Everyday Injustice

A month ago, in an event sponsored by the California Donor Table, Justice Reform groups came together to discuss DA races across the state.

The webinar was hosted by the California Donor Table, which invests in communities of color to help elect people who represent their values and needs, and they have identified six district attorney races with the greatest potential to reduce mass incarceration and advance criminal justice reform policies.

Everyday Injustice this week talked with executive director Ludovic Blain discussing races including: Sacramento, Alameda, San Francisco (recall), Santa Clara, Riverside, Contra Costa, Orange County and more.

This week on Everyday Injustice we talk with Santa Clara Law Professor David Ball. Among the topics we discuss are his work on the Corrections Committee of the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section where he has been co-chair. We talk about mass incarcerations and alternatives to traditional incarceration. We talk about the new jail in Santa Clara County and about the need for bail reform. We also talked about his work on a blue ribbon commission on the legalization of marijuana.

Jarrett Adams was a high school student and made one mistake - he went to a college party, ending up wrongly convicted for the rape of a white college woman having been convicted by an all-white jury - and facing nearly 30 years in prison.

It took him nearly ten years to get exonerated with the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

Amazingly, he took the lessons he learned as a jailhouse attorney during his incarceration and worked his way through law school and now has a non-profit, dedicated to exonerating the wrongly convicted.

As he explains - his book takes you through his journey and you feel like you are in the shoes of that scared 17-year-old, who has no idea what is in store for him.

Listen as Jarrett Adams talks about his experience behind bars, being wrongly convicted, how he got through law school and his current work. He also discusses the role that race played in his wrongful conviction and the criminal legal system.

Jeffrey Baker grew up in the deep south and moved to teaching law school at Pepperdine’s Caruso School of law where he heads up the Community Justice Clinic. Professor Baker discussed the differences but also the similarities between Alabama and Southern California.

Listen as Professor Bakers talks about his work on domestic violence, social justice as well as research on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement on the southern board and the School to the prison pipeline.

Everyday Injustice this week talks with the Los Angeles Stonewall Democratcs – Alex Mohajer the President and Jasmyne Cannick a Steering Member At-Large. The Stonewall Democrats, named after the protests represent the LGBTQ community.

The discussion focused on two critical races in LA – the Sheriff’s race where they talked about the problematic administration of current sheriff Alex Villanueva and their group’s support for Eric Strong, one of the challengers.

In addition, they gave their assessment of DA George Gascon and the current situation with his recall.

They also talked about uplifting the marginalized voices in the queer community and some of the key legislation their group is backing.

For more information see https://www.stonewalldems.org amd https://www.stonewalldems.org/legislation.

UC Davis Law Professor Irene Joe has had an interesting experience - born in Nigeria, grew up in Texas, and came to California for law school. After law school she worked doing death penalty work with the Equal Justice Initiative and Bryan Stevenson.

From there, she ended up working as a public defender in New Orleans and experiencing the post-Katrina world there and then back to California to become a tenured professor at UC Davis.

Listen as she discusses the importance of President Biden’s Supreme Court nomination, the controversy of critical race theory, and public defender caseload and much more.

In 2020, Eli Savit rode a wave of progressive prosecutorial successes to victory in Washtenaw County Michigan, the home of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

For the most part, Savit has avoided a lot of the extreme pushback that some of his progressive prosecutor colleagues have suffered. In part that is because he knew he would win the race well before he took office and was able to bring the stakeholders on board and give them stake in his success.

Listen as Savit talks about his accomplishments in his first year of office, what he hopes to do, and his take on the state of criminal justice reform.

Anne Irwin and Natasha Minsker of Smart Justice California join Everyday Injustice this week to talk about criminal justice reform efforts.

Smart Justice California works to educate and embolden policymakers who support meaningful criminal justice reforms that promote safety, fairness and healthy communities.

Among the legislation they are supporting this year includes, the follow up to the Racial Justice Act which would allow people with past criminal convictions to challenge racial discrimination in charging or sentencing.

They are also supporting, Kevin McCarty’s AB 759 which would shift DA and Sheriff elections to presidential election years.

They are supporting Senator Dave Cortese’s SB 300, which reforms felony murder special circumstances law to ensure that the death penalty and LWOP cannot be imposed on those who did not kill or intend that a person die.

And they are supporting SB 731, which sunsets criminal convictions and expands record sealing to all sentences following completion of terms of incarceration, post-release supervision, and an additional period of time.

The right to a trial by jury is enshrined into the constitution, yet increasingly over the last few decades, trials have become a vanishing feature of the criminal justice system.

University of North Carolina law professor Carissa Hessick recently wrote the book, Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is a Bad Deal.

While there are positive aspects of the plea bargain – efficiency in the system and reduced punishment, overall 97 to 98 percent of all cases end not with a jury verdict but with an agreement between prosecutor and defense – an agreement that is often negotiated under unfavorable and unequal terms.

As Hessick points out, “Instead of protecting defendants’ right to have their guilt or innocence decided by their peers, judges routinely punish defendants for exercising that right.”

Specifically, “judges regularly impose longer sentences on those defendants who insist on going to trial than on those defendants who plead guilty.”

A 2018 report shows that, “on average, defendants who insist on a trial receive sentences three times longer than those of defendants who plead guilty.”

This practice is so common that it even has a name: the “trial penalty.”

Listen as Everyday Injustice talks with Professor Hessick about why this arrangement is detrimental to the system including the incentive for innocent people to plead guilty to crimes that they did not commit rather than risk the longer trial penalty.

Duke Law Professor Brandon Garrett wrote one of the seminal books of the Innocence Movement, Convicting the Innocent – a must-read classic that highlights the problem of wrongful convictions and its causes.

We have been taught to believe that fingerprint analysis is an ironclad science. But we learned in the case of Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongly identified as the Madrid Subway bomber, even though he had never left the states based on a partial match of fingerprint, that the science has more holes in it than we want to believe.

Autopsy of a Crime Lab is “the first book to catalog the sources of error and the faulty science behind a range of well-known forensic evidence, from fingerprints and firearms to forensic algorithms.”

In his book and in his interview with Everyday Injustice, Garrett asks the questions that should have been asked years ago: Where are the studies that validate the basic premises of widely accepted techniques such as fingerprinting? How can experts testify with 100-percent certainty about a fingerprint, when there is no such thing as a 100 percent match? Where is the quality control at the crime scenes and in the laboratories?

The answers to these questions have frightening consequences as they lead to wrongful arrests and even more alarmingly, wrongful convictions.