Cuyahoga County Courts Show True Colors, False Justice
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Editorial
10/29/2008
Court systems need to act now on racial disparity.
So flagrant are the racial inequities in sentencing it seems as if our criminal judiciary slept through the civil rights movement.
White defendants were 35 percent more likely to receive treatment in lieu of conviction. Out-of-town and suburban whites were at least 77 percent more likely than black defendants to walk away with misdemeanor convictions.
[...]
The Ohio Supreme Court, meanwhile, must order judges to collect racial data pertaining to sentencing — a responsibility Ohio’s highest court has ducked since a 1995 state law directed it to do so.
Last year, Chief Justice Thomas Moyer agreed that the collection of race data was a worthy goal, “but I’m not sure how we achieve it.”
Start by demanding that judges in all 88 counties comply with state law.
That would be the first step to putting an end to this injustice.
Race and Justice to Get Action by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, Cuyahoga Prosecutor Bill Mason
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Regina Brett
10/24/2008
Jackson, Mason, and Cleveland City Council’s Public Safety Committee to take serious look at racial injustice in drug sentencing.
None of us can continue to remain blind to the racial disparities in the way felony drug cases are handled from our streets to our courtrooms.
No more claiming the discrepancies are merely anecdotal in nature. We have proof.
In Cuyahoga County, white people are more likely to have their felony drug charges reduced to misdemeanors – or to get treatment as an alternative to any conviction – than black people charged with the same crime. Black people are 12 times more likely to go to prison on drug charges than a white person.
The NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for a Safe and Fair Cleveland and the United Pastors in Mission want action.
Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson has met with the police chief and safety director. He is expected to announce a policy decision about the matter any day.
Councilman Kevin Conwell told me that his Public Safety Committee would hold a hearing about it on Nov. 19 at 9:30 a.m. in council’s committee Room 217.
Cleveland Council to Hold Hearing on Sentencing Disparities
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Gabriel Baird
10/23/2008
Cleveland City Council moving on race disparity.
City Council’s Public Safety Committee will hold a hearing Nov. 19 on disparities between sentences imposed on white and black criminals in Cuyahoga County Commons Pleas Court.
[...]
The newspaper found that white defendants tended to fare substantially better than their black counterparts — even when facing virtually identical charges.
The council session will be at 9:30 a.m. in council’s committee room at City Hall.
Reform and Consent
Cleveland Scene
Charu Gupta
10/22/2008
Ohio Supreme Court case filed by Bill Mason against a county judge trying to clean up the drug law racial disparity, may show that Mason has no intention of taking action.
In May 2003, a year after Mason’s meeting with the NAACP (see main story), Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Burt Griffin, a 30-year veteran of the bench, was getting ready to impanel a new grand jury. According to court documents (he declined to comment for this story), Griffin felt compelled to tackle the high volume of “crack pipe” felony indictments. He set aside the usual legal texts from which he read jury instructions, and wrote 10 pages of an original charge. Much of it was pro forma, but what Griffin said about crack pipe cases was unprecedented in Cuyahoga County.
[...]
Finally, Griffin explained in great detail the controversy involving crack-pipe cases. Defendants caught with these could be charged with either possessing a drug abuse instrument – a misdemeanor – or drug possession and trafficking, a fourth- or fifth-degree felony (assuming crack residue is found on the pipe). He then told the grand jury about “differential prosecution,” and how other jurisdictions in Ohio often treat such cases as misdemeanors.
[...]In court documents filed later, Griffin explained that he was “trying to lay the foundation for possible policy reform” – the very thing Mason had pledged to do with black leaders 12 months earlier. He continued: “An honest exploration and development of the facts surrounding the apparent differential prosecution of crack-pipe cases in Cuyahoga County might lead both to a reduction of the burdens of minor drug prosecutions,” Griffin wrote to the court, “and to greater confidence by members of the African-American community in our criminal justice system.”
