A wonderful victory from the Ohio Supreme Court for criminal justice rights and fair trials over the holiday break.

A better criminal justice system is coming to Ohio.

The Ohio Supreme Court recently approved new rules governing pretrial procedures that will help ensure those convicted of crimes are truly guilty, according to Thomas Moyer, chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.

The amendment to Rule 16 of the Ohio Rules of Criminal Procedure will require greater sharing of evidence between prosecutors and defense attorneys before trial.

The Dispatch discusses why it’s important the 9/11 detainees are being tried in a criminal court in New York.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that five Guantanamo Bay detainees who are charged with plotting the 9/11 terrorism attacks will have their day in court in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, blocks from where 2,751 people perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Critics, from everyday people to Republican lawmakers, have come up with all sorts of reasons not to allow this civilian trial to be conducted in New York City: It will pose too much of a safety risk, both for the site and for the judge and jurors. It will give terrorist boss Khalid Sheik Mohammed a platform to spew his anti-American rhetoric. The trial will turn into an indictment of the Bush administration and its terror-fighting tactics.

And the worst claim of all: There’s no way that these men will get a fair trial in New York. One group says they’re sure to be convicted, no matter how poor the case against them, while another group claims Mohammed and his cohorts are certain to go free on some legal technicality.

Have Americans really become so craven after 9/11? Has their distrust in the legal system become insurmountable?

The ACLU of Ohio and several other advocates appeared before the Ohio Supreme Court to challenge the Adam Walsh Act, which retroactively reclassified many low level offenders. The ACLU argued this violates due process and also diverts needed resources away from targetting sex offenders who are more likely to reoffend.

Thousands of registered sex offenders would be subject to less-stringent reporting requirements if defense lawyers succeed in challenging parts of a 2007 state law intended to crack down on sexual criminals.

The attorneys told the Ohio Supreme Court yesterday that the get-tough law was applied illegally to more than 26,000 sex offenders who were sentenced before it took effect.

In addition, the lawyers said, the measure penalizes people who commit sex offenses before they turn 18 by requiring them to continue to register as sex offenders well into adulthood.

The state’s highest court heard four cases yesterday challenging Senate Bill 10, which created a new system for classifying sex offenders based more on the severity of the crime than the likelihood of committing future offenses.

More than half of the offenders were placed in the most-serious category — sexual predators — who are required to register every 90 days for life.

Jeffrey M. Gamso, a Toledo lawyer who argued one of the cases, said the law had more to do with securing federal funding under the Adam Walsh Act than protecting Ohioans.

“Is the sheriff really keeping tabs on all those people?” Gamso asked in an interview. “We know that some people will re-offend, and we want to be able to target those people.

“You want to find the needle in the haystack, and what this does is build a bigger haystack.”

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court categorically forbidding schools from doing so, a school in Iowa strip searched a group of students because a sum of money went missing.

School’s in! September’s here; pencils are sharpened, apples are polished, and — in one Iowa town where administrators’ summer reading list clearly did not include Safford Unified School Dist. #1 v. Redding — female students are strip-searched on suspicion of theft.

The Des Moines Register reported over the weekend that on Aug. 21, the third day of school, a student at Atlantic High reported $100 missing from her purse. Five girls who were somehow deemed persons of interest in the case were asked to strip in front of a female counselor and their accuser (!?). (No boys were involved because apparently none were around when the theft was believed to have occurred.) Lawyers (yuh!) for the girls’ families told the Register that (paraphrase) each girl stripped in varying degrees. One 15-year-old “was asked to remove all of her clothing including her undergarments.” Another asked if she could lift up her bra and was told that wasn’t good enough. One was searched twice. At least two were permitted not to remove their underwear because it was more revealing than the others’ and therefore an unlikely hiding place. [End of repellent soft-core juvie prison scene]

Students, have you been strip-searched at school? Tell us about it.

ACLU Staff Counsel Carrie Davis discusses some of the problems with neighborhood watch groups and how they can sometimes unintentionally cause others to unfairly be subject to police scrutiny.

Cruise down the tree-lined streets of the Old Oaks neighborhood on a summer evening and know this: Someone is watching you.

It might be Richard Vickers, who records your license plate number in a notebook as he retrieves gun shell casings from the sidewalk while out on his nightly walk. Or it might be Doug Motz, who alerts via text message: “Watch out for the green van lurking in the alley.”

