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The number of criminals under 18 serving time in adult prisons more than doubled between 1985 and 1997 as states prosecuted steadily more young people as adults.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers unveiled its "innocence agenda" Friday, calling for easier access to DNA testing, crime labs independent from police departments and increased pay for public defenders.

The reactions by the presidential candidates to the Diallo verdict acquitting four white New York police officers of murder of an unarmed black immigrant.

After 39 years of exile in Britain, Australia and Africa, Preston King finally woke up at home today in America. Mr. King was a 24-year-old graduate student in the early 1960's when the draft board here, after learning that he was black, stopped referring to him as Mr. King and began addressing him as Preston. He received a pardon from President Clinton.

In a stinging report, the Justice Department accused guards at a privately run juvenile prison of violating inmates' rights by habitually using excessive force and allowing brutal fights over such basic items as food, clothing and shoes. The report about the facility in Jena was submitted to a federal judge overseeing Louisiana's juvenile prisons.

Saying that science has overtaken the state penal code, Gov. George E. Pataki proposed yesterday the most aggressive laws in the nation for solving crimes using DNA analysis. The proposals would abolish prosecution deadlines for 16 felonies and require every person convicted of a crime to provide a biological sample for a state database.

The Supreme Court, voting 5-4 Tuesday, rejected a challenge to Alabama's use of the electric chair as the only means of execution. But doubt remained whether three states – Alabama, Georgia and Nebraska – can continue offering no alternative for putting inmates to death.

The state parole board Tuesday refused to halt Thursday's execution of a woman who was convicted of shooting her fifth husband to death. Betty Lou Beets, 62, and her supporters argued that her death sentence should be commuted to life in prison because she acted in self defense after years of domestic abuse.

California voters decide next month whether to take a harder line on juvenile crime. Under Proposition 21, a measure on the March 7 ballot, juveniles as young as 14 could more easily be charged as adults for serious crimes and could face life sentences.

In a Harlem debate, Al Gore and Bill Bradley promised Monday night to act against racial profiling from the White House -- and then tried to turn the question against each other.

President Clinton granted a full pardon Monday to Preston King, who fled to England 39 years ago to avoid a prison sentence for draft evasion.

Afraid the U.S. Supreme Court will ban the electric chair, the Georgia House voted overwhelmingly Monday to phase out electrocution and execute inmates by lethal injection.

Decrying racial disparities, including those in perceptions of justice in America, President Bill Clinton on Saturday announced $223 million in grants to help provide education and job training to up to 44,000 poor youth across the country.

A quadriplegic who says he uses marijuana for medical reasons has been sentenced to seven years in prison -- where he will cost taxpayers five times more than an average inmate -- after being accused of selling the drug out of his home.

With the South Carolina primary at hand, Republican candidates George W. Bush and John McCain continued to be dogged by racial issues Friday.

The only sure result of America's three-strike laws has been a leap in the prison population. The problem is like a runaway train with politicians at its wheel who are scared that even slowing down will lead them to a political crash.

Sears, Roebuck and Co., the second largest U.S. retailer, said it would stop sales of Benetton USA apparel and remove the products from its stores. Benetton, through its United Colors of Benetton stores, recently introduced an advertising campaign called ``We, on Death Row'' that features interviews with convicted killers.

Since the advent of DNA testing, 64 convicted prisoners have been exonerated in the United States alone. Of the 62 analyzed for "Actual Innocence," eight were on death row. The Innocence Project, headed by lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, only takes cases where DNA evidence exists, and identification of the perpetrator is the key issue. But in their new book with co-author Jim Dwyer, they demonstrate more than the miracles of DNA. "The message of our book isn't that DNA can prove people innocent," Scheck says. "The book asks, Why did all these people get convicted in the first place?"

President Clinton on Wednesday rejected calls for a moratorium on the federal death penalty, but praised Illinois Gov. George Ryan for suspending executions in his state. He also said he favored in principle a bill in Congress aimed at ensuring defendants in capital cases have competent legal defenses and access to DNA testing that could prove innocence.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty thinks at least three innocent prisoners have been put to death in Texas during the governorship of George W. Bush, who is campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. Bush does not think Texas has ever executed an innocent man. In the five years of Mr Bush's governorship, 118 men and one woman have been put to death. Mr Bush has only once granted clemency.

