Another day, another example of police brutality. Albert Wilson is in jail because a “woman” made a false claim that she was raped by him. The evidence is very clear that he did not rape her, but the court and prosecutors do not care. They only care about protecting a “woman’s feelings”. They even deny knowing the name of the accuser, you are not allowed to know it, or even demand that she face charges for lying. It is despicable behavior by the courts and legal system.
It is so sad. Your mother’s false allegations are buried by the court, and the police and prosecutors protect her fragile psyche.
Stay strong, justice is coming. This insanity will end.
Please watch the Police Killing ofGeorge Floyd if you have not already seen it. It is disturbing example of Police Brutality.
Some facts:
Police knelled on his neck for 8 minutes while he screamed out “I can’t breathe”. He was dead after about 4 minutes. He was handcuffed and it was impossible for him to be a threat when the police knelled on him.
The Minneapolis police department had 2600 complaints of bad behavior in last 8 years. Only 12 of those complaints resulted in any disciplinary action- the worst being a week suspension for a police officer. No accountability. They are above the law and act with impunity. Brutal and savage. It is systematic.
Derek Chauvin- the Police officer who killed George Floyd had 18 complaints against him, and he never was disciplined by his department, so the bad behavior gets worse. In fact he did not ever care that people were filming him while he killed Mr. Floyd. His four fellow police officers just watched. Derek even had his hand in his pockets to show how relaxed he was killing Mr. Floyd.
Your mother is not facing consequences or disciplined for her fraudulent and cruel behavior of destroying the family. Protected by the Police, she thinks she can get away with anything. Just like Derek Chauvin.
But her behavior is escalating, and getting continually worse. Please, for your own safety beware of her, and understand what she is capable of.
Lise-Anne is just like Derek Chauvin
Read this article in the WSJ (fair use), or many others online. It is astonishingly horrific behavior.
By Dan Frosch, Douglas Belkin, Zusha Elinson and Erin AilworthMay 31, 2020 8:37 pm ET
MINNEAPOLIS—When Medaria Arradondo became this city’s first black police chief in 2017, the department was in trouble. His predecessor had abruptly resigned after an officer killed an Australian woman who called for help, and a spate of shootings of minorities was straining an already fraught relationship with the city’s black community.
Chief Arradondo, a veteran police officer who once accused his own department of racist employment practices in a lawsuit, promised changes. He made data on the use of force available to the public, required officers to turn on body cameras at the beginning of each call and ended low-level marijuana enforcement.
Less than three years after he was sworn in, one of his white police officers pressed a knee to the neck of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, while fellow cops watched. The eight-minute video of his death has thrust his city into chaos and sparked violent protests across the country. His department is at the center of another national crisis over race.
Authorities in cities across the U.S. used tear gas, curfews and arrests in an attempt to contain violent protests sparked by the death of George Floyd. WSJ reporters in Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles describe the worst civil unrest to erupt across the country in decades. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
The killing of Mr. Floyd shows how hard it is to alter entrenched police tactics and culture, even by a reform-minded administration.
Chief Arradondo, a soft-spoken Minneapolis native known as “Rondo,” had successfully implemented a number of changes long sought by activists aimed at greater transparency, continuing the department’s recent push to hold its officers more accountable.
Those reforms mirrored many of those instituted at police departments around the country in the years after an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. Anger over that incident and many others fueled nationwide protests and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, center, in 2018.PHOTO: ANTHONY SOUFFLE/STAR TRIBUNE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Floyd’s death shows the fragility of those reforms.
“Even what we consider a progressive, forward-looking police chief still has problems in his ranks,” said Chris Burbank, a former Salt Lake City police chief who is now vice president of law-enforcement strategy at the Center for Policing Equity, a reform group that has worked with Chief Arradondo. “It shows how deeply rooted these things are.”
Among the most deeply embedded problems that departments including Minneapolis face is a difficulty punishing officers who are too often insulated from repercussions, law enforcement experts and community leaders said.
Unions like the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis fight to shield their members from punishment, both through contract negotiations and disciplinary hearings, saying that neither top police officials nor the public understands how dangerous their jobs are.
The officer who pinned Mr. Floyd down by the neck, Derek Chauvin, has 18 complaints on his official record, two of which ended in discipline from the department, including official letters of reprimand. The details of those incidents aren’t publicly available.Traffic and street stops by Minneapolispolice, by race/ethnicity of subjectSource:
A lawyer for Mr. Chauvin couldn’t immediately be reached. The Minneapolis police department didn’t respond to requests for comment on the nature of the complaints.
Since 2012 there have been more than 2,600 complaints filed against Minneapolis police officers by civilians, according to data provided by Dave Bicking, who was part of the city’s Office of Police Conduct Review. Of those, the data showed just 12 resulted in an officer being disciplined. Among those, eight received written warnings. The most severe penalty was a 40-hour suspension.
Mr. Bicking, a member of Communities United Against Police Brutality, an organization of civilians who advocate for improved policing, said the board largely operated behind closed doors and has a lengthy, cumbersome process. “The whole system is designed to avoid discipline,” he said.
