis unit to help people the mentally ill get treatment instead of a costly jail sentence that often impairs recovery.In Minnesota, the Hennepin County District Attorney's office partners with the nonprofit Operation de Novo to help low-risk arrestees make amends through community service and a payment plan, not jail time. So far, it has kept 800 people out of jail and collects more than $250,000 in restitution for victims of crimes.We need more programs like these, championed not just by advocates and researchers, but also by law enforcement officials, prosecutors and judges who see these problems firsthand (and who must deal with the results of inadequate "solutions"). More Americans than ever, across a transpartisan spectrum, now understand that incarceration-as-usual isn't working. We need more people to recognize that local jails are a big part of the problem, and that they can -- and must -- be part of the solution.Justice System is “Broken,” Lawyers SayBy Henry WeinsteinThe American criminal justice system relies too heavily on imprisoning people and needs to consider more effective alternatives, according to a study released Wednesday by the American Bar Assn., the nation's largest lawyers' organization."For more than 20 years, we've gotten tougher on crime," said Dennis W. Archer, a former Detroit mayor and the group's current president. But it is unclear, he said, whether the U.S. is any safer for having 2.1 million people behind bars, including 160,000 in California."We can no longer sit by as more and more people -- particularly in minority communities -- are sent away for longer and longer periods of time while we make it more and more difficult for them to return to society after they serve their time," Archer said at a Washington news conference. "The system is broken. We need to fix it."Both the number of incarcerated Americans and the cost of locking them up are massive, the report said, and have been escalating significantly in recent years.Between 1974 and 2002, the number of inmates in federal and state prisons rose six-fold. By 2002, 476 out of every 100,000 Americans were imprisoned, according to Justice Department statistics. That compares with 100 per every 100,000 in Western European countries such as England, Germany and Italy.In 1982, the states and federal government spent $9 billion on jails and prisons. By 1999, the figure had risen to $49 billion.The study was launched in response to an August speech by Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in which he urged the association to study "the inadequacies -- and the injustices -- in our prison and correctional systems."Kennedy, who was appointed to the high court by President Reagan, said last year that "our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long." He called for the abolition of mandatory minimum sentences, saying the system gives prosecutors too much power to, in effect, determine sentences by the nature of the charges they file.He also made pointed remarks about the demographics of the nation's inmates. "Nationwide, more than 40% of the prison population consists of African American inmates," Kennedy said. "In some cities, more than 50% of young African American men are under the supervision of the criminal justice system."That reality is not likely to change, according to the group's study. Based on trends, a black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of being imprisoned during his lifetime, while the chances for a Latino male are 1 in 6, and for a white male, 1 in 17.On Wednesday, Archer and George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg, who led the association's Kennedy Commission, presented its report to the justice at its Washington headquarters. "Society ought to ask itself how it's allocating its resources," Kennedy said in accepting the report, noting that while the number of prisoners increases, the nation's schools do not have adequate funds for music and sports programs.The report contains numerous reform proposals. Among them: the repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing laws; more funding for substance abuse and mental health programs; assistance for prisoners reentering society; task forces to study racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system; and expanded use of clemency and pardons to reduce sentences."These recommendations are intended to make our criminal justice systems more effective and to utilize our limited resources more efficiently," Saltzburg said. "For too long we have focused almost exclusively on locking up criminals.... We have to remember that roughly 95% of the people we lock up eventually get out. Our communities will be safer and our corrections budgets less strained if we better prepare inmates to successfully reenter society without returning to a life of crime."The commission said that, based on past statistics, about one- third of the 650,000 inmates set to be released this year were expected to return to prison.The report was based on nine months of work by a panel of lawyers and judges from around the country, including lawyer Andrea S. Ordin, who was the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles during the Carter administration. Public hearings were held in Washington, San Antonio and Sacramento.The commission put considerable emphasis on reducing recidivism rates. The report recommended that Congress and state legislatures eliminate "unnecessary legal barriers" that make it difficult for released prisoners to become productive members of society. In particular, the report noted, individuals convicted of drug offenses, even minor ones, were permanently ineligible for federal student loans, housing assistance or other public aid.In the same vein, the report urged Congress to repeal mandatory minimum sentences, including those for drug crimes, suggesting that the laws tended "to be tough on the wrong people." For example, the average federal drug trafficking sentence was 72.7 months in 2001, compared with a 34.3-month average in manslaughter cases.The commission's recommendations will be taken up at the group's annual conference in Atlanta in August. If the 400,000-member organization endorses the recommendations, its leaders will