Death penalty critics say a woman who claims she was a battered wife will be executed next week because Texas Gov. George W. Bush is ignoring her pleas for mercy. The critics say Bush is ignoring the pleas in order to demonstrate his tough, pro-death penalty stand as he runs for President.

The United States has 25% of the global prison population. Its jail population is expected to reach 2 million on Tuesday, prompting a wave of protests across America.

Gary Haynes, Attica survivor, waited almost 30 years for this day. He was the first of 14 former inmates to offer their opinions at a unusual hearing about last month's prisoners' rights settlement, in which New York State agreed to pay a total of $8 million to inmates who were tortured by guards and state troopers after the 1971 Attica prison uprising. Forty-three people were killed and more than 80 wounded in the four-day siege and its suppression, the bloodiest prison uprising in the country's history.

33 people who were sentenced to die in Illinois had lawyers who were later disbarred or suspended, and many more had lawyers with no experience in capital cases. Death penalty experts say the situation is almost certainly worse -- though not as well documented - in states where capital punishment is more routine.

The American Bar Association's call for a national moratorium on capital punishment, made three years ago this month, once seemed destined for a quiet death. No more.

2/11/2000...Innocence Protection Act Introduced in Congress Today ...National Ass'n of Criminal Defense Lawyers

The "Innocence Protection Act," introduced today by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) offers long overdue changes that will pave the way for the vindication of some who have been wrongfully convicted and improve the quality of counsel for indigent defendants who make up the overwhelming majority of individuals facing the death penalty.

The Justice Department disclosed Thursday it is reviewing whether racial minorities have been unfairly given more federal death sentences than white defendants.

The Justice Policy Institute reports that the U.S. Prison and Jail population will top two million for the first time on February 15, 2000 - the day after the nation celebrates Valentine's Day. Using the most up to date Justice Department statistics and trends, the Institute estimates that the U.S. now has the world's largest incarcerated population, and highest incarceration rate.

A Superior Court Judge in Mohave County has revoked the probation of a woman born with no arms or legs, and sentenced her to the Arizona Department of Corrections for one year, for violating probaton for a minor offense of attempted sale of marijuana. Her incarceration will cost the taxpayers $300 a day.

President Clinton attacked the Republican Senate on Wednesday for refusing to vote on a Hispanic-American lawyer he nominated to be a judge as an example of politically motivated Republican inaction on many of his appointees to federal judgeships.

There are signs that our love for the death penalty is on the wane....There are many reasons for the shift but first among them... is the rash of innocent people recently released from death row, often after many years. Further undermining the public's faith in the fairness of the process is the use of jailhouse informants to obtain a conviction in exchange for significant favors like a reduced sentence. Other events and facts may be moving the public to see the death penalty as the ultimate abuse of human rights....

2/8/2000...Diversionary Legal Tactics - San Franciso's Mentor Court......Law News Network

Everyone talks about San Francisco's mentor court. Everyone praises what it does. But who really knows how it works? Instigated by District Attorney Terence Hallinan in 1997, the court aims to identify young drug dealers likely to benefit from some education to embark on new vocations.

Across the nation, dozens of convicts go free after a new look at evidence proves them innocent. A police scandal unravels in Los Angeles, with 99 people framed and convicted. Illinois stops all executions after 13 condemned men are freed. Is the criminal justice system itself on trial? And what can be done about it?

In the final years of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration, the city's six-year "quality of life" crackdown against low-level crimes is approaching its zenith. ...The zero-tolerance approach toward ticket scofflaws, turnstile jumpers, public drinkers, marijuana smokers and others, which may be out of the headlines but is still in full effect... leaves the courts in a continual struggle to keep from being overwhelmed.

It's a dispute that has engulfed the drug debate for years: how best to end the disparity between mandatory prison sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine.

President Clinton will consider a request that he suspend federal executions, the White House said Friday.

At a time when the criminal defense bar is besieged by critics and disheartened by the low pay for assigned counsel, the organized defenders have chosen Kathryn Kase as their leader a feisty, 5 feet 2 inch, uprooted Texas journalist who was admitted to the New York bar less than six years ago. [Ed. Congratulations, Kathryn!]

The U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay of execution Thursday to an Alabama death row inmate convicted of robbing and killing a rural grocer in 1984.

Minority juvenile offenders in California are much more likely to be transferred to adult courts and sentenced to prison than are whites who commit similar crimes, a study released yesterday shows.

