And we thought Paul Morrison’s downfall was spectacular.
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer held a press conference Monday to address reports that he was involved in a high-priced prostitution ring. He apologized to his family and the public.
“I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself,†he said. “I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.â€
Better block out some time for that. This sounds like a career-ender for Spitzer, especially given his past high-profile crusades as attorney general against public corruption and scandal, including a 2004 case against, um, a prostitution ring.
What makes otherwise smart politicians think they can get away with these shenanigans?
Police chiefs and prosecutors from three northeast Kansas counties got together in Topeka last week to promote early childhood education. “If you care about crime prevention, if you care about saving money and ultimately lives, then you must care about high-quality early education programs,†said Lenexa Police Chief Ellen Hanson at the event sponsored by Fight Crime: Invest in Kids. The crimefighters cited studies favoring greater investment in high-quality early childhood education, asserting that every $1 spent on such programs for at-risk kids saves $16 later on law enforcement, corrections and the like. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius included $30 million more on early childhood programs for at-risk kids in her budget proposal, a tough sell in the current economic climate. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity-Kansas proposed as part of its “model†state budget that lawmakers eliminate prekindergarten spending, because “a parent is a child’s most important educator†— which sounds good but ignores the many Kansas parents who are not.
State lawmakers must back up their 2005 commitment to track and fight racial profiling by law enforcement by clarifying what counts as racial profiling. The bill proposed by state Sen. Donald Betts, D-Wichita, may go too far in calling it racial profiling whenever an officer uses race, ethnicity or gender as “a factor†in investigation, traffic stops and questioning. But the current language, that it be “the sole factor†in such situations, clearly does not go far enough, discounting many of the instances in which Wichitans and others believe they’ve been profiled. If Kansas’ law against such racial profiling means anything, it must be backed up with meaningful data collection and analysis.
For the first time, 1 of every 100 Americans is behind bars, reports the New York Times. Our prison population is the largest in the world — 1.6 million — with China second at 1.5 million. The prison costs are “blowing a hole in state budgets,†according to a report by the Pew Center on States.
America’s lock ’em up fervor in the past two decades has had an undeniable impact in reducing crime rates, but the report says too many nonviolent offenders are going to prison.
Kansas was one of 12 states that showed a decline in prison population in 2007.
Steve Kazmierczak, who killed five at Northern Illinois University last week before killing himself, reportedly spent more than a year in a mental health facility for psychological problems during and after high school. He might also have been discharged from the military for psychological reasons. But he was able to buy several guns in the months prior to the shootings.
Are gun laws still too lax in identifying people with a history of mental illness?
In the wake of the Virginia Tech killings, Congress passed a law tightening mental health screening for guns. But the law only targets people who have been legally committed to a mental institution or program.
A new Illinois gun law that takes effect this summer will require medical personnel to report patients who exhibit “suicidal, threatening or assaultive behavior.â€
Some kind of higher standard seems reasonable. Everyone has an interest in keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
Wichita must not be apathetic about its crime surge in 2007, especially the 65 percent increase in homicides. The city also saw more rapes, robberies and burglaries last year. Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams was right to address the statistics directly this week, a day after Mayor Carl Brewer promised a crackdown on gang violence. Williams suggested adding a downtown patrol bureau, as more businesses attract more people to the core.
But City Hall should not be alone in feeling the heat. Such alarming crime statistics also are a call to the community’s businesses, neighborhood associations, churches and individuals to seek solutions that will improve public safety and peace of mind.
Texas accounted for 62 percent of all executions in America this year — up from its typical average of about 37 percent. The reason for the increase isn’t that Texas is doing more executions. Rather, it’s that the rest of the country is doing fewer. As a result, of the nation’s 42 executions in the past year, 26 were in Texas. The remaining 16 were spread across nine other states, none of which executed more than three people, the New York Times reported.
The Texas judicial system apparently does not share in the rest of the country’s growing concern about the biased and possibly incorrect application of the death penalty. On the contrary, what separates Texas from other states is its aggressiveness in carrying out executions once a death sentence is imposed.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
New Jersey hasn’t executed anyone since 1963, though it reinstated the death penalty in 1982. That put it in a similar situation as Kansas, which has yet to use the death penalty it reinstated in 1994. Will Kansas join New Jersey in abolishing its unused death penalty? New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine signed the bill this week replacing it with a sentence of life without possibility of parole, saying, “There is little collective will or appetite for our community to enforce this law and therefore the law has little deterrence value – that is if you ever accepted that there was deterrent value.â€
Each passing year makes the ineffective deterrence argument, along with the one about cost and fairness, ring truer in Kansas, especially with executions largely on hold nationally until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Listen to our annual satirical Christmas carols. The topics spoofed this year include the casino, Wild West World, Brownback’s presidential run and the Wichita Wingnuts. Enjoy.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Some think Sunday’s church shooting in Colorado is a prime example of why gun liberties are important.
