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Man steals TV remote, gets 22 years in jail
https://www.cnet.com/news/man-steals...tag=CAD590a51e
How TX keeps poor people in poverty, even make the poverty much worse.
House Corrections committee rethinking probation fees
If someone is on probation, there will be a lot of fees. First, a probationer pays up to $60 a month for supervision. Depending on the crime, there will be program fees for drug education or domestic violence classes. If substance abuse is involved, there will be costs for random urinalysis tests, and perhaps an ignition interlock (for DWI cases). If you have lost your license, which happens with any drug conviction, you will have to take a class to renew that license. Once the class is completed, you will need to go to the Department of Public Safety and pay between $125 and $325 to get your license back.
Larding on court costs
The committee examined various court fees, particularly ones aimed purely at revenue generation:
The 83rd Legislature directed the Office of Court Administration to study the necessity of certain court costs and fees in the state. The report outlined several troubling trends (link added).
Many of the court fees and costs, whether deposited at the state or local level, are not dedicated fees and are simply deposited in the general fund of the state or local government. They are then appropriated at the discretion of the funding body.
Some of these court fees and costs are used to fund programs outside of and unrelated to the judiciary. Meanwhile, court fees and costs are generally insufficient to cover the cost of funding the judiciary at the local government level, with expenditures for the judiciary oftentimes far surpassing collected revenues for court fees and costs.
There are hundreds of these fees, with a few dozen of them ending up in state coffers.
The best known Texas court fees are "consolidated court costs," which run:
Up to $133 for felonies, $83 for misdemeanors, $40 for nonjailable misdemeanor offenses. Ninety percent of collected funding goes to the state for 14 purposes, including; crime stoppers assistance, abused children's counseling, law enforcement and custodial officer supplemental retirement fund, judicial and court personnel training fund, and emergency radio infrastructure account
Many fees are spent in ways which have nothing to do with their ostensible purpose. A $250 DNA fee on sexual assault cases, for example, is split between general state coffers and the highway fund, with no relationship to funding the activity for which it's named.
The committee could have added that this is happening at a time when DNA labs are underfunded and strained trying to keep up which evolving science, not to mention re-testing backlogs of DNA-mixture cases that were evaluated using flawed methodologies.
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.co...ethinking.html
Man steals TV remote, gets 22 years in jail
https://www.cnet.com/news/man-steals...tag=CAD590a51e
Man steals TV remote, gets 22 years in jail
https://www.cnet.com/news/man-steals...tag=CAD590a51e[/QUOTE]
remote $100, 22 x $30K = $600K+
that'll teach him, and fix Illinois budget problems
Most TDCJ sex assault victims housed in just a few units, most victimized by staff
A disproportionate number (41.2 percent) of inmate sexual assault victims self-identified as LGBTQ, the survey found, confirming a pattern where inmates deemed gay or even just effeminate may be more likely to become victims.
Survey respondents reported sexual assaults at 15 prison units across the state with the majority of reports coming from three units:
Estelle (Huntsville), Robertson (Abilene), and Allred (Iowa Park).
A whopping 58.9 percent of respondents said they were assaulted by a staff member, which jibes with past investigations into sexual assault at TDCJ.
"In 2014, 766 allegations of staff-on-offender sexual abuse and sexual harassment incidents were reported to the PREA Ombudsman by unit-level TDCJ staff."
They cited a 2015 Marshall Project report showing that, nearly half the time, local prosecutors refuse to pursue cases involving staff-on-inmate sexual abuse.
When they do, "Of the 126 staff members convicted of sexual misconduct or assault, only nine were sentenced to serve time."
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.co...housed-in.html
aka, The Texas Gulag, totally lawless.
Red Justice in a Blue State
Oregon has one of the worst criminal justice systems in the country. These prosecutors are largely to blame.
Here’s a riddle: What state incarcerates a higher percentage of its black population than Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana?
I’ll bet you didn’t guess Oregon.
Indeed, the Beaver State locks up its black citizenry at a rate twice that of Georgia and Mississippi.
Oregon also has the second highest rate of youth transferred to adult court after Florida.
It is the only state besides Louisiana that allows non-unanimous jury verdicts in criminal cases, and
it is the only state besides Texas to require “future dangerousness,” a discredited and scientifically bankrupt jury determination, as a determining factor in sentencing people to death.
