another example of why it's the 'just us' system.......

[SmarterthanYou]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ath-row/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.481d3c6ff0a2

A Kern County Superior Court judge last week ordered that a 68-year-old former farmworker, Vicente Benavides Figueroa, be released from San Quentin’s death row after the local district attorney declared she would not retry him. Benavides had been in prison for more than 25 years after being convicted of raping, sodomizing and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter.



Benavides was freed after all but one of the medical experts who testified against him recanted their conclusions that the girl had, in effect, been raped to death — conclusions they had reached after reviewing incomplete medical records. In fact, the first nurses and doctors who examined the semiconscious and battered girl in 1991 observed no injuries suggesting she had been raped or sodomized, but those details were not passed along to the medical expert witnesses who testified in court. Injuries later observed at two other hospitals were likely caused by that first effort to save her life, which included attempts to insert an adult-sized catheter.

Two points to add some context to this unimaginably horrific story:

First, Kern County, home to Bakersfield, was also the terrain of longtime district attorney Ed Jagels, one of the pillars of the law-and-order movement of the 1980s and 1990s. There was a joke that Bakersfield’s unofficial motto was “Come for vacation, leave on probation.” Jagels used to brag on his official Web page of having a higher per-capita imprisonment rate than any county in California. He was elected head of the state’s district attorneys association multiple times and was often referred to as the dean of California prosecutors. He also led the charge for nearly every draconian crime bill the state passed in that era, including the state’s notorious “three strikes” law. He helped get three anti-death-penalty justices removed from the California Supreme Court and lobbied heavily against medical marijuana.

Jagels was regularly berated by appellate courts for alleged prosecutorial misconduct, and as the journalist Edward Humes points out in his book “Mean Justice,” by his second term the number of misconduct complaints against Jagels’s office was triple that of his predecessor.

Jagels is perhaps best known for making Kern County ground zero for the ritual sex-abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s. Jagels’s office convicted 26 people of unimaginable crimes, including orgies involving children and animals, children forced to drink blood, and infants who were raped and cannibalized. These charges were based almost entirely on the memories of young children. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there was no physical evidence at all. No children showed signs of abuse. No children were reported missing. There was no blood to be found where these alleged crimes took place. Of the 26 convictions, 25 were later reversed. And overall, Benavides is now at least the 26th completely innocent person wrongly convicted by Jagels’s office. Kern County leads the state in exonerations per 100,000 residents, and by a large margin.

Jagels should have been removed from office and faced disciplinary sanctions. Instead, when he announced his retirement in 2009, he was called “the prosecutor’s prosecutor.” A former subordinate told the local paper, “Prosecutors from around the state seek and respect his advice on almost every issue of public safety.”

Since retiring, Jagels has been a criminal-justice policy adviser to various Republican campaigns, including Meg Whitman’s California gubernatorial campaign. As for Kern County, since Jagels left, the DA’s office has been run by Lisa Green, a Jagels protégé who began working with him in 1983, the year he was elected. Green also personally represented the office in its fight against overturning some of the verdicts in the child sex-abuse cases.

Green’s tenure in Kern County has also been marked by scandal and allegations of misconduct. Last year, the California Supreme Court overturned three convictions, finding that Green’s office was racially discriminatory during the jury selection process. Before that, Robert Murray — one of Green’s top assistants — was suspended for a year by the California State Bar (a punishment that is vanishingly rare) for attaching a forged signature and confession to the statement given by a man accused of child molestation. Green stood by Murray and refused to fire him. (So did then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, now a senator and possible presidential candidate.) Kern County is consistently among the leading counties in the United States when it comes to both its rate of police shootings and death sentences.

Green is retiring this year, but it doesn’t look like her exit will bring much change to Kern County. The two leading candidates for the job are both already prosecutors in Green’s office. One is Green’s top assistant, who has won her endorsement. The other has worked in the office for more than 30 years and has been endorsed by Jagels.

The second thing worth considering in light of Benavides’s exoneration is Prop 66, the death-penalty law passed by California voters in 2016. As the Los Angeles Times editorial points out, the measure is intended to speed up executions in the state by putting time limits on post-conviction petitions and restricting the grounds on which the condemned can request a new trial. This, even as we continue to learn about staggering prosecutor misconduct across the state, not just in Kern County, but in Orange County, Riverside County, Santa Clara County, Alameda County and Los Angeles County.

As the Los Angeles Times editorial above points out, if Prop 66 had been in place when Mr. Benavides was convicted, he’d almost certainly be dead. He’d never have lived to see his exoneration.

This problem isn’t just limited to California. Even as we learn more about the extent of wrongful convictions, prosecutor misconduct and misuse of forensic evidence, states such as Texas, Alabama and Florida have also moved toward limiting appeals and speeding up executions. It’s almost as if some lawmakers and law enforcement officials think that the problem with wrongful convictions isn’t that there are too many of them, but that they’re bad PR for the law-and-order cause. And that the best way to make them go away isn’t to fix the problems that allowed them to happen, but to execute people before we ever get the chance to learn that they’re innocent.

 

[Dirt McGirt]

This is why I laugh every time I hear "just fight it in the courts."

