Broomfield Cop Guilty of Tasering Girl

Broomfield police officer pleaded guilty last week to child abuse and prohibited use of a weapon for shooting a girl in the face with a Taser while off duty.

William Van Arsdale, a 16-year veteran, was arrested in January and placed on "modified duty" by the department. He continued to work but was not allowed to carry a weapon or wear a uniform.

Van Arsdale could not be reached for comment Monday evening. A department spokesperson did not return a call.

Van Arsdale will be sentenced Sept. 28 and faces up to three years in jail and $6,000 in fines for the two misdemeanors, said Adams County chief deputy district attorney Tom Quammen.

Prosecutors also dismissed a felony child abuse charge against him, Quammen said.

Van Arsdale was a motorcycle officer and also ran the department's Santa Cops program giving holiday gifts to the needy.
The Denver Post

OHIO- Treatment Instead of Incarceration

By Alan Johnson

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Five years after Ohio officials linked arms to beat back a campaign to treat nonviolent drug offenders instead of incarcerating them, a prison population explosion is causing them to revisit the idea.

A bill crafted by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction appears headed for passage this fall. It has bipartisan support from top legislative leaders as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Among its many provisions, the bill would give judges far more latitude in sentencing nonviolent offenders to drug and alcohol treatment or to community programs instead of prison.

For example, current law prevents offenders who are drug-dependent or "in danger of becoming drug-dependent" from qualifying for pre-trial diversion to treatment. The proposal would remove that exclusion.

Prisons chief Terry Collins hopes that section and other parts of the bill will relieve growing pressure on a system 32 percent over capacity.

"In this department, I don't get to put up a 'No vacancy' sign," Collins said.

"We can handle 50,000 or 51,000, but it's what you do with the bodies after you receive them that matters."

In 2002, Ohioans voted by a 2-1 ratio against State Issue 1, which would have substituted drug treatment for incarceration. The issue was supported by a trio of billionaires, including George Soros, but was vigorously opposed by former Gov. Bob Taft and all other senior statewide officials.

The week starting June 4 shows the urgency of the population problem. During that week, a record 308 inmates were added to the prison system.

Last week, there were 49,513 inmates in state institutions, slightly less than the all-time record set last month but 12.3 percent higher than just two years ago. The system is built to accommodate about 37,000.

Collins has opened unused wings and buildings in existing institutions, but short of reopening closed prisons -- which he does not intend to do -- he has few options, other than diverting new prisoners from coming in or sending more home.

The crime rate is somewhat higher, Collins said, and more prisoners are coming in on drug charges. The percentage increase for women is twice that of men.

On the other end of the prison process, the bill would make it easier for the state to request and for judges to grant early "judicial release" for prisoners for medical and other reasons.

The legislation also attempts to keep ex-offenders from returning to prison by removing obstacles to obtaining professional and vocational licenses and certificates.

State Rep. Sandra Williams, D-Cleveland, sponsored similar legislation that would prevent state boards and commissions from rejecting licenses for ex-offenders unless the crime is "substantially" related to the occupation.

Betsy Houchen, executive director of the Ohio Board of Nursing, said her agency "wants to maintain authority to review cases based on criminal history and the facts of the case."

"That's how we protect the public," she said.

Article Here

Trashing the Truth - Part 3

Socorro, N.M. - Bruised and shaking, Joanna watched the doctor prepare the instruments that could cull traces of a gang rape from her body.

At a party the night before, three fellow New Mexico Tech students had drugged her, overpowered her and raped her, she told the hospital staff.

Now, she was lying unclothed on a cold table splashed with bright light, allowing another set of prying hands - a female physician's - to probe her body.

"Just please get it over with," the 19-year- old recalls saying to herself last November....

Read Part Three at The Denver Post

NY Times Review of PBS "Prison Town"

NY TIMES: The “before” debates tend to get plenty of news coverage: some town in New England or the Midwest or wherever is torn apart over whether to allow a dump or power plant or mega-whatever to come in. Rarely, though, does the “after” get much attention. Once the project in question went forward, did the promised economic benefits accrue? Was the social fabric shredded?

“Prison Town, USA,” a smartly constructed documentary tonight on the PBS series “P.O.V.,” explores the “after” in Susanville, a small city in Northern California that a decade ago underwent a substantial makeover with the construction of three huge prisons. The hopes were that the complex would take the place of lumber and other major businesses that were fading. The fears were — well, myriad.

