How bad is the epidemic of violence against transgender women? It's hard to know. - Vox

But are these murders a growing epidemic? The answer, worryingly, is we don't know. Local, state, and federal governments don't collect much data on trans populations or violence against them, which means the 21 deaths we know about are — at best — a bare minimum, and it's unclear how big of a problem those deaths signify.

"There's very little data on violence against transgender women of color," Chai Jindasurat, the co-director of community organizing and public advocacy at the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), told me. "There's so much data that needs to be collected for us to make the case that we know we can and should be making to policymakers about why this issue is so important."
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That's important, because if we don't know exactly how many trans people are in the US, we can't figure out the rates of violence they face. And further demographic breakdowns could give more insight into who, exactly, is more likely to face violence — whether, for example, trans women of color are at greater risk.

But we also don't know how many trans people are victimized by violence each year. The biggest issue is that trans people often aren't correctly identified by authorities. If a homicide victim has a penis, police will assume that person is a man. If a victim has a vagina, police will assume that person is a woman. That's it. Police will rarely question if the victim identified differently — at least until family, friends, and media bring it up. (As one example of how bad this can be, the Advocate, an LGBTQ news outlet, reported that one woman, Jasmine Collins, wasn't identified as trans for two months.)

How bad is the epidemic of violence against transgender women? It's hard to know. - Vox

America's Justice System Sure Doesn't Know Much Science | WIRED

James Holmes walked into a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 carrying three guns including a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring 70 more. Nobody, not even his defense attorneys, denied that. But those attorneys still told a jury and a judge that Holmes was not guilty of those crimes—because he was insane. Last month, that jury rejected that assertion, finding Holmes guilty on all counts.

Holmes’ plea didn’t get him off, but it did get people talking about the insanity defense again. It’s a rare move for defense attorneys these days, even quaint sounding. Psychiatrists no longer call patients “insane.” It’s not a clinical diagnosis. Yet the term persists in the courtroom—along with many other practices unsupported by modern psychology and neuroscience.

Americans inherited a legal system shaped by history, not by science. “The legal system is resistant to change and resistant to paying attention to scientific research,” says Adam Benforado, a law professor at Drexel University and author of the recent book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. The system assumes that innocent people don’t confess to crimes they didn’t commit. It presumes that eyewitness testimonies are reliable. It counts on the impartiality of jurors.

None of those things are borne out by evidence.


America's Justice System Sure Doesn't Know Much Science | WIRED

A Little-Noticed Supreme Court Case Could Deny Justice For Sandra Bland

In Taylor v. Barkes, all nine justices shut down a lawsuit by family members of Christopher Barkes, a Delaware man who took his own life within a day of being arrested for violating probation. Jail officials' failure to set up safeguards to keep him from hanging himself, the court ruled, was not a violation of his civil rights.

Barkes had a history of “suicidal ideations” and had attempted suicide on several occasions. This and a fuller mental-health picture were contained in Barkes’ probation file. But the intake nurse at the Howard R. Young Correctional Institution in Wilmington, Delaware, had no access to it, and Barkes only told her about one of these attempts. There also was evidence that the nurse didn’t use the latest version of a standard suicide screening form, and that a qualified mental-health professional should have conducted the screening instead.

The night before his death, Barkes called his wife and told her he "can't live this way any more," and planned to take this life. The next morning, while still in custody, he hanged himself.

This failure to properly screen Barkes and take steps to prevent his suicide, his family charged, amounted to cruel and unusual punishment -- a violation of his Eighth Amendment rights.

But a unanimous Supreme Court disagreed. “No decision of this court establishes a right to the proper implementation of adequate suicide prevention protocols,” the court said in a short, unsigned opinion that was decided without briefing or oral arguments. “No decision of this court even discusses suicide screening or prevention protocols.”

In other words, Barkes had no right to be kept alive while in custody.

If that sounds harsh, it’s because the dirty little secret of the case is that it was less about “a troubled man with a long history of mental health and substance abuse problems,” as the court put it, and more about the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity, a legal shield the Supreme Court created decades ago to protect government officials accused of constitutional wrongdoing.

The law of qualified immunity is thorny and rife with controversy. But as characterized by the court, its purpose is as simple as it is overarching: It “protects all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law” from being sued. And not just any law, but “clearly established” law at the time of the violation.

A Little-Noticed Supreme Court Case Could Deny Justice For Sandra Bland

ADDENDUM::Exposing the Koch Brothers' Stunning Hypocrisy on Criminal Justice Reform | Alternet

Back in January we had this:

Ten years ago, he began giving money to support efforts by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to help train defense lawyers and reverse what some see as a national trend to get tough on crime, which has resulted in the tripling of the incarceration rate since the 1980s and has stripped the poor of their rights to a legal defense.

He’s going to give more to that effort, he said.

“Over the next year, we are going to be pushing the issues key to this, which need a lot of work in this country,” Koch said. “And that would be freedom of speech, cronyism and how that relates to opportunities for the disadvantaged.”

Which at the time sounded great.

Now we have this,

A new report traces the exceptional hypocrisy of the Koch brothers’ recent high-profile interest in criminal justice reform.

"The Koch Brothers’ Criminal Justice Pump-Fake," by American Bridge 21st Century, a watchdog group “committed to holding Republicans accountable,” traces how the Kochs became interested in criminal justice reform after losing a years-long battle with federal environmental regulators that began in the late 1990s. The study details how the Kochs have long supported candidates and elected officials whose tough-on-crime policies have created the criminal justice crisis they now insist must be reformed—by imposing harsher sentences, building prisons and narrowing probation and parole. The report notes how their efforts to partner with left-leaning groups like the ACLU have led to a public relations bonanza eclipsing their deeper record of supporting politicans who have delivered—and stand by—their draconian crime policies.

“For all their professed concerns about reforming the criminal justice system, the Kochs don’t really care— not about the impacted families and individuals, anyway— their only concern is their bottom line,” the authors said. “The Kochs’ criminal justice charade is just that — a public relations scam.”

Exposing the Koch Brothers' Stunning Hypocrisy on Criminal Justice Reform | Alternet

Ex-prosecutor asks for pardon in fatal GM crash

A former Texas prosecutor has asked the state to pardon a woman who pleaded guilty in a 2004 car crash that killed her fiance, saying she now believes the accident was caused by a faulty General Motors ignition switch.

Candice Anderson was driving a 2004 Saturn Ion in November 2004 when the car suddenly veered off a road and ran into a tree in Van Zandt County, southeast of Dallas. Her fiance, Gene Mikale Erickson, who was 25, was killed. Anderson, then 21, was severely hurt.

Because there were no skid marks, authorities believed Anderson was at fault and charged her with negligent homicide. Anderson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years of probation and 260 hours of community service.

GM has said the faulty switches - which have resulted in 17.1 million vehicles being recalled - have caused 13 deaths. GM spokesman Jim Cain said Wednesday the automaker is not "confirming the identity of any of the accident victims out of respect for their privacy."

But Anderson's attorney, Robert Hilliard, said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in May confirmed for Erickson's mother that the crash was caused by a bad switch.

In an email to Rhonda Erickson, Kevin Vincent, chief counsel for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, wrote that although his agency "does not have direct information from GM about individual identities, we understand that GM counts Mr. Erickson's death in its list of thirteen deaths."

In a letter written this week to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, Leslie Poynter Dixon, a former Van Zandt County district attorney, said she would have dismissed the case against Anderson if she had known about the crash's true cause.


Ex-prosecutor asks for pardon in fatal GM crash