Mason was outraged. He called Griffin’s assessment “a bald allegation with no support of any kind,” and accused the judge of a “stunning … disdain for the prosecutor’s office,” according to affidavits and motions filed immediately against Griffin. The judge should be disqualified, Mason told the court, for harboring prejudice against prosecutors and for incorrectly instructing the jury to use a different burden of proof for crack-pipe cases. Such a statement, Mason wrote, “is an act to prevent the prosecution of felonies under Ohio law.”
[...]
The matter was finally settled in Griffin’s favor when the court found no grounds for bias or prejudice. Griffin retired in 2005. Similar instructions have never again been issued by any judge.
Earlier this year, an ACLU study concluded that the racial disparity in Cleveland’s treatment of crack-pipe cases versus those in the suburbs was, in fact, real – far from a “bald allegation with no support of any kind.”
Bill Mason’s Mean Machine
Cleveland Scene
Charu Gupta and James Renner
10/22/2008
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor, Bill Mason, has had years to address the racial disparity in drug laws. Meaningful action is overdue.
Mona Lynch is a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine. Earlier this year, she studied aspects of Cuyahoga County’s criminal-justice system as part of the ACLU’s national project on racial disparities in drug arrests. At Scene’s request, Lynch also read the
2005 report. She found Mason and JSR’s inattention to open discovery surprising.“It would have been very low cost to implement,” says Lynch, “and perhaps provided some cost savings as well. There are important justice and efficiency reasons to have open discovery.”
In September, a new committee headed by Judge Friedman proposed another course: Within one week of the first pretrial conference, prosecutors would give defense counsel a “discovery packet” containing all police reports, statements and criminal records of defendants, witnesses names and addresses, and any lab and hospital reports. Prosecutors could decide to redact any information in any of these documents they deemed sensitive. Defense attorneys could still ask a judge to unmask it, after showing “good cause.”
That’s still not enough prosecutorial advantage for Mason.
A few weeks ago, Mason told Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett – who’s been flogging the prosecutor over open discovery – that he’s “not against open discovery” and is working with the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association on a statewide proposition.
[...]
In 2000, Human Rights Watch documented just how disproportionately the so-called war on drugs targets African Americans. At that time in Ohio, blacks made up 11 percent of the general population but 70 percent of the prison population. Most were locked up on drug-related charges.
In early 2002, the Rev. Marvin McMickle got to see why. The pastor of Antioch Baptist Church and civil-rights activist spent four months serving as foreman of a Cuyahoga County grand jury, the body that issues felony indictments. He left a troubled man. A majority of the defendants accused of low-level drug felonies were black Clevelanders – and most were addicts, not dealers.
[...]
“If you get a [fifth-degree] felony at age 20,” McMickle told Scene this July, “then 20 years later you’re still a felon and maybe you’re having a hard time taking care of your family, right? That just perpetuates this cycle.” McMickle and the pastors wanted to know: Would Mason tackle the random police sweeps and subsequent charging decisions that were putting so many black Clevelanders on the path of felony convictions?
According to a 2002 Plain Dealer article, Mason promised back then to look for ways to reduce the number of minor drug-possession arrests (dubbed “crack-pipe cases”) being charged as felonies. He would go into the community and meet with police officers and municipal judges who were sending these cases to his office and try to find a systematic solution to the pastors’ and NAACP’s concerns.
[...]
The number of Cleveland’s felony drug-possession arrests has remained steady – 5,500 a year since 2003, nearly 70 percent of the county’s total – according to statistics compiled by local and federal agencies.
[...]
Former county judge Peggy Foley Jones, who served until 2005, says Mason’s office seldom reduces charges before trial. “That’s what’s clogging up the system,” she says. “You try a crack pipe case for two days.” While many such cases are settled during trial, the snowball of court time and costs has already been set in motion.
[...]
For the last several years, annual grand jury costs for jurors, court personnel and prosecutors have totaled nearly $1.5 million.
[...]
Citizens for a Safe and Fair Cleveland was formed in early 2007 to focus on the impact of law enforcement, judicial equity and community relations.
