From Marcia Killingsworth’s always informative blog, Intown Writer, this story of keeping career criminal Andre Grier off the streets. For now, at least:
[R]ecently, CourtWatch Coordinator Janet Martin and one of our community prosecutors Assistant District Attorney Kimani King alerted us to State of Georgia vs. Andre Grier 09SC77314, a case coming before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Wendy L. Shoob. ...
I have been watching the growth of court-watching in Georgia, and it is encouraging to see the practice taking hold. Nothing will change on the streets until public scrutiny is brought to bear on the courts, where evidence abounds that judges have been breaking and bending the intent of Georgia’s sentencing laws with no professional consequences whatsoever.
No consequences for judges, even when they actually violate Georgia’s sentencing laws. No prosecutor dare complain when a judge cuts an illicit deal with an offender — because the prosecutor must appear before that judge, or one of that judge’s peers and colleagues, every single day. You can’t be critical of judges and be effective in the courtroom. So there are no consequences for judges, even when their decision to overlook the law or their failure to do their jobs with appropriate diligence results in preventable murders, like the killing of Dr. Eugenia Calle. ...
Back in the 1990’s, Georgia Lt. Governor Mark Taylor made it a priority to build the state’s DNA crime database. He did this long before other states got on board, and for many years Georgia was rightly viewed as a leader in using DNA to solve violent crimes. Taylor was driven by his strong commitment to victims of rape and child molestation who had been denied justice. He did not heed the civil rights and convict rights lobbies who tried to stir up hysteria over using DNA to solve crimes (ironically, these same activists are howling over the Supreme Court’s utterly reasonable decision last week not to enshrine post-conviction DNA as a blanket, federal right, when 46 states already guarantee it, as even Barry Scheck admits: don’t believe virtually anything you read about this case on the editorial pages).
Taylor’s leadership on DNA databasing yielded an extraordinary number of database “hits” long before other states got their databases up and running. In 1998, only convicted and incarcerated sex offenders were required to submit DNA samples in Georgia, yet 13 repeat-offender rapists were immediately linked to other sexual assaults, and scores of “unidentified offender” profiles were readied to be used if those offenders were finally caught and tested. ...
Sgt. Scott Kreher of the Atlanta Police Department, has been returned to desk duties as Mayor Shirley Franklin continues down the path of using the D.A.’s office to “investigate” him for importune remarks made during a hearing on denying medical benefits to the city’s disabled officers. Stephanie Ramage, at The Ramage Report, has issued another call to restore Sgt. Kreher to his full duties. It’s an amazing plea for forgiveness and the respect the police deserve.
Along the lines of Stephanie’s blog, I’ve been having some interesting conversations with a young police officer at my gym. What always strikes me when I’m talking to police is how they view their jobs as a calling, not just a place to punch the clock. The young officer at my gym told me that he does not do overtime because he recognizes the need to be able to go home and have a life at the end of his shift, because the job is so intense and what is being asked of police officers is so emotionally challenging. ...
I’ve been writing this week about the predictable reactions to the semi-annual release of the Uniform Crime Report statistics.
In Atlanta, much is being made of the fact that violent crime is down. However, burglaries and larcenies are up — substantially. Why might this be? ...
As I’ve mentioned several times, most crime is committed by a small number of very prolific offenders. Remove these people from the streets, impose real consequences, and crime rates will drop.
But so long as the courts continue to let people off for their first offense, whatever it may be, and then for their second and their third and their fourth offenses, with a slap on the wrist and time served or probation, then the streets will remain dangerous. ...
The release of the FBI’s semi-annual report on crime has provided Atlanta’s pathologically tone-deaf Mayor and the Chief-of-Police-In-Absentia with another opportunity to shower contempt on every citizen of the city. What else could inspire the Mayor to repeat the words, “the city is ‘safer now than it has been in decades’,” given her knowledge of public feelings on her attitude?
Apparently, according to City Hall, a slight drop in the still unacceptable high rates of some crime in some areas, a rise in crime rates in other areas, and a sharp rise in property crime rates is cause to break out the bubbly. ...
As elected officials in Atlanta crowd the microphone to denounce Sgt. Scott Kreher for saying something importune about Mayor Shirley Franklin, the list grows . . . of elected officials in Atlanta grandstanding on Kreher while refusing to comment on the city’s grotesque treatment of wounded police officers, the real issue.
Here is a video Kreher helped create that details the systematic abuse of the officers by the city. And here is a petition supporting Kreher, a decent guy who lost his temper over real injustice. Not fake injustice. I urge you to read the text of the petition, if you want to know what really happened. ...
Why not spend the money actually trying the cases instead? Why bother having a justice system at all?
If the genius of democracy is the peaceful transfer of power through elections, the tragedy of democracy is the exploitation of this public goodwill by elected and appointed officials who treat their last year or so in office (sometimes, their entire time in office) like a tin pot dictatorship, holing up and divvying the spoils while behaving as if the needs of the people are beneath their concern.