The film, made by Katie Galloway and Po Kutchins over two years, looks at the big-picture issues Susanville now confronts through a collage of small stories. There are no documentary-style talking heads or charts here, just some very ordinary-looking people trying to find their places in a changed community.

A man who has lost a good lumber job tries to make it through correctional-officer training. A recently discharged prisoner struggles to find work and support his wife and children. The owner of a local dairy tries to fight a state decision to cancel his prison contract, which he contends would violate a pledge that the prisons would buy locally whenever possible.

The film is light on specifics, beyond the intriguing factoids interspersed in stark white-on-black lettering between scenes. (“Nearly half the adults in Susanville, California, work at one of the area’s three prisons.”) But the impact of the prisons is more subtle than numbers can capture. It’s in how neighborhood dynamics change when the population includes many women and children who have moved to Susanville while Dad does time. (Can the children of prison guards play with the children of inmates?) It’s in how domestic life is affected by the militarylike training a corrections officer goes through
NY TIMES

Running Out of Prison Space

More proof that are current policies need to be revamped and it needs to be done quickly. Technical violations of parole need to have cheaper alternative actions available. Mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities need to be built, not more prisons. Private prisons are going to have a stranglehold on states across the nation if priorities aren't changed.

The silence that greeted the Idaho Department of Correction's recent call for 1,100 private prison beds was further proof of what its director already knew.

"It's a seller's market. There just aren't any beds across the nation," said Brent Reinke, whose request netted one offer of 240 beds at a lockup near Dallas. He accepted.

Private facilities, either owned by for-profit companies or governments that contract out their management, for years have become an increasingly important relief valve for public systems at or near capacity.

Now the private system itself is bulging at the bars, creating a market in which beggars can't be choosers and governments in some cases are sending inmates to facilities with shaky reputations.

"There are maybe a handful of (U.S. private) facilities currently going unused right now, and they're marketing those to federal agencies and other states," said Kevin Campbell, a prison industry analyst for Avondale Partners. "There's just a lot of demand for only a few beds left."

Campbell said companies are more apt to seek big fish, such as the U.S. government or large states like California — which is 70,000 inmates over capacity — than those like Idaho or Harris County seeking far fewer beds.

With nationwide inmate populations expected to grow by 40,000 a year in the near-term, Campbell said there's no sign the system won't continue to be strained.

"Essentially, the supply side is not keeping up with demand," he said.

The reasons are many, from more stringent immigration enforcement nationally to Texas laws forcing county lockups to house state jail felons and parolees who commit technical violations of their release terms.

Girl Gives Birth In Cell - PA

After a painful contraction, Shakira Staten would rise from the bare-mattressed bunk in her Lackawanna County Prison camera cell, trudge to the door and try to get someone’s attention.

Every time, she says, she was ignored, over and over, until her baby dropped to the floor next to the cell door as she pleaded one last time.

Through a prison phone from the other side of impenetrable glass, Ms. Staten met with The Times-Tribune on Saturday, recounting — in graphic detail — her version of the events which culminated in her giving birth July 10 in her jail cell.

The story told by Ms. Staten, 22, differs significantly from what county and prison officials have said in recent days.

Other than to say Ms. Staten was checked frequently, county officials won’t discuss her care during the four hours she was in the hospital’s medical unit and the camera cell, citing a federal medical privacy law.

“I was in excruciating pain,” Ms. Staten said during an interview at the prison. “It was terrible. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, what I went through.

“I thought I was going to die.”

As the mother of a 2-year-old boy, she knew what contractions were; she knew she was in labor. She knew it at midnight when she first told a guard to take her to the medical unit, she said.

She did not want her little girl born in prison.

Ms. Staten said she begged time after time to go to the hospital.

Dressed only in a T-shirt, flip-flops and prison-issued pants, she pounded on the door, she screamed for help, she pleaded for guards to take her to the hospital.

No one was with her when the baby was born, she said emphatically. No one.

“I can’t believe this happened to me,” she said.
Read the article here

USA Today - Release Doesn't Mean the Sentence Ends

Thanks to Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy for pointing us this way. We currently have 2.25 million people in prison and 95% of them will be released.

Ex-cons' sentences don't always end with release

By Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY

In New Jersey, some ex-convicts can't get a driver's license. In Alabama, a misdemeanor drug conviction means a ban on adopting a child. In 12 states, former felons are ineligible for food stamps.

