Human Rights Watch Report Regarding Registration Requirements for Children Who Commit Sex Offenses

An interesting CNN article recently discussed a new Human Rights Watch report the examines the use of sex registration requirements to deal with children who commit sex offenses. The report is entitled "Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the U.S." and states in its opening:

Upon release from juvenile detention or prison, youth sex offenders are subject to registration laws that require them to disclose continually updated information including a current photograph, height, weight, age, current address, school attendance, and place of employment. Registrants must periodically update this information so that it remains current in each jurisdiction in which they reside, work, or attend school. Often, the requirement to register lasts for decades and even a lifetime. Although the details about some youth offenders prosecuted in juvenile courts are disclosed only to law enforcement, most states provide these details to the public, often over the Internet, because of community notification laws. Residency restriction laws impose another layer of control, subjecting people convicted of sexual offenses as children to a range of rules about where they may live. Failure to adhere to registration, community notification, or residency restriction laws can lead to a felony conviction for failure to register, with lasting consequences for a young person’s life.

This report challenges the view that registration laws and related restrictions are an appropriate response to sex offenses committed by children. Even acknowledging the considerable harm that youth offenders can cause, these requirements operate as, in effect, continued punishment of the offender. While the law does not formally recognize registration as a punishment, Jacob’s case and those of many other youth sex offenders detailed below illustrate the often devastating impact it has on the youth offenders and their families. And contrary to common public perceptions, the empirical evidence suggests that putting youth offenders on registries does not advance community safety - including because it overburdens law enforcement with large numbers of people to monitor, undifferentiated by their dangerousness.

The entire Human Rights Watch Report is available here.  The CNN article is available here.

DOJ Report Recommends More Compassionate Release for Prisoners

According to a New York Times article, a recent report by the Department of Justice Inspector General recommends that the federal Bureau of Prisons utilize compassionate release more often to save money and reduce overcrowding.

The federal Bureau of Prisons could save taxpayer money and reduce overcrowding if it better managed a program for the “compassionate release” of inmates who are dying or facing other extraordinary circumstances, according to a new report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general.

The federal prison system does not allow the parole of inmates before their sentences are completed, but in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, Congress authorized the bureau to request that a judge reduce an inmate’s sentence for “extraordinary and compelling” circumstances. Such compassionate release does not have to be for reasons of terminal illness, but it generally is.

The 85-page report, released on Wednesday by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, examined compassionate releases from 2006 to 2011. It recommended that the bureau make greater use of its ability to release inmates who are taking up bed space — and using costly medical services — but who pose relatively little risk to the public because of factors like their age or poor health.

“We concluded that an effectively managed compassionate release program would result in cost savings for the B.O.P., as well as assist the B.O.P. in managing its continually growing inmate population and the resulting capacity challenges it is facing,” it said. “We further found that such a program would likely have a relatively low rate of recidivism.”

The recidivism rate within three years for all former federal inmates is around 41 percent. By contrast, just 5 of the 142 inmates released for compassionate reasons — or 3.5 percent — in the studied period were rearrested within three years, it said...

Charles E. Samuels Jr., the bureau’s director, said that he accepted most of the report’s recommendations, and that some improvements were already under way.

The entire article is available here.  The DOJ Inspector General Report is available here.

BP Plea Deal Approved by Federal Court - $4 Billion in Fines and Penalties

According to CNN, the plea agreement between BP and the U.S. Justice Department has been approved by a federal judge in New Orleans.  The plea deal requires BP to plead guilty to numerous federal charges and pay $4 billion in fines and penalties.

A federal judge in New Orleans Tuesday approved a $4 billion plea agreement for criminal fines and penalties against oil giant BP for the 2010 Gulf oil spill, the largest criminal penalty in U.S. history.

U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Vance imposed the terms that the Justice Department and BP had agreed to last November, which include the oil company pleading guilty to 14 criminal counts -- among them, felony manslaughter charges -- and the payment of a record $4 billion in criminal penalties over five years.

Vance's ruling came after hearing from eight witnesses Tuesday, including family members of those killed, cleanup workers, and members of the Southeast Asian Fisherfolks Association.

The plea agreement is with the oil company and not with indicted individual employees, so it doesn't result in anyone going to jail.