Messages left for the police conduct office seeking comment weren’t immediately returned.Police shooting incidents in Minneapolis byrace/ethnicity of subjectSource: Minneapolis Police DepartmentNote: Reports from Feb. 2008 to Dec. 2019. Notshowing five incidents with race ‘other’ or ‘unknown’SubjectkilledNotkilledBlackWhiteAsianNativeAmericanHispanic02550
“One of the easiest things for law enforcement to do is arrest people for violent crime—except when it comes to our own,” said David O. Brown, the Police Superintendent of Chicago. “We hem and haw. We pull our thumbs. We have to do a thorough investigation with evidence staring us in the face, and we don’t apply the same standards of swiftness of justice.”
Protesters cheered in Minneapolis as the Third Precinct burned.PHOTO: CRAIG LASSIG/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Mr. Floyd, who police suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, lost consciousness and was pronounced dead at a hospital after the encounter. Mr. Chauvin has since been arrested on third-degree murder and manslaughter charges. Three other officers who didn’t stop Mr. Chauvin have been fired and are likely to face charges too, prosecutors said.
Minneapolis allows police officers to use neck restraints by “compressing one or both sides of a person’s neck with an arm or a leg,” but only on a person who is actively resisting police, which Mr. Floyd didn’t appear to be doing in a video widely shared online.
With protests and riots sparked by Mr. Floyd’s death raging, top police officials around the nation, and even unions representing rank-and-file officers who rarely criticize their own, have strongly condemned the killing.Of the city’s more than 400,000 residents,about 20% are African-AmericanMinneapolis population by race/ethnicitySource: Census Bureau 2014-18 AmericanCommunity Survey%OtherAsianHispanicBlackWhite020406080100
Behind those public statements, big city chiefs worry their own reform efforts at mending relations with minority communities are being derailed by what happened in Minneapolis.
A survey released Sunday by Elucd, a data research group that tracks public safety issues, found that the number of people who feel police don’t treat residents of their neighborhood respectfully had jumped to 24% from 16% in the past week.
Superintendent Brown of Chicago said the video of Mr. Floyd’s arrest made him “sick to his stomach” and has ordered all his officers to watch it. “I don’t want people to turn away,” he said.
The rage in Minneapolis was no surprise to many residents and activists, who say that a few years of change can’t overcome decades of mistrust.
“The issues that have created what we’re in now have been longstanding,” said Chanda Smith Baker, a Minneapolis community leader and businesswoman, and a supporter of Chief Arradondo. “The current situation is a culmination of seeing black people and others in the community being shot [by the police] and killed for unjustified means with no accountability.”
Roy Clark, left, and Joe Bradford said they understood the anger felt by the protesters.PHOTO: ERIN AILWORTH/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Joe Bradford, a 46-year-old African-American who grew up in the same neighborhood where the Third Precinct was set on fire by protesters, could hear the rioting from his backyard, where he sat with family and friends.
“To tear up the neighborhood—that don’t make no sense,” he said.
“But it was to get a point across,” replied Roy Clark, 64, a family friend. “Property you can replace, people’s lives you can’t.”
While neither man condoned the violence, they said they understood the anger behind it. Too many black men, they agreed, have lost their lives at the hands of police.
“After a while, it sets in you, and you get angry,” Mr. Clark said.Minneapolis police incidents involving use offorce, by yearSource: Minneapolis Police DepartmentNote: 2020 data are through May 272008’10’12’14’16’18’2005001,0001,500
A May 2015 report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that African-Americans, who make up about 19% of Minneapolis’s population, were stopped by police for low level offenses nearly nine times as frequently as white people. Then-chief Janeé Harteau launched an analysis of officers’ traffic stops, which confirmed the ACLU’s findings.
Later that year, on Nov. 15, a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed Jamar Clark, a black 24-year-old, during a scuffle in which police said he tried to grab an officer’s gun. The killing sparked weeks of protests, including an 18-day encampment at the Fourth Precinct. Officers involved in the shooting were cleared of any wrongdoing when Hennepin County District Attorney Mike Freeman declined to press charges, determining the shooting was justified.
Demonstrators in November 2016 protested the death of Jamar Clark, who was shot by a police officer a year earlier.PHOTO: JERRY HOLT/TNS/ZUMA PRESS
Amid fallout from that case, Ms. Harteau announced a new “sanctity of life” policy that mandates officers only resort to force after they had exhausted all other means, and required that police intervene if they saw another officer doing something wrong. The latter policy was what Chief Arradondo used to fire the three officers who failed to intervene with Officer Chauvin.
Ms. Harteau also equipped her officers with body cameras.
But more police shootings continued to sow outrage in the city. In July 2016 a police officer just outside of St. Paul shot and killed Philando Castile, a 32-year-old African-American man, during a routine traffic stop. The immediate aftermath of the incident was filmed live on Facebook by Mr. Castile’s girlfriend, prompting violent protests across the area. In June 2017 the officer was acquitted on charges of second-degree murder.