then be in a position to formally advocate the changes at the state and federal levels.Texas Poised to Reform its Criminal Defense System for PoorBy Henry WeinsteinTexas legislators on Thursday approved dramatic changes in the state's system of representing indigent criminal defendants, culminating a battle that came to national attention during the 2000 presidential election when then-Gov. George W. Bush had to face questions about defense lawyers who slept through death penalty trials.The reforms are much stronger than a set that Bush vetoed in 1999, and some observers--including state Sen. Rodney Ellis (D- Houston), one of the chief sponsors of the legislation--said there was little doubt that the public scrutiny Texas' procedures received during the election played a role in the outcome.On Thursday, the Senate approved a revised bill, already passed by the House, paving the way for it to go to Gov. Rick Perry, who is expected to sign the measure.Passage of the measure marks "a milestone in the evolution of Texas' criminal justice system," said Rep. Juan J. Hinojosa (D- Edinburg), principal sponsor in the Texas House."This is the single largest step Texas has taken to improve indigent defense practices across the state," said Austin attorney Bill Beardall, legal director of Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit group that played a key role in advocating reform.Appleseed issued a detailed report last December saying poor Texans charged with crimes frequently languished in jail for months without a lawyer and often received poor representation when they finally got one. More than 80% of defendants in criminal cases in Texas are indigent.The legislation provides that an arrested person must be brought before a magistrate within 48 hours of arrest.For the first time in Texas, there will be time limits on how soon attorneys must be provided to indigents charged with crimes-- within 24 hours after appearing before a magistrate in large counties and within 72 hours in counties under 250,000 population.The measure also creates a 12-member task force to establish for the first time statewide standards for appointing defense attorneys. The bill provides that there can be three types of defense representation: a public defender system; the creation of a "wheel" of acceptable attorneys who would be chosen in rotation; or some other acceptable system set up by judges and commissioners in a given county. Appointments must be allocated among qualified attorneys in a "fair, neutral and nondiscriminatory manner."The bill also makes it easier for defense lawyers to be reimbursed for investigative expenses and the use of experts such as psychiatrists.In another first, the state will distribute $12 million annually in grants to assist counties with additional expenses incurred in providing indigent representation.The pending changes were lauded by criminal justice consultant Robert Spangenberg of West Newton, Mass., who has spent considerable time in Texas investigating the situation."Just the fact that the bill requires judges to publish and distribute the requirements for appointment of counsel and fees is a major step forward," Spangenberg said. "Prior to now, individual judges had so much control in the appointment process there was no way to determine how it happened."Still, Spangenberg cautioned, "this is not a perfect bill. This is not the end of indigent defense problems in Texas."Some defense lawyers were more critical. John Niland of the Texas Defender Service, which provides free representation to defendants appealing death penalty convictions, said key parts of the bill had been "gutted." He expressed particular concern that the standards for an attorney to be appointed in a capital case had been weakened.Currently, the state's rate of per capita spending on indigent representation is the second lowest in the nation, higher only than that of North Dakota.Texas is one of only three states in the nation that has provided no state funding for indigent defense. All such funding has come from each of the state's 254 counties, leading to a patchwork system that varied wildly in quality, according to the Appleseed report.Unlike California, where virtually every county has a tax- supported public defender office, only a few Texas counties have such systems. In addition, Texas is the only large state where populous cities such as Houston, in Harris County, have no public defender system.In most counties, including Harris--which has sent more people to death row than most states--lawyers are picked by individual judges to represent indigents on a case-by-case basis and there have been no statewide standards for qualifications. Two cases pending on appeal--one in federal court and one in state court--involve trials in Harris County where defense lawyers slept through significant portions of a death penalty case.In recent days, county commissioners, who expressed dismay about potential costs of the new legislation, wrested one significant concession--an amendment withholding appointment of a government- paid attorney to an indigent individual who is free on bail but not formally charged with a crime. Such persons would not get the services of a government-paid attorney until their first court appearance.Some Texas judges oppose the bill and may urge Perry to veto the measure as they lobbied Bush to kill even weaker legislation in 1999.Judges, who are elected in Texas and will lose the virtually unfettered power they now have over appointing lawyers for indigents, can wield enormous behind-the-scenes influence in the state, said Michael K. Moore, a University of Texas-Arlington political science professor who co-authored a Texas Bar Assn. report in September that described Texas' system as a "national embarrassment."Moore said that although a number of advocacy groups and individuals played key roles in the reform effort, the person most responsible is the president."George Bush is the reason this passed," Moore said. "Had it not been for Bush's run for the presidency and his veto of the 1999 bill and all the media attention he brought to Texas, we would be nowhere near where we are now." ................
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