smallblog domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/cestbonl/public_html/thehaleyreport/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6170The study, reported by The Eye, reviewed over 1,000 rulings where defendants had accused the prosecution of misconduct. The study showed that at least 120 criminal convictions since 1985 had been reversed due in part, or completely, to prosecutorial misconduct. On top of that number, another 250 cases involved criticism of the prosecutions behavior by judges, though determined to be “not serious enough to affect the jury’s decision”, therefore retaining the convictions.
The definition of “misconduct” varied from case to case, often involving prosecutors who failed to turn over vital evidence to the defense, misrepresented evidence in statements, or failed to disclose information that could discredit their witnesses.
The number of convictions that were ultimately reversed may be just around 10% of the convictions reviewed, but the real problem lies in the failure of the Massachusetts judicial system to monitor and discipline prosecutors that botch their job:
“NECIR found no case in Massachusetts where a prosecutor was disbarred for professional misconduct since 1974, when the state Board of Bar Overseers was created to hear complaints against attorneys. Only two public reprimands for professional misconduct were found in that 42-year span, and they came without fines or other punishment.” (The Eye)
That means courts are not naming names, or even providing a system to correct any kind of structural professional malpractice. Many are calling this out as a huge issue, especially considering how often prosecutorial misconduct leads to undeserved sentencing. The NECIR study alone showed 11 cases in which the defendants were exonerated from their charges entirely. Together, they served a total of more than 100 years of prison time. The other 109 cases saw defendants convicted again or pleading guilty, though often with lesser charges.
Critics of the practice of shielding the prosecution point out how difficult it is to track down and hold Massachusetts prosecutors who have a history of misconduct accountable. In all but seven of the 120 cases in which decisions were reversed, the prosecutors’ names were omitted.
The study also found that at least seven prosecutors whose professional misconduct led to conviction reversals had been promoted to higher posts, including judges and district attorneys. Even worse, they also identified four prosecutors whose actions had led to conviction reversals multiple times. Out of those, only one person was ever disciplined and now is practicing privately.
A professor at the William & Mary Law School in Virginia, Adam Gershowitz, who argues for naming names, explained that judges have worked as prosecutors, and can therefore often sympathize with the struggle of a heavy workload, or may simply retain a cultural rule against snitching.
Massachusetts’ failure to track and punish prosecutorial misconduct is an issue that clearly puts the public at risk, Daniel Medwed, a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law argues:
]]>“Prosecutors have more power than anyone, in many respects, over the lives of the average person. But there is almost no accountability, no transparency, and the public isn’t paying attention—that is a very, very combustible concoction.”
Struck with sensationalized images and stories of city gang violence, people were convinced that America was facing an onslaught of a radicalized, sociopathic youth. On every corner could be one of these young predators, they thought, waiting to brutally take a life without consideration. People wanted protection, and leading political figures saw it as an opportunity to score political points by addressing these, if misguided, genuine fears.
What resulted from those efforts were a series of laws directed at juvenile offenders that would fail to make important distinctions between adult criminals and corrupted, immature juvenile delinquents. What resulted would be a major push towards “tough-on-crime” policies that would exacerbate and expand the tragedy of mass incarceration.
And yet in 2017, a time when the topic of police brutality and a broken criminal justice system is prevalent in political conversation, it seems figures who were so instrumental in the shift towards tough crime policies two-and-a-half decades ago are now changing course without a word of how they put us on the wrong track to begin with.
We see this through a recent editorial put out on the Boston Globe by Wayne Budd, former Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. His recent piece in the Boston Globe, titled “A Tipping Point for Criminal Justice Reform”, is filled with important ironies that should be noted and addressed before his new-found commitment to criminal justice reform can be taken seriously.
In it, he rails against the ills that have come from an age of heightened mass incarceration and harsher criminal justice principles. Citing a report released a few months ago by the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, he explains the need to reverse missteps like high incarceration rates, cuts in rehabilitation programs and mandatory minimum sentencing.
Before we are so quick to listen to and heed the calls for criminal justice reform from Wayne Budd, we should be fully aware of his background and role in creating the issues he now laments.
