law: January 2008 Archives

AlterNet: Reclaiming King: Beyond "I Have a Dream"

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." -- Dr. Martin Luther King jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", April 1963

The "I Have a Dream" speech has become a cliche'. It's played every Martin Luther King Day and perhaps again during our so-called "Black History Month." With each passing year it feels more distant to me, more quaint. Its power has always been its simplicity and clarity, but its unassailable message has turned the man who delivered it into more of a myth than a human being made of flesh and blood.

Leaving Prison Doors Behind, Some Find New Doors Open - New York Times

Paroled after 11 years in prison for manslaughter, Sharon White was determined to earn the bachelor's degree she had begun working toward while serving her term. Her goal was to become a social worker; she wanted to counsel former prisoners as well as young people "at risk of going astray," just as she had, she said, when she became a drug-selling high school dropout who ended up stabbing a man to death.

When Marcelino Guillen was released on parole after serving five years for selling cocaine, he was bent on restarting his pursuit of a college education. The first time around, he had dropped out after failing all the courses in his first semester. "I realized that if I had gotten a degree, I probably wouldn’t have sold drugs," he said recently.

Mr. Guillen, 39, and Ms. White, 38, are students at Lehman College in the Bronx, part of the City University of New York, pursuing bachelor’s degrees in social work with the aid of a program devoted to giving people with criminal histories "the know-how and support" they usually need to apply for and succeed in college, said the initiative's founder and director, Benay Rubenstein.

Ms. Rubenstein started the program, the College Initiative, in 2002 at Episcopal Social Services, an arm of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. This past May, she moved it to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, another branch of the City University. Jeremy Travis, the college's president, is a specialist in the problems released prisoners face in returning to society.

At the college, Mr. Travis formed the Prisoner Re-entry Institute, which fosters research and programs on this issue. The College Initiative program is part of the institute.

The initiative not only helps former prisoners with academic, financial-aid and admissions counseling, but also assists with job and housing problems. In addition, it offers a course in computer skills and in preparing for the math and English sections of the City University entrance exams, said Debbie A. Mukamal, the institute’s director.

Post-prison programs like the College Initiative - and like College and Community Fellowship, a similar effort that is part of CUNY’s Graduate Center - were developed in response to a drastic reduction a decade ago in college programs in the nation's federal and state prisons, specialists in prisoner rehabilitation say. At that time, with crime rates having climbed, many elected officials worked to make sentences and prison conditions tougher.

In 1994, Congress removed prison inmates from eligibility for Pell Grants, a major federal program of aid to low-income students that was the financial backbone of most in-prison college programs. Many states, including New York, followed the federal lead and removed prison inmates from their own college aid programs.

As a result, about 25,000 inmates taking part in such programs with Pell Grants had their "education abruptly ended," according to a study by Kenneth Mentor, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. By 1997, only 8 college prison programs remained active nationwide, compared with as many as 350 in previous years, Mr. Mentor said.

Justices to Hear Case Testing Rule on Witness - New York Times

WASHINGTON - A defendant's right to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses is among the most valuable of constitutional rights in the courtroom, one to which the Supreme Court has paid increasing attention in the last few years. A landmark decision in 2004 held that unless the witness is available for cross-examination, the state cannot ordinarily introduce any incriminating statements the witness made before disappearing.

But what if the defendant stands accused of the witness's murder?

The justices agreed on Friday to hear a case presenting that wrinkle in the Sixth Amendment's "confrontation clause." It is an appeal brought by a California man convicted of shooting his former girlfriend to death several weeks after she complained to the police that he had threatened and beaten her. The trial court allowed the police officer who had responded to the girlfriend's complaint to testify about her description of the matter.

The defendant, Dwayne Giles, argued unsuccessfully to the California Supreme Court that those statements should have been kept out of court, because there was no proof that he had killed the victim, Brenda Avie, for the purpose of preventing her testimony.

In allowing the statements, the California court applied an old doctrine called "forfeiture by wrongdoing," which means that a person should not be permitted to profit from wrongful acts. To invoke the doctrine, it was not necessary to prove that the defendant's motive was to make the witness unavailable, the state court said.

The question of whether proof of motive is necessary has come up with surprising frequency in courts around the country in the years since the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington. That decision greatly strengthened the Sixth Amendment right of defendants to confront the state's witnesses by excluding statements from absent witnesses that previously had been commonly accepted, under the looser rules governing hearsay evidence.

Some legal scholars regard the Crawford decision as one of the Supreme Court's most important criminal law rulings in recent years. The author of the 9-to-0 decision, Justice Antonin Scalia, based it on a literal reading of the language of the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a defendant's right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him."