A month later, Minneapolis officer Mohamed Noor shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a white 40-year-old Australian woman who was unarmed, as she approached a patrol car after calling 9-1-1. Mr. Noor was later convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to 12½ years in prison.
Ms. Harteau resigned soon after the shooting, under pressure from the mayor at the time.
Chief Arradondo, who was promoted from assistant chief to replace her, said from the outset that his officers would have to work hard to regain the trust of the city’s residents.
“The one thing we cannot equip [officers] with is the benefit of the doubt, and they have to gain that through their relationships with the community,” he said at the time.
Soon afterward, he made changes that activists cheered, including lessening enforcement of low-level marijuana offenses, which the public defender’s office said primarily affected poor African-Americans.
Former Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau in 2016.PHOTO: ELIZABETH FLORES/TNS/ZUMA PRESS
Community leaders and activists said they believed Chief Arradondo understood why they distrusted the police department. A decade earlier, he had sued the city along with four other African-American officers, alleging they were the victims of systemic racial discrimination and a hostile work environment within the Minneapolis Police Department.
They alleged that African-American officers were promoted at slower rates than white officers and disproportionately demoted and disciplined. They also cited a 1992 incident in which every African-American in the department was threatened in a letter sent through the department interoffice mail that was signed “KKK.”
The city eventually settled and paid the officers a total of $740,000.
Like Ms. Harteau before him, Chief Arradondo had a starkly different vision for the department than Lt. Robert Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis since 2015. Like his union counterparts across the country, Lt. Kroll has been a fierce advocate for greater autonomy for officers.
Lt. Kroll has criticized the Black Lives Matter movement as a terrorist organization. In his racial discrimination lawsuit, Chief Arradondo, who was then a lieutenant, accused Mr. Kroll of calling former U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison a terrorist. Mr. Ellison, a Democrat who is now Minnesota’s attorney general, is both Muslim and black. In the same lawsuit Chief Arradondo accused Mr. Kroll of wearing a leather motorcycle jacket with a white power badge sewn on it.
Mr. Kroll couldn’t be reached for comment but in the past has publicly denied charges that he is racist.
Protesters in 2017 carried a banner depicting Philando Castile, who was shot by police the year before.PHOTO: STEPHEN MATUREN/GETTY IMAGES
The union chief also opposed a 2019 ban by Mayor Jacob Frey on aggressive “warrior-style” training for police, which doesn’t emphasize de-escalation during encounters with civilians. The ban went into effect, but controversy has continued over whether officers are following it, according to local media.
Ms. Harteau, the previous chief, said in an interview that the union was the biggest obstacle to making changes at the department.
“The police federation will have a greater impact on the police culture than a chief ever will,” said Ms. Harteau.
She criticized the union for standing up for officers in even the most egregious cases, and said that the union’s “silence is deafening” in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s killing.
Scott Dahlquist, who worked for 26 years as a police officer in Minneapolis before retiring in 2014, said there was typically a disconnect between the command staff of any department, and rank-and-file officers on the street.
“It doesn’t matter who the chief is,” he said, speaking in general about all police chiefs. “Our response is always ‘You weren’t there. You didn’t see what I saw. You weren’t there to help me.’ ”
Mr. Dahlquist, who now assists with law-enforcement training courses at a local college, said officers viewed the union as their only recourse to protect their jobs and keep management from unfairly and capriciously disciplining them.
Under Chief Arradondo, who didn’t respond to interview requests, police shootings and use of force have edged down, but racial disparities remain. Over the past three years, 60% of the people on whom police used force were black, city data show.
The same has been true nationwide. The number of civilians killed by police in the U.S. has hovered around 1,000 every year since the nationwide protests in 2014 and the subsequent reforms that followed, said Justin Nix, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Black men are still more likely to be shot and killed by police than any other group, he said.
Just a few months before Mr. Floyd was killed, a Minnesota task force on policing, which included law-enforcement officials, community leaders and lawmakers, released a 34-page report listing recommendations they hoped will be adopted statewide. The goal: to prevent police officers from killing civilians, and to more-sensitively respond when they do.
The report calls for an increase in mental health resources for communities and officers, greater diversity in recruiting for departments and more emphasis on de-escalation training. Lawmakers were expected before the past week’s incidents to address the recommendations in a special session this summer.
Ms. Smith Baker, who was part of the task force, said that changing the character of the police department was a more intractable problem.
“I have seen many steps to try to improve the police-community relationship,” she said, adding it was harder to reform “the type of climate and culture that would allow for three other officers to witness that murder and do nothing.”
A Minneapolis protester last week.PHOTO: KEREM YUCEL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
In 2018, city leaders condemned a Christmas tree in the lobby of the Fourth Precinct station that officers decorated with empty packs of chips, Newport cigarettes, malt liquor bottles and yellow crime scene tape. City leaders said the items, pulled from garbage bins, were chosen to play on negative stereotypes about African-Americans. Two officers involved in the incident were fired and a commander demoted, according to news accounts.
Former chief Ms. Harteau, who now lives near Sarasota, Fla., struggled to comprehend how Mr. Floyd’s death could occur in Minneapolis, given the changes the department had undergone.