[…]

Carrie Davis, staff council for the American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio, says block watch members who aren’t trained by police should be cautious of overstepping legal boundaries.

“You have a right to observe what’s going on in the street, but that doesn’t give you a right to go peer in your neighbor’s window,” Davis says.

A great victory for ensuring that the guilty are sentenced, rather than those who may be innocent.

A death row inmate scheduled for execution in September will get a chance to convince a judge that information discovered after his conviction could have exonerated him.

Romell Broom, 53, was sentenced to death in 1985 for the rape and murder of 14-year-old Tryna Middleton. Tryna, a ninth-grader at Shaw High School in East Cleveland, had been walking home with friends from a Friday night football game when she was abducted at knife point and forced into his car.

The 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that 165 pages of records from the East Cleveland Police Department can be presented to the original trial court as possible grounds for a new trial.

ACLU of Ohio Associate Director Gary Daniels discusses the problems that arise when a court interpreter is not competant.

A Spanish-language interpreter for Franklin County Municipal Court was fired last month because he couldn’t interpret legal terms, possibly jeopardizing the constitutional rights of thousands.

[…]

“The fact that it doesn’t happen all the time is of no comfort to the person it did happen to and who is now in jail,” said Daniels. Defendants should understand exactly what is said in court, he added.

They could appeal their cases based on Bustos’ involvement, but they would need proof that the interpreting was inaccurate, said Jack R. Kullman Jr., Franklin County Court of Appeals administrator.

That might not be easy, he said. Court reporters record only what is said in English, and interpreters speak quietly to participants to avoid disturbing the proceedings.

A local activist writes about the need to close down Guantanamo Bay detention facilities and restore due process for all those suspected of terrorism.

Contrary to what some political pundits spout, the ACLU does not stand alone in calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw operations at Guantanamo and led troops in Iraq, agreed with President Barack Obama’s decision to close it.

Detractors of Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo detention facility raise claims that allowing these prisoners to be housed in the United States might pose a safety risk. However, the past record of successfully incarcerating convicted terrorists in the U.S. suggests that this concern is unfounded.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, terrorists currently housed on U.S. soil include some of the masterminds behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Many have been incarcerated for years without incident.

All of these men were tried in open court with constitutional protections, which has not been provided to the Guantanamo Bay detainees. The prisons where convicted terrorists would likely be held are super maximum-security facilities.

Guantanamo Bay has been a black eye on America’s long tradition of fairness and respect for the law. We must close the base in order to restore our most cherished constitutional protections.

Cara Greenberg

Yellow Springs

The story of one man who was found innocent after being wrongfully convicted of a rape, may bring needed changes to Ohio’s justice system.

James Vaughan came chillingly close to spending the rest of his life behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. Some say his case is a testament to the justice system’s vulnerability to human error and carelessness.

Last year, Vaughan was convicted in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court of raping a 9-year-old girl. He faced a mandatory term of life in prison without parole and had been in jail for a year when he won a new trial based on a social worker’s previously unheard testimony. A jury overturned his conviction last month.

Now, the 30-year-old University School and University of Cincinnati graduate is trying to readjust to life untethered from the criminal justice system.

The power to determine post-conviction DNA testing lies with the legislature, not the courts, declares U.S. Supreme Court.

Prisoners do not have a constitutional right to DNA testing after their conviction, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, even though the technology provides an “unparalleled ability both to exonerate the wrongly convicted and to identify the guilty.”

In the court’s first examination of how to treat the rapidly evolving field of biological testing, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a majority that said it is up to the states and Congress to decide who has a right to testing that might prove innocence long after conviction.

The “challenges DNA technology poses to our criminal justice systems and our traditional notions of finality” are better left to elected officials than federal judges, Roberts wrote for the majority in a 5 to 4 decision.

Ohioans should call their state legislators and encourage them to support both SB 22 and 77. Both would greatly expand the rights of the incarcerated and relieve the overcrowded prison system in Ohio.

A bill that would expand DNA testing and try to improve the way authorities conduct investigations and another that would let prisoners earn shorter sentences each passed Senate committees yesterday.

But only the DNA bill appears to have a bright future.

The criminal-sentencing bill would allow most prisoners to get out early by earning up to five days of credit per month, up from the current one day, if they participate in education and rehabilitation programs. But even though it won the battle yesterday, it seems likely to lose the war in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Senate President Bill M. Harris, R-Ashland, had hoped that the committee process would temper the strong opposition to the bill, but that didn’t happen. He wanted to include it in the new two-year budget, saving an estimated $50 million over the biennium to help close a $3.2 billion shortfall.