The blame lies in significant part with Oregon’s out-of-touch elected prosecutors. These powerful forces within the criminal justice system help to explain the gap between two seemingly incompatible Oregons: one with a governor who has placed a moratorium on executions, and the other whose retrogressive and racially disparate criminal law enforcement policies have led to the seventh highest rate of black imprisonment in the nation.
A prime example of these prosecutors run amok is Josh Marquis ... recently called “the claim that mass incarceration is out of control” one of those “urban legends accepted by conservatives and liberals alike.”
Back in 2006, Marquis authored a law review article led “The Myth of Innocence” and wrote in the New York Times that “Americans should be far more worried about the wrongfully freed than the wrongfully convicted.” More recently, he opposed a new law to expand post-conviction access to DNA evidence, legislation that made it easier for people to prove their innocence.
Both the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association and the Oregon Association Chiefs of Police support reclassifying offenses involving the possession of a small amount of drugs from felonies to misdemeanors. Josh Marquis opposes the plan.
An Oregon trial court judge concluded that “race and ethnicity was a motivating factor in the passage” of Oregon’s peculiar non-unanimous jury law.
elected prosecutor for Deschutes County, said that a jury verdict with two dissenting views is one that “we shouldn’t have confidence in.” Marquis is quoted in the same article in support of non-unanimous jury verdicts.
he is symptomatic of a system that is overly influenced by a narrow band of thuggish prosecutors who wield outsized power both in the Oregon District Attorneys Association and in fanning the flames of fear across the state’s media landscape.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...n_the_u_s.html
8,300 People Should Be Locked Up
Instead, there’s 2.2 million.
In 1946, the US incarceration rate was 99 people per 100,000. In 2013, it’s 698 people per 100,000. That’s a 700% increase,
We couldn’t even keep that plateaued. If we had just kept it to 99 per 100,000, there’d be about 316,00 people locked up right now. That still sounds like a lot, but it’s a lot less than the 2.2 million incarcerated today, and that’s not including the 4.75 million on parole or probation.
the recidivism rates (percentage of inmates who serve time, are released, and then are again arrested and convicted), which are dependent on which study you look at. Pew Center puts it at 43.3%, while the Bureau of Justice Statistics says 68% within three years and 77% within five years.
If we’re sending people to prison to rehabilitate (and the sentences aren’t life without the possibility of parole or death row), then that percentage should be close to 0%. If it was at 10%, I’d consider that a big problem. 43.3% is crazy high, and 77% is unfathomable.
Laughable “rehabilitation” efforts, woefully lacking mental health resources, limited educational resources, approaching drug addiction as a crime rather than a health issue, stripping rights upon release, the professional implications of a criminal record, and other cause-and-effects have led to the incredibly high recidivism rates.
factors that are most likely to lead to criminality in the first place. These include economic stressors (like living in poverty), unemployment, poor parenting, poor education, alcohol abuse, and income inequality.
The War on Drugs, three strikes, stop and frisk, longer sentencing, mandatory minimums, and similar policies directly linked to the systematic annihilation of minorities in America; creation of for-profit prisons; building excess prisons and overtly attempting to fill them; and other cause-and-effects led to an enormous increase in the prison population. It also led to the massive number of people on parole or probation.
To further put it into perspective, according to Prison Policy Initiative, the United States has
“1,719 state prisons,
102 federal prisons,
2,259 juvenile correctional facilities,
3,283 local jails, and
79 Indian Country jails.” T
hat’s a total of 7,442 places you can find yourself behind bars, less than a thousand shy of being the same number of total prisoners with that 5% reduction every year since 1946.
https://bull .ist/8-300-people-should-be-locked-up-27434d0881e4#.9nxbiznq8
Two LAPD officers who fatally shot a Boyle Heights teen didn't have their body cameras on
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lapd-shooting-20170111-story.html?utm_source=Essential+California&utm_cam paign=77e5898217-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_12&utm_medium=email&utm_ter m=0_6e35f7f85b-77e5898217-80115881
“A LIVING NIGHTMARE”
Women Visiting Loved Ones Jailed at Rikers Describe Years of Invasive Searches by Guards
What Quattlebaum says she experienced next, however, went far beyond a standard pat down. “Once I put my hands back up, she pulled my panties out, takes her two fingers, and just jams it in between my crotch,” she said of the officer. “My reaction — I slapped her hand away a little bit, like, where’s the privacy?” Though Quattlebaum visited Rikers every week, “I’d never been through this before.” When she objected, she said, the officer “tried to pull both of my hands together with one hand, and she tried to still put her fingers into my crotch” with the other. As Quattlebaum attempted to pull free, the officer said she had “put her hands” on her and should be arrested.
