juvenile justice

ACLU BLOG -- Let’s End Juvenile Life Sentences Without Parole Now! [from ACLU Blog by Nahal Zamani, Human Rights Program]

"Today at 3:00 pm [EST], the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security will convene a hearing on H.R. 2289, the "Juvenile Justice Accountability and Improvement Act of 2009.” This legislation would deny funding to states that refuse to offer a parole option to juvenile offenders and authorize state grants to improve legal representation for youths charged with life sentences.

It’s hard to believe that the United States still sentences children as young as 13 to spend the rest of their lives in prison without any opportunity for release. Right now, there are approximately 2,570 children serving juvenile life sentences without parole in the U.S. — the only country that allows this cruel punishment to happen..."

aclu on sotomayor

ACLU BLOG -- "The ACLU today released a report summarizing the civil liberties and civil rights record of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who was nominated by President Obama to replace retiring Justice David Souter as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The report was prepared in accordance with ACLU policy, and will be made available to the public and members of the Senate.

The ACLU does not endorse or oppose candidates for elective or appointive office. The full text of the report is online at: www.aclu.org/scotus/2008term/39769pub20090608.html.

sotomayor data point

Conservative Group Criticizes Sotomayor on Death Penalty Memo [Washington Post, Opening Arguments, By Jerry Markon, June 5, 2009] -- "A conservative group is criticizing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for signing a 1981 memo that opposed the death penalty and said 'capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society.'’’

The Voldemort of higher education ... U.S. News & World Report

Chronicle of Higher Education - Researcher Offers Unusually Candid Description of University's Effort to Rise in Rankings [By Martin Van Der Werf, Wednesday, June 3, 2009] - "Clemson University is run in an almost single-minded direction, with nearly all policies driven by how they will help the land-grant institution rise in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings, according to a university official whose candid comments stirred debate among conference-goers here on Tuesday.

maybe gloss a few?

I'm fairly certain Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will at least gloss a few Sotomayor opinions, just for fun, " ... before [they] end this."

Sotomayor Visits Lawmakers on Capitol Hill [By Shailagh Murray, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, June 2, 2009] Washington Post -- "Reid took a similar view of Sotomayor's towering case file. 'I understand that during her career, she's written hundreds and hundreds of opinions," he told reporters today. "I haven't read a single one of them, and if I'm fortunate before we end this, I won't have to read one of them...'"

["... No matter how good the researcher is, there is no substitute for reading the opinion yourself ... Crime & Consequences blog, "Don't Confuse Us With The Facts," June 3, 2009 | Posted by Lauren Altdoerffer]

capital punishment costs | people v. burgener

Professor Shaun Martin neatly sums up the fiscal realities of capital punishment in California @ his California Appellate Report blog - "People v. Burgener (Cal. Supreme Ct. - May 7, 2009)" (Posted Tuesday, May 19, 2009):

"I'm telling you this right now: Michael Burgener will die in prison, but it won't be from an antiseptic needle in the arm. At this point, it'll be 40+ years after the conviction before there'd actually be an execution. And the justice of such a penalty -- though understandable in all its individual components -- seems far from clear.

Burgener shot and killed a 7-11 clerk an emptied the cash register of $50. He's not a nice man. He deserves to live the remainder of his life behind bars, and that's what will happen. Why -- at this point -- we're spending the millions and millions of dollars I'm sure is being spent to keep this one going is beyond me.

I know the counterarguments. They're not frivolous. I appreciate them. I truly do. But this one, in my view, you let go."

sotomayor | point counterpoint | chemerinsky somin

LATIMES.com Sotomayor Debate -- "Do race and gender matter for the Supreme Court?" "Today's topic: Much has been made of the fact that Sonia Sotomayor would be the first Latina justice, and sitting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said she feels "lonely" as the only woman on the bench. How much, if at all, does the ethnic and gender diversity of the Supreme Court bench matter?

Point Erwin Chemerinsky [Dean, UCI School of Law]

Counterpoint Ilya Somin [Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason U School of Law; Volokh Conspiracy blogger]

"an honest conversation"

ACLU BLOG: "An Honest Conversation about the Death Penalty " - "California remains on track to spend over $1 billion on the death penalty in the next five years, in the midst of the worst financial crisis in nearly a century. Incredibly, even as state officials announce that they must fill a deficit of $21.3 billion this year, and contemplate drastic cuts in the most basic services, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger continues to support funding to pursue capital prosecutions — a breathtakingly expensive and ineffective policy that does nothing to promote public safety..."

redesign ! scotus website long overdue

redesign ! scotus website long overdue

Sunlight Foundation: "Redesigning the government: the U.S. Supreme Court" (Jen 2, 2009)

"President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor has brought increased attention to the U.S. Supreme Court. It also has led us to reexamine the Court’s web site, which is long overdue for an overhaul. In its current form, its web design is suggestive of the 1990s, and its functionality is similarly dated.

The Justices appear to agree. They’ve recently ask Congress for money to move control of the site in-house, taking over responsibility from the GPO. This move would allow them, in their words, to “better control and manage the web site and to be able to expand the data and services provided by the site more efficiently.”

The current web site has many shortcomings. It doesn’t contain briefs by the parties and omits all but a few relatively recent Court opinions. Its navigation is a nightmare and its design fails to incorporate modern techniques such as RSS feeds and XML. Much information is unnecessarily locked in PDFs. And yet, in January 2009 the nine-year-old site received 18 million hits.

To help the Court update its web presence, the Sunlight Foundation has put together the following mock-up..."

Federal Justice Statistics, 2006 - Statistical Tables:

Federal Justice Statistics, 2006 - Statistical Tables: "Describes criminal case processing in the federal justice system, including arrest and booking through sentencing and corrections. These statistical tables present the number of suspects arrested and booked by the U.S. Marshals Service, suspects in matters investigated and prosecuted by U.S. attorneys, defendants adjudicated and sentenced in U.S. district court, and characteristics of federal prisoners and offenders under federal supervision.

Data are from the Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP), which collects comprehensive information describing suspects and defendants processed in the federal criminal justice system, and annual data on workload, activities, and outcomes associated with federal criminal cases. The data presented in these tables were collected from the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA), Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC), U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

The Urban Institute prepared these tables under the supervision of Mark Motivans, Ph.D., of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The tables were prepared under BJS grant number 2005-BJ-CX-K004. The BJS-sponsored Federal Justice Statistics Resource Center (FJSRC) provides online access to the federal justice database. Users may download data from the federal justice database for independent analysis or use the online query system to obtain customized statistics..."