Yesterday, I posted about yet another heinous sex crime committed by yet another felon who should have been in prison but was granted leniency and was free on the streets.
The information I had yesterday was limited to what I could find in public incarceration records, but today the Athens (Georgia) newspaper has more details about Jones’ criminal history. ...
First, a controlling fact. California’s much-reviled “three-strikes” law bears no resemblance to what you’ve read about it in the news. How much no resemblance? Lots of no resemblance:
There is a great website by Mike Reynolds, an expert on California’s three-strikes law and its application (application being 95% of the law, no matter what they tell you in school). I urge you to read his site and support his efforts: ...
Hat tip to Alfonso: Deborah J. Saunders on the role the death penalty plays in Life-Without-Parole cases.
Giovanni Ramirez has been arrested for inflicting permanent brain damage in the April near-death beating of Giants fan Bryan Stowe. Some non-news regarding the arrest:
Well, who could be surprised? The headlines this week are about the Supreme Court decision forcing California to release 46,000 inmates on the grounds that their civil rights are violated by prison overcrowding. Bad enough, but those 46,000 soon-to-be wrongfully freed offenders are only a fraction of the problem. They, at least, ended up in prison for some portion of their sentences. ...
Editor’s Note: I suspended this blog eight months ago, for the usual personal reasons. Sometimes, it’s good to swing a hammer instead of a pen. I’ve been trying to find a way to start the blog up again. When writing about the justice system’s dealings with crime victims, the problem is that there are too many injustices to cover. And the media rarely acknowledges any of these injustices, except in condescending ways. They’ll mouth pieties about feeling sorry for victims, but, in reality, they are utterly disinterested in actually reporting the systematic ways the justice system fails the vast majority of people who have been on the receiving end of crimes, large and small.
They’re too fixated on empathizing with criminals to do that. ...
With a flick of public relations rhetoric, Texas has suddenly become a media darling to criminal justice journalists who previously viewed the state as mean and bloodthirsty. The sudden transformation of the Lone Star State into the South Massachusetts of empathetic corrections was accomplished entirely in the media, of course, where gaining good PR is as easy as clicking your heels and saying: “I think it’s time we considered alternatives to incarceration, Joe. This puttin’ people in jail just ain’t working.”
You don’t have to do it, you just have to say it. Then you hand out lollypops and watch the great reviews (oops, I mean newspaper stories) roll in. ...
Early release is going to be a disaster. It would be less of a disaster if the public had access to the real criminal histories of the people being released. But we’re being kept in the dark: nobody wants to admit the chaos in criminal record-keeping.
Kevin Eugene Peterson ...
The St. Petersburg Times has been digging into Tommy Lee Sailor’s past, asking hard questions about Florida’s many failures to keep Sailor behind bars. Sailor is the serial rapist and self-described serial killer who was deemed “reformed” by Florida Corrections — until last New Year’s Eve, that is. Only his victim’s courage, quick thinking by 911 operator Ve’Etta Bess, and quick action by the police saved that victim’s life.
So on the one side, you have the response of public safety professionals, and the victim herself. On the other side, you have the courts, and the Department of Corrections, and Sailor’s attorneys, and even prosecutors, all agreeing to let Sailor go, or not even try him for sex crimes, not once or twice, but repeatedly. ...
The Florida Department of Corrections (headed by Walter McNeil) needs to stop pointing fingers and start taking responsibility for the escape of Tommy Lee Sailor. They’re the ones who screwed up by failing to notice when the violent serial offender absconded from his ankle monitor on New Year’s Eve, enabling Sailor to attack yet another innocent victim.
The Florida Parole Commission (headed by Frederick B. Dunphy) also needs to stop hiding and start answering questions about their decisions and policies that freed Sailor before his sentence was complete. ...
Which part of this story isn’t part of the reported story?
#3. Of course. And with no real reporting on the multiple failures that led to Tommy Lee Sailor being free and under-monitored, the following won’t be part of any future story, either: ...
As the Justice Department and everybody else barrel forward with plans to get as many violent offenders back on the streets as quickly as possible (to save money, you know, and aid those poor benighted, imprisoned souls), here’s a reminder of the inevitable consequences of anti-incarceration-early-re-entry-alternative-sentencing-community-control chic, from the Chicago Sun-Times, via Second-City Cop:
She lost 20 teeth. She suffered a brain injury and seizures. And she struggled to pay her medical bills because she didn’t have insurance. Jen Hall was the victim of a brutal, disfiguring beating outside a Jewel store in the South Loop in August 2008. ...
Courtwatcher Orlando’s Laura Williams brings attention to the case of Loc Buu Tran:
2006-CF-014820-O In custody since 10/19/06 ~ Trial now scheduled for 11/16/09 with Judge John Adams. 1st Degree Murder. Allegedly stabbed a UCF student to death 10/06 when she tried to break up with him. Also was convicted 8 years ago in Clearwater for rape. Mistrial was declared 8/12/09 after Judge Jenifer Davis realized during the first witness’ testimony that she had worked on the case when in the PD’s office.