As record numbers of people leave prison, thousands of ex-criminals are pouring into communities. They've served their time, but their conviction bars them from many jobs, state and federal aid and some types of housing.

Policymakers are beginning to consider whether the hodgepodge of state laws and regulations are protecting the public or creating an underclass of ex-cons who, after serving their sentence, cannot return to society. Congress will consider the issue later this year. And a nationwide legal conference will vote on a model state law this month.

"What we're seeing around the country is prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges all coming to an understanding that just because someone has committed a crime and had to pay a price for it, doesn't mean they should be relegated forever to second-class citizenship," says Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and chairman-elect of the American Bar Association's criminal justice section.

The number of people released from prisons and jails has increased 16% since 2000, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in June.

"We've created a class of people who essentially don't fit in," says Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice think tank in Washington.

'Trying to do the right thing'

Stosh Klos, 23, admits he ran with the wrong crowd in his teens and in college. He's been arrested once for marijuana possession, another time for sharing his pain pills with friends after he got his wisdom teeth pulled. When he was 19, he was convicted of driving while intoxicated.

"I wasn't going after my goals or caring about how it would hurt me going down the road," Klos says. "I had no idea of the severity of it."

Klos graduated from the University of South Florida last year with a degree in business and marketing, but he's had a tough time finding a job in his field and obtaining the professional licenses he would need to be a stockbroker, financial manager or real estate agent. Now, he's working two construction jobs and refurbishing a house as an investment property.

Read The Entire Story

Trail of Two Test Tubes

HIDDEN ODYSSEY | Because of a lab's care, the vials endured 17 years of jostling and logged hundreds of miles without breaking. Then a relentless attorney found them, setting a man free.

By Miles Moffeit
Denver Post Staff Writer

Scott Fappiano didn't know it for most of his 21 years behind bars, but his fate rested inside two test tubes.

The fragile vials, orphaned from an unsuccessful 1989 DNA test, were jostled by dozens of people, trucked hundreds of miles across the Northeast and banished to a succession of storage vaults.

Somehow they survived, without shattering, without spilling. And, incredibly, they were found.

While their trail illuminates how government can lose track of the smallest biological crime relics, it also shows how private labs often safeguard the lowliest of specimens.

"We got Scott out of prison, but it was a cruel cosmic joke in the meantime," said his lawyer Nina Morrison of the Innocence

Project, who spent two years hunting down Fappiano's lost evidence.

The odyssey dates to the December 1983 rape of a police officer's wife.

Shortly after midnight, a gun-wielding intruder crept through the window of the couple's Brooklyn apartment. Once in, he tied the officer to the couple's bedpost, raped the officer's wife repeatedly, smoked a cigarette and downed a couple of beers.

Among the many pieces of evidence he left behind were the future contents of the test tubes - his semen on her white sweat pants.

Soon after, the victim picked Fappiano from a batch of police photos. The 22-year- old Brooklyn native had a juvenile offense, had features similar to the attacker's and lived just blocks from her apartment.

Authorities had all they needed for a conviction after her husband also pointed to him during a physical lineup.

Fappiano was sent away for 50 years.

"Don't forget about me," he told his girlfriend, Joanne.

Read the Rest of the Story at The Denver Post

Prison Town, USA

Watch July 24 on PBS

Prison Town USA

What happens when a struggling rural community tries to revive its economy by inviting prisons in? The story of four families living in a modern-day prison town, as told in "Prison Town, USA," is a riveting look at one of the most striking phenomena of our times: a prison-building and incarceration boom unprecedented in American history.

The Tyler family was just passing through Susanville, California, when father Lonnie was arrested for shoplifting $40 worth of groceries and diapers. Lonnie got a 16-month sentence, leaving his wife Jen and their kids stranded in "prison town." Dawayne Brasher worked in Susanville's lumber mills for nearly 20 years until the last one closed in 2004. His only choices were to leave his hometown or seek work at the huge prison complexes that have sprung up in the area. Gabe Jones liked his job at Mike O'Kelly's Morning Glory Dairy, but the prospect of earning much more money as a prison guard finally proved irresistible — sending him off to guard academy. O'Kelly, a third-generation dairyman, finds his business endangered when the prisons threaten to abrogate their "good neighbor" buy-local policy.