We can follow Budd back to his time working in Massachusetts with his law firm, Budd and Reilly. The second name will sound familiar to Massachusetts residents; Reilly is Tom Reilly, former Massachusetts Attorney General. Reilly and Budd have been lifelong friends, running this law firm together and even running campaigns together when Wayne Budd served as Reilly’s campaign manager.
When the “tough on crime” mentality was taking over the imaginations (and ambitions) of Massachusetts politicians, Wayne Budd was right there in the center of the action. When local and state officials began to worry about the possibility of a riot set off by racially-charged police brutality, Wayne Budd advised then-Governor Bill Weld to appoint an African-American as District Attorney to Suffolk County to deter protest.
Budd’s close relationship with Tom Reilly cannot be missed. In a 2001 issue of Boston College Law Review, Christine Chamberlain pinpoints a important and relevant source of the advance of harmful mandatory-minimum sentencing procedures for juveniles:
“The need for more serious punishment for juveniles who commit very serious crimes was expressed by Massachusetts state legislators, district attorneys, the Attorney General and the Governor, following the initial decision of Judge Paul Heffernan to try fifteen-year-old Edward O’Brien as a juvenile for the gruesome murder of his neighbor”.
District Attorney Tom Reilly personally served as the prosecutor for the Eddie O’Brien case, a highly unusual role for any DA to be playing on a trial of such stature. As Chamberlain points out above, this was the case that made way politically for the sentencing of children to adult prisons for life with no parole, a practice deemed unconstitutional in 2015.
It takes a little putting the pieces together, but as one begins to explore the history of the prosecutors of this case, it begins to look like tough-on-crime policies were being used to satisfy political ambitions.
The Edward O’Brien case was recently reviewed with its conclusion challenged by author Margo Nash in “The Politics Of Murder”. While her stance that the 15-year-old boy at the center of the case was innocent and a victim of political gain has not been confirmed, the unconventional and sloppy practices by the prosecution revealed in the book leads one to take pause. In Nash’s eyes, prosecutor Tom Reilly his network of support from figures like Governor Bill Weld and Wayne Budd used this case to amass support for mandatory minimum sentencing, thereby increasing their own political standing.
And indeed, as we follow the political history along, we see that these men had no lack of the political ambition central to the motive we have asserted. After the Eddie O’Brien case and other public pushes towards tougher policies, Governor Bill Weld would unsuccessfully challenge Democratic Senator John Kerry in the 1996 Senate election. Tom Reilly would successfully run as Attorney General in 1998 and be re-elected in 2002.
As for Wayne Budd, his work in the field of criminal prosecution landed him his own impressive positions in the political world. Though before the onset of Eddie’s case, he served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts from 1989-1992.
He also served as Associate Attorney General of the U.S., overseer of the Civil Rights, Environmental, Tax, Civil and Antitrust divisions at the Department of Justice and served on the Federal Bureau of Prisons as an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Notably, the Clinton administration is now widely criticized for exacerbating the issue of mass incarceration, though Budd’s connection to those policies are less clear.
In Wayne Budd’s editorial, he eloquently diagnoses what happened in Massachusetts and across the country to erode the morality of the criminal justice system:
“For the past two decades, like other states across the country, Massachusetts responded to sensationalized events with tough-on-crime policies that sent more people to prison and kept them there longer. At the same time, the state cut back on treatment and reentry services that can alleviate underlying problems that lead individuals into criminal activity. Without help, prison simply reinforces criminogenic tendencies, leading these individuals to reoffend.”
Budd is spot on, and he even gives a prescription for how to start addressing the issue:
“Reform starts with sentencing, in this case immediately repealing ineffective mandatory-minimum sentences that keep judges from considering circumstances that may warrant less time in prison.”
But no where in this editorial does Budd address his own role, and the role of his own close peers, in pushing for these mandatory-minimum sentencing policies. No where does he explain his change in heart and mind that prompted this change in tune on issues of criminal justice. His past and the past of others responsible for pushing these harmful policies seems to be brushed over by claiming it was all part of a wide-spread mass hysteria over sensationalized crime.
