sign up here to receive periodic e-mails and news alerts from The Crime Report.
The Crime Report talks funding, inertia and over-incarceration with the man who heads Vera Institute of Justice’s NOLA office.
It’s rare for an entire city to get a do-over, but after Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans and the levees gave way, the Crescent City became ground zero for policy makers and visionaries wanting to transform the city’s agencies and social structures.
Almost one in eight federal judgeships is vacant in the country, and legal scholars warn that the increasingly politicized confirmation process threatens the administration of justice across the nation, says the Los Angeles Times. Democrats and the Obama administration accuse the Republican minority in the Senate of systematically opposing the president’s nominees to prevent him from putting his stamp on a judiciary that, Democrats say, moved to the right under President Bush. Republicans and conservative analysts say the stalled pace of “replenishment” is part payback for congressional Democrats’ efforts to scuttle some Bush nominees and part indifference on the part of President Obama, who they say has been slow to nominate judges. (more…)
Newsweek mulls whether the three women now on the U.S. Supreme Court will somehow transform it. Social scientists contend that the difference is more than just cosmetic. They cite a 2006 study by the Wellesley Centers for Women that found three to be the magic number when it came to the impact of women on corporate boards: after the third woman is seated, boards reach a tipping point at which the group as a whole begins to function differently. (more…)
Judicial elections over the past decade have seen an explosion of campaign donation, attack television ads and litigation about judicial elections found a new report from The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. The report studies the elections nationwide from 2000-2009.
Read the report here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on Judges.
A 15-year-old Alabama law meant to discourage big-dollar donations to judicial campaigns has never been enforced, and each of the three branches of government blames another for the failure, reports the Birmingham News. The attorney general says the state court system is supposed to come up with rules for enforcement; the state court system says the law first needs the blessing of the U.S. Justice Department, which the AG’s office has not sought; and a legislative sponsor of the law says he’d be happy to rewrite it if someone would tell him what’s wrong with it. (more…)
A survey of nearly 1,200 state trial judges around the country by the American Bar Association Coalition for Justice finds during the weak economy litigants are increasingly representing themselves.
The Crime Report in May told the story of a nine-month old infant murdered in the midst of a bitter California custody battle. Last month, the presiding judge in the case lost his battle for re-election.
Could the death of little Wyatt Garcia have been prevented? Supporters of the boy’s mother, Katie Tagle, have charged that a San Bernardino, CA family court judge who refused to accept her plea for custody was indirectly responsible for the chain of events that ended when her estranged husband shot the boy and then turned the gun on himself last year. (See “Failure to Protect“, The Crime Report, May 26, 2010)