Stories like these are increasingly common in rural America where, during the 1990s, a prison opened every 15 days. The United States now has the dubious distinction of incarcerating more people per capita than any other country in the world. Yet this astonishing jailing of America has been little noted because many of the prisons have opened in remote areas like Susanville. "Prison Town, USA" examines one of the country's biggest prison towns, a place where a new correctional economy encompasses not only prisoners, guards and their families, but the whole community.

CLICK HERE FOR TIMES AND LISTINGS

States Seek Alternatives to More Prisons

By John Gramlich, Stateline.org Staff Writer

With swelling prison populations cutting into state budgets, lawmakers are exploring ways to ease overcrowding beyond building expensive new correctional facilities. Though the construction of prisons continues as states struggle to provide enough beds for those behind bars, legislators increasingly are looking at other ways to free up space and save money, including expanded programs to help prevent offenders from being incarcerated again, earlier release dates for low-risk inmates and sentencing revisions. Criminal justice analysts point to Kansas and Texas as recent innovators. Both states are putting off building new prisons, focusing instead on rehabilitation and recidivism. At the same time, a new $7.7 billion prison spending plan in California – where overcrowding last year forced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) to declare a state of emergency – has met with skepticism. Critics call the plan “prison expansion, not prison reform” and say the initiative relies on impractical fixes such as shipping inmates out of state. State spending on prisons surged 10 percent nationally last fiscal year (see graphic) and growing inmate populations played a lead role in those costs, according to an analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Corrections trails only education and health care in swallowing state dollars, and experts say lawmakers are responding to the budgetary pressures by trying more cost-effective approaches. “We’re seeing more and more states in different regions and with different political leadership tackling this issue and recognizing that the more they spend on prisons, the less they have to spend on health, education and other priorities,” said Adam Gelb, project director of the Public Safety Performance Project. The project – which, like Stateline.org, is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts – in February forecast steep increases in incarceration rates and state spending in the next five years unless legislatures enact policy changes.

Read the rest at Stateline

Interview With Buffie McFadyen

Check out Buffie's interview on Colorado's "Ultimate Politics", radio / you tube show. See attached link. She did a great detailing the issues, private prisons, the need for treatment and criminal justice reform in general. Thanks to one of our members for sending this my way.
Watch the Video Here

Sex Offender Residency Problems

People who have been convicted of sex offenses need to live somewhere...it's important that we
are thoughtful about the rules that we make...

DENVER -It all began in 1999 when five men dutifully went to the Lakewood Police Department to register as sex offenders.

Each gave the same address, which grabbed the attention of city officials, who quickly took action to close the house. Soon the City Council passed an ordinance permitting only one sex offender to live in a house in a residential area.

Lakewood's approach spread like wildfire, with 16 other metro- area cities promptly passing similar regulations.

But governments that passed laws over the past few years to keep sex offenders from living in group homes in their jurisdictions may have done so at the cost of public safety.

A number of studies, including one released last month by the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, conclude that restricting where offenders may live does not prevent repeat sex crimes.

Instead, the restrictions encourage sex offenders to "disappear," blending into communities where they live in the privacy essential to committing new sex crimes, the studies say.

"Frankly, sex offenders like being told they can't be around other sex offenders," said Greig Veeder, executive director of Teaching Humane Existence, a sex offender treatment program. "It ruins their privacy. They can't commit their crimes unless they have privacy."

Colorado has more than 10,500 registered sex offenders. More than 3,000 live in the metro area. As of last week, Denver had 1,337 registered sex offenders.

Sex offenders generally have a high rate of recidivism - 18.9 percent for rapists and 12.7 percent for child molesters over a period of five years, the Colorado study reported.

"But recidivism only reflects crimes that are reported," said Kim English, research director for the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, an arm of the state Department of Public Safety.

"We know that most victims of sex crimes never report the crime," English said. "What we do know is that known sex offenders are more likely than other criminals to commit another sex crime."

'Snakes in a basket'

What keeps that from happening is having sex offenders living in a structured environment with close supervision by professionals and observation by their peers, English said.

"Residency restrictions prevent us from having sex offenders living together," Veeder said, "but 25 years of my experience and significant research all support that the more you can make them live together, the easier it is to control them.

The Colorado research, based on a 2004 survey of sex offenders, found that high-risk sex offenders living in shared living arrangements had significantly fewer probation and criminal violations than those living in other living arrangements.

Violations also were more quickly reported because of the heightened peer and professional oversight. Quick reporting is essential for speedy action to protect potential victims, the study noted.