Quattlebaum never made it to see her fiancé that day. After the incident, she was detained in the same building where the search took place and held there for another eight hours. She was arrested and booked around 11 p.m. and arraigned the following morning. The Bronx district attorney charged her with obstructing government administration and harassment.
The criminal complaint against Quattlebaum does not accuse her of attempting to bring any contraband into the jail complex. Based on the officer’s account, it says the woman “felt a large bulge through defendant’s pants around defendant’s vaginal area.” When the officer touched the area, according to the complaint, Quattlebaum pushed her, after which the officer “felt threatened and experienced annoyance, alarm, and fear for her physical safety.”
Quattlebaum disputes many of the details in the complaint and has refused to accept a plea deal in the case. She continues to go back and forth to court because of the charges pending against her. But even if she succeeds in seeing the charges dismissed, the repercussions of what happened that day were lasting and harmful.
After the incident, Quattlebaum was banned from visiting Rikers for six months. “It’s just been very hectic because I was going to see my children’s father, my fiancé, and I’m basically the only person he has to come see him, and [I bring] his children to come see him,” she told The Intercept. She appealed the penalty to the Board of Correction, a watchdog agency that oversees the DOC and city jails, which sent her a letter five months later granting her appeal and restoring her visiting rights immediately.
“I just felt very violated that day. I cried for so long, for days after I got home,” Quattlebaum said. “I was scared. My whole life was trying to figure out what was going on. Am I going to be taken away from my kids? Because I’m a single mom and I have three children. It was just very stressful.”
HE DEPARTMENT OF Correction has been sued several times in the past for strip-searching detainees accused of minor crimes, and New York City has paid out hefty settlements as a result. In 2001, the
city agreed to pay up to $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of tens of thousands of people who were strip-searched while awaiting arraignment;
in 2010, the city reached a $33 million settlement with more than 100,000 low-level detainees who were strip-searched after being charged with misdemeanors.
But for years, an investigation by The Intercept and WNYC has found, women like Quattlebaum have reported
enduring invasive searches not while incarcerated, but while simply attempting to visit someone detained at a New York City correctional facility.
Records obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information law reveal that since 2010, New York’s 311 call center has received at least
83 complaints about correction officers subjecting visitors to strip searches or cavity searches. The complaints range in severity from visitors who said officers made them open their pants or disrobe completely to those who said officers penetrated their body cavities.
Over the same period, the Board of Correction received 84 complaints about visitors being searched improperly.
At least 27 women have filed or are in the process of filing lawsuits that accuse the Department of Correction of unlawfully strip-searching visitors. Most of the allegations involve searches conducted at Rikers, New York City’s largest jail complex, but they also span facilities across the city’s boroughs, including the Manhattan Detention Center and the Brooklyn Detention Center.
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/...ails-visitors/
Prison guards have to be sadistic sickos, or become sadistic sickos, same with cops.
The entire criminal justice system in America is ed up, a huge stain. A taxpayers get stuck with $Bs in compensation to victims.
Here's some cop porn for you "law-and-order" racists to jerk off to
WATCH: Cops Violently Arrest Black Man Suspected of Stealing Car—That Turns out to Be His Own
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...out-be-his-own
Law Enforcement Has Been Using OnStar, SiriusXM, To Eavesdrop, Track Car Locations For More Than 15 Years
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...15-years.shtml
You shouldn't have anything to worry about with your AM - 8track player.
Louisiana police chief pushes ‘Blue Lives Matter’ law to make resisting arrest a felony ‘hate crime’
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/loui...e+Raw+Story%29
Departing District Attorney To DOJ: Albuquerque Police Department Is A 'Continuing Criminal Enterprise'
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...terprise.shtml
Matthew Luckhurst, the San Antonio police officer who was effectively fired for providing a feces sandwich to a homeless man, was given a second indefinite suspension, according to police records released this week.
