Assistant AG Disbarred, How Prison Guards Get Away With Rape & More

"Because of today's ruling, the next person the county targets will have a real opportunity to go to court and challenge the seizure of their car. And they won't have to wait months or years to get it."
 
This week, a panel of federal appellate judges unanimously ruled officials in Wayne County, Michigan are violating citizens’ 14th Amendment rights by seizing their vehicles for months without an opportunity to contest the seizure. The 6th Circuit ruled that Wayne County must provide car owners a post-seizure court hearing within two weeks.
 
"They were sent to federal prison to do time, a certain amount of years. They weren't sentenced to rape."
 
This week, Reason published a stomach turning investigation into the pervasive sexual abuse in FCI Coleman—a federal women's correction facility in Florida—and the government's failure to hold the perpetrators within the federal Bureau of Prisons accountable. Federal prison guards admitted under oath to raping women incarcerated at the facility for years but were allowed to retire before they could be fired or disciplined.
 
"The harm that resulted from the combined misconduct of Verner, Foster, and Kaczmarek cannot be overstated. Many criminal defendants were found guilty, admitted to sufficient facts, or pleaded guilty because of the AGO’s failure to turn over exculpatory evidence."
 
A former Assistant Attorney General has been disbarred in Massachusetts, her supervisor has been publicly reprimanded, and one of her direct reports suspended for 366 days, after the state's Supreme Judicial Court found the trio's professional misconduct compromised tens of thousands of drug convictions in the state. Anne Kaczmarek failed to disclose exculpatory evidence in some 16,500 cases that had been processed by an employee at a drug testing facility in Amherst, Massachusetts, who was using drugs on the job and tainting samples. More than 24,000 convictions have been dismissed in the state as a result of the misconduct. 
 
"The kids suspended, expelled, or arrested are far less likely to graduate and more likely to have further run-ins with the criminal justice system."
 
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is weighing whether to call a special session to address law enforcement concerns over a recently passed ban on the use of certain physical restraint techniques, such as chokeholds, on students. An article published in the Minnesota Reformer this week highlights a forthcoming SUNY/RAND study that gets right to the heart of the issue: do cops make schools safer? The study finds that while school resource officers (SROs) deter or prevent violence in some cases, their presence also leads to an increase in suspensions and referrals into the broader criminal justice system, for instance, which may have long-term negative consequences for students.
 
"I get to see remarkable human beings inside that have so much to offer society, and many of them were sentenced to die in prison."

Since 2009, after a panel of federal judges ordered California to reduce its prison population to alleviate overcrowding, the state has made progress through legislation and enacted ballot initiatives, but advocates say a portion of the population is languishing without action—the thousands of incarcerated individuals sentenced to life without parole (LWOP). Now, lawmakers are considering legislation that would allow those sentenced to LWOP prior to 1990 the ability to petition a judge for a sentence reduction that would put parole back on the table.