There’s little the public can do about a lame duck elected official who treats them with contempt. Little, that is, except doing their homework for the next election, noting who is aligned with whom, voting accordingly — and carefully counting the towels after each transfer of power is complete. ...
Michael Ledford’s attorneys want the jury to believe that Ledford is not responsible for murder and rape — is not responsible for any of the rapes he committed — because he once fell out of a tree.
If they believe that he is utterly incapable of controlling himself, and that he must rape and kill, then where were they when he was released from prison? Why didn’t these experts — or rather their peers, somebody from the cohort of prison psychiatrists — make the case that Ledford should have been committed to an institution upon release from prison? For surely he has not fallen out of another tree since his release: he has not changed. If he was that dangerous and that crazy a few years ago, why did nobody do anything then? ...
The sentencing phase has begun in the Silver Comet Trail case, and this is a good opportunity to see the types of things that keep or get a killer off death row — not just now, during sentencing, but later, during the endless appeals that will inevitably follow.
Anti-death penalty activists always use the “evidence” presented during the sentencing phase to try to get their clients off death row, “evidence” in quotes because the types of things that get presented in court during sentencing are wildly subjective. Nevertheless, if the defense says later that jurors did not consider these factors appropriately, there’s an appeal. And if one defense lawyer says later that the defense lawyer at trial did not present this subjective “evidence” appropriately, there’s another appeal. ...
From 11 Alive, Atlanta, which carried the story after all sorts of officials dropped the ball:
Stefan [Ferraro] is an 11-year-old boy with Autism. A judge ruled he was physically and verbally abused at school.. . . Stefan cannot speak. He has Autism, and is non-verbal. ...
Some mop-up for the week:
The Silver Comet Trail murder case is moving along despite efforts by the defense to derail it. Tragically, Michael Ledford’s mother had tried to get her son put back in jail before Jennifer Ewing was killed: ...
On Sunday, May 10, the Atlanta Journal Constitution published an article by Bill Torpy that raises troubling questions about what is going on in Atlanta’s courtrooms. Like this April 10 story by Steve Visser, Torpy’s story focuses on an element of the justice system that receives less attention than policing but is arguably far more responsible for the presence of dangerous felons on Atlanta’s streets: the choices, both legal and administrative, made by Atlanta’s judges.
We invest judges with extraordinary power. We allow judicial discretion in all sorts of sentencing and administrative decisions. Legislators have tried to limit judges’ discretion in recent years by imposing minimum mandatory sentence guidelines and repeat offender laws. But Georgia’s sentencing guidelines still give judges far too much latitude to let criminals go free. Also, far too many judges have responded to this legislative oversight (aka, the will of the people) by simply ignoring the intent, and even the letter, of those laws. ...
Exactly how many murders and other shootings have occurred in metro Atlanta since May 1? Here is only a partial list:
College Park police are investigating a home invasion at a College Park apartment early Sunday in which a victim shot and killed one of the robbers. Sunday, May 3 ...
The MySpace Page (thanks, to Grayson) of the “30 Deep Gang” is, according to the creator, “all about money.” There are images of dice, diamonds, blocks of gold, rap stars, and twenty dollar bills. There is a photograph of a young man pointing a gun at the camera, and another photo labeled “Lil’ Wayne . . . Prostitute Flange” showing a smiling woman towering over the rap star. In the “friends” section, there is a picture of a young man with the caption, “Zone 3 shawty money men da longway.” Zone 3 is where bartender John Henderson was murdered, and the police are looking for “30 Deep Gang” members in Henderson’s death.
Zone 3 is also where I used to live, and the sound of gunfire was a regular thing there. In order to get by you had to ration your response to it, or you would spend every day responding to it, which is an impossibility. This is what the mayor and the chief of police are denying whenever they announce that residents are being hysterical about crime. Residents police themselves, even more than criminals are policed. Innocent people are held captive by the threat of violent crime, but, still, there are people who believe it is distasteful to demand to be freed. ...
This week, I have been writing about alternative sentencing and drug court. My perspective is shaped by experiences as a “community outreach” worker, witnessing the gaming that takes place when non-profits and private companies are granted fat government contracts with little oversight to monitor and provide therapy to offenders in the community. We are playing with fire whenever we turn over important government duties, like protecting the public, to private individuals – especially when there is no oversight.
Community control supervised by private companies and non -profits have become the status quo, however – and now community monitoring has become one of those things, in our twisted judicial system, that is increasingly viewed as a defendant’s right. ...
Sorry for the absence of a blog post yesterday. I went into Tampa to attend a hearing to appeal a judge’s inexplicable and unheard-of release of a convicted sex offender as the offender waits out the appeals process. Appallingly, the hearing judge yesterday decided that it was more important to honor the feelings of a fellow judge than to consider the safety of the victim and the community, and he refused to overturn the prior judge’s strange and inappropriate decision to release the convicted sex offender. Richard Chotiner remains free as he appeals his 15-year sentence for sexually assaulting a mentally handicapped man. I plan to write about this awful case next week.
