General Criminal Justice

Every once in a while, I post something of general interest that is not informant-related. The Restoration of Rights Project is an important new resource from the NACDL (National Assoc. of Criminal Defense Lawyers) that everyone with a criminal record should know about. It provides detailed information about every state: what rights are lost upon conviction, and how to get them back. Here’s the description:

NACDL is pleased to offer, as a resource for its members and as a service to the public, a collection of individual downloadable documents that profile the law and practice in each U.S. jurisdiction relating to relief from the collateral consequences of conviction. The 54 jurisdictional profiles include provisions on loss and restoration of civil rights and firearms privileges, legal mechanisms for overcoming or mitigating collateral consequences, and provisions addressing non-discrimination in employment and licensing. In addition to the full profiles, there is a set of charts covering all 50 states (plus territories and the federal system) that provide a side-by-side comparison and make it possible to see national patterns in restoration laws and policies. The information covered by the charts is summarized on the page for each jurisdiction. These materials will be an enormous aid to lawyers in minimizing the collateral consequences suffered by clients and in restoring their rights and status.

Reason Magazine’s July special issue is entitled “Criminal Injustice: Inside America’s national disgrace.” There is an article on the social costs of incarceration by Harvard sociologist Bruce Western, one on snitching entitled The Guilt Market by me, one on wrongful conviction by Radley Balko, and many others.

I’m blogging over at Prawfsblawg this month, and just posted the following about the New York Review of Books’ excellent essay on prison rape. Link here. The essay describes the data and recommendations that have come out of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), as well as the politics of current reform efforts. For more general information on prison conditions and legal developments, check out Prison Law Blog.

Once in a while I share information about important non-snitch-related developments in the criminal system. The American Law Institute is an influential voice in the development of U.S. criminal law. It is made up of prominent judges, practitioners, and academics, and issues Restatements of Law and other scholarly resources that are widely relied on. One such resource is the Model Penal Code, a comprehensive criminal code worked out by criminal justice experts, on which many states have based their own criminal laws. The ALI has announced that it is withdrawing Section 210.6 of the Model Penal Code, which prescribes the procedures to be used when a court is considering imposing the death penalty. Here is the statement from ALI Director Lance Liebman:

For reasons stated in Part V of the Council’s report to the membership, the Institute withdraws Section 210.6 of the Model Penal Code in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.

Here’s a link to the report on which the decision was based: Report of the Council to the Membership of the ALI on the Matter of the Death Penalty. The Model Penal Code now has no provision for administering the death penalty, although the ALI describes itself as taking no position on the propriety of the death penalty itself. For a survey and discussion of recent death-penalty-related developments, see this post on Sentencing Law and Policy blog.

While this blog is primarily devoted to the policy of using criminal informants, the significance of snitching is deeply connected to drug enforcement. It is largely because drug offenses constitute so much of our criminal system–around 30 percent of state felony convictions among other things–that snitching is such a pervasive phenomenon. Accordingly, big shifts in drug enforcement are big snitching news. The U.S. Department of Justice announced yesterday that it will no longer prosecute medical marijuana users and distributors in the 14 states that have legalized medical marijuana, as long as those users/producers obey state law. New York Times story here. This step represents an important repudiation of the punitive, enforcement-by-any-means-and-at-all costs rhetoric of the past twenty years of federal drug enforcement. Over the summer, writer/journalist Sasha Abramsky predicted in an article in the Nation that “the nation may soon see a gradual backpedaling from the criminal justice policies that have led to wholesale incarceration in recent decades.” Monday’s announcement might be evidence of just such backpedaling.