We could give him a pass. We could take Wayne Budd’s editorial for what it is, be thankful that he has indeed changed course in the right direction and go on letting individuals like him shape the criminal justice policies of the future.
Or we could ask a deeper question. How seriously should we take Wayne Budd’s commitment to positive criminal justice reform that will inject humanity and decency into the way we deal with our nation’s prison population? Could Wayne Budd simply be blowing hot air in the direction of the current political winds now that the tides have changed?
Back in the 90s, often racially-charged and sensationalized violent crime was leading the public into a panic. People wanted a way to know they would be safe in the streets. Instead of assessing the situation calmly and taking a strategic, measured approach, officials like Bill Weld, Tom Reilly and Wayne Budd used this public hysteria as a wave to surf right into political promotion on.
As a result, more people went to prison unnecessarily for longer. Punishment was emphasized over rehabilitation, and entire legions of human beings, often with little more than a drug charge, were left to rot in a correctional system devoid of compassion. More children, with minds that had not yet developed and personalities that had not yet matured, were punished as if they were adults.
The citizens wanted safety, but these tough-on-crime policies had the opposite effect by over-incarcerating and criminally radicalizing people behind bars so that they’d be more likely, not less, to commit crime when they left.
Today, more and more of the public has realized the failure of the criminal justice policies of the past. Politicians, particularly Democratic politicians, who want to be taken seriously are having to ride a new wave of compassionate correctional reform. Should we trust figures like Wayne Budd to truly have the integrity and will to lead us into an era of criminal justice reform? Or without admitting responsibility and explaining the change in course, should we assume Budd is still playing the game of political gain by trying to follow the popular rhetoric of the day?
]]>That’s just what happened to Eddie O’Brien according to Margo Nash, former bar counsel of the 1995 case of a 15-year-old boy that was convicted of first degree murder. She believes he was innocent, and that a corrupted judicial system stood in the way of his fair defense. The infamous O’Brien case is currently under review by the Innocence Program and set to undergo investigation.
Eddie was charged in the mid-90s, when political fervor was ramping up against “super-predators”, a racially-charged term to refer to sadistic, homicidal youths.
O’Brien was a white, Catholic teenager…and he might have been the perfect target for a political win for the prosecution. Was there a concerted effort to ignore the evidence against Eddie O’Brien being the murderer of Janet Downing? Nash thinks so.
The Politics Of Murder, Nash’s thrilling investigative book on the O’Brien case, paints a picture of a corrupted judicial system which convicted an innocent boy to advance a political agenda.
Margo’s side of the story hardly leaves any piece of evidence unaddressed. She has entirely gone back and reinvestigated the case, piecing together an over-arching political influence behind the failure of O’Brien’s defense, a motive she says she missed the first time.
Margo explains her conviction to stick with the case and working so tirelessly to prove Eddie’s innocence in her book:
“I have often cringed at the realization that I completely missed the big picture twenty years ago. But to be fair, the big picture took years to develop and emerge into a legible image…today, I finally understand what actually happened to Eddie O’Brien and who he has spent more than half of his life behind bars.”
Nash argues that the person who tried the case against Eddie O’Brien, the county’s District Attorney at the time, had political motives to use Eddie’s case to reform juvenile criminal justice law and put himself into a position to run for Attorney General. She has done her homework and provided incredible evidence and a compelling narrative to tell that side of the story.
Even at the time that Eddie’s case was decided, controversy was brewing over the apparent lack of investigation into the brother-in-law of Janet Downing. An article in the editorial South Coast Today, posted in 1997, commented:
“His parents’ anger with the verdict was directed at investigators who they said did not seriously investigate Janet Downing’s brother-in-law whom she apparently had evicted from her house several months before the crime.”
Those protests from O’Brien’s parents, then just another element of the great public spectacle the case turned out to be, are explored in-depth in Nash’s Politics of Murder. In fact, she lays out exactly how she believes corruption within the judicial system led to evidence being systematically ignored and Eddie O’Brien being targeted and framed.
Is it true? Margo Nash certainly outlines a well-investigated and well thought-out theory as to why she thinks it is. She also holds with her the testimony of several who worked closely on the case who confirmed that they believed in Eddie’s innocence.