In June, just a month after the incident with the sandwich, police say Luckhurst defecated in the women’s bathroom stall at SAPD’s Bike Patrol Office and spread a brown substance with the consistency of tapioca on the toilet seat, giving the appearance that there was feces on the seat.
Officer Steve Albart was also involved in the prank, according to the records. He was originally given an indefinite suspension, but Chief William McManus reduced it to 30 days without pay. Albart finished serving that suspension Jan. 19.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/loc...n-10886745.php
really, really hard to charge, convict cops, here feeding people doesn't even get you fired for cause.
Paris police claim rape of black man with tactical baton was an ‘accident’
The conclusion on Thursday came a week after the arrest in the northern Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois of the 22-year-old victim, who has been identified only as Theo.
According to the AFP news agency, a police source said that having taken into account CCTV recordings and witness accounts, "there are insufficient elements to show that this was a rape".
However, an investigating magistrate had charged one of the police officers with rape and three others with aggravated assault, and is still examining the case.
Theo, whose family say he was not known to police,
required surgery for severe anal injuries after he was assaulted with a truncheon,
and also suffered head trauma.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/paris-police-claim-rape-of-black-man-with-tactical-baton-was-an-accident/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaig n=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story%29
African-Americans more likely to be wrongfully convicted
African-Americans are far more likely to be wrongfully convicted of crimes such as murder, sexual assault and illegal drug activity than whites due to factors including racial bias and official misconduct,
Of the 1,900 defendants convicted of crimes and later exonerated, 47 percent were African-Americans – three times their representation in the population – according to the study from the National Registry of Exonerations, which examined cases from 1989 to October 2016.
The study also said black Americans were about seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white Americans.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/afri...e+Raw+Story%29
No Charges In Death Of Inmate After Forced Prison Shower
Witnesses said Darren Rainey was cooked alive by water “hot enough to brew a cup of tea.”
Four Florida corrections officers who reportedly locked a mentally disabled inmate in a scalding shower for two hours will not be charged in his death.
The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office said its lengthy probe found no basis for criminal charges and characterized the 2012 death of inmate Darren Rainey, 50, as an accident.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...term=HuffPost&
America's "justice" system is as 100% rotten as America's political system.
This Dystopian Riot Control Truck Is the Vehicle of the Future
The new and improved Bozena Riot can handle any and all duties when one needs to put down an uprising.
At full functionality, it has three components:
a carrier,
a 3000 kg adjustable shield, and
a water trailer.
Two water cannons can send protesters flying from the front or the rear and
if that doesn’t do the trick, you can always fire up the high-pressure tear gas gun.
http://gizmodo.com/this-dystopian-ri...the-1793656046
Paid for by taxpayers, to attack taxpayers.
Or people could quit rioting...
Facial recognition database used by FBI is out of control, House committee hears
Database contains photos of half of US adults without consent, and algorithm is wrong nearly 15% of time and is more likely to misidentify black people
About 80% of photos in the FBI’s network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver’s licenses and passports.
“No federal law controls this technology, no court decision limits it. This technology is not under control,”
The FBI made arrangements with 18 different states to gain access to their databases of driver’s license photos.
“I’m frankly appalled,” said Paul Mitc , a congressman for Michigan. “I wasn’t informed when my driver’s license was renewed my photograph was going to be in a repository that could be searched by law enforcement across the country.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...nses-passports
It's not only the cops and sheriffs ...
DEA has seized billions of dollars from people never charged with a crime
According to a new report issued by the Justice Department’s Inspector General,Since 2007, the report found, the DEA has seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of involvement with the drug trade.
But 81 percent of those seizures, totaling $3.2 billion, were conducted administratively, meaning no civil or criminal charges were brought against the owners of the cash and no judicial review of the seizures ever occurred.
That total does not include the dollar value of other seized assets, like cars, homes, electronics and clothing.
These seizures are all legal under the controversial practice of civil asset forfeiture, which allows authorities to take cash, contraband and property from people suspected of crime. But the practice does not require authorities to obtain a criminal conviction, and it allows departments to keep seized cash and property for themselves unless individuals successfully challenge the forfeiture in court.