"Offenders hold each other accountable for their actions and responsibilities and notify the appropriate authorities when a roommate commits certain behavior, such as returning home late or having contact with children," the 2004 Colorado report said.

The study found that sex offenders living with their families re-offend or violate probation at twice the rate of high-risk sex offenders living with other offenders.

Residency restrictions often force sex offenders to "go underground," registering their residence at a shelter or motel where they stay only temporarily.

Rocky Mountain New

s

Trashing the Truth -- Part 2

Part two in the series of how evidence is really handled in this country.

Authorities across the country have lost, mishandled or destroyed tens of thousands of DNA samples since genetic fingerprinting revolutionized crime solving 20 years ago.

Evidence from cold cases goes misplaced across Colorado.

Delicate traces of human biology sit stuffed into pizza and fried-chicken boxes in rat-infested New Orleans evidence vaults.

And specimens are dumped by the truckload in Los Angeles, Houston and New York - sometimes soon after high-profile exonerations.

In a country whose prime-time TV lineup glorifies DNA forensics, many real-life evidence vaults are underfunded and mismanaged, struggling to keep up with technological advances and lagging behind most corner groceries

Trashing the Truth

LISTEN AND VIEW video as the "Trashing the Truth" project unfolds.

in the way they track valuable crime-scene items.

Facing real-world training and space challenges, even the best-intentioned clerks commonly toss DNA samples, especially from old cases, in what one expert calls the "sledge-o-matic approach to clearing out evidence rooms."

"You can't keep everything," said Arthur Morrell, Orleans Parish clerk of Criminal Court.

The Denver Post examined purges in 10 states and found that authorities destroyed biological evidence in nearly 6,000 rape and murder cases during the past decade, rendering them virtually unsolvable. Over the past three decades, the loss or destruction of DNA evidence in 28 states has undermined efforts by at least 141 prisoners to prove their innocence, The Post has found.

Given that federal and state governments don't track evidence destruction and law enforcers often cloak purges in secrecy, the toll certainly is much higher.

The truth is being trashed.

"It's like that, I guess. One man's garbage could be another man's salvation," said Shirley Clemons, whose fiancé, Willie Grimes, is unable to appeal his North Carolina rape conviction because a court clerk tossed his evidence.

The Denver Post

Emily Rice Relatives March In Protest

By Nick Martin Denver Post Staff Writer

Relatives of Emily Rae Rice, who died last year in Denver's jail, had a message for city officials today: "We're not going away."

The woman's parents and siblings were attending an evening protest led by Denver CopWatch in front of the jail and Denver Health Medical Center.

"They just can't stall and wait for us to leave," said her sister, Ginny Rice.

About 15 protestors, including the family, called for the firing of a nurse at Denver Health, where the 24-year-old woman was taken following a car crash.

She was later sent to the jail on suspicion of drunken driving, where she bled to death from internal injuries in February 2006.

Denver CopWatch and members of Emily Rae Rice's family marched from Denver Health Medical Center to the Denver city jail Sunday to protest the handling of the investigation into Rice's death and call for changes including:

• The immediate firing of the nurse on duty when Rice died.

• Regular, unannounced inspections, by an outside party, of all police holding facilities.

• An independent review of all policies and procedures by the Denver Sheriff's Department and treatment of prisoners by Denver Health Medical Center.

Protestors also called for an independent audit of the jail, which they likened to Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Rice's relatives have filed a lawsuit against the city and hospital, seeking damages.

In the past, city and hospital officials have declined to comment, citing the lawsuit.

The Denver Post

Crazy In America: The Criminalized Mentally Ill

Crazy in America: The Hidden Tragedy of Our Criminalized Mentally Ill examines the fate of people with mental illness who tangle with a treacherous and unforgiving criminal justice system.Mary Beth Pfeiffer shows how people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and other mental illnesses are incarcerated simply because there is no viable alternative and then how they are punished again behind bars for behavior that is psychotic rather than criminal.

The stories are moving and tragic as Ms. Pfeiffer puts a face to the horrific problem that we are facing.

- The psychiatric odyssey of a 39-year-old Iowa woman with a history of 25 hospitalizations who blinded herself while locked in solitary confinement.

-- The suicides of an 18-year-old youth who was abandoned for eight weeks in a tiny cell in a California juvenile prison and a 21-year-old New York woman who had been repeatedly punished with confinement to the prison "box".

-- The deaths of two Florida men at the hands of untrained police who panicked in the face of psychosis.