James Hardiman, CSFC’S co-chairman and first vice president of the Cleveland NAACP, has called low-level drug arrests charged as felonies “a crisis in our community.”Earlier this year, CSFC partnered with the ACLU, which was already looking at racial disparities in sentencing and drug arrests nationwide. The ACLU has focused on Cuyahoga County, with research conducted by Mona Lynch, the criminology professor from UC, Irvine. Lynch’s conclusions were released in July and titled, “Selective Enforcement of Drug Laws in Cuyahoga County.”
Lynch scrutinized grand jury reports and demographic data to document what many had long suspected: There is a racial – or at least a geographic – disparity in how the county prosecutes drug cases. Cleveland drug suspects are more likely to be charged with felonies in county courts, while suburban counterparts usually face only misdemeanors in municipal courts.[...]
Peggy Foley Jones, a Republican, served on the bench for 14 years until losing to Peter Corrigan, a candidate backed by Mason in the 2004 election.
(Of the five separate bar associations that make up the Judicial Candidates Rating Coalition, three ranked Jones as “excellent” and two reviewed her as “good” in 2004. All five rated Corrigan “good.”) Jones says that many sitting judges find at least an appearance of impropriety in Mason’s political behavior. “Mason is in a powerful position in the county Democratic party,” she says. “He [influences] who gets endorsements, who gets to run. So that affects judges’ thoughts, even if it’s just a perception.”[...]
“Mason is at the heart of county Democratic politics,” says Chris Link, the executive director of Cleveland’s ACLU. “That isn’t a good thing because you then don’t really have an independent prosecutor. It’s very difficult to be critical of people in your own party.”
[...]
After news reports revealed his refusal to debate his opponent at the City Club – he hadn’t even responded – Mason finally agreed, and he and Annette Butler met there on Monday.
[...]
She brought up recent media coverage of racial disparity in crack-pipe cases, and two questions from the audience dealt with the issue. Oddly, Mason’s response seemed to suggest that the problem was news to him. “I find it disconcerting to all of us involved in the justice system. I will say
this: I will go out and I will ask for funding to look at this issue very strongly, to have it analyzed.”He neglected to mention the studies that have already confirmed the disparity or the fact that local community leaders brought it to his attention six years ago.
Cuyahoga County Needs to End Double Standard in Drug Cases
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Regina Brett
10/21/2008
Change is needed at the Justice Center.
Why do so many black people end up there with felony charges?
Two newspapers have answered that question in a way that should shame us into action.
[...]
In Cuyahoga County, black people … are 12 times more likely to be sent to prison on drug charges than a white person.
The Call & Post, Ohio’s black newspaper, ran a story last week about a new report released by Citizens for a Safe and Fair Cleveland. “Selective Enforcement of Drug Laws in Cuyahoga County, Ohio” shows that whites and blacks use drugs at similar rates but blacks are more likely to be convicted of felony charges.
[...]
“It can no longer be denied,” Rev. Marvin McMickle told me. “There is a double standard.”
On Monday, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason said he would look for solutions. McMickle would like one of them to be more black prosecutors.
[...]
It’s time for a clear-cut plan of action that includes the mayor, the police chief, the law director, the prosecutor, the judges and the lowliest beat cops on the street. It’s time they all operate with both eyes open.
The Drug War Sends White People Into Treatment, While Black People Get Felonies
StoptheDrugWar.org
Chronicle Blog
Scott Morgan
10/21/2008
National drug policy blog picks up what’s happening in Cleveland.
This Cleveland Plain-Dealer story just completely blows the lid off the inherent racism of the war on drugs. Reporter Bob Paynter pulled out all the stops, digging through court records to demonstrate how people of color receive harsher punishments than white defendants for the same drug crimes.
Prosecutor Bill Mason to Address Issue of Drug Case Disparities
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Leila Atassi
10/21/2008
During a debate at the City Club of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor, Bill Mason, states that he is now willing to look for solutions to racial disparity in his office.
