Legal Research

The average spending per inmate per day in Pennsylvania was $97.72 last year -- more than triple the cost from 25 years ago. The number of inmates in the state is expected to rise from 49,000 at the start of this year to nearly 58,000 by the end of 2013. The Rendell budget proposal for fiscal year 2009-2010 also increases funding for the Board of Probation and Parole, which plans to use the money to hire more field agents. The 8.3 percent increase brings the department's budget to $99.2 million, less than one- eighteenth of Department of Corrections spending.

The attorney general signaled that states will be able to set their own medical-marijuana laws. "We may be seeing the end of an era," said Rob MacCoun, a law professor who studies drug policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's not likely to be a priority for the Obama administration." MacCoun said the administration's stance may help to legitimize a "quasi-legal" marijuana culture in California. The state has as many as 200,000 medical-marijuana users, the most of the 13 states that allow such use of the drug. Holder's announcement was praised by backers of a proposal to legalize sales of marijuana for recreational use in California. Democrat Tom Ammiano, an assemblyman from San Francisco, proposes regulating pot like alcohol, allowing its sales to people ages 21 and older. Ammiano has estimated that marijuana is a $14 billion crop in California. Taxing the drug $50 an ounce, it said, would generate more than $1 billion annually for a cash-strapped state that closed a $42 billion budget deficit last month.

This year, more than $30 million has been intercepted in the Alanta area - far more than the $19 million in Los Angeles and $18 million in Chicago. "The same folks who are rolling heads in the streets of Ciudad Juárez" - El Paso's Mexican neighbor - "are operating in Atlanta. Here, they are just better behaved," says Jack Killorin, who heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy's task force in Atlanta. The same regional features that appeal to legitimate corporate operations - access to transportation systems and proximity to major U.S. cities - have lured the cartels, Atlanta U.S. Attorney David Nahmias says.

Arrests came in December when police and federal agents got a break as they charted the relationship and rivalries between at least five cartel cells operating in Houston. A rogue's gallery of about 100 names and mug shots taken at Texas jails and morgues offers a blueprint for Mexican organized crime. Houston has long been a major staging ground for importing illegal drugs from Mexico and shipping them to the rest of the U.S., but a Department of Justice report notes it is one of 230 cities where cartels maintain distribution networks and supply lines.

For three years, researchers will study police departments across the country, including Chicago, other major cities such as Boston and Los Angeles, and some suburban towns. It will take Rosenbaum and his researchers deep into the realm of police work through interviews, surveys and observations. Rosenbaum wants to find out from the men and women on the front lines what it's like to be a cop and what can be done to make their jobs better. In Chicago, Rosenbaum plans to look initially at rookie officers, focusing on everything from training to their backgrounds and lives in their assigned districts. In Los Angeles, he'll focus first on supervisors. Over time, he'll share his findings with the police departments that work with him, so they can get a better understanding of what works and what doesn't. "This is about officer safety and health and emotional well-being and work conditions," he said. The goal is to "understand for the first time what are the stresses they go through, what are the factors they deal with on the street and how we can improve those situations."

In 2007, time and money were the reasons New Jersey became the first state to ban executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in the mid-1970s. Out of 36 remaining states with the death penalty, at least eight have considered legislation this year to end it -- Maryland, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, New Hampshire, Washington, and Kansas. Death penaltycases are more expensive for several reasons: They often require extra lawyers; experience requirements lead to long appellate waits while capable counsel is sought; security costs are higher, as well as costs for processing evidence.

The story explained how "sequential lineups" now used in many places can help prevent misidentifications. Gauldin helped develop computer software to conduct photo lineups via a laptop, to help avoid having comments by police officers sway witnesses. Law professor Rich Rosen of the University of North Carolina says that in the vast majority of places, there's been no reform, and that needs to change. "This is something that police officers can and should be in favor of," he said. The real rapist in the North Carolina case committed more crimes when police "went after Ron Cotton," Rosen said "So Ron is not the only person who suffered from this mistake." The victim and the wrongfully accused assailant, Thompson and Cotton, have co-authored a book about the issue, Picking Cotton.

One service, called CrimeDex, is billed by its creators as a "Facebook for law enforcement." Jim Hudson, a former officer, started the service in 2002 after growing frustrated with the wasted time investigators spent trying to determine whether other agencies were chasing the same suspects. CrimeDex, now owned by 3VR, a San Francisco company that makes an image recognition system for surveillance cameras, says it is used by more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies and private businesses like banks and retail chains. For a monthly fee, members can submit information, photographs and videos related to possible crimes and make comparisons with data from agencies that may be seeing similar patterns or suspects. Civil liberties advocates worry about possible abuses of CrimeDex. The police typically file subpoenas or make other formal requests to get companies to hand over evidence of a crime. There is no legal process, or oversight, for sharing information on CrimeDex. Privacy advocates believe that a bank or another company may wrongly put an innocent person's name or image onto the system, and that the person could suffer consequences elsewhere.

Want to know how much money a convicted felon had in his prison bank account? It's there. Want to know if the man you think raped his neighbor has his DNA on file? It's there. Want to know if someone is on probation? Not only can you find out he is, but you'll find others in his neighborhood who are, the names of their probation agents, whether they have hunting or fishing licenses, lists of traffic tickets, whether they're registered sex offenders or owe back taxes. In just five weeks, cops across the state have conducted more than 10,000 searches of the database. The maps and data might lead to more patrols and tighter scrutiny, might even be combined with other intelligence to build a criminal case. In the end, police will be judged not only on the usefulness of the information but also on how they use it. It shouldn't be dismissed as Orwellian, but the cops need to understand its Orwellian potential, says Sun crime beat reporter Peter Hermann.

Some experts fear that the situation will continue to deteriorate. The source of the added concern is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's state employee furlough plan. It went into effect in February, calling for most state employees, including dispatchers, to take two days off without pay each month through June 2010. "If they're furloughing dispatchers, that's crazy," said Charles Cullen, outgoing president of the California chapter of the National Emergency Number Association and director of technical services for the Palo Alto Police Department. "You're lessening crucial services to the public. It doesn't make any sense at all, particularly in a system that is already overburdened."

The officers had a long association with a southern Maryland motorcycle club, the Tribes, which the Post describes as a "rough-hewn band of bike enthusiasts founded more than 30 years ago by corrections officers and other law enforcement officials." In 2004, a former member pleaded guilty to gun and drug charges after an undercover investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Said one official: "We were well aware of what some of the accusations were -- some of which may have been repugnant, their associations with these guys -- but none of it was criminal or actionable from an administrative" perspective. Terry Katz, a longtime investigator of motorcycle gangs for the Maryland State Police, said, "the question would be whether you can be a biker by night and a cop by day."

In other federal cases: A judge in Massachusetts granted a request in January for online streaming of a hearing in a recording industry lawsuit against a Boston University student accused of downloading music illegally. A judge in Sioux City, Ia., allowed a Cedar Rapids Gazette reporter to offer live blog updates in a January tax fraud trial from a laptop computer. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York allowed live television coverage in December of arguments in the case of a Canadian engineer who wants to sue the U.S. for mistaking him for a terrorist and sending him to Syria. Bloggers covering the 2007 CIA leak trial of former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were given the same credentials as traditional journalists.