“‘It’s a model for what police departments should be doing…How could this still happen’?” she said. “I just don’t understand when we are doing all these things. It makes me question everything I knew to be true.”
John Thompson, a friend of Philando Castile, said he and other activists had made significant progress with the city’s department in the past few years. Now, he worries it is all but destroyed.
“We had a seat at the table, we even had a plate at the table and that’s a big deal because [the Minneapolis Police Department] had never even stuck out their hand and asked us to be part of anything,” said Mr. Thompson, who is planning to run for the state legislature on a police reform agenda. “All it takes is for one white police officer to do what he did, and all that progress goes to shit.”
Another organized hoax. hydroxychloroquine The drug HCQ is used for malaria or 70 years, and is reliably safe…. in fact it has one the highest safety records of any drug ever produced…
yet during the Coronavirus panic it is suddenly reported to kill people... This report comes in the reputable medical journal Lancet.
After Lancet convinced everyone that HCQ is a “terrifying drug”, with heart failure and sudden death. They accomplished their goal of destroying its effective use, and all research studies into the HCQ effectiveness. Drug assassination is just like character assassination.
The HCQ drug also happens to be cheap and abundant, and might compete with massive sums of money devoted to new Covid-19 drugs.
The authors, supported by the drug companies, now retract their story and admit is it all fake. Even the WHO is restarting their research studies on HCQ and admitting all earlier reports were false.
Your mother, after 20 years of beautiful happy family life, decided to suddenly report that your Father is violent, …it is all retracted now without evidence or crimes. It is the same type of hoax. Hysteria with facts or evidence- even when the established record in plain to anybody with a 3rd grade education.
But the hoax is effective with stupid people. Even today most people will not take HCQ because they are fearful of the former narrative, no matter how fake and fraudulent the narrative is.
This 24 year man was asphyxiated by Gendarmes in the police van. He was already in handcuffs, and killed… This is police brutality, just like the George Floyd case in the USA. More than 20,000 people were protesting in Paris yesterday for justice.
And drum roll please… the careful, reasoned and sensible decision by prosecutors after a lengthy 4 year investigation? Nothing, nada, zilch. Not even a trial or indictment. That is what will happen with George Floyd too…delay for years, sit on the evidence and claim Floyd “had an underlying medical condition”
No consequences for police when they act badly or dishonorably. That is how Lise-Anne behaves- preying on their lawless behavior, and never facing consequences for bad acts. French Prosecutors do not use evidence, or facts, they simply protect their friends, and kill people they don’t like, or that offend them.
Facts and evidence are meaningless to Prosecutors.
Police are savage, cruel and evil- unaccountable to anyone. And Lise-Anne is part of this savage game. She has enlisted the police as her ally. Without the Police, she could never have orchestrated such a hoax, and destroyed our family.
Beware. Your mother will turn on you personally as well.
Lise-Anne Brutality, she is unaccountable to anyone. Beware.
first astronauts in 10years…. I wish I could watch with you brig, soren and reidar. I am watching in real-time…. Space exploration is the future. I have goose bumps, and so much of my life and inspiration. Feel the energy of greatness. This is human ambition.
The Guilty Project is an outgrowth of the “Innocence Project”, demonstrating the massive amount of wrongful convictions. It is an organization at Stanford that is exposing the absurdity and cruelty of sentencing in the criminal justice system.
Tens of thousands of people are serving life imprisonment, even death penalty for stealing a bicycle or a TV. 3 strikes and you are out. violent or not.
Their project shows that Prosecutors are not:
absent-minded, distracted…
following the law dutifully enacted by politicians and electorate…
a small number of bad apples…
Rather the Guilty Project shows that Prosecutors are unwilling to take zero professional risk releasing any criminal, and for any reason. They are incompetent at applying justice, and they are so risk averse that they will use to their power to keep ALL PEOPLE locked up forever, and protecting themselves from any feedback. They are destroying people’s lives- just to satisfy their ego and fears.
With the persistence of the “Guilty Project” prosecutors have reviewed the facts of cases – in detail – about these guilty but non-violent people. There is no distraction or absent-minded monday morning amnesia. And yet these prosecutors STILL REFUSE to let out a someone who has stolen a bicycle after spending 20 years in prison.
It seems unbelievable- and that nobody could be that cruel… until you understand the prosecutors are cowards. Afraid to lose their jobs or slightest bad publicity and too cowardly to defend their decisions. T
If this story does not describe the graft and gross incompetence of criminal justice system to you, then you have not have capacity for understanding.
The Guilty Project: An Interview with Mike Romano and Susan Champion
On April 28th, the life sentences imposed on James Washington and Pablo Garcia under the infamous Three Strikes Law were vacated. After fighting their release for over seven years, in a stunning reversal, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office conceded that the two men, who had each already served over two decades in prison, should be released and their crimes reclassified as misdemeanors.
