This blog often criticizes prosecutors and judges, but it's also important to highlight the good stuff going on as well. Here's Philadelphia's new District Attorney trying to make change.
From Slate:
On Tuesday, [Larry] Krasner issued a
memo to his staff making official a wave of new policies he had announced his attorneys last month. The memo starts: “These policies are an effort to end mass incarceration and bring balance back to sentencing.”
“These policies are an effort to end mass incarceration and bring balance back to sentencing,” Larry Krasner said in an announcement on Tuesday.
The most significant and groundbreaking reform is how he has instructed assistant district attorneys to wield their most powerful tool: plea offers. Over 90 percent of criminal cases nationwide are decided in plea bargains, a system which has been
broken beyond repair by mandatory minimum sentences and standardized prosecutorial excess. In an about-face from how these transactions typically work, Krasner’s 300 lawyers are to start many plea offers at the low end of sentencing guidelines. For most nonviolent and nonsexual crimes, or economic crimes below a $50,000 threshold, Krasner’s lawyers are now to offer defendants sentences below the bottom end of the state’s
guidelines. So, for example, if a person with no prior convictions is accused of breaking into a store at night and emptying the cash register, he would normally face up to 14 months in jail. Under Krasner’s paradigm, he’ll be offered probation. If prosecutors want to use their discretion to deviate from these guidelines, say if a person has a particularly troubling rap sheet, Krasner must personally sign off.
“It’s the mirror of a lot of offices saying, ‘If you don’t ask
for the max you’ve got to get my permission,’ ” says David Rudovsky, a
prominent Philadelphia civil rights attorney. For longtime career
prosecutors, this will take some getting used to. “You want to be sure
your assistants are actually doing it,” Rudovsky says.
Krasner’s lawyers are also now to decline charges for
marijuana possession, no matter the weight, effectively decriminalizing
possession of the drug in the city for all nonfederal cases. Sex workers
will not be charged with prostitution unless they have more than two
priors, in which case they’ll be diverted to a specialized court. Retail
theft under $500 is no longer a misdemeanor in the eyes of Philly
prosecutors, but a summary offense—the lowest possible criminal charge.
And when ADAs give probation charges they are to opt for the lower end
of the possible spectrum. “Criminological studies show that most
violations of probation occur within the first 12 months,” the memo
reads, “Assuming that a defendant is violation free for 12 months, any
remaining probation is simply excess baggage requiring unnecessary
expenditure of funds for supervision.” When a person does break the
rules of probation, minor infractions such as missing a PO meeting are
not to be punished with jail time or probation revocation, and more
serious infractions are to be disciplined with no more than two years in
jail.
In a move that may have less impact on the lives of
defendants, but is very on-brand for Kranser, prosecutors must now
calculate the amount of money a sentence would cost before recommending
it to a judge, and argue why the cost is justified. He estimates that it
costs $115 a day, or $42,000 a year, to incarcerate one person. So, if a
prosecutor seeks a three-year sentence, she must state, on the record,
that it would cost taxpayers $126,000 and explain why she thinks this
cost is justified. Krasner reminds his attorneys that the cost of one
year of unnecessary incarceration “is in the range of the cost of one
year’s salary for a beginning teacher, police officer, fire fighter,
social worker, Assistant District Attorney, or addiction counselor.”
Unfortunately, Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump are doing the exact opposite. Sessions is pushing for more min/mans. And Trump is now calling for the death penalty in drug prosecutions.
Here's Krasner's memo. It's worth a read.
