Everyday Injustice

In 2018, California passed a lass that mandated police departments to release body camera footage within 45 days of any incident when an officer fires a gun, or uses force that leads to great bodily injury or death.

However, a CalMatters investigative report found that agencies rarely release the raw footage to the public.

Instead, CalMatters reported “the public and the media must rely on edited presentations that often include a highlighted or circled object in a person’s hand, slowed-down video to show the moments when the person may have pointed the object at police and transcriptions of the body camera’s audio.”

“To only release an edited version is not what we think is called for from the defendant’s point of view,” said Stephen Munkelt, executive director of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a Sacramento-based association of criminal defense attorneys. “If they’re editing things out, it’s probably the stuff that’s beneficial to the defendant.”

CalMatters reported, “He also worries about the impact of the release of the body camera footage on a potential jury pool. Still, Munkelt said, some video is better than none, if only because defense attorneys have more grounds to ask a judge for the full, unedited video.”

This week on Everyday Injustice, Stephen Munkelt joins us and discusses police body worn camera footage and the state of the law.

This week on Everyday Injustice, we are joined by UCLA Law Professor Scott Cummings who discusses a 2020 paper published in Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, that looks into the role that lawyers and schools play in movements of social transformation.

One of the key findings in the literature has been the notion of drift away from public interest work – he cited that when law students enter law school more than half have an interest in going into public interest law, but that falls to about five percent by the time they actually pass the bar and gain employment.

Cummings and his colleagues look into things that law schools can do to bolster pursuit of public interest law.

They find surprising ways that law schools play a crucial facilitative role: “guiding students toward public interest careers through externships, summer jobs, and extracurricular activities that equip students with the tools they need to navigate the public interest job market and pursue social justice over the course of their professional lives.”

Dave Beers, a NY state licensed PI with law enforcement experience ended up working with the Taft Defense. He tells the story of how the mother of a young child arrived to find her child dead.

Veronica Taft, a single mother with four small children, all under the age of five, was convicted of Murder and Manslaughter for the brutal murder of her two-year-old son Lyric.

For reasons that are unclear, the prosecutors and police focus on Veronica rather than her boyfriend who is the more obvious suspect.

Beers describes the poor quality of the investigation in the small college town of Binghamton, New York. The use of Taft’s boyfriend, who ends up getting immunity for his testimony despite evidence implicating him in the crime.

After more than five years in prison, Taft was set free after a bombshell Appellate Court decision found the verdict was against the weight of the evidence. The court overturned the theory and evidence used by authorities, including time-of-death, Taft’s alibi, and controversial testimony of a desperate jail-house snitch.

Listen as investigator Dave Beers tells the full story of tragic miscarriage of justice that fortunately an appellate court corrects after five years of wrongful incarceration.

In March, the Sentencing Project announced the creation of the Second Look Network.

Across the country, we have seen the rise of resentencing and other laws designed to allow people who have served decades in prison, but who no longer represent a threat to public safety, to have their sentences reconsidered and at times, resentenced and gain release.

“The Second Look Network is a coalition of attorneys and post-sentence advocates across the country working on behalf of incarcerated individuals seeking relief from lengthy or unfair sentences, beyond the context of wrongful conviction or innocence claims.”

Data shows that mass incarceration has often sentenced people to lengthy sentences even as they age out of crime and even as the costs of already inadequate health care in prisons soar.

It is a project of the Sentencing Project.

Listen as Everyday Injustice speaks with Becky Feldman who is heading up the Network as she discusses the focus and goals of the project.

In 2021, Professor Daniel Medwed published an article in the Brooklyn Law Review: “Black Deaths Matter: the Race-of-Victim Effect and Capital Punishment.” In it, he found that irrespective of the race of the perpetrator, cases with white victims were more likely to see a death penalty charge.

Medwed notes, that one of the “troubling feature(s) of the death penalty landscape: Similarly situated offenders frequently receive divergent outcomes.”

From there we discuss efforts to correct some of these problems such as the racial justice act in California and a recent case out of Riverside.

One of the main problems with the death penalty is that while the entire system in infected with racial and socio-economic inequities, “death is different” in that the death penalty is irreversible.

Medwed’s research concludes: “Most Americans acknowledge, even if only grudgingly, that (1) there’s a racial dimension to the death penalty, and (2) Black defendants get the death penalty more frequently than whites.”

But even more alarming, “the race of the victim, not the defendant steers cases in the direction of death.”

Listen as Daniel Medwed discusses the implications of race on the death penalty and the criminal legal system.

Recently a Texas Judge delayed the execution of Andre Thomas – a man who is so severely mentally ill, the crime he committed of killing his wife and mixed race children involved cutting out their hearts and carrying them in his pocket.

He proceeded to separately gouge out both of his eyes, the second of which he ate.