Mike Romano and Susan Champion, Director and Deputy Director of the Three Strikes Project based out of Stanford University, represented both Washington and Garcia in their resentencing petitions. Both were convicted in 1996 ― Washington for stealing a $200 stereo from a department store, and Garcia for stealing $180 worth of clothing from a parked car. Romano and Champion strive to correct for the unintended consequences of a law originally implemented to “keep murderers, rapists, and child molesters behind bars, where they belong,” but which disproportionately affected vulnerable populations, particularly the poor and mentally ill.
Amanda Knox
I wanted to start off by asking about the Three Strikes Law. I was born in 1987. This law was made in 1994, so I do not remember it. Can you describe to me what the environment was like when this law was put into place?
Mike Romano
The law was originally inspired by a really horrific murder in Fresno, California in 1993, where a 17-year-old girl named Kimber Reynolds was out on a date, and a couple of guys came up to her and her boyfriend on a motorcycle, stole her purse, a fight ensued, and she was shot in the head and died. It was just horrible. And Kimber’s father, Mike Reynolds, channeled his grief in order to try to fix what he saw was a glaring hole in California’s sentencing laws. The two men who were responsible for his daughter’s murder were on parole at the time, and so he devised the Three Strikes Law. People’s initial reaction was that it was too harsh and didn’t make sense and swept too many people under the rug. And then a couple of months later, an 11-year-old girl in Petaluma, California was kidnapped from her bedroom during a sleepover. She was missing for a long time before her body was finally discovered. And it was really the combination of stories, Kimber Reynolds first, and then Polly Klaas, that really galvanized California to pass this law. And it spread across the country. Even Bill Clinton called for a national Three Strikes Law in the State of the Union, just a few weeks after Polly Klaas’ body was found. And it really spread like wildfire throughout the country. And now, depending on how you count, about 30 to 40 states have some version of a Three Strikes Law. California’s is the most famous because it’s really where it started and it was most widely used. All of them have slightly different variations, but that’s really the genesis of it.
Amanda Knox
As tragic as these murders were, people are murdered every day. What was it about this time period that galvanized people to be so tough on crime?
Susan Champion
At the time there was just a lot of fear in the post 80’s crack epidemic. There was a lot of publicity about violence and about rampant crime. And, like so many bad laws, I think a public response to these anecdotal situations meant that we swung very far to punishment as a means of addressing some of these things.
Amanda Knox
Tell me about yourselves and how you became interested in the impact of the Three Strikes Law on society.
Mike Romano
I used to work at the Innocence Project in New York City, before I was in law school. And then I went to law school and was clerking in Seattle and what came across my desk was two cases that just stuck out like sore thumbs. One case was a person who was serving life under the Three Strikes Law for aiding the sale of $5 worth of cocaine to an undercover police officer in Los Angeles. This is the case of Willie Joseph. The police walked up to him and said, “Can you get me some crack?” And Willie said, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t have any. But my friend could sell you some.” And for that introduction, Willie got sentenced to 25-years-to-life. He had absolutely no representation. The case was decided in a special kind of hearing in under a minute. The decision that was released is literally four sentences long. And then a similar case where a guy got sentenced to life for forging his nephews driver’s license exam. His nephew didn’t speak English well, so his uncle took his DMV exam, and of course, at the end of the DMV exam you have to sign your name under penalty of perjury that it was actually you that took the exam. And he was sentenced to life for forgery. Those two cases back to back, the absolute utter lack of representation, the lack of attention that was paid by the courts, really stuck out to me. So I began to think more about those cases, studying both the litigation strategy and political strategy around wrongful convictions and death penalty cases, to see if they could be applied to three strikes cases. And kind of as an experiment, we found a couple of cases, and I approached Stanford to say, “We should start a legal clinic, like an Innocence Project.” And they said, “Well, that sounds neat, but really how many are there?” And as we began researching, it was just this thread on a sweater where nobody had been really paying attention. We’ve had 10 cases, and a dozen cases, and a 100 cases, and finally, there were about 10,000 cases in California of people serving life sentences for non-serious, non-violent crimes. They were disproportionately African American. They were also disproportionately mentally ill and homeless. And it became clear to me that you don’t get sentenced to prison for ― a client stole a pair of socks, or stole a jack from the back of a tow truck, or one dollar in change from a parked car, or for shoplifting ― if you don’t have some serious problem going on in your life. I sort of say glibly that our project, it’s the Guilty Project. Our clients are guilty, but the punishments are so grossly disproportionate that we felt like something could and should be done.
Amanda Knox
The Guilty Project. I love that. How about you, Susan?
Susan Champion
So I actually came to law school pretty late in life. I was 40 years old and the oldest person in my law school class at Stanford when I started. I had been working in health care in Seattle for almost a decade and I felt like I really was seeing this incredible disproportionate effect on the poor, non-English-speaking, people of color. All of this was coming up in my healthcare work. I wanted to unpack that. And in law school, I began to see these announcements of the work that Mike’s clinic was doing, so I signed up for the clinic and Mike was my teacher. I had a client who was serving a life sentence for selling some beer steins that he had stolen out of a commercial storage unit, and his prior two strikes were stealing his mom’s VCR and a daytime burglary of a home where nobody was home, nobody was hurt. And I thought, “This is crazy.” I knew I was going to go into a lot of debt in law school and I thought, “It’s worth it if I can get one person out of prison who’s serving a life sentence for something so minor.” And that’s how I started.
