West Virginia's prison population has ballooned, and formerly incarcerated people face numerous obstacles when they are released. A Charleston-based program pairs