Enough evidence has also been brought forward to put Eddie’s case on the list for the Innocence Program, an organization which works to appeal false conviction cases and get innocent people out of prison.
Margo’s work to uncover the truth behind this case picks apart the legal evidence and proceedings, but it goes even further. This book paints the image of the context in which this trial happened to show readers just what happened to fool the Boston area into thinking an innocent 15-year-old boy was guilty of murder.
Whether you buy the story she uncovered or not, Nash’s masterful feat of weaving together this story should give pause to anyone who trusts the integrity of the judicial system. Nash shows just how easily the social networks of powerful people within a local court system can lead to an influential person manipulating the process and infringing on the rights of ordinary Americans.
From biased appointments to the court to political intimidation to key figures on the case or to general masking of the real story with rhetorical games and legal tricks, Nash demonstrates how realistic political corruption in the court system is.
The central argument of The Politics Of Murder depends on the former Middlesex District Attorney, Thomas J. Reilly, former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, and their political aspirations to run for Attorney General and US Senator.
Imagine being in a particular political moment where the public was frenzied over perceived danger in the streets from young, soulless, homicidal “super-predators” who threatened to unweave the very fabric of society. Imagine being in a moment in which the pressure was on to move policy to try certain charged juveniles as adults through the criminal justice system.
Now imagine the opportunity Thomas J. Reilly and William Weld, both politicians aspiring for a higher office, saw in the Eddie O’Brien case. Here was a young 15-year-old who looked like he may be guilty of a sadistic crime. Try and convict this kid, use it as political leverage to make the juvenile system more strict and win political points with your constituents that will turn into votes later.
And when it looked like that kid might not have been guilty after all, when evidence to the contrary comes up, they just had to use their respective powers to influence to case to their advantage. ‘
Thomas Reilly, in an unprecedented move to personally try a case as District Attorney, took on the Eddie O’Brien case himself. With the help of the O’Brien case, Governor Weld would sign into law a bill that required anyone aged 14, 15 or 16 charged with murder to be tried as an adult.
As another piece of powerful evidence, Margo Nash recalls a conversation she had with a judge, Judge Paul Heffernan, who says he was pressured to step down from the case by powerful political interests. Governor Weld would replace Judge Heffernan with a judge who, by all accounts, seemed much more likely to give into the prosecution’s demands.
Years later, Judge Heffernan stands up to the corruption he was asked to participate in by telling Nash the real story in The Politics of Murder.
It wasn’t hard to see the interests merging, the political actions taken as a result of the case, and just how the conviction of Eddie O’Brien would be convenient for a number of powerful people.
It looks like Eddie O’Brien is going to get another chance to make his case and prove his innocence. Margo Nash believes so much in O’Brien’s innocence that she put together a comprehensive image of political corruption in the legal system.
O’Brien has spent nearly 20 years in jail for a crime that he and others close to him maintain he didn’t commit. His trial was headed by a prosecution team who was great at playing the legal system, but Margo Nash has unearthed new evidence that warrants a full investigation on the decades-old case.
Margo speaks highly of Eddie O’Brien, a man who she calls “a good man, a spiritual man, a forgiving man”. She says she has kept in touch with the 35-year old and his parents, and that he helped her piece together the puzzle of the O’Brien case in order to write this book.
In the opening pages of The Politics Of Murder, she introduces his case as one which “would turn out to be the catalyst which changed juvenile law in Massachusetts and sent children to adult prisons for the rest of their natural lives. It also catapulted political careers and perverted the orderly administration of justice that he, his parents, and I, until then, all very much believed in.”
The Politics of Murder very much could be the first time that the story of Eddie O’Brien, from the fateful night that led to his conviction through the legal proceedings that followed, has been told in all honesty. His story swept the news in the mid-1990s, but it’s likely that the public by-and-large wasn’t seeing half of the story.
Was everyone from the public to the defense team blinded by a thin veil hiding deep corruption? Has Eddie O’Brien, charged at 15 years old, spent 20 years in prison as an innocent man and a victim of political ambition?
