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Highlights From This Week At The Appeal
By Matt Ferner (@matthewferner)

Stories From The Appeal

In A Florida County, Sex Workers Are Ensnared In ‘Trafficking’ Raids. Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister’s stings, conducted under the guise of targeting human trafficking, netted the largest number of arrests there since 2008. Sex workers say the operations put them at risk. [Molly Minta]

Police and Sheriff’s Departments Join Media Campaign Against Bail Reform In New York State. A wave of sensationalist press is not just coming from New York City, but also from county sheriff and city police departments frustrated by bail reform that they claim is ‘too broad.’ [Adam H. Johnson]

Jackie Lacey’s Culture Of Fear. Lack of evidence does not stop opponents of former San Francisco DA George Gascón from making the claim that the city’s criminal justice reforms unleashed a crime wave. [Alex Sherman]

Federal Crackdown On Fentanyl Analogues Repeats the Mistakes of the Drug War, Advocates Warn. Legislators are considering giving the DEA dangerous authority, harm reduction advocates say. [Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg]

Elizabeth Warren Endorses José Garza in Travis County D.A. Race. Garza has promised to end cash bail and address racial inequities in the legal system. [Kira Lerner]

In New Orleans, Drug Testing Is Imposed More Frequently on People Released Without Money Bail. People freed from jail on their own recognizance miss more court appearances because of disproportionate conditions placed on their release, a new study suggests. [Joshua Vaughn]

Pretrial Reform Must Go Beyond Ending Cash Bail. As a society, we can’t continue to subject hundreds of thousands of people to the trauma of incarceration before they face a jury of their peers. [Andy Philipson]

Five Jurists Said Donnie Lance Deserved a New Sentence. Georgia Executed Him Anyway. Three Supreme Court justices and others said competent counsel could have saved his life. [Kyle C. Barry]

Harris County D.A.’s Office Dropped Theft Case After Defense Attorney Alleged Race-Based Jury Selection. A Texas judge approved a Batson motion, then overruled it. But a transcript shows that a Black man was struck unfairly, the attorney said. [Aaron Morrison]

Jackie Lacey Met Her Progressive Challengers On Stage For The First Time, And It Was Explosive. A fiery debate outlined what’s at stake in the race to lead the largest prosecutor’s office in the country. [Eliyahu Kamisher]

Joe Kennedy III Says He Is Running A Progressive Senate Campaign. But He Worked  For One Of The Most Regressive DAs In Massachusetts. In his run for president, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has been forced to address his consulting past. Kennedy should do the same about his work at a Massachusetts DA’s office. [Will Isenberg]

Singling Out Crime ‘Suspects’ As Homeless Is A Media Double Standard That Unjustly Penalizes The Poor. Leading with housing status for homeless people is a common trope in the news reporting business and one in urgent need of re-examining. [Adam H. Johnson]

Podcasts

The Appeal Podcast: Locking Up Women For Killing Their Rapists. With Appeal staff reporter Lauren Gill. In 2018, Brittany Smith was assaulted and raped by a man in her Alabama home. Later that night, when the same man attacked both her and her brother, Smith shot and killed him in what she calls self-defense. Now she’s on trial for murder and her case tells us a lot about how our criminal legal system treats gendered violence. Today we are joined by Appeal writer Lauren Gill to talk about this case and the broader trend of throwing the book at women who defend themselves from abusive men. [Adam H. Johnson]

Stories From The Political Report

Blockbuster D.A. Races Rock Big Texas Counties, from Austin to Houston: The death penalty, drug policy, and bail reform are shaping debates, with primaries weeks away. But across Texas, hundreds of local elections are left uncontested. [Daniel Nichanian]

Chesa Boudin's New Bail Policy is Nation's Most Progressive. It Also Reveals Persistence of Tough-On-Crime Norms. Boudin eliminated cash bail and restricted pretrial detention in San Francisco. He also reaffirmed a flawed quest to predict who should be jailed for what they might do. [Colin Doyle]

Visit the Political Report's interactive trackers on legislative developments on criminal justice reform and on the politics of prosecutors for regular updates from around the country.

Spotlights

When Jail Time Comes With A Bill. In November 2018, a ballot initiative in Florida that would re-enfranchise well over a million people with felony convictions was hailed as a historic voting rights victory. In the months since, many of those people have seen their re-enfranchisement delayed because of an argument advanced by Republican lawmakers and the governor that they must first pay any outstanding legal system debt. For some people, this amount runs to tens of thousands of dollars, an amount that is impossible to pay. [Vaidya Gullapalli]

On Kobe Bryant, The Search For Nuance In An All-Or-Nothing System. On Sunday, news that basketball legend Kobe Bryant had died in a helicopter crash along with his daughter and seven others overtook the impeachment trial as the top news story. “A generation lost a hero on Sunday, thousands of basketball players who grew up spinning along baselines and firing up picture-perfect midrange jump shots lost the legend that showed them how,” wrote Chris Mannix for Sports Illustrated. “There are no words for such an unspeakable tragedy.” Josh Levin, of Slate, noted that ESPN’s coverage stuck to Kobe’s professional achievements and ABC News’s special report was “extremely hagiographic.” [Sarah Lustbader]

Why Police Violence Is A Public Health Problem. Last week, Joseph Goldstein of the New York Times reported the devastating story of Khiel Coppin and Na’im Owens, two brothers, both of whom were both shot dead by NYPD officers. Khiel, the older brother, was killed in 2007; Na’im, the younger, in 2014. The boys lived and died in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Their mother, Denise Elliott-Owens, a teacher from Trinidad and Tobago, moved to New York in 1990 with dreams of becoming a lawyer someday. Her sons were 18 and 22 when they died. Goldstein spoke with Elliott-Owens and other family members. [Vaidya Gullapalli]

Professors Propose A ‘Defender General’ To Level The Playing Field. State court is where everyday criminal justice gets meted out. Generally speaking, if you’re arrested for robbery, or assault, you’re getting arrested by local police and prosecuted in a state court, under state law. What does it matter what happens in fancy federal courts across the country? And what could be less relevant to the informal, chaotic mess that is state court than the pristine halls of the Supreme Court of the United States? [Sarah Lustbader]

The Death Penalty Is Part Of A Larger System Of Punishment. Colorado’s Senate took a critical vote on Thursday that put the state on the pathway to abolishing the death penalty. The body voted 19-15 in favor of a bill to repeal capital punishment. Around 11:30 a.m. local time today, Denver Post reporter Alex Burness wrote on Twitter to report further progress: “The Colorado Senate has given final passage to the bill to repeal the death penalty. This was expected, but still a huge moment. Colorado may now be just weeks away from becoming the 22nd state to repeal the death penalty.” [Vaidya Gullapalli]

The Tweets

We examined the U.S. House of Representatives bill that passed this week to extend the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ban on fentanyl—a proposal that harm reduction advocates say is misguided and regressive, and perpetuates the ineffective, racist war on drugs. [Jay Willis]

We broke the news and analyzed Arizona Department of Corrections failure to provide adequate health care to incarcerated people. [Jay Willis]

We obtained exclusive imagery from Parchman, Mississippi’s maximum security state penitentiary, where, over the past month, a dozen people have died in Mississippi Department of Corrections custody—a trend advocates blame on badly-deteriorating facilities and chronic under-staffing and under-funding throughout the system. [Jay Willis]

Thanks for reading.  We'll see you next week.

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The Daily Appeal is a publication of The Justice Collaborative, a project of Tides Advocacy

Copyright © 2020 The Justice Collaborative, a project of Tides Advocacy. All rights reserved.


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