Prisons – Attorney Legal Counsel

California AG opens civil rights probe into sheriff’s office

attorneylegalcounsel99 — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:19:40 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The California attorney general on Thursday opened a civil rights investigation into the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, one of the largest law enforcement agencies in Southern California, after deaths in county jails hit a two-decade high last year and other allegations of excessive use of force surfaced.

attorney General Rob Bonta announced the investigation in Los Angeles following what he called “deeply concerning” allegations of misconduct within the sheriff’s office and confinement conditions at the sheriff’s jails. He did not give examples.

While Bonta said no specific incidents were a tipping point to prompt the civil rights investigation, there have been patterns in data — including disparate impacts on communities of color — that, in his words, have been “disturbing for some time.”

Exact figures on in-custody deaths, use of force incidents and misconduct allegations were not immediately available from his office Tuesday.

“It is time for us to shine a light on the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office and its practices,” he said during a news conference.

Bonta called the status of the trust between the department and the public “in peril” and alluded to the recent line-of-duty deaths of two Riverside deputies in shootings that rocked the county.

“Ensuring public trust and keeping our communities and officers safe is not mutually exclusive,” Bonta said.

Sheriff Chad Bianco, in a video response posted online, called the investigation “a political stunt” and said Bonta, a Democrat, was bowing to anti-law enforcement activists’ demands.

“This will prove to be a complete waste of time and resources,” said Bianco, a Republican.

In 2021, the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the attorney general’s office urging the state to investigate the Riverside department for what it called “its racist policing practices, rampant patrol and jail deaths, and its refusal to comply” with court orders.

The attorney general has the power to open civil investigations to determine whether a law enforcement agency has “engaged in a pattern or practice” of violating state or federal law. These cases are not criminal in nature and are meant to identify potential problems and then work with the agency to correct the issues, which are typically systemic violations of a community’s constitutional rights.

The state agency has similar cases open into the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Those probes are ongoing.

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Cases affected by California county’s illegal use of jail informants jumps to 57, new analysis finds

attorneylegalcounsel99 — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 06:44:19 +0000

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — The California public defender who sounded the alarm about Orange County’s illegal use of jailhouse informants says the number of major criminal cases that have unraveled because of the scandal has jumped from about a dozen to 57.

A new analysis by Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders finds 35 homicide cases and 22 serious felony cases saw convictions overturned, charges dropped and sentences dramatically reduced, the Orange County Register reported Tuesday.

“We already knew that this was the largest and longest running informant scandal in U.S. history, but there had never been a complete accounting of the cases with changed outcomes,” Sanders told the newspaper. The analysis was partly based on data from the district attorney’s office.

With Sanders first raising concerns in 2014, state and federal investigators confirmed that Orange County prosecutors and law enforcement officers systematically violated the constitutional rights of criminal defendants with the illegal use of jailhouse informants.

Some informants collected up to $1,500 a case to coax confessions out of targeted inmates. Many of those inmates had a constitutional right not to be questioned by informants because they had already been charged and retained attorneys.

Some of the informants used threats of violence to persuade their targets to talk, which is not allowed by law. Prosecutors failed to disclose to defense attorneys the use of informants and their histories.

All of the impacted cases came during the tenure of former District attorney Tony Rackauckas. The use of informants under current DA Todd Spitzer is more restricted.

Spitzer said in a statement that much of Sanders’ analysis was previously compiled by the DA’s office and shared with the U.S. Department of Justice.

“We have a team of prosecutors tasked with reviewing each one of these cases and ensuring all of our discovery obligations have been met, and to take any further remedial action, if necessary,” he said. “In addition, the Orange County District attorney’s Office has expanded the role of our Conviction Integrity Unit by adopting a policy to review any wrongful conviction claim.”

Authorities can use jailhouse informants but can’t have them deliberately elicit information from defendants once they are represented by lawyers. In addition, prosecutors are required to turn over evidence to defense attorneys that could be seen as favorable to their clients.

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Oregon must get criminal defendants attorneys within 7 days or release them from jail, judge says

attorneylegalcounsel99 — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 23:42:13 +0000

A federal judge has ordered Oregon counties to release criminal defendants from jail if they aren’t appointed an attorney within a week of their first court appearance.

The state is one of many that have struggled to ensure their public defense systems meet the requirements of the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, and Oregon has faced multiple lawsuits over the issue in recent years.

Ruling Thursday in a case filed this year by the Federal Public Defender’s Office, U.S. District Judge Michael McShane said indigent defendants are essentially being locked up and deprived of a voice simply because they are too poor to hire their own lawyer.

“While the reasons underlying the shortage of publicly funded attorneys in Oregon are complex, all parties agree that the state is facing a crisis in its constitutional mandate to provide qualified attorneys to those charged with crimes,” McShane wrote.

Fixing the problem will take systemic change and time, the judge said, “But the luxury of time, unfortunately, is not something that many petitioners have when faced with a criminal prosecution.”

Roughly 135 people were in Oregon jails without access to attorneys at the end of October, the judge said. Many of them had technically been appointed public defenders but no attorney ever actually showed up to represent them. State laws generally require that criminal defendants have their first court appearance within 36 hours of being arrested, though that time frame doesn’t include weekends.

The ruling will go into effect Nov. 16.

Judges in Multnomah County, which is home to Portland, routinely dismiss cases due to a lack of defense attorneys. More than 300 cases, most of them felonies, were dismissed in 2022.

The county’s top prosecutor, Mike Schmidt, has called the shortage “an urgent threat to public safety” and said 10 cases were dismissed between Oct. 20 and Nov. 2.

Public defenders say uncompetitive pay, high stress and overwhelming caseloads affect staffing levels, and the state has historically relied on a contracting system that made it difficult to track which attorneys are assigned to which cases. Lawmakers passed a public defense reform bill earlier this year, but the reforms will take time to implement.

The U.S. Constitution says people charged with a crime have a right to an attorney, but it’s up to states to decide how to make sure that happens. States have carried out that constitutional mandate with varying degrees of success.

“America’s dirty little secret is that thousands of people go to jail every single day in our country without ever having spoken to an attorney,” said David Carroll, executive director and founder of the Sixth Amendment Center, which advocates for equal access in the criminal justice system.

Earlier this year the Mississippi Supreme Court changed that state’s rules so that poor criminal defendants must be appointed an attorney before they are indicted. The indictment process in Mississippi can sometimes take a year or more, forcing indigent criminal defendants to spend months or longer in jail without anyone to fight for their legal rights, Carroll said.

But Mississippi, like most states, lacks enforcement mechanisms to make sure the criminal defense requirements are actually followed, Carroll said.

The lack of enforcement mechanisms means improvements are sometimes forced by lawsuits rather than legislation.

In August the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine obtained a settlement over the failure of that state’s public defender system with a state agency’s commitment to press for more funding, additional public defender offices and other improvements.

A 2004 ruling in a Missouri state court took action similar to this week’s Oregon ruling, ordering that indigent inmates could not be held in lieu of bail for more than seven days without an attorney. But civil rights advocates said the problems continued, and additional lawsuits were filed in 2017 and 2020. In February of this year, a state judge ordered that poor defendants facing imprisonment must be provided a public defender no later than two weeks after they qualify for representation.

Idaho has also faced lawsuits over its patchwork public defense system, which has been plagued by high caseloads and long waits for representation. In 2022 the Idaho Legislature passed a bill shifting the cost of public defense services from the counties to the state starting in 2025.

The ACLU of Idaho, which has brought a class-action lawsuit against the state, has said the new funding scheme still falls sort. A trial in the case is set for February.

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