Two high-ranking supervisors on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig have been indicted on 23 counts, including manslaughter, for allegedly ignoring warning signs of a possible blowout on the rig. It caught fire April 20, 2010, resulting in the deaths of 11 workers. Those separate criminal cases remain in litigation.

The entire article is available here.

True Believers in Justice - NYT Opinion and Video

The New York Times has an interesting opinion page article and related video entitled "True Believers in Justice."  The article and video describe the work of public defenders in the United States. 

I’d always wanted to be a lawyer, but unlike Travis Williams — the subject of this Op-Doc video — I never wanted to be a public defender. I didn’t understand how anyone could represent people who did terrible things. “Criminals” were not people I wanted to help.

Then, in 2009, while working in the legal department at A&E Television, I met Jonathan Rapping, the founder of what’s now Gideon’s Promise. He invited me to his client-centered legal training program in Alabama. At the start of training, Mr. Rapping asked each lawyer to articulate why he or she chose to become a public defender. One young man said he had a brother with Down syndrome, so he wanted to help people who could not navigate the legal system for themselves. Another said he had been arrested as a teenager, so he wanted to help kids like him who didn’t know their rights. Their stories moved me. I learned more about the true state of the criminal justice system during that week than I knew from all my years practicing law. I wanted other people to learn about what they were doing and so I decided to make this film.

I was horrified by what I learned about the criminal justice system. Innocent people, in prison for months or years, sometimes plead guilty to get out of jail; onerous sentences are too often given for minor crimes; people can lose civil rights, like the right to vote, as a result of criminal convictions. In America, a felony conviction can be a lifelong sentence because of this multitude of collateral consequences.

The entire article and the video are available here.

Aaron Swartz and Plea Bargaining

The death of Aaron Swartz earlier this month sparked a significant discussion of the purposes of punishment and of prosecutorial discretion.  Another important aspect of the case is plea bargaining.  As detailed in the Wall Street Journal Article below, Swartz faced a significant sentencing differential in his case and difficult decisions regarding how to proceed in the face of federal charges.

Just days before he hanged himself, Internet activist Aaron Swartz's hopes for a deal with federal prosecutors fell apart.

Two years ago, the advocate for free information online, who was known to have suffered from depression, allegedly used the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download nearly five million articles from a fee-charging database of academic journals. To some in the Internet community, it was a Robin Hood-like stunt.

Prosecutors disagreed and threatened to put him in prison for more than three decades.

Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time.

Mr. Peters said he spoke to Mr. Heymann again last Wednesday in another attempt to find a compromise.  

The prosecutor, he said, didn't budge...

A few years ago, Mr. Swartz caused a stir by downloading some 20 million pages of court documents from the fee-charging Pacer website by exploiting free access given to libraries. No charges were ever brought, and no crime was committed, his lawyer said. But his efforts to make online content available for free ultimately brought him into conflict with federal prosecutors.

He was arrested in 2011 and charged in a scheme in which he allegedly logged into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and using it to download millions of academic journal articles from a database called JSTOR, owned by a nonprofit group.

According to the indictment, Mr. Swartz bought an Acer laptop in September 2010 and hooked it up the same day to the MIT network, registering as a guest under the name Gary Host and computer name "ghost laptop." Over the next few months, he allegedly used that computer and another to automatically download journal articles, playing cat and mouse with the university and JSTOR as they tried to shut him down.

Mr. Swartz's goal, friends said, wasn't to steal the material for personal gain, but to make it publicly available. On Wednesday, after a 10-month trial program, JSTOR opened its archives to free reading by the public.

"We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz," JSTOR said on its home page Saturday. The organization said it had told prosecutors that it wasn't interested in pursuing charges against Mr. Swartz.

The trial was set to begin April 1. Mr. Swartz faced charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He faced as many as 35 years in prison, in addition to up to $1 million in fines.

In a superseding indictment handed up in September, prosecutors expanded the original charges to include 13 criminal counts that could have carried an even lengthier prison sentence.

The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to do jail time.

"I think Aaron was frightened and bewildered that they'd taken this incredibly hard line against him," said Mr. Peters, his lawyer. "He didn't want to go to jail. He didn't want to be a felon."

The case also brings attention once again to the important issue of mental health and its relation to the criminal justice system.  The entire Wall Street Journal article is here.