Critics across the political spectrum say this creates a perverse profit motive, incentivizing police to seize goods not for the purpose of fighting crime, but for padding department budgets.
they can’t even say if the forfeitures are effective, other than ballooning the DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture Fund to $28 billion:
The Inspector General found that the Department of Justice "does not collect or evaluate the data necessary to know whether its seizures and forfeitures are effective, or the extent to which seizures present potential risks to civil liberties."
In the absence of this information, the report examined 100 DEA cash seizures that occurred "without a court-issued warrant and without the presence of narcotics, the latter of which would provide strong evidence of related criminal behavior."
Fewer than half of those seizures were related to a new or ongoing criminal investigation, or led to an arrest or prosecution, the Inspector General found.
"When seizure and administrative forfeitures do not ultimately advance an investigation or prosecution," the report concludes, "law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an investigation or prosecution."
The scope of asset forfeiture is staggering.
Since 2007 the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture Fund, which collects proceeds from seized cash and other property, has ballooned to $28 billion.
In 2014 alone authorities seized $5 billion in cash and property from people -- greater than the value of all do ented losses to burglary that year.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/0...28Daily+Kos%29
I'm sure populist Trash and Sessions will correct this abuse of the populus, keep better records, etc, etc.
US Immigration Detainees Forced to Work
Immigrants held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Denver Contract Detention Facility have alleged that the private prison forced them to work for $1 per day.
This suit was first filed back in 2014, but has now been awarded class-action status. This marks the first time in history that a class-action lawsuit has moved forward against a private US prison company.
The Denver center is under contract with ICE and is owned and operated by GEO Group.
If the allegations are true, the for-profit prison company GEO Group will be in violation of American anti-slavery laws.
http://projectcensored.org/us-immigr...s-forced-work/
United Airlines passenger brutally dragged from plane for no good reason
His sin? Booking a ticket on a full flight.
Videos posted to social media show uniformed security agents violently assaulting a passenger on a United Airlines plane as he is forced off a flight from Chicago to Louisville on Sunday evening.
While the man was being physically removed from his seat, he appeared to be knocked unconscious. The uniformed men then drag him down the plane aisle as other passengers look on in horror.
A United spokesperson told the Louisville Courier-Journal that “Flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville was overbooked.” That prompted staff members to ask for volunteers to take another flight.
“After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate,” the spokesperson added.
Here’s how law enforcement dealt with that customer, who according to other passengers is a doctor who had to be back in Louisville to see patients Monday morning:
passengers boarded the flight, but were then told four people needed to volunteer to exit to make room for United employees who had to travel to Louisville. United offered $800 for volunteers, but had no takers.
A United manager then came aboard the plane and explained that a computer would randomly select four people who would then have to exit. The man who was later dragged off the flight was among them.
United redirected questions about the incident to the Chicago Police,
who redirected questions to the Chicago Department of Aviation,
who referred questions to a TSA,
who declined to comment.
https://thinkprogress.org/united-pas...e-f886330eb393
Is there a lawsuit here? United settles for several $Ms?
Corporate America The Beautiful
Last edited by boutons_deux; 04-10-2017 at 10:59 AM.
If the "warrior cops are out of control," why does the left try so hard to prevent Heather MacDonald from speaking? If her defense of the police is wrong, why are they so afraid to let people hear it?
Administrators expressed disappointment and threatened discipline in the wake of a demonstration that disrupted a planned public event last week featuring conservative commentator and author Heather MacDonald at Claremont McKenna College.http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...408-story.html
At Claremont McKenna, about 250 protesters on Thursday blocked the entrance to the Athenaeum, where MacDonald was scheduled to appear. Many chanted "black lives matter" and "black lives — they matter here."
Campus officials and security decided not to force entry into the venue on behalf of those who came to hear MacDonald speak.
United apologizes for ‘having to re-accommodate’ doctor who was dragged out of flight ‘like a rag doll’
“This is an upsetting event to all of us here at United,” Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz said in a statement. “I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers.”
“No one volunteered (to leave), so @United decided to choose for us. They chose an Asian doctor and his wife.”
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/unit...e+Raw+Story%29
re-accomdate?No apology for Shutzstaffel knocking the out of one of your customers?
Who the ordered the SS to drag the doctor out? Musta been United staff.
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