Amanda Knox
Looking at this Three Strikes Law and life sentences given to people for stealing a VCR, a part of me is thinking, who in their right mind would sentence someone to 25-years-to-life for such a minor case? You mentioned people weren’t paying attention to how this law was being applied, but someone was prosecuting these cases and someone was handing down these sentences. Why weren’t those people looking at how absurd that was? Who’s accountable for this?
Mike Romano
That’s the $50,000 question. In the beginning, when the Three Strikes Law was first passed in 1994, it was incredibly popular. It was passed by 70% of voters in California. Even Democratic President Bill Clinton embraced it. So, everybody in California, judges, prosecutors, really felt like this was what the voters sincerely wanted across the country, and that they were enforcing the will of the voters. But I don’t think that that’s much of an excuse. Judges and prosecutors are sworn to uphold justice and are supposed to be standing up for what is right regardless of public pressure. And really very few are willing to do that. And that really extends to this day. We had a case not long ago, where our client was serving a life sentence for stealing three cans of instant coffee. He served 20 years of that sentence already. He’s had a perfect prison disciplinary record. He’s 70 years old. He was recommended for release by the Department of Corrections. They said, “He’s rehabilitated. He’s not a threat to public safety. His continued incarceration is no longer in the interest of justice.” We had to get that blessed by the court. And we had a meeting in chambers with the judge and the prosecutor who basically said they’re not willing to take the political heat for releasing this guy should something go wrong. And I just think it’s unconscionable that not only are judges imposing these sentences in the first place, but that when they get the opportunity to revisit them, many judges and prosecutors fight them. We’ve been fighting in Los Angeles County for eight years for some of our clients to be freed, and just in the past couple of weeks, prosecutors have finally conceded. I will say that we were able to pass reforms to California’s Three Strikes Law in 2012. But the leader of that reform effort was an incredibly tough-on-crime, right-wing, Republican prosecutor from Los Angeles, who had sent more people to death row than the entire state of Texas. And he was the person who stood up and said, “This is absurd.” And he and us partnered to reform the Three Strikes Law and, but it really took somebody like that, whereas his predecessor, a Democratic, progressive, anti-death penalty prosecutor, did nothing and in fact sent more people to life in prison than probably any other person in America.
Susan Champion
And I want to point out, too, that it’s such a risk averse kind of a space. This kind of stuff is still going on today. The prosecutors in one county right now are very strenuously opposing a client of mine who has earned three associate’s degrees while in prison, who has taken hundreds of hours of rehabilitative resources, and become a certified drug and alcohol counselor and is confined to a wheelchair. And the prosecution refuses to consider that he might be ready for release because he had a history of getting into fights. And it’s just this complete fear. As Mike alluded to earlier with the coffee case, it’s very easy to keep someone in prison. It’s much easier to keep them in prison than to risk that someone’s going to come out and commit a crime. This is extending now even to parole. People who have been traumatized by being in prison for life for minor crimes are now going before the parole board and the parole board is denying them parole, because they had a cell phone a year ago. People are absolutely terrified [to] let somebody out without being able to say this person is perfect. And that is just an inherent problem with this system.
Mike Romano
And, you know, we work in Palo Alto, which prides itself as being one of the most progressive communities in California, if not the country, but a judge here was recently recalled from the bench and fired by popular vote after handing out a lenient sentence. It was a horrible crime, a sexual assault on Stanford campus, but the judge in that case, Judge Persky, was following the advice of probation recommendations and gave a lenient sentence. And the backlash was extraordinary. It is not some distant history where prosecutors and judges who stand for election fear being painted as soft on crime.
Susan Champion
And that sends a message to all the other judges and so the defendants that are going to really face the harsh outcomes are generally going to be the poor people of color.
Amanda Knox
Right. Who can be swept under the rug.
Susan Champion
Exactly.
Amanda Knox
I wrote an op-ed in response to the Stanford rape case, precisely making the argument that maybe we should be listening to probation officers who say maybe there’s an alternative to incarceration here. I know that we have to take these crimes seriously, because there are victims involved, but treating prison like the catch-all solution to everything bad that happens in the world is a really simplistic and damaging viewpoint that very often is coming from people who have never been to prison. And I think it goes back to this idea of people thinking that there are certain kinds of people, certain career criminals, who are often all too young when they’re labeled that, who are just going to be criminals, and they’re different than the rest of us. Trying to empathize with people who look at prisoners that way, is there any truth to that? Or is that just society abandoning whole populations of people?
Susan Champion
That’s one of Mike’s least favorite phrases. “Career criminal.” He hates that.
Mike Romano
Like that’s an aspiration. Their career is to be a criminal.
