In a 2015 ACLU-PA report — Guilty Property: How Law Enforcement Takes $1 Million in Cash from Innocent Philadelphians Every Year — and Gets Away with It — we argued for specific reforms to fix Pennsylvania’s broken and unfair civil asset forfeiture laws. The Pa. Senate did not get the message. Photo via ACLU-PA.
By Matt Stroud
ACLU-PA criminal justice researcher
ACLU-PA is conferencing in an undisclosed Arizona location with staff from the other ACLU affiliates, so The Appeal will be brief this week.
While we bake and commiserate in the Arizona sun, consider that this week, the Pennsylvania Senate passed a bill to “reform” civil asset forfeiture. We quibble with that characterization. (“The state Senate had a great opportunity to truly reform forfeiture,” said ACLU-PA’s executive director, Reggie Shuford, in our statement on the passage. “But it failed.”) It reminds us, however, that there are a lot of other bills up for consideration in the Pennsylvania legislature as you read this.
There’s House Bill 90, for one, which has been introduced and referred to House Judiciary Committee. It adds “employment as a law enforcement officer, firefighter or emergency medical services provider” as a protected class to the Ethnic Intimidation Statute.
There’s also HB 305 and HB306. The former would allow “corrections staff members who experience a significant exposure of an inmate’s blood or bodily fluids to learn of the inmate’s status regarding infection of HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C.” The latter the the more extreme version of the same idea; it would require the Pa. Department of Corrections to “disclose the HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C status of any infected inmate to all corrections officers required to interact with the infected inmate.”
And Senate Bill 461 — the one that would allow Pennsylvania State Police to collect DNA samples of people convicted of misdemeanor offenses (among other convictions), and require people to give up a DNA sample to finish the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program, or ARD, which is intended to wipe one’s slate clean.
There’s a lot going on in the Pennsylvania State Capitol, in other words — including bills we’ve addressed here, and over at ACLUPA.org. If you get a few minutes, have a look at some of our recommendations.
We’ll have more for you next week. Until then, on to the links.
EXCERPTS
(Criminal justice news that could use a second look.)
David Hess’s gravestone at Merion Memorial Park. Photo via The Inquirer.
The Inquirer: “Death, rapes, and broken bones at Philly’s only residential treatment center for troubled youth”
“The death of Hess, 17 — ruled a homicide — was yet another violent chapter in a hidden history of abuse at the city’s only residential treatment center for troubled young people. In the last decade, at least 49 sex crimes have been reported at Wordsworth, including 12 rapes and 23 accounts of sexual abuse, an Inquirer and Daily News investigation has found. Interviews, court records, state inspection reports, and police records reveal a trail of injuries to children, from broken bones to assaults to the suffocation death of Hess. Along the way, lawyers, licensing inspectors, and others found conditions there appalling and sounded the alarm with little success. In 2015, three girls at the center were sexually assaulted by a counselor who lured them with promises of money and gifts, they would later tell police. While rumors of the incidents swirled, Wordsworth officials were slow to investigate, and the girls say the assaults continued for weeks. ‘I couldn’t believe that. It’s pretty outrageous,’ said Frank Cervone, executive director of the Support Center for Child Advocates, which represents victims of child abuse and neglect.”
ACLU of Pennsylvania: “State Senate Bill Fails to Reform Civil Asset Forfeiture”
“Legislation passed today by the Pennsylvania Senate fails to reform the practice of civil asset forfeiture in any significant way, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania said in a statement after the vote. The civil liberties advocacy group said that the bill leaves in place many of the most egregious provisions of forfeiture law, including provisions that allow the government to take and keep property from people who have not been convicted of a crime. ‘Civil asset forfeiture has been misused and abused by law enforcement in Pennsylvania,’ said Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. ‘The state Senate had a great opportunity to truly reform forfeiture. But it failed.'”
Highline: “What bullets do to bodies”
“She is the chair of Temple’s Department of Surgery, one of only 16 women in America to hold that position at a hospital. In my initial conversation with her, which took place shortly after the mass shooting in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and 53 injured by a man who walked into a gay nightclub with a semi-automatic rifle and a Glock handgun, she was joined by Scott Charles, the hospital’s trauma outreach coordinator and Goldberg’s longtime friend. Goldberg has a southeastern Pennsylvania accent that at low volume makes her sound like a sweet South Philly grandmother and at higher volume becomes a razor. I asked her what changes in gun violence she had seen in her 30 years. She said not many. When she first arrived at Temple in 1987 to start her residency, ‘It was so obvious to me then that there was something so wrong.’ Since then, the types of firearms have evolved. The surgeons used to see .22-caliber bullets from little handguns, Saturday night specials, whereas now they see .40-caliber and 9 mm bullets. Charles said they get the occasional victim of a long gun, such as an AR-15 or an AK-47, ‘but what’s remarkable is how common handguns are.'”
HEADLINES
(Criminal justice news to be aware of.)
What did the witnesses see? Photo via The Philadelphia Daily News.
Pennsylvania
- The Daily News: “Amid questions, officers cleared of shooting innocent deliveryman”
- More Daily News: “Police bust ‘smokeasy’ pot party and raid home of activist host; 22 arrested”
- CBS Philly: “ACLU Of Pennsylvania Launching Its First Ever Get Out The Vote Campaign.” With additional coverage in The Tribune.
- Lancaster Online: “More protections from civil forfeiture pass the state Senate”
- Public News Service: “Senate Bill Would Deny Public Access to Police Video”
- City&State: “El-Shabazz was disciplined, removed from cases as a defense attorney”
- The Intelligencer: “Unequal funding, unequal justice”
- Courier Times: “What price justice? Difficulties of facing criminal charges without a lawyer”
- News Journal: “Where Delaware gets its heroin”
- Daily News: “Ex-Philly homicide detective pleads guilty to helping girlfriend flee murder charge”
National
- New York Times: “21,587 Reasons to Fix Forensic Science”
- More New York Times: “El Chapo Complains About Conditions at Manhattan Jail”
- U.S. Courts: “Policy Shifts Reduce Federal Prison Population”
- The New Inquiry: “White Collar Crime Risk Zones”
- Journal-Sentinel: “Prosecutors: Inmate’s water cut off for 7 days before his death in the Milwaukee County Jail”
- NJ.com: “Do immigrants facing deportation have a right to an attorney?”
- ACLU: “In Its Rush to Kill, Arkansas May Have Executed an Innocent Man”
- The Lens: “Orleans Parish prosecutors are using fake subpoenas to pressure witnesses to talk to them”
- Wall Street Journal: “NYC Jails Grapple With Housing for Dangerous Inmates While jails drastically have reduced the number of inmates in solitary confinement, problems remain, watchdog agency says”
Trump Criminal Justice Watch
- San Francisco Chronicle: “Judge says Trump can’t punish cities over sanctuary city policies”
- Daily Beast: “Biggest Murder Spikes Not in Sanctuary Cities”
- The Nation: “Why We Need a Whistle-Blower in US Customs and Border Protection”
- BuzzFeed: “The Trump Administration Launched An Office To Highlight Crimes Committed By Undocumented Immigrants”
- American Prospect: “Fire and ICE: Hiding in Plain Sight”
The Appeal is a weekly newsletter keeping you informed about criminal justice news in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania and beyond. It is written and compiled by Matt Stroud, ACLU-PA’s criminal justice researcher.
If you have suggestions for links or criminal justice-related work that you’d like to highlight in The Appeal — or ways that we might improve — please email Matt Stroud at mstroud@aclupa.org. And if someone forwarded this email to you, and you’d like to receive it every Friday, you can subscribe here.
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