Search Results

The primary focus of this chapter is the relationship between group interests and the legislative policy process in Pennsylvania. In striking similarity to the situation in Congress, criminal justice agencies and a few prolific groups representing professional and single-issue citizen interests generally dominate. The citizen groups that appear are ones that specialize in the crime issue du jour—guns, sex offenses, crimes against children, or the death penalty. The share of hearings that includes citizen groups has increased, but a closer examination reveals that this is due to a dramatic increase in single-issue groups and a decline in groups with more diffuse interests. This picture of legislative crime hearings is confirmed by extensive interviews with state legislators, whose contact with citizen organizations is limited to a handful of high-profile, single-issue, and civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and several statewide women's organizations. The ubiquity of prosecutors, law enforcement, and single-issue groups focused on women, children, and civil liberties leaves a glaring hole in policy debates about crime: the omission of the interests of the poor and urban minorities, many of whom face serious crime on a regular basis. This chapter also discusses the limitations of the American Civil Liberties Union as a group representing the broad interests of citizens at risk of crime and violence.

This chapter details the Commission's recommendation of the establishment of a Special Prosecutor's Office for the criminal justice system in New York City to monitor the district attorneys in their anti-corruption efforts and, when necessary, to conduct its own investigations. They suggested that the governor select, and the attorney general appoint, a special prosecutor with jurisdiction throughout the City of New York over matters involving the whole criminal justice system. The remainder of the chapter describes Governor Nelson Rockefeller's appointment of Maurice Nadjari as the first Special Prosecutor, and the disastrous results that followed; the appointment of author as interim Special Prosecutor, and eventual appointment of John Keenan as special prosecutor.

At the end of the twentieth century, frontier mythology played an integral role in the representation of capital punishment as a virtuous practice in two communities responsible for the largest number of executions since the late 1970s: Harris County, Texas, and Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. In both of these counties, white, male district attorneys built their identities around the death penalty. Media constructions of them in local newspapers reveals how the pursuit of death penalty was, for some, a pleasurable enactment of a mythological, racially-charged vision of American freedom, one in which white men use violence against racial outsiders for noble purposes while showcasing their own capacity for self-control. As lethal injection masked the violence of executions and as capital defendants lingered on death row for long periods, men like District Attorneys Johnny Holmes and Bob Macy embodied the kind of anti-modern killing state many Americans wished they had, one in which punishment of the capital offender revealed the freedom of the men charged with bringing them to justice.

This chapter explores an emerging experiment among American prosecutors who use websites and annual reports to describe for constituents and other observers the patterns of decisions in their offices. This modest mechanism may point toward a larger response to the prosecutorial accountability deficit: functional transparency. The first part of the chapter focuses on two examples of websites and annual reports: those of the Washington State District Attorney in Kitsap County and the Tennessee District Attorney General in Shelby County. The second part connects this public reporting strategy to the two existing strategies that prosecutors around the world use to address the accountability deficit: electoral accountability in the United States, and bureaucratic accountability in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. It suggests that in the face of increasing caseloads and limited resources, the two traditional responses to the accountability deficit are converging in both American and civil-law systems. The third part discusses how the intriguing but limited development of prosecutorial websites and annual reports can amplify the effects of the more traditional accountability strategies for prosecutors. It asks whether websites and reports might be a third piece of the accountability puzzle—one that would fall under the general heading of transparency.

This chapter explores the unanticipated consequences of aggressive policing and looks into some potential policy recommendations. The author ties in interview data from outside stakeholders, like a New York City Housing Authority Tenant Association president and a high-ranking assistant district attorney from the Bronx District Attorney’s office, in order to help illustrate exactly what type of impact aggressive policing can have on outcomes such as securing a conviction. As the data suggests, these police tactics can significantly affect a prosecutor’s ability to obtain witness testimony as well as receive a favorable decision from a jury.

As seen in chapter 5, trial coverage brought even greater scrutiny of Mississippi racial mores. Central to this chapter is a study of how national and regional news outlets chose to cover the trial (e.g., Associated Press newswire, United Press newswire, embedded reporters, stringer reporters, editorials, letters to the editor) as well as of which aspects of the trial and the milieu each publication found salient. This chapter also covers the dispute between Mamie Till-Mobley and the NAACP that led to a severing of ties between the two parties. Through their framing of the trial, regional and national publications put Mississippi mores under scrutiny as Tallahatchie County shepherded Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam through a farcical criminal proceeding.

This chapter further looks at the aftermath of the “night of horrors” which occurred in the slum neighborhood of the Calle de los Negros in Los Angeles's Chinatown on October 24, 1871. The incident had begaun after a gunfight involving five or six Chinese shooting at each other in the middle of the street. This resulted in a riot that ended in the massacre of several innocent Chinese by an angry mob of white Angelenos. The chapter considers the jury that was formed to investigate the murders, including the examination of seventy-nine witnesses. It also discusses the results of the coroner's inquest and the suspects that were identified before turning to the responsibility of the grand jury and the district attorney in bringing the wrongdoers to justice. Finally, it analyzes the complicity of Los Angeles's prominent people in the grisly murders carried out by the mob.