Talking with Marc Bookman, who founded the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation in Philadelphia and has followed this case, he laid out a number of the concerns about this case.

His late white was white, the children were mixed race, and as Bookman noted, “four of the twelve eventual jurors were opposed to people of mixed-race backgrounds marrying and/ or having children.”

One even stated that he did not believe “God intended for this.” Andre’s court-appointed lawyers did not object, and the jurors were seated. The entire jury—not to mention the judge and all of the lawyers—were white.

The prosecutor in his closing argument clearly played the race card, asking the jurors if they were willing to risk Andre “asking your daughter out, or your granddaughter out?”

This is a case tinged in racism, dogged by ineffective assistance of counsel, and by a mental health system that failed all the way through.

And somehow, at least to this point, the legal system has failed to stopped the execution train.

Listen as Marc Bookman discusses one of the most disturbing death penalty cases in memory.

In Everyday Injustice’s second installment with Marc Bookman, we discuss the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation – a non-profit set up in 2010 that was created due to lack of state funding in Pennsylvania for indigent defense.

“ACCR fills a void created by the lack of adequate funding for poor defendants and provides hope to those who have lost it,” the group’s mission explains.

Pennsylvania continues to be a state caught in limbo.

In February, newly elected Governor Josh Shapiro announced a moratorium on executions, “The Commonwealth shouldn’t be in the business of putting people to death. Period.”

The Governor went further, speaking “to the fundamental question as to whether death is a just and appropriate punishment for the state to inflict on its citizens.” The system is fallible, he said, and the outcome is irreversible. Rejecting the idea that our capital punishment system is flawed but fixable, he called on the General Assembly to “work with me to abolish the death penalty once and for all here in Pennsylvania.”

This was a surprising move, as Bookman points out, “our former Attorney General, Mr. Shapiro had hardly appeared the abolitionist. He himself admitted that he had “evolved” on the issue, and evolve he certainly did…”

At the same time, the moratorium, only goes so far. Bookman explained, “As long as there is a death row, there is a risk the next governor will end the moratorium, just as Trump ended the unannounced but very real moratorium by President Obama.”

Listen as Marc Bookman talks about the work of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and the nature of the death penalty in Pennsylvania.

In Everyday Injustice’s second installment with Marc Bookman, we discuss the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation – a non-profit set up in 2010 that was created due to lack of state funding in Pennsylvania for indigent defense.

“ACCR fills a void created by the lack of adequate funding for poor defendants and provides hope to those who have lost it,” the group’s mission explains.

Pennsylvania continues to be a state caught in limbo.

In February, newly elected Governor Josh Shapiro announced a moratorium on executions, “The Commonwealth shouldn’t be in the business of putting people to death. Period.”

The Governor went further, speaking “to the fundamental question as to whether death is a just and appropriate punishment for the state to inflict on its citizens.” The system is fallible, he said, and the outcome is irreversible. Rejecting the idea that our capital punishment system is flawed but fixable, he called on the General Assembly to “work with me to abolish the death penalty once and for all here in Pennsylvania.”

This was a surprising move, as Bookman points out, “our former Attorney General, Mr. Shapiro had hardly appeared the abolitionist. He himself admitted that he had “evolved” on the issue, and evolve he certainly did…”

At the same time, the moratorium, only goes so far. Bookman explained, “As long as there is a death row, there is a risk the next governor will end the moratorium, just as Trump ended the unannounced but very real moratorium by President Obama.”

Listen as Marc Bookman talks about the work of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and the nature of the death penalty in Pennsylvania.

Andrew Krivak was acquitted last week in a second trial, after spending 24 years in prison for the rape and murder of a 12 year old girl. The jury spend just three hours deliberating following a seven week trial.

In 2016, Krivak’s co-defendant, Anthony DiPippo, was acquitted at his third trial. DiPippo also spent more than two decades in prison.

Everyday Injustice interviews attorney Oscar Michelan and Jeffrey Deskovic, who played an important role in the exoneration, but was not an attorney on this case.

Listen as they discuss the case as well as the jury reaction to the seven week trial.

Earlier in February, the state of Missouri executed Leonard Taylor, despite strong evidence of innocence. Discussing that and a number of other cases recently and over the years is Sean O’Brien, Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Sean O’Brien has been director of various criminal defense clinics at UMKC School of Law since 1983, including the Public Defender Appeals Clinic, the Public Defender Trial Clinic and the Death Penalty Representation Clinic.

Professor O’Brien served as the chief public defender in Kansas City, Mo., from 1985 through 1989, when he was appointed executive director of the Missouri Capital Punishment Resource Center, now the Public Interest Litigation Clinic, where he represents clients in capital trial, appeal and post-conviction cases

Listen as Sean O’Brien discusses the state of the death penalty and problems in the criminal legal system.