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.”
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.
Cuyahoga County to Start Drug Court
Cleveland Plain Dealer Blog
Tom Benning
June 13, 2008
Judges in Cuyahoga County have voted to establish a countywide drug court.
Cuyahoga County judges didn’t let the chance to start a drug court slip through their grasp a second time.
Common Pleas Court judges unanimously voted in favor of a countywide drug court this week — 11 years after voting against such a measure. Court officials hope the treatment program will be up and running within a year.
“We are not going to be soft on crime,” Court Administrator and former Common Pleas judge Tom Pokorny said. “We are going to be smart on crime.”
Drug court is a yearlong treatment program for non-violent drug offenders. Participants must submit to random drug tests, counseling and job training. If they graduate, charges are dismissed. If they fail, they serve out their sentence.
Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
New York Times
Adam Liptak
4/23/2008
This article comparing the prison population in the US with that of other countries is part of a series of articles in the New York Times titled American Exception: Millions Behind Bars.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
Petty felons get prison too often
Columbus Dispatch
Letter to the Editor
3/29/2008
Columbus attorney Harry R. Reinhart wrote this letter to the editor in response to an article and letter on prison populations in the Columbus Dispatch.
After reading Nancy Elliott’s Feb. 22 letter suggesting that I had complained about prison populations being swollen due to maximum sentences for dangerous criminals, I was forced to go back to the original Dispatch article (“Life terms pile up for rapists,” Feb. 11) to see if I said such a thing. After all, prison bed space is indeed designed for taking the dangerous criminal off the street for long periods of time. Why on earth would I make such a comment? Now, having refreshed my recollection, 1 realize that I did not “conveniently forget” that “cruel, merciless and unrepentant” criminals should be incarcerated, as suggested by Elliott.
Although the entire interview was not published, what I said and what reasonable readers would understand from the part quoted was that the General Assembly has passed laws that put far too many petty felons in prison — people who, to paraphrase Elliott, are not cruel, who do have mercy and who are repentant — thus limiting the beds available for the deserving. If Elliott would take the time to look beyond her vicarious pain and into the current demographic of the Ohio prison population, she would discover that the majority — indeed, the substantial majority — of prisoners are minor and petty offenders. Low-level drug offenders or folks sentenced for petty property offenses doing minimum or near-minimum sentences have swollen the prison population. These prisoners constitute the majority of the prison population. They should not.
Our view: Ohio has to spend smarter on prisoners
Dayton Daily News
3/16/2008
The Dayton Daily News editorial comments on Ohio’s prison overcrowding problem.
The overcrowding problem in Ohio’s prisons is so awful that when Gov. Ted Strickland’s administration backed off double-bunking at Dayton’s two prisons, the concession — significant though it was here — barely rippled in Columbus.
Ohio’s corrections department has 12,000 more inmates than it has beds. Putting 450 to 500 more people in Dayton would have helped ease the situation, but it obviously wasn’t going to solve or even dent the problem.
So what is Ohio going to do with all the inmates it doesn’t have space for, especially when that number is projected to grow by 15,000 more by 2016?
It’s good that Terry Collins, the head of Ohio’s corrections department, is emphatically telling the governor and lawmakers that building more prisons is not the answer. Prisons are tremendously expensive to put up and to run, and, once they’re constructed, they will be filled. The only way prisons get shut down is by a court order — when they’re so old and foul that humans can’t be put in them.
But if not more cell blocks and razor wire, then what?
[...]
Ohio is putting a lot of people in prison who just a little over a decade ago would have gotten a lecture, probation or a free pass. Judges’ discretion has been taken away with mandatory sentences; some penalties have increased; new crimes have been identified. In many cases, the individuals — including repeat drunken drivers, those convicted of multiple and especially violent domestic violence charges, and sexual offenders who’ve served their time, but failed to register with authorities — deserve real punishment.
But the questions are at what cost and where.
Prison Director Collins recently told legislators that sending the wrong people to prison can actually do more harm than good. In making those choices, Mr. Collins said, “We need to figure out who’s bad and who we’re just mad at.”
Prisons need to be for the worst of the worst.
Three-strikes provision in Ohio law could double sentences for repeat offenders
Cleveland.com Blog
10/25/2007
Although Ohio’s prisons are bursting at the seams, state representatives and senators are considering a bill that would double the time spent in prison for repeat offenders.
Columbus — The Ohio Senate began hearings this week on a bill that could permit judges to lock up repeat felons for twice as long as current law allows.
Judges could hand down maximum sentences without explanation for a second offense in any felony case. And those headed to prison for at least the third time — under a so-called “three strikes” provision — could see their time doubled.
The three-strikes provision is getting the most attention. Currently, 26 other states and the federal government have similar laws, according to the Justice Policy Institute. But few are as tough as Senate Bill 208, the Ohio proposal, which could mean double time for everyone from shoplifters to rapists.
The bill would be the most significant change to sentencing guidelines in Ohio in a decade and would almost certainly lead to increases in the state’s prison population — which at just under 50,000 inmates today is already at a record high.
An analysis by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction estimates this bill could add 11,000 inmates in three years. The estimate jumps to about 40,000 additional inmates over the next 10 years or, worst case, the prison population could swell to more than 100,000 during that period.
Critics already are lining up to pan the bill, saying it is Draconian, expensive, wrongly focused on nonviolent offenders and that it could disproportionately affect blacks.