Everyday Injustice

Michael Dougherty came to Boulder from Manhattan and worked as a deputy in the DA's for nearly twenty years before being appointed in 2018 to replace the long time prosecutor. He then won on his own. He now is running to be elected to his first four term.

He was a strong supporter of the effort recently completed with the governor's signing to end the death penalty.

“I’m strongly opposed to the death penalty, and it should be abolished in Colorado,” he told legislators. “I don’t believe any state or country should put its citizens to death.”

He also talked about efforts at bail reform - with a low-level bail reform already in place statewide and the expansion of the Boulder County restorative justice program.

Buta Biberai was elected last year as Commonwealth Attorney in Loudon County Virginia. She ran as the progressive reformer and became the first new top prosecutor in 16 years.

Criminal justice reform looks a bit different in suburban Virginia, what has traditionally been more red but has over time shifted.

We talk about the issues and challenges of reform in Virginia and it how it differs from other places that we have spoken about.

Maurice Caldwell was convicted in 1991 in San Francisco Superior Court in the June 1990 death of Judy Acosta, who was shot dead during an apparent drug deal that went sour in the Alemany public housing project in San Francisco.

A woman would identify Mr. Caldwell as one of the gunmen and based solely on her testimony that she saw him standing under a light pole, Mr. Caldwell was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Years later, Caldwell wrote to the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law, which began investigating his case.

On December 16, 2010, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charles Haines granted a motion for new trial brought by the Innocence Project. Hanes ruled that Caldwell’s attorney was constitutionally ineffective for failing to investigate Caldwell’s innocence and that had he done his job properly, there was a reasonable probability that the jury would have acquitted Caldwell.

Since his release in 2011, Maurice Caldwell has attempted and failed to get compensation for his time in prison.

Listen as Lisa Rea from Restorative Justice International and David Greenwald from the Davis Vanguard speak to Maurice Caldwell and Paige Kaneb from the Northern California Innocence Project, who helped get him free.

Restorative Justice International (RJI) and the Davis Vanguard will be partnering to launch The Wrongful Conviction Project (WCP). The project will shine a light on wrongful convictions while urging the application of restorative justice to seek systemic reform of our justice system(s). The project will produce joint podcasts on wrongful convictions, work on prosecutorial reform and support public policy changes needed to right the wrong of wrongful convictions.

In November of 2019, the 4th District Court of Appeal in the cases of Lamaroux and Gooden, ruled that SB 1437, Felony Murder Reform was constitutional.

SB 1437 redefines that law for felony-murder liability by excluding “a person who is not the actual killer, did not act with the intent to kill, or was not a major participant in the underlying felony who acted with reckless indifference to human life.”

SB 1437 also permits individuals convicted of felony-murder or murder to petition for resentencing.

Patty Ann Lamoureux “was convicted of conspiracy to commit robbery and felony murder arising from the killing of a friend’s family member… [and] sentenced to prison for life without the possibility of parole” in 2016. In that trial, “[t]his court affirmed the murder and conspiracy convictions, but concluded the evidence was insufficient to support the finding that Lamoureux had an intent to kill or acted with reckless indifference to human life.”

She filed an SB 1437 petition in 2019 to vacate a first-degree murder conviction and obtain resentencing under section 1170.95. The District Attorney’s Office of San Diego opposed “on the grounds that the amendments effectuated by Senate Bill 1437 were unconstitutional.”

Appellate Attorney Michelle Peterson talks about the case and the law.

In 2019, Tiffany Caban, a career public defender ran for DA in QUeens, NY and came within an eyelash of beating the establishment backed candidate.

Ms. Caban talks about what she is doing today and the ramifications of her race as well as the future of the progressive prosecution movement.

UDi Ofer is the ACLU Director of the Justice Division and Deputy National Political Director. We talk with him about recent elections and their implications for criminal justice reform as well as the goal of reducing incarceration by 50 percent and the how to reach that number.

“The next president must tackle the country’s mass incarceration crisis in a way that restores fundamental civil liberties, upholds human dignity, combats racial injustice, prioritizes rehabilitation, and leads to safer and healthier communities,” Udi Ofer wrote last year.

Diana Becton took an unusual route to become prosecutor. She had served 22 years as a judge in Contra Costa County before the Board of Supervisors in 2017 appointed her interim DA, then she was elected DA in 2018. She became the first African American woman to serve as DA in the county.

The previous DA in Contra Costa County was charged with felonies and was forced to resign.

“The reasons people thought that I would be good for that position had to do not only with my administrative experience, but also people thought that I would bring criminal justice reform to Contra Costa County,” she explained.

She said, “It was a really a difficult position for me.”

But she noted, “The laws in our criminal justice system really shifted a lot so that judges really didn’t have that much discretion in what happens in the court room.” While a lot of people see judges as the most powerful person in the courtroom, “what I came to see is that it’s really the prosecutor in that courtroom who had all of the discretion and the power.

Listen as she discussed her efforts to reform the system.

Jonathan Rapping is a nationally renowned criminal justice innovator who is the founder and president of Gideon’s Promise, a 501(c)(3) non-profit public defender advocacy organization that provides training, leadership development and mentorship to improve the quality of legal representation for the clients and communities they serve.

His book by the name of Gideon’s Promise will be out May 5.

We talk about the need to engage public defenders in criminal justice reform and how to overcome obstacles like lack of resources and high case loads through changing the culture in some public defender offices.

John Pfaff is a law professor at Fordham University. He is the author of a groundbreaking work which looks at a series of data to analyze mass incarceration and the true causes of it and presents a path to achieve real reform.

He argues that the "standard story" about mass incarceration is largely wrong. Mass incarceration is not drive by the war on drugs as some have argued and instead in order to get to the heart of the problem we have to address how we incarcerate the most serious offenders.

On Everyday Injustice, the professor discusses this theory as well as his thoughts on criminal justice reform and the progressive prosecutor movement.

ASUCD President Justin Hurst along with External Affairs Vice President Adam Hatefi and Francois Kaeppelin talk about the successful fee referendum and what that means, as well as the strike over the UC Santa Cruz COLA demands and how that impacts UC Davis and student housing issues on campus.