At Colorado Springs’ New Life Church, volunteer security guard Jeanne Assam (in photo) is said to have saved "untold" lives when she shot gunman Matthew Murray. Carrying almost 1,000 rounds of ammunition, Murray had the potential to cause widespread death, but killed just two before he was taken down by Assam.
Assam, a former police officer, was permitted to carry a gun, while security guards at Westroads Mall in Omaha, where eight people were killed, were not.
Posted by Kristin Mehler
In February 2003, American defense contractors Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes, and Marc Gonsalves were shot down over Colombia while conducting a counternarcotics mission. After 4½ years and promises that the United States would “never give up†until they were home, the three were believed to be dead –until video footage of them was recently released.
The footage, which also shows French-Colombian citizen Ingrid Betancourt, has stirred outrage and sympathy in France, with French officials leaning on the Colombian government for her safe release.
Their efforts for a woman who wasn’t even born in their country are contrasted with the current lack of outrage from the United States, which has three citizens still in captivity after almost five years.
Posted by Kristin Mehler
The U.S. Supreme Court decided 7-2 Monday that judges may use discretion for sentences related to crack cocaine, which further addresses the injustice of disparate sentencing guidelines for crack and powder cocaine. Dissenting Justice Samuel Alito said that because of this and another Tuesday decision, “Sentencing disparities will gradually increase.†But if it ever made sense for Congress to consider possessing crack — a drug of the poor — 100 times worse than possessing the same amount of powder cocaine, it no longer does.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Setting aside serious concerns about the misapplication of the death penalty, a number of recent studies have concluded that executions save lives — though these conclusions are being hotly debated. The New York Times reports that the “studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise.†The studies estimate that executing one inmate can prevent three to 18 murders.
But critics contend the studies’ methodology is flawed and that there aren’t enough executions and other data to create a correlation with crime trends. They contend that crime could also decrease if we took the amount of money spent on capital cases and executions and put it into crime prevention.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Hundreds of innocent people may be in prison based on faulty forensic evidence, yet the FBI never alerted those prisoners, their attorneys or the courts about the error, a joint investigation by the Washington Post and “60 Minutes†reported. For about 40 years, the FBI believed that the lead in bullets had unique chemical signatures, and that it was possible to match that lead to a single box of bullets. But that isn’t true. In fact, it’s statistically possible that lead from a bullet can have tens of millions of matches. After the FBI learned about this mistake a few years ago, it sent out a form letter saying that it was stopping the test, but it didn’t admit that the evidence from the lab was wrong, and it didn’t advise the Justice Department to review cases in which this evidence was instrumental in a conviction.
Because of the media investigation, the FBI is finally launching a review of these cases and plans to notify prosecutors of the faulty analysis. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Network also are creating a task force to review these cases.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Good for officials for acting promptly to fortify fencing and reassign staff in response to the recent prison break at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. The decisions to add $200,000 worth of razor wire and better supervise an outdoor exercise yard should offer neighbors and other Kansans some peace of mind after the daring escape, which apparently was aided by a former prison officer. It’s also reassuring that the escape will be further reviewed by the Kansas Department of Corrections. Kansans need to trust that high-security inmates are in fact secured at the facility.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
However the two prisoners’ escape from the El Dorado Correctional Facility plays out, the public will be left to wonder whether the prison’s security is all it should be. The Kansas Department of Corrections must ensure that it is, as it learns how Jesse Bell and Steven Ford were able to cut through three fences Sunday night and apparently reach the waiting car of former prison guard Amber Goff. This was not a case of small-time criminals walking off a minimum security prison farm. Bell and Ford were assigned to a long-term involuntary segregation unit, in the same part of the prison where BTK strangler Dennis Rader and Kansas’ death row inmates are confined. Kansans need to be able to trust that the El Dorado prison is secure.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
When the United Nations passed a resolution last December opposing the sentencing of children and teenagers to life in prison without parole, the vote was 185-1, with United States casting the only dissenting vote, the International Herald Tribune noted. U.S. opposition may have something to do with the 73 Americans serving life sentences without parole for crimes they committed as 13- and 14-year-olds.
Human rights groups such as the Equal Justice Initiative are asking that the policy be changed to allow cases to be reviewed as the years go by and considered for possible parole. “We’re not demanding that all these kids be released tomorrow,” said the group’s Bryan Stevenson. “I’m not even prepared to say that all of them will get to the point where they should be released. We’re asking for some review.”