Former federal prosecutor Annette Butler, who hopes to unseat Mason in November, challenged the prosecutor using stories that ran Sunday and Monday in The Plain Dealer, analyzing the outcomes of hundreds of criminal cases since 2004. The investigation found that black defendants were more likely to be convicted of felonies than their white counterparts who committed similar crimes.
[...]
[Mason] highlighted a report produced in 2004 by the Denver-based Justice Management Institute, which extensively studied the county court system and provided 36 recommendations to improve its efficiency. The Justice Management Institute recently returned to evaluate the county’s improvement and rated it a B+.
Mason and the justice system reform council, however, have not done enough, Butler said. Mason has ignored the institute’s suggestions to adopt open discovery, she added. The practice would require prosecutors and defense attorneys to share evidence with one another.
Review Finds White Drug Defendants 55% More Likely to Have Charges Reduced
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Bob Paynter
10/20/2008
Prosecutor Bill Mason and his staff are a large part of the racial disparity in drug sentencing, according to research.
Why did Kevin McFaul, white and the son of the county sheriff, get off with a misdemeanor conviction last year in his cocaine-possession case — potentially preserving his law license — while Mercia Cherry, a black resident of Cleveland’s East Side, had to take a felony in hers?
[...]
The newspaper reported Sunday that among first-time offenders who pleaded guilty last year to a single felony drug-possession charge, white defendants were 35 percent more likely than black people to get a second chance to make their pleas and charges disappear by successfully completing a treatment plan.
Court records show that virtually all of that racial disparity occurred in something called the Early Intervention Program, the control of which remains somewhat mysterious.
Judges and defense attorneys said in interviews that the program has come to be controlled by Prosecutor Bill Mason’s office over the years, an assertion prosecutors dismiss.
[...]
Among all defendants indicted in Cuyahoga County on a single, low-level drug-possession charge over the last four years who were convicted after pleading guilty, white people were 55 percent more likely than black people to have their charges reduced to a misdemeanor.
[...][Public defender Robert Tobik] has been arguing for years that more entry-level drug offenders should be allowed misdemeanor pleas, especially in crack-pipe “residue” cases like Cherry’s, which typically involve mere chemical traces of cocaine.
These residue cases clog the system and waste the court’s resources, Tobik said; several judges have made similar arguments. But to no avail:
Misdemeanors have actually become harder — not easier — to come by in Common Pleas Court.[...]
On the matter of misdemeanor pleas, prosecutor protests notwithstanding, it appears from the data to help if you live in the suburbs or outside the area.
It helps even more if you’re from out of town and white.
Justice Blinded: Race, Drugs and Our Legal System
Cleveland Plain Dealer
10/18/2008
Another study following the Lynch report, shows serious inequalities in the way drug laws are executed in Cuyahoga County.
Anthony Smith Jr. and Dontez Orr are young, black and poor. Both are residents of inner-city Cleveland. And both earned felony records for drug possession last year after seemingly minor run-ins with police.
Brian Biddulph of Westlake had more drugs than Smith and Orr combined when he was arrested last summer, and had a worse criminal record. But Biddulph, who is white, was allowed to enter an intervention program. His case — and the stain of a possible felony conviction — will disappear if he completes it.
A Plain Dealer investigation into the handling of low-level drug cases in Cuyahoga County shows that white defendants tended to fare substantially better than their black counterparts — even when facing virtually identical charges.
The issue raises important questions about the fairness of the justice system. National data have long shown that white people use illegal drugs at about the same rate as black people but that blacks are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned far more often for doing so.
Drug Court Helped Graduate Maintain Sobriety, Regain Custody of Children
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Rachel Dissell
October 9th, 2008
Cuyahoga County’s Family Drug Court helps mothers beat addiction.
The support that helped her get sober after 20 years and losing six children to her addiction is something she never found before coming to Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court’s Family Drug Court.
Beyond rebuilding the ravaged self-esteem of many women — and a few men — who have had their children taken away, the program has reunified families faster than through traditional court and child-welfare methods, according to studies of the program.