Why can’t we seem to get this guy tried? ...
The Guilty Project documents flaws in the justice system that enable serial offenders to commit more crimes.
Failure to Prosecute, Wrongful Acquittal by Jury, Early Release by State, Family/Employer Cover-Up ...
DeKalb Officers blog pulled up James Ferrell’s arrest record after Ferrell shot a cop last week, an attempted murder already reduced to an aggravated assault charge.
How is shooting an officer, even if you only hit him in the leg, not attempted murder? If the sentencing code of Georgia is so incoherent that it is better to charge someone with a lesser crime in order to circumvent the possibility of a shorter sentence, why doesn’t the legislature fix that terrible problem? Or is it the District Attorney’s office that is being incoherent on the “shooting a cop isn’t attempted murder” thing? Would Ferrell be charged with attempted murder if he had shot a cop in some other county? ...
Ronald Clemons, the 24-year old who is now charged with killing three people, including a three-year old baby, should have still been in prison for a 2004 murder when he committed this crime.
Here we go again. ...
So Al Sharpton, Andrew Young, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, and Fulton Superior Judge Marvin Arrington walk into a courtroom. . .
There is no punchline. They walked into a courtroom to hold yet another courthouse special event for yet another group of criminal defendants who were having their crimes excused, who then failed to avail themselves of all the special tutoring and counseling and mentoring provided to them in lieu of sentencing, all paid for by us, the taxpayers. What is going on in the courts? Here is the press release from Paul Howard’s office: ...
The Walter Ellis case is still unfolding, but there are already lessons to be learned.
One of those lessons is that police agencies around the country are on the verge of connecting serial rapists and killers to many unsolved crimes, thanks to DNA and re-opening cold cases. The picture that is emerging of these men will change what we know about serial offenders. ...
For me, the high imprisonment rate in the United States is a sign of social health, not of social disease. . . societies such as several western European ones that cannot summon the confidence to set apart those who have persistently shown themselves unwilling to abide by the most elementary rules, and which prevaricate and beat their breast wondering how they and not the law-breakers are really to blame, may truly be described as decadent.
Read here. ...
Really Shocking Story. See it here, at the blog Dekalb Officers, which includes all the background.
Pleading down, failure to build a murder case (need more prosecutors?), recidivism, and just not putting the b******s away, all in one case. ...
Three men are now in custody for the murder of boxer Vernon Forrest. Of course, two are recidivists with state records and histories of getting off easy for multiple crimes, and the third is probably just too young to have accumulated a non-juvenile record yet. The man they killed was a world-champion athlete who founded a charity in Atlanta to help the mentally challenged. How many times does the same sickening story have to play out?
Forrest’s mother told the Atlanta Journal Constitution she hopes the three men never leave prison again: ...
From a City Journal article by Heather Mac Donald. How the murder of 17-year old Lily Burk could have been prevented:
The recent arrest of a vicious murderer in Los Angeles vindicates—tragically, only after-the-fact—several policing and sentencing policies that anti-law-enforcement advocates have fought for years. . . ...
In the Boston Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby has other criticisms of The Sentencing Project’s anti-life sentence report:
OF THE 2.3 million people in prisons and jails in the United States, roughly 140,000, or 6 percent, are serving life sentences. Of that number, about 41,000 – 1.8 percent of all inmates – were sentenced to life without parole. Both numbers are at an all-time high. ...
It ought to take more than 25 seconds and two mouse clicks to find evidence that the media and The Sentencing Project are making stuff up. It ought to, but it does not.
The Sentencing Project is a well-funded, powerful, anti-incarceration advocacy organization. They pose as a think tank that publishes objective academic research on crime and punishment. ...
Amazing, the amount of work it takes to get our leaders to the point of appearing to do their jobs. But the job of getting elected officials to do their jobs, alas, is never done. The mayor and chief of police have promised more police on the streets by next summer (and if this promise is not kept, they will be long gone anyway, so accountability is moot). A weekend crime sweep netted 159 arrests, including many for outstanding warrants, which means that enough manpower was deployed to do what is supposed to be done all the time: pick up people with outstanding warrants.
In other words, in the last five days, the mayor briefly did her job by addressing the crime problem while only slightly denying it; the chief of police was spotted in the same zip code as his office, and law enforcement officers were given enough resources for all of 48 hours. ...
Every weekday, I receive a useful summary of crime, policing, and justice news stories called Crime and Justice News, compiled by Ted Gest at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Considering that there are so many relevant articles from which to choose, Gest and his assistants do a good job of spotting national trends.
But, sometimes, reading through the report is singularly depressing, not only because crime is depressing, but because the trends in crime prevention that crop up regularly these days seem doomed to failure. ...
From PROTECT, the National Association to Protect Children:
Miami’s Julia Tuttle Causeway fiasco–where about 70 “registered” sex offenders have been herded under a bridge to live–is being challenged in court by the ACLU. ...