 

[Irish Exit]

There have been reforms in a lot of states, but that doesn't really do much for the old cases. For instance in mine, they have removed the fee caps for capital cases and implemented high minimum requirements in order to be appointed to defend someone in them (including having represented someone in one before). You just have to convince the judge the charges (time and expenses) were legitimate and reasonable. As long as a Judge signs off on them, you can bill like a crack addict. Even so, it is very hard to get someone to take one of them whether they are appointed or you are being paid cash up front because their entire appeal will be about what a crappy lawyer the defense counsel was. They almost always only seriously consider ineffective assistance arguments on criminal appeals in the federal system.

 

[Fentoine Lum]

Keep tryna tell folks, for profit corporate prisons and a legal system based upon profiteering is a horrible thing to set up, it will eventually criminalize poverty and anything else it can via lobbying and think tank legislation, while our war criminals and white collar Wall Street criminals skip around freely.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

and continuing the theme...........

https://injusticetoday.com/in-louis...e-can-lead-to-a-five-year-prison-4cece4c63edc

In Louisiana, Threatening to File a Complaint Against Police Can Lead to a Five-Year Prison Sentence

On April 30, 2015, William Aubin Jr. was at home with his wife in Livingston Parish, Louisiana when a patrol car from the sheriff’s office pulled onto his street. The deputy, William Durkin, was there to investigate a reckless driving complaint. Aubin wasn’t involved in the incident but he knew about it and went outside of his home to speak with Durkin. During a vulgar and combative conversation, according to Aubin, Durkin repeatedly called Aubin a “pussy.”

“I’m calling your supervisor,” Aubin said. “I’m gonna get you fired.” Aubin took out his cell phone, called the sheriff’s department, and started walking back towards his house. But before he made it inside, Durkin arrested him. The charge: intimidation of a public official — a felony that in Louisiana carries a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment.

The 21st Judicial District Attorney’s Office (whose jurisdiction includes Livingston Parish) ultimately declined to prosecute Aubin. But in a lawsuit filed in April 2016 in the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of Louisiana against Durkin and his supervisor, Sheriff Jason Ard, Aubin challenged the constitutionality of the statute that led to his arrest. The statute prohibits “the use of violence, force, or threats … with the intent to influence [an official’s] conduct in relation to his position, employment, or duty.”

The statute’s constitutionality was also called into question in a December 2015 incident in nearby Tangipahoa Parish, when officers pepper sprayed a man named Travis Seals even though he was already in handcuffs. After telling the officers he was going to file a complaint against them, he too was charged with public intimidation. Seals then launched his own lawsuit, also in federal court, challenging the constitutionality of the statute.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry intervened in both cases to defend it. But in the past year, federal judges in the two cases have called the statute unconstitutional. In a September 2017 ruling, Chief Judge Brian A. Jackson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana pilloried the application of the statute in the Aubin case. “The right to criticize the police without risk of arrest distinguishes a democracy from a police state,” he wrote.

In the Seals case, Jane Triche Milazzo, a judge in the United States District Court for the Eastern District Of Louisiana, ruled last July that the statute violates the First Amendment.

“The Attorney General does little in the way of arguing that [the law] is constitutional as written or in overcoming the presumption of unconstitutionality,” Milazzo wrote. She noted that the statute broadly criminalized “threats to engage in lawful conduct such as, criticizing a police officer, writing a letter to the newspaper, filing a lawsuit, voting for an official’s opponent, or filing an ethics complaint.”

Landry has appealed her ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. His office did not respond to requests for comment.

Kearney Loughlin, the New Orleans-based attorney representing both Aubin and Seals says that the statute has become a “sort of a hammer that the police officers can use” since it was ratified in 1942. “You get a higher bail because it’s a felony,” he said. “It’s a more serious felony than battery on a police officer. You can punch an officer and not face the same ramifications.”

According to Loughlin, higher bail means that often many are jailed simply because they can’t afford to purchase their freedom. Loughlin also says that prosecutors may be using the law against defendants arrested for less serious offenses, such as public intoxication, in order to leverage them into pleading guilty to lesser charges.

In August 2017, the ACLU condemned the statute after it was used in the case of a Northern Louisiana man who raised his middle finger to a state trooper. “Among the freedoms this country provides is the right to criticize the government and public officials, including police officers,” wrote Marjorie Esman, who was then the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana.

Sheriff Ard, one of the defendants in the Aubin lawsuit, argued in court filings that the statute is necessary to protect public officials from threats and coercion. “The government certainly has a substantial interest in ensuring that such threats are not allowed to influence the behavior of police officers and other officials,” Ard’s office wrote in a memo submitted to court in January 2017.

Not everyone in law enforcement, however, agrees that the statute is necessary to ensure the safety of public officials. Twenty-first Judicial District Attorney Scott Perrilloux recently told the Advocate that there are other laws that his office can use to fulfill the statute’s original aim — protecting public officials from true threats and coercion. Perrilloux did tell the newspaper, however, that he believes that the basis for the statute is sound.

But Seals’ and Aubin’s attorney Loughlin maintains that the statute’s broad reach is a clear violation of constitutional protections. “Ultimately the case is, can you threaten to do something lawful and go to jail for it, or is that protected by the first amendment,” Loughlin said. “That’s what this comes down to.”