ACLU Staff Counsel Carrie Davis discusses the growing trend of police departments and schools using social networking sites to profile young people for certain crimes.

Dayton area teens who use the Web to communicate with their friends could be in for a surprise if their postings include activities that break school rules.

[…]

Police need to exercise restraint in developing suspicions on the basis of what is said on social networking sites, said Carrie Davis, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

“Really, what they’re doing is using people’s speech and associations as a basis for suspicion,” Davis said.

It is a challenge for law enforcement because technology has developed at a rate that outpaced the laws, she said.

“They’re dealing with technologies that didn’t exist when the laws were written,” Davis said. “Most of our privacy laws were written in the 1970s.”

ACLU of Ohio Staff Counsel Carrie Davis suggests a better route to tackle the issue of teen “sexting.”

The recent bills proposed by state Rep. Ron Maag and state Sen. Bob Schuler to reduce penalties incurred by teenagers who electronically distribute nude photos of themselves or others are well-intentioned, but may create more problems than they solve.

The criminal justice system should not be the arena to address this issue. By exposing young people who simply made a foolish decision to criminal charges, officials may stigmatize those youth and could cause them to fall deeper into the court system. Instead, we must work to create strong educational programs to help teens cultivate better judgment and respect for others.

If a young person is upset that another person distributed his or her nude picture without permission, his or her parents should instead utilize the civil courts and sue the person for violating one’s privacy rights. Those who disseminate personal photos would still have negative consequences, but would not be labeled as a criminal and processed through the justice system.

While no one will argue that teens should be sending nude photos of themselves to others, the remedy is not to simply punish the children in criminal court. If we hope to prevent these unfortunate incidents in the future, parents and educators must engage in open and meaningful discussions with children about respect for others’ privacy and how to cope with pressure to engage in dangerous activities.

Some Ohio legislators propose pulling sentencing reform out of the state budget. Opponents argue this would delay much-needed changes, endanger prisoners and correctional officers, and wreak havoc on the budget.

Sentencing reforms that the Strickland administration has touted to reduce prison crowding by nearly 7,000 inmates a year and save about $30 million might be pulled out of the proposed biennial budget.

Strickland’s sentencing plan, along with a counterproposal by the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association that focused primarily on relaxing drug-law penalties, may be shifted to another legislative committee to be considered separately — and later.

That could spell trouble, both for the proposed sentencing overhaul and the state budget, which would spring another leak with the removal of cost savings, according to prisons chief Terry Collins.

[…]

The Akron Beacon Journal urges lawmakers to act in the best interest of Ohioans when reforming prisons rather than out of fear of looking “soft on crime.”

Fearful of the criticism ‘’soft on crime,” state lawmakers are unlikely to include Ted Strickland’s sentencing reforms in the next two-year state budget.
State Rep. John Carney, a Columbus Democrat and a key voice in this debate, admitted this week that constituents’ fears about rising crime are overwhelming the hard evidence presented by the governor and Terry Collins, the director of the Department of Correction and Rehabilitation, about rapidly rising prison costs.

Carney and colleagues on both sides of the aisle are in danger of succumbing yet again to the tough-on-crime reflex. The trouble is, decades of harsh sentencing laws are pushing Ohio and other states to the edge of fiscal disaster, with voters also demanding cost-cutting in government. The common-sense plan advanced by Strickland and Collins would meet both demands. It would reduce the likelihood of repeat offenses and save the state the cost of housing and caring for a rapidly rising prison population.

[…]

Given the current budget squeeze, state lawmakers should consider leading rather than fanning fears. They should keep the governor’s proposals in the budget bill.

[…]

USA Today covers the ACLU’s challenge to the government labeling a Toledo-based organization as supporting terrorists without providing any kind of due process.

The Treasury Department faces a legal challenge over its use of an emergency power to freeze the assets of U.S. charities based on suspicions — and without formal charges — that their money aids groups tied to terrorism.
Four charities have had operations “blocked pending investigation” by Treasury under authority granted by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. The authority, provided under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, lets Treasury freeze a charity’s operations indefinitely if officials have “reasonable basis” to suspect its money or activities benefit terrorists.