The Senate, in passing the Bankruptcy Reform Bill today, also passed the Hatch Amendment raising the penalties for powder cocaine to those now in effect for crack cocaine. Here is the roll call vote, with 33 Democrats and 50 Republicans voting for the bill, which will now head for conference.

A congressional commission issued a report Tuesday recommending that the attorney general and the FBI have more authority to coordinate the fight of crime, and that the FBI take over enforcement functions of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1976 Gregg decision finding the death penalty constitutional, Illinois has executed 12 people and found 13 people on death row innocent. After condemning people to death, Illinois has actually found more death row inmates innocent than it has executed! Illinois has exonerated 13 individuals but the numbers are sure to grow, as other cases continue to be investigated and appeals make their way through the courts.

Citing a "shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row," Gov. George Ryan of Illinois today halted all executions in the state, the first such moratorium in the nation.

The nation's female inmate population in state and federal prisons in the 1990s doubled, growing far faster than the male population, according to a federal study released yesterday by the General Accounting Office.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors put its stamp of approval Monday on a plan to issue identification cards to medical marijuana users.

Attorneys for 58 Florida death row inmates said on Monday that state lawmakers overstepped their authority by making sweeping changes in the way the state carries out executions.

Visit Forfeiture.Org and TAKE ACTION! as soon as possible. A national coalition of prestigious organizations has come together to support forfeiture reform in Congress, but we will not be able to pass S. 1931 unless your two U.S. senators hear from you and your friends, colleagues, and family.

Prisoners of Love....CourtTV ... Monday, February 14, 2000, 10:00 PM/ET...

Court TV's Crime Stories, hosted by Catherine Crier, examines the impact of mandatory minimium drug sentences through the personal stories of two women caught in the War on Drugs

Hearing on Federal Civil Forfeiture Bill..Thursday, February 10, 2000 at 10:00 a.m...226 Dirkson

Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a business meeting to markup H.R.1658, regarding procedures for Federal civil forfeitures.

Hearing on Enhancing Border Security...Thursday, February 10, 2000 at 2:00 p.m...226 Dirkson

Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration is holding a hearing on enhancing border security.

"Reducing Youth Violence: Community Based Strategies"...Tuesday, February 8, 2000 at 2:30 PM...

Senators Harkin and Specter are sponsoring a briefing on "Reducing Youth Violence: Community Based Strategies" in room SC-6 of the Capitol. The hour-long briefing has been set up to help educate Senate staff on the importance of prevention funding. Staff will hear from local leaders running Title V, 21st Century, and Runaway and Homeless Youth programs across the country.

Hearing on Identity Theft...Tuesday, February 8, 2000 at 10:00 a.m....226 Dirkson

Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information is holding a hearing to examine issues relating to Identity Theft.

President Clinton has signed into law a ban on the so called "date-rape" drug known as GHB gamma-hydroxybutate). The new law places the drug in the same category as cocaine and heroin.

While S. 1931 is not as ideal as H.R. 1658 -- which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on June 24, 1999 -- S. 1931 should be supported because it would implement a number of major reforms ...

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right! Read the text of the Amendment to the Controlled Substances Act that passed along with the Bankruptcy Reform Act. Instead of reducing the penalties for crack, the Amendment increases the penalties for powder cocaine, making offenses involving more than 50 grams of powder cocaine subject to a five year mandatory prison sentence. The bill will now go Conference. Write or E-mail your representatives in Congress and demand they oppose this draconian, ill-advised, political grandstanding measure.

The Senate voted on the Bankruptcy Reform Amendment to increase powder cocaine penalties on November 10, 1999. The vote was 50 to 49 with Senator John McCain not voting. How did your senator vote?

A bill that would significantly toughen federal laws for possession and distribution of a "date rape" drug passed the House on Monday and was sent to President Clinton for his signature.

The civil forfeiture laws that allow the government to confiscate the property of narcotics dealers even in the absence of a criminal conviction spawned a growing number of cases in which people guilty of no wrongdoing have had their assets seized -- giving rise to civil liberties concerns, as well as a promising reform movement in Congress....There is a chance now to strike a better balance between legitimate law enforcement needs and protection of individual rights. It should not be missed.

The cops had their day in court and were acquitted. The hope here is that the cops who killed Amadou Diallo for the crime of breathing while black will turn in their badges and their blue uniforms and move on....Whatever they do, the problems that they have come to epitomize will remain -- the humiliation and brutalization of thousands of innocent New Yorkers, most of them black and brown, by police officers who are arrogant, tyrannical, poorly trained, often frightened and not infrequently racist.