Posted by Kristin Mehler
Congress passed sentencing guidelines in the 1980s for federal crimes in hopes of lending uniformity to prison terms. But the guidelines also caused federal prison population to increase from 24,000 in 1980 to 181,000 last year, as judges became forced to impose tougher sentences than the specific circumstances of a case might have justified.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard a case that could ease the guidelines and allow judges to pass lower sentences with discretion.
“The guidelines are only guidelines. They are advisory,” said Justice Antonin Scalia.
That’s good to hear. But unless those guidelines are loosened, our prisons will unnecessarily keep bursting at the seams.
Posted by Kristin Mehler
The troubled teen who opened fire on teachers and classmates at a Cleveland high school Wednesday reportedly issued many threats of violence that should have set off alarm bells.
Asa H. Coon shot and wounded four people at the school before killing himself.
“He’s crazy. He threatened to blow up our school. He threatened to stab everybody,” said one student. “We didn’t think nothing of it.”
Why not? Several students said they had tried to warn the principal but that she was “too busy.”
How many more school shootings will have to happen before people take such threats seriously? There should be zero tolerance in schools for any expression of violent revenge fantasies, just as there is zero tolerance in airports for any mention of bombs.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Mark McCormick, a newsroom columnist and employee rep on the editorial board, did a public service in writing about the funding and staffing needs in the area of juvenile justice supervision in Sedgwick County. Too many kids, 600 to 700, and too few caseworkers are resulting in high staff turnover. The real problem may be too many years without a budget increase from the state, meaning state funding has dropped since 2001 from $21.3 million to $14.8 million. Area lawmakers need to put the department’s needed $4.5 million more on their 2008 agenda.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
During the speech to the National Rifle Association in which he bizarrely took a phone call from his wife, Rudy Giuliani expressed support for the Tiahrt amendment, calling it “a sensible provision” that “gives law enforcement the ability to get information.” A day earlier, Giuliani had suggested he didn’t know much about the 2003 measure championed by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, that blocks access to aggregate gun trace data. Giuliani’s support put him squarely at odds with his successor, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who lost his costly fight earlier this year to overturn the Tiahrt amendment, which he calls “an outrage.”
Bloomberg, who chided Giuliani for disavowing a 2000 lawsuit New York City had filed against gun manufacturers, did praise the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for, “after what they said was overwhelming demand from around the country, starting to give out more information, probably in violation of the Tiahrt amendment.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Federal prisons, including Leavenworth, had from January until June to remove from their chapel libraries books as seemingly benign as C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia” and Charles Schuller’s “Living Positively One Day at a Time,” on the premise that library materials should be “free of discrimination, disparagement, advocacy of violence and religious radicalization.” The purge resulted from a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department that recommended that prisons take steps to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups, the New York Times reported. As a result, all books not included on an approved list were removed.
Prisoners are denied some rights, but they shouldn’t be denied the right to read materials of a spiritual nature. Not surprisingly, a Christian and Orthodox Jew at a New York prison have sued. As Pat Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship, in Lansdowne, Va., told the Topeka Capital-Journal, “The problem is the government is situating itself as the sanctioner of what is a proper religious book for prisoners.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
A Wichita pharmacist was justified and acted in self-defense in shooting to death an armed robber last month, the Sedgwick County district attorney’s office has ruled. Judging by the circumstances, the ruling sounds right.
But it was sad and poignant nonetheless to learn that the would-be robber, Alexander Mies, was a former high school football standout who became addicted to painkillers after a long series of knee operations. And to read that he had a gentle, compassionate side. And that his gun was not loaded.
No, that doesn’t change how we see the ruling or excuse what he did, but it casts the fatal outcome more in shades of gray than black and white. Like most shootings, justified or not, this was a tragedy for all concerned.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Someone in Opinion Line, which is always on the cutting edge of public policy debates, wondered Wednesday when Sedgwick County is going to crack down on “sagging pants.” The city councils in Shreveport and Alexandria joined at least four other Louisiana towns Tuesday in voting to make the wearers of droopy drawers subject to fines and community service. Atlanta and other communities have considered such measures, which some argue are unconstitutional and racist.
In Sedgwick County or anywhere, though, it should be difficult to justify turning police into fashion police. As one man told the Shreveport leaders: “Are you going to have a ’sagging’ court? The police have more important things to do than chase young boys and girls and say ‘pull your pants up.’”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison recently burnished his tough-guy image by taking on a Doberman. That’s right — a Topeka woman said her Labrador retriever was being viciously attacked by a Doberman pinscher when a truck pulled over and Morrison stepped out. He managed to separate the dogs.
The owner was grateful. “I mean, what other attorney generals in their states just stop in some neighborhood when they see something going on?” she asked.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
And we thought Paul Morrison’s downfall was spectacular.