[…]

“The government is saying it can take a U.S. corporation and shut it down indefinitely … without any due process,” says Hina Shamsi, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing KindHearts. “No one’s saying ‘don’t go after terrorist financing’ … but this has the opposite consequence. It has a tremendously chilling effect on humanitarian aid in areas where the United States has a strong interest in changing public opinion about itself.”

Exonerees are pushing for changes to current law to make it easier to obtain DNA testing for those charged with a crime.

A Senate committee was smacked with a sobering dose of reality yesterday from three Columbus men who were improperly imprisoned for a combined 53 years and now want to prevent the same thing from happening to others.

DNA evidence eventually led to the release of Joseph R. Fears Jr., Robert McClendon and Walter D. Smith, but not until each was forced to endure years in prison and the unjust label of “convicted rapist.” In all, eight Ohio inmates have been freed through post-conviction DNA tests.

As free men, the three are pushing lawmakers to pass Senate Bill 77, which would give more inmates access to testing and strengthen requirements on the retention of biological evidence. It also requires that interrogations be recorded and that lineups be administered blind, with officers in charge kept unaware of which person or photo is the actual suspect.

Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh defies logic in denying a convicted man on death row a DNA test to prove whether or not he is innocent.

Summit County prosecutors say they will not agree to DNA testing requested by condemned killer Brett Hartmann unless ordered by a judge.

In a letter sent Friday to Hartmann’s attorneys, Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh wrote that the former Akron man ”is faced with clear and convincing evidence of his guilt.”

She rejected DNA testing of hairs, such as those found on the body of murder victim Winda Snipes, because they are ”easily transferrable.”

Luckily, officials have come to their senses in at least one case in the recent hysteria over students “sexting” one another.

A 14-year-old Kettering Middle School student will not be charged for having a picture of herself and another juvenile engaged in a sexual act on cell phone, according to Kettering Police Officer Michael Burke.

A Montgomery County Juvenile Division Prosecutor reviewed the girl’s case and a decision was made not to press charges against the girl, Burke said Tuesday, March 24.

The girl’s cell phone was confiscated on March 10 for having the cell phone on during school hours, according to Kettering City Schools Superintendent Robert Mengerink. The school official who confiscated the cell phone noticed the picture of the sexual act and called police.

Margo Pierce at the City Beat picked up an action alert the ACLU sent out regarding legislation that would ban corporal punishment in Ohio.

Violence begets violence; it certainly doesn’t have the effect of bringing about effective communication that ultimately leads people to understand and embrace positive actions. So why would Ohio schools – institutions of learning and thought – allow hitting kids as punishment?

The history of abuse and tyranny connected with physical violence ought to be enough of a motivator for lawmakers to take a stand against adult violence in the schools. But politicians are politicians so logic doesn’t always apply, that’s why the ACLU is encouraging people to call the members of the Ohio House Education Committee today, the group is voting on House Bill 26, “which would end the use of corporal punishment in all public schools.”

The Dispatch gets it right in this powerful editorial on the need for expanded DNA testing.

Judges and prosecutors should not stand in the way of DNA testing for people convicted of crimes if, for any reason, the best testing available has not been used.

Technology continues to advance, “lost” evidence is found years after conviction and defense attorneys sometimes fail to request a test that could make a difference. These circumstances and more can justify new testing.

Just ask Joseph R. Fears Jr., who spent more than 25 years in prison on two rape convictions. He was cleared by a DNA test on evidence that had been declared lost and probably will be released this week.

More data has come out about the dangerous over population of prisons.

One in every 25 adult Ohioans is in prison, jail or on parole or probation, a study by the Pew Center on the States shows.

While the national average is one in 31 U.S. adults, the numbers are more dramatic for Latinos (one in 27), men (one in 18), and blacks (one in 11), according to One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections, released yesterday.

Ohio’s one-in-25 rate was sixth among the states. Georgia had the highest at one in 13, and New Hampshire the lowest at one in 88.

Check out this great editorial from the Youngstown Vindicator on the need to balance liberty and security.

The release of nine memos drafted by Bush administration lawyers in the aftermath of 9/11 provide a cautionary tale of how fear can motivate bureaucrats to advocate the deconstruction of a constitutional republic.

The snapshot provided by the memos is that of a band of Justice Department lawyers who were willing, if not eager, to create an imperial presidency that was not answerable to the Congress, the judiciary or the Constitution, at least not as most people understand the Constitution.