You can read Margo Nash’s book for yourself and decide. The Politics of Murder is now available on Amazon for Kindle or Print here.
]]>At some point during this time frame, the circle of friends they have had since they were children begins to change before their eyes. They’re getting older. Conversations are now about new things, new experiences, new passions and new interests.
One of those friends, by some set of circumstances, will probably get ahold of some weed, and the group will agree it’d be exciting to try.
From that point forward, a failed legal system is set in place which ensures that the situation is dealt with in the most erroneous, counter-productive, foolish way imaginable. If the consequences this system weren’t so tragic, the War on Drugs would be comical in that it manages to make every problem it tries to address ten times worse.
The War On Drugs tells that child who decided to try smoking pot with a few of their closest friends that they are a criminal. They may begin thinking of themselves differently, engaging in other (more destructive) criminal behaviors because they already had a taste of that label.
And what if they have a good experience with it?
What if they experience marijuana as a relatively non-dangerous substance that doesn’t even hurt as much as their parents’ alcohol that they tried a few months before? The War on Drugs tells that person that the law is inconsistent, labelling alcohol as legal yet criminalizing a plant that doesn’t even cause too much of a hangover.
Maybe the War on Drugs was wrong about other substances too. Cocaine? Pills? Something even more addictive?
The War On Drugs also ensured that marijuana is more accessible to that child than alcohol is at their age, thanks to the entire industry being forced into the unregulated black market.
The truth is, whether a person starts using drugs through an experience in school, whether they try it for the first time at a fast food chain they got a job at, whether it simply slipped its way into their social life otherwise, drugs are a part of human culture. People are going to do it – and it is going to be a huge huge health issue for those who end up addicted to something.
Instead of labelling this human behavior as a criminal offense and trying to stop substance use in its tracks (a goal that has failed miserably), why not drop the stigma, regulate intelligently and give people real medical help when they need it – not jail time?
Instead of continuing a system that disproportionately oppresses low-income people and people of color, sometimes by design, why not build a compassionate system that genuinely aims to improve the lives of people through a realistic drug policy?
Instead of making it even harder for people to get off of drugs by punishing them rather than supporting them, why not strip this ridiculous criminalization of substance use? Why not genuinely care about the people who choose to try drugs due to inevitable socio-political or economic factors, and help make sure they stay healthy and don’t become a danger to anyone around them?
Look, these policies are stupid. They just exacerbate the problem of substance use and abuse.
If you want any more proof of it, read this CNN article in which an aide to Nixon admits about the War on Drugs:
“The Nixon White House…had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course.“
I know this speaks for itself, but the fact that this farce has gone on for so long is an outrage.
We need to legalize and regulate marijuana, a substance that is probably less dangerous than alcohol, but can cause serious issues when used at a young age. Several states have already taken this step, with a general absence of negative consequences being reported.
We need to decriminalize all other substances and treat people with addiction in a compassionate, care-focused manner.
We need to stop letting the pharmaceutical industry make opiate addiction a bigger and bigger problem and look into possible alternate solutions for pain relief and decreased dependency on addictive painkillers.
We need to care about people, and we need to end the War on Drugs.
]]>But, just as many societal ideals, this is too often not a reality.
Let’s set aside the problem of the price and accessibility of higher education for a moment and focus on the kids who often don’t ever make it out of high school. We have a big problem in this country with unnecessarily criminalizing children, often for non-violent offenses or offenses that are ultimately rooted in discrimination or structural barriers.
This problem is collectively known as the school-to-prison pipeline, and the image that name evokes is fairly accurate. It is a system in which some groups of students in this nation are disciplined disproportionately. It is a system in which schools across the country outsource their disciplinary obligations to local law enforcement.
It is a system in which children are placed unnecessarily into correctional facilities. Those experiences are shaping their own conception of who they are, often leading to a pattern of behavior that will land them in prison again and again.