*** ...
National Drug Court Month is just around the corner, so I am going to spend this week taking a closer look at some of the claims being made about the effectiveness of drug courts. By next week, the canned press releases will be seeping out all over the news in the form of stories lifted directly from the press kits provided by advocacy groups such as the National Association of Drug Court Professionals.
Rather astonishingly, the NADCP press kit asserts that “for twenty years, drug courts have saved millions of lives.” Millions? Really? In New York State, which has one of the larger state drug court systems, only 20,400 people have graduated from drug court since the program began, and nobody can say how many of those people stayed sober for more than a few years after they left the scrutiny of the courts. No man is an island, but really — millions of lives? ...
Apparently, while it may be hard to be a pimp, as the popular song goes, it isn’t particularly hard to be a defendant in a child molestation case:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ...
Last week, I wrote about Lavelle McNutt, a serial rapist given many second chances. His Georgia Department of Corrections record is a record of something else, as well: our failure to imprison repeat offenders, even after the 1994 sentencing reform law was passed.
As the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported a few weeks ago, McNutt’s first adult rape conviction, for two separate rapes in New York State, occurred in 1976, just after he turned 18. When you see an 18-year old convicted of a serious offense, you have to wonder about the contents of his sealed juvenile record: 18-year olds don’t wake up one day, break into the first house they see, and rape the occupant. They usually start experimenting with sexual abuse early in adolescence, victimizing their siblings, peers, and other easy targets. How many children and young women had already been sexually assaulted by McNutt by the time he aged out of the juvenile system? ...
Yesterday, I wrote about Russell Burton, who got away with violent sex crimes in two different states thanks to a sympathetic judge, an apathetic military command, and a psychopathic appeals system.
Burton is in good company. With sex offenders, in particular, there always seems to be somebody willing to step up and offer a helping hand. Such behavior is not limited to ladies who latch onto serial killers like frowsy pilot fish. Distinctively non-marginal people like college presidents and judges often assume the role of head cheerleader for some of the worst repeat offenders. ...
The children’s board game, Chutes and Ladders, offers a clearer template for understanding our criminal justice system than a hundred studies put forth by academicians and think tanks. Here is one example:
Russell Burton, who has been called a “Ted Bundy in the making,” was born in 1967. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, when Burton was 17, he was arrested in Lancaster, California and charged with “breaking into a woman’s apartment and fondling her in bed.” “Fondling” is a troubling term here: you fondle your child, or a puppy. When you break into a woman’s house and try to rape her, that isn’t “fondling.” (“81 Years for Sexual Predator,” L.A. Daily News, 4/27/05, fee for link) ...
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Jury selection in Silver Comet case may be delayed ...
I am traveling to Atlanta this week, so I will stick to a subject that comes painfully easy: recidivism. ...
From today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A string of mishaps — including uncertainty about whom to call, voice mail messages left unanswered for hours and previous false alarms — combined to help double-murder suspect Derrick Yancey remove his ankle monitor and escape house arrest, according to a report issued Wednesday. . . ...
From the Atlanta Journal Constitution, on a triple shooting near Turner Stadium: “Boy Slain in Attack Near Turner Field was Just 15.”
Nick, whose last name is being withheld, was lying roughly 10 feet from his back door when paramedics arrived at his southwest Atlanta apartment. He died Monday night at Grady Memorial Hospital. His half-brother, Andre, remains in critical condition at Grady, though friends and family say he is expected to recover. They’ve asked that the two teenagers’ surnames not be published for fear of retribution. . . ...
A thoughtful column by Atlanta Journal Constitution writer Rick Badie on the ways people are changing their lives to deal with the threat of crime. It raises a question: is crime really more prevalent because the economy has gone south? The kids (and they are kids) and young adults running robbery rings and invading homes to steal televisions aren’t doing these things on their hours off from some legitimate work, and there has been absolutely no reduction in levels of support available from social services, so (unlike the rest of us) they aren’t being squeezed in their home lives.
This is a criminal subculture. If anything is making them seem more aggressive now, it is police furloughs and the collapse of the courts. Backlogs in court hearings, ever more intense pressure to let people go on first, second, tenth offenses, cases simply being dropped because there aren’t the resources to try them — this is what puts more, and bolder, criminals on the streets. ...
With a hat tip to Chris, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Fulton Inmates to be Released Before Trial,” by Steve Visser. It’s worth quoting extensively, to grasp precisely what is being done:
Fulton County court officials say they can save taxpayers $5.5 million a year by releasing suspected criminals from jail — inmates whom judges have balked at freeing because of the likelihood they would commit another crime before their trials. ...