-- The path that led to a jail cell and breakdown for a 24-year-old Texan whose only crimes were to be mentally ill and drug-addicted.

Pfeiffer's book is an indictment of a society that fails to provide decent mental health care to its most vulnerable citizens and then incarcerates them for often petty crimes, leaving them sicker and more damaged by the experience.

Crazy In America Website

Jena 6: Take Action

Perhaps you heard the mothers, fathers and others talking about the Jena 6 on democracy now!. Here is another outrageous but true example of segregation-era oppression happening today in Jena, Louisiana. I signed onto ColorOfChange.org's campaign for justice in Jena, and wanted to invite you to do the same.
Color of Change

Last fall in Jena, the day after two Black high school students sat beneath the "white tree" on their campus, nooses were hung from the tree. When the superintendent dismissed the nooses as a "prank," more Black students sat under the tree in protest. The District Attorney then came to the school accompanied by the town's police and demanded that the students end their protest, telling them, "I can be your best friend or your worst enemy... I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen."

A series of white-on-black incidents of violence followed, and the DA did nothing. But when a white student was beaten up in a schoolyard fight, the DA responded by charging six black students with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

It's a story that reads like one from the Jim Crow era, when judges, lawyers and all-white juries used the justice system to keep blacks in "their place." But it's happening today. The families of these young men are fighting back, but the story has gotten minimal press. Together, we can make sure their story is told and that the Governor of Louisiana intervenes and provides justice for the Jena 6. It starts now. Please join me:

http://www.colorofchange.org/jena/?id=2131-200043

Real Cost of Prisons

What happens when DNA evidence ends up destroyed? Should DNA and evidence be handled independently? Here's the first of a four part series....

The proof of Clarence Moses-EL's guilt or innocence may well have been written in DNA code on two bedsheets, a sexual-assault kit and a pink and black outfit worn by a Denver rape victim.

From prison, he won a judge's permission to test the evidence and persuaded fellow inmates to pitch in $1,000 for the lab work.

Denver police packaged the items and labeled the box "DO NOT DESTROY."

Then, they threw it in a dumpster.

The move violated a court order and the Denver Police Department's own evidence policies.

More than 19 years after his conviction, Moses-EL remains behind bars, with no way to free himself from a 48-year sentence for a rape he says he didn't commit.

He

Trashing the Truth

LISTEN AND VIEW video as the "Trashing the Truth" project unfolds.

is one of 141 prisoners The Denver Post has found whose bids for freedom have stalled because officials lost or destroyed DNA. Whether guilty or innocent, they are victims of a U.S. Supreme Court decision justifying negligence in evidence handling. The ruling allows destruction unless inmates can meet the nearly impossible task of proving authorities acted out of malice, or "bad faith."

Nearly two decades after the 1988 decision, DNA analysis has evolved into criminal justice's most reliable tool for uncovering the truth. Yet the system continues trashing samples like the ones that so far have exposed more than 200 wrongful convictions.

"They broke their own rules and threw out the only key to my freedom," Moses-EL said from Kit Carson Correctional Facility in Burlington. "If that ain't bad faith, man, I don't know what is."

Nationwide, the specter of bad faith looms over scores of criminal cases, from unsolved murders to innocence bids such as that of Tim Masters, another Colorado inmate featured last week in The Denver Post.

For four days, the paper will detail how the system routinely mishandles biological evidence, undermining justice for victims and prisoners and allowing criminals

The law on whether authorities have a constitutional duty to preserve evidence predates the 1990s, when use of DNA became widespread in criminal justice.

Critics liken the 1988 Arizona vs. Youngblood ruling to one of the U.S. Supreme Court's most notorious.

"It's the Dred Scott decision of modern times," said forensic scientist Ed Blake, referring to the 1857 opinion holding that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery.The Denver Post

NY TIMES - Case For the Juvenile Sex Offender

By MAGGIE JONES

In the early 1980s, a therapist named Robert Longo was treating adolescent boys who had committed sex offenses. Their offenses ranged from fondling girls a few years younger than they were to outright rape of young children. As part of their treatment, the boys had to keep journals — which Longo read — in which they detailed their sexual fantasies and logged how frequently they masturbated to those fantasies. They created “relapse-prevention plans,” based on the idea that sex-offending is like an addiction and that teenagers need to be watchful of any “triggers” (pornography, anger) that might initiate their “cycle” of reoffending. And at the beginning of each group session, the boys introduced themselves much as an alcoholic begins an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “I’m Brian, and I’m a sex offender. I sexually offended against a 10-year-old boy; I made him lick my penis three times.”