Over the last five years, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has tried to shift the debate from what the city owes the homeless to what the homeless should be required to do in return for shelter. At issue is a proposed rule that would evict homeless people from shelters for failing to meet workfare requirements. A policy that would boot New York's most vulnerable citizens into the street is both inhumane and politically insupportable.

Minority communities are those most affected by crime, and, historically, they have not been well policed. Minority communities want policing that is not only effective, but sensitive, compassionate and respectful of constitutional guidelines.

The death penalty is the most blatantly violent symbol of our societal sickness. It is an antiquated remnant from a barbaric age, long passed. Only when our government leads by peaceful, non-violent example will we begin the process of becoming a less bloodthirsty, more civilized society. Killing people cannot be, should not be, and is not an acceptable solution to societal problems. We deserve better than that.

America is at last beginning to grapple honestly with the profound flaws of the death penalty system. Congress need not wait for the administration to act. Last week Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, introduced legislation to address "the growing national crisis" in how capital punishment is administered. This promising measure, the Innocence Protection Act of 2000, stops short of abolishing the death penalty, the course we hope the nation will eventually follow.

Two cases illustrate what seems to me a fundamental flaw in the 1996 Immigration Act. It sets out to eliminate all judgment, all weighing of individual factors, making deportation automatic. But as countless cases show by now ...that approach leads to inhumanity.

It's happening more and more: a convicted criminal, heading for execution, is sprung by DNA tests. And if the innocent are in jail, the guilty are still out there.

The Clinton administration has unveiled a $1.3 billion plan to help Colombia, including $955 million in security assistance.... The plan reflects neither a realistic strategy to fight illegal drugs nor an effective long-term approach to establish peace and stability. Instead it risks dragging the United States into a costly counterinsurgency war.

Although President Clinton seems unaware of it, the $1.6 billion he is requesting to fight coca production in Colombia amounts to intervention in another country's civil war. Neither the president nor the secretary of state has given the American people any coherent explanation of what is at stake in Colombia or of how massive military assistance can do anything but make matters worse.

Regardless of the extent of compassion in his "compassionate conservatism," Gov. George W. Bush of Texas could show some concern for justice by following the example of his presidential campaign chairman in Illinois, Gov. George Ryan, who last week announced a moratorium on executions in his state.

The decision by Illinois Gov. George H. Ryan--a pro-death penalty Republican--to stop all executions in his state pending further study of the death penalty system there is a breath of fresh air on an issue on which politicians do not normally demonstrate political courage. Illinois has had a staggering string of death-row inmates cleared of the crimes for which they were sentenced to die. The governor is right to step back and reassess.

Gov. George Ryan of Illinois has shown political courage and integrity in being the first governor in a death penalty state to put a stop, at least temporarily, to executions in light of overwhelming evidence that the capital punishment system is prone to make mistakes.

TalkLeft Commentary

On February 17, 2000, Sears, Roebuck and Co., the second largest U.S. retailer, said it would stop sales of Benetton USA apparel and remove the products from its stores due to strong objections to the company's Capital Punishment campaign. TalkLeft and CrimeLynx urge you to protest - here's how.

How would Presidential candidate George Bush, Jr. fare under an experienced criminal defense lawyer's cross-examination about possible past cocaine usage?

Vice President Al Gore says prevention and fair policing will reduce black incarceration

Vice President Al Gore says he is so strongly in support of the death penalty that he's willing to accept wrongful executions.

George W. Bush, Governor of Texas and campaigner for the Republican Presidential nomination, denies Texas has ever exceuted and innocence man.

U.S. Rep. Asa Hutchinson on racial profiling: The United States honors the principle that all individuals are equal in the eyes of justice. Unfortunately, certain practices - such as racial profiling - threaten that premise. Not only does racial profiling undermine the credibility of our justice system, it is a morally bankrupt practice and our laws should be reformed to reflect this reality.

Elisabeth Semel, Esq., Chair, ABA Death Penalty Representation Project, commented on the Inadequacy of Defense Counsel and Funding Afforded Death Row Inmates, increasing the likelihood of a wrongful conviction.

"Ms. Semel used a boxing analogy to describe the disparity in resources and experience between prosecutors and defense lawyers in most death penalty cases.

"It's like a match between Mike Tyson and Martin Short," she said, "and the referee -- the judge -- is on Tyson's payroll."

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