Here’s how it works (in part):
Challenges Facing Certain Groups Of Students:
The school-to-prison pipeline does not necessarily start with bad behavior on the part of a student. Behaviors that might lead to harsh punishment often begin with disadvantages that certain students face, and failures of schools to recognize and correct for these disadvantages. Example of these groups include:
Students of color disproportionately facing:
LGBTQ+ Students disproportionately facing:
Low-income students facing:
Students with disabilities disproportionately facing:
Removal From School/Harsh Treatment:
So then, certain groups of students are systematically facing an institutional environment that has too often left them behind. In many, many situations, it is barriers such as these that lead to the kinds of behaviors that schools have to discipline. But at this point in the pipeline, we must look at how schools choose to discipline students to see how this worsens the issue.
In the 2011-2012 school year, schools sent around 260,000 students to law enforcement, with 92,000 students arrested on school property. Suspensions and expulsions rose over the last ten years, pushing students out of school and building extra barriers to success.
Data indicates that these removals from school are often due to trivial misbehavior, and not violent behavior. That data holds up when looking at students detained in the juvenile justice system as well.
Students involved with drugs are also pushed out of school rather than being properly treated for addiction, or otherwise rehabilitated.
Labelling Theory:
When schools choose to send students out of school and into the criminal justice system due to trivially breaking regulation, they do these children a major injustice. Not every student can be disciplined and kept in school, but many can.
Schools are not addressing the underlying challenges facing these students and their methods of discipline are not rehabilitating them. Instead, they are taking these children by the arm and dragging them into a mindset that says, “I’m a criminal.”
There is absolutely no need for this.
With these circumstances, it isn’t hard to see how the school-to-prison pipeline works. This cannot go on, the underlying issues must be understood and addressed, and schools must find a way to actually help these kids, not send them straight through the pipeline from school to jail.
(Facts and statistics from American Bar Association study conducted by School to Prison Pipeline Task Force)
(Image Credit: www.hamline.edu)
]]>Unfortunately, in practice, that ideal is nowhere close to a reality.
Take the case of Steven Jessie Harris, a man who entered the Mississippi prison system under murder charges in 2005. Though doctors had confirmed that this man suffered from symptoms of schizophrenia and he was declared unfit to stand trial, he somehow remained in prison for 11 years without even being offered any kind of trial or opportunity to get out.
His brother claims the mental disorder, as well as the alleged shooting of their father by another culprit, was what triggered the tragic violent episode. District Attorney Scott Colom said Harris’ case simply “fell through the cracks”.
Harris wrote a letter that he intended to send to the “U.S. General” in 2012:
“I been in jail…after I stormed the city of West Point with my guns. I need your help because it was war crimes, and I can’t get a fair trial…please let me go with some funding.”
Sadly, this couldn’t be further from the only case of mentally ill people being mistreated by our criminal justice system.
The problem starts with how police tend to treat mentally ill people who are not yet incarcerated. According to a report written by the Treatment Advocacy Center in 2015, a person with an untreated mental illness is 16 times more likely to be killed by police.
The US criminal justice system, whether it’s behind the bars or on the streets, has disturbingly become a way to address mental illness in lieu of any affordable public mental health care option in the country. As recently as 2012, reports indicated that there were around 356,268 people with severe mental illnesses in prison and jails. In state hospitals at the time, there were only about 35,000 patients with severe mental illnesses.
You read that right. That means that in 2012, there were about 10 times as many people with severe mental illnesses in prison than in state hospitals. While awareness of this may be on the rise in some circles, undoubtedly this problem has yet to be addressed comprehensively on a federal level.
The Treatment Advocacy Center has also released a report which claims that the following issues associated with incarcerated mentally ill persons are widespread:
This is a crisis of human rights and an epidemic of unthinkable cruelty. There are countless individuals with severe mental health care issues who are doing time in solitary confinement, surfing more and more and becoming more ill by the day. Our society has a moral obligation to make sure that no person with a legitimate mental illness is doing time behind bars and especially not in solitary confinement; they must instead be treated by hospitals.
Will all of these individuals be able to integrate back into society? No. But we cannot force these people into solitary confinement, and we cannot allow their mental state to deteriorate without proper care. While many state and federal prisons do offer mental health care facilities, the problem is far too widespread and a new system must be created to stop this crisis.
We can’t continue to ignore the basic rights of our citizens. We can’t keep letting this issue hide in the shadows.
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