Sex-offender therapy for juveniles was a new field in the 1980s, and Longo, like other therapists, was basing his practices on what he knew: the adult sex-offender-treatment models. “It’s where the literature was,” Longo, a founder of the international Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me not long ago. “It’s what we’d been doing.”

As it turns out, he went on to say, “much of it was wrong.” There is no proof that what Longo calls the “trickle-down phenomenon” of using adult sex-offender treatments on juveniles is effective. Adult models, he notes, don’t account for adolescent development and how family and environment affect children’s behavior. Also, research over the past decade has shown that juveniles who commit sex offenses are in several ways very different from adult sex offenders. As one expert put it, “Kids are not short adults.”

That’s not to say that juvenile sexual offenses aren’t a serious problem. Juveniles account for about one-quarter of the sex offenses in the U.S. Though forcible rapes, the most serious of juvenile sex offenses, have declined since 1997, court cases for other juvenile sex offenses have risen. David Finkelhor, the director of Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and others argue, however, that those statistics largely reflect increased reporting of juvenile sex offenses and adjudications of less serious offenses. “We are paying attention to inappropriate sexual behavior that juveniles have engaged in for generations,” he said.

New York Times Magazine

Ny Bans Solitary For The Seriously Mentally Ill

ALBANY - Gov. Eliot Spitzer and lawmakers announced yesterday that they have agreed on a compromise bill to ban solitary confinement for seriously mentally ill prison inmates because legislation passed this session faced a certain veto by the executive.

The Senate passed the bill unanimously during a special session yesterday, and the Assembly is scheduled to vote on the measure when it returns to Albany later this year.

About 12 percent of the prison population in New York, or some 8,000
inmates, has serious psychiatric disabilities, according to the bill's
sponsors, Nozzolio and Assembly Correction Committee Chairman Jeffrion
Aubry, D-Queens.

The bill would not ban solitary confinement entirely for this population. This is how it would work:

- Inmates with severe mental illness (such as schizophrenia or bipolar
disorder) would be diverted or removed from solitary confinement if the isolation term could potentially be for more than 30 days. They would be assessed by a mental-health clinician within one business day of being placed in the solitary unit.

- Inmates with minor mental disorders, or who required limited intervention, would be assessed by a professional within 14 days. If the prisoner were found to have a serious mental illness, the prison system would have 14 days to decide whether the inmate should be removed from solitary confinement.

- Prison officials could decide not to remove someone from the box if doing so would place in jeopardy the safety and security of the inmate, another person or the facility.

- Prisoners with serious psychiatric disabilities who were not removed from solitary confinement would receive a heightened level of treatment consisting of at least two hours a day, five days a week, of out-of-cell therapeutic care.

Senators gave final passage to the original bill at the end of their regular session last month, but negotiations had not concluded with Spitzer's office about how to hold down costs, provide special services only to the sickest of the sick, and ensure inmates without severe mental illnesses could not take advantage of the system.

Real Cost of Prisons

Mentally Ill Pose Problems For Cops

When a delusional Aaron Snyder continued to advance after revealing the gun beneath his jacket, the State Patrol officer did what he was trained to do.

"You can't think, 'Hey, this guy is mentally ill, so he probably won't shoot.' ... You are looking at the gun, and is the guy going to use the gun?" said Edward Connors, president of the Institute for Law and Justice, a nonprofit organization in Virginia that works with police agencies to improve training.

Gov. Bill Ritter and Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman have praised the actions of Colorado state Trooper Jay Hemphill, who shot and killed Snyder on Monday at the Capitol after Snyder claimed he was "the emperor" and motioned toward his fully loaded .357 revolver. Hemphill twice ordered Snyder to stop advancing.

But the case again raises issues of what happens when law enforcement officers encounter mentally ill people exhibiting violent behavior, as did Snyder, whose mother told people he had been diagnosed as delusional and was under the care of a psychiatrist.

Mentally ill people pose a difficult problem for police, who try to protect themselves and the public without hurting someone who is deranged, said Connors. Since 2002, more than 70 Colorado law enforcement agencies have sent more than 1,800 officers to Crisis Intervention Team training to learn how to defuse potentially violent interactions with disturbed people.

The Denver Post