Susan Champion
I just do not believe that there is a truth to someone being a certain type of person. I think that our clients have themselves been victims of trauma. So many of them have come from not only a home life or lack of one that has created very few options for them, but they’ve also been targeted by and abused by the system, whether it’s law enforcement, whether it’s government agencies. There is super clear evidence that crimes are committed by a very particular demographic, young and male generally, and that people age out of crime, and there are protective factors that make someone much less likely to do so. Things like having a home, having a partner, having a job, all of these things have a huge impact on somebody’s risk of either committing crime or recidivating, had they committed crimes in the past. Obviously there are going to be outliers. Obviously, there are some people that may be incorrigible or unable or unwilling to conform. But I think that they’re by far a tiny, tiny minority. This idea that people are criminals and will be always is just bunk.
Mike Romano
I think the data shows that incarceration is criminogenic. And what I mean by that is, in many cases, putting people behind bars only makes them more dangerous to public safety, especially when you put them behind bars for such a long period of time. Incarceration can endanger public safety. We’re really trying to find reforms that not only reduce incarceration, but improve public safety. It’s too often put as a dichotomy between reducing incarceration and risking public safety. We’re going to show the opposite, that we can actually improve public safety and reduce incarceration at the same time. Part of it is finding alternatives to incarceration, services for people. Part of it is just shortening sentences. Part of it is improving reentry prospects for people. When you sit down in prison and meet these people, and realize what they’ve been through in their lives and the suffering that they are being put through, in many cases since childhood, it’s heartbreaking and extraordinary. And one of the things that we are particularly proud of is that our program works with law students. We bring Stanford Law students who are at the top of the legal pyramid to sit down in prison, sometimes maximum security prisons, across a table with somebody who’s at the absolute bottom of the criminal justice system, to find that connection and that humanity between people who are so far apart in our society. And then, of course, the great payoff is when we’re able to get these guys out of prison. But that proximity to the injustice, it’s one thing to look at data and graphs and charts. It’s another thing to sit across the table from somebody that this is actually happening to. This is not my idea, you know. Bryan Stevenson’s lesson to people, let’s get you proximate to the injustice that you see in the world. It’s incredibly powerful and life changing for me, and our students, and, of course, for our clients who’ve been abandoned. Many of our clients have never had a single visitor in prison for 20 years. They were homeless drug addicts, they had dysfunctional families to begin with, and they’ve been in prison for 20 years. They usually haven’t seen the inside of a visiting room, and then all of a sudden, this bright, shiny, Stanford Law student and professor walk in the door.
Susan Champion
The vast majority of people that go to prison come out. And prison does absolutely nothing for helping them learn the skills that they need to be able to succeed when they come out. So a big part of what we do is make sure that our clients have resources available to them. I remember when I was a student in the clinic, I spent hours and hours trying to find a place for my clients to land. Mike and I visited some reentry places and there was really a desert of resources available. Thankfully, I think things are improving, but the whole system could really use a very close look.
Amanda Knox
I wanted to ask about James Washington and Pablo Garcia. Who are they? What do their stories reveal about the Three Strikes Law, and the criminal justice system in general?
Susan Champion
There were two ameliorative propositions that California voters overwhelmingly approved in 2012 and 2014. Proposition 47 requires that a court find that if you were released, you would be likely to commit one of a series of very, very heinous crimes, for example: murder, a violent rape, a child molestation. Both Mr. Garcia and Mr. Washington were eligible for relief under Proposition 47. That means that if we were to take those cases to court, the judge would have to find that they were likely to commit one of those crimes. Of course, in order to be eligible for Prop 47, you can’t have committed one of those crimes. So you would have to have found that Mr. Garcia and Mr. Washington were likely to commit crimes they’ve never committed before and have actually become more violent now that they were in their 50s and had spent 20 plus years in prison. The District Attorney was really fighting against their release, particularly Mr. Garcia. The District Attorney spent a year on trying to get mental health records to show that this person was dangerous. And then a couple months ago, they approached me and said, “You know, we’re not sure that it’s really worth it to go forward on these cases.” They acquiesced. It was really wonderful. But neither of them should have been in prison for as long as they were. Both of them are incredibly vulnerable. Both of them have histories of mental illness. Both of them have histories of abandonment and neglect, of abuse. And both of them committed really, really minor crimes to land them into a life sentence.
Mike Romano
Both of those crimes would now be mandatory misdemeanors if they were prosecuted today, and they would get less than 40 days in county jail. And instead they’ve served over 20 years. It’s really extraordinary.
Amanda Knox
What was it like to have a DA push and push and push against you for years, and then suddenly come up to you and be like, “Eh”?
Mike Romano
This is dynamic in court, where before court starts, there’s chit chat amongst the attorneys and the court clerk and the bailiff, and everybody’s supposed to be cordial and polite to one another, and everybody has a job to do, and we’re all professional. And to a large degree, I participate in that. At the same time, especially when our clients are sitting right there in handcuffs, in an orange jumpsuit, I find it extraordinarily difficult to carry on a cordial relationship with people who are fighting to keep this poor, old, usually black man in prison for the rest of his life. And I’m supposed to chit chat about, you know, our kids soccer games or something like that. And I know that these DAs for the most part, especially in Los Angeles, are following orders. It’s not their decision in many cases. In fact, some have come up to us and said, “I tried to push to get your guy out, but my superiors said no.” That’s happened. We’ve had conversations in chambers where prosecutors say, “You know, judge, if it was up to me, I’d let this guy out, but my boss tells me what I need to fight this case.” At the same time, I know how beneficial it can be to our clients to have a good relationship with these prosecutors who have so much control over their case. And of course, I want to maintain professionalism and all that, but it’s sometimes very trying. Susan is the friendliest person on the planet. Susan is not only an extraordinary litigator, but she’s very friendly and has managed to maintain very positive relationships with these prosecutors, who I think like and respect what she does.
Susan Champion
I think Mike is giving me a little too much credit. As always, it really does lie with the prosecutor. I think LA lags behind every single other county in terms of processing these cases. After the initiative passed, something like 3000 people became eligible for this relief, about 1000 of them were out of LA, and now, almost a decade later, they’re still working on these cases. And part of that is the District Attorney in LA set up a policy to just oppose every single one of them. And the deputies in charge were really in DA mode, where we have to win and we have to be punitive and we have to do everything we can to show that our decision was the right one in the first place, to go for a life sentence and we’re not backing down. Recently, their leadership has been more amenable to really looking at each case individually. The prosecutor still holds a lot of power, and whoever is in that Head Deputy chair is still really, really the one in control. Being nice helps get things done a little more quickly, but ultimately, it really does come down to whoever’s in charge on the other side.
Mike Romano
I will also add, in Los Angeles, there is a movement to elect a progressive prosecutor. And the current head DA is in an election. She’s facing somebody who’s challenging her to her left, who’s actually one of the most vocal advocates for Three Strikes reform. His name is George Gascón. Nobody would say to our faces that this change of heart in the DA’s office has anything to do with the Gascón campaign, and I don’t know if it is or not. Those are dynamics that are in the air. Maybe she’s just responding to what she perceives is her electorate changing. But Los Angeles is the largest prosecution office in the country by a lot. If it was its own state, it would be like the fifth biggest state in the country. There are more trial judges in Los Angeles County than the entire federal judiciary. So it’s an incredibly large machine and of many layers of bureaucracy. And when I said the DAs that we’re dealing with in court, they’re following orders from higher ups, they’re not responsible for these decisions in many ways. But the policy trickles down in a myriad of ways through an incredibly complicated bureaucracy.
Amanda Knox
It sounds like ultimately it comes down to all of us, and whether or not politicians are afraid that they’re going to be held accountable either for draconian laws that are unfair and ruin people’s lives and communities, or if they’re going to be held accountable for crimes that take place that are shocking and harm people and harm communities. And they’ve chosen a side because that’s the side that the electorate has been on for so long. And it’s only now that the electorate is understanding that it’s us who they’re prosecuting. All of us.
Susan Champion
Yeah, we are the people.
Amanda Knox
How does the electorate have a more sophisticated understanding of crime and crime resolution?
Susan Champion
A lot of my clients’ parents voted for the Three Strikes Law because it was sold to them as: these are really bad people and they can’t stop committing crimes and they’re wreaking havoc on our communities and they’ve got to be stopped. Right? I’ve had my clients’ parents say to me, “If I had ever known that the Three Strikes Law was going to do something like this to my child, I would never have voted for it. I would have spoken out against it.” It’s very easy for people to misunderstand the impact of some of these laws.
Mike Romano
When we ran our campaign to reform California’s Three Strikes Law, we ended up winning with 70% of the statewide vote. We won every county in California, even red counties that voted for Republican presidents. And I think really showed robust, genuine interest on the part of voters towards criminal justice reform. Year after year after year, California voters have enacted really important criminal justice reforms. Our polling also shows that voters still feel that the system is unfair, and want a better justice system. Originally people thought, “People want criminal justice reform because it’s so expensive.” So we poled on that. “Why did you support proposition 36?” And it turned out, yes, of course, people don’t want to spend unnecessary money, but the main reason why people supported it was for fairness purposes, that a life sentence for this kind of crime was unfair. And that also gave us a lot of hope, that it isn’t this cynical, “Oh, people don’t want to just spend money.” They really understood that these sentences were unfair. The second thing is, there’s just been this real transformation in the past 10 years about the idea of mass incarceration, to the point where even President Trump, despite all his rhetoric, signed the First Step Act, which is a reform to the federal Three Strikes Law that has released more people than were released on under programs that President Obama sponsored. So we work across the aisle, and I think that there is widespread public support for criminal justice reform, certainly in California, but I think beyond. I think people have realized that the policies that we have now are not only unfair, but are not doing a tremendously good job in terms of improving public safety. And so again, the sweet spot is finding reforms that reduce incarceration, increase fairness, at the same time. Not just maintain public safety, but actually improve it. So that’s really our mission.
This is really interesting book I placed in your kindle. There are some great schools and teachers (Ecolint is absent from this list)
Brig, Soren and Reidar- just reach out to me and I will help you get into a real school, where you learn and are inspired. I am so sorry you are trapped, but there is opportunity outside. Please get in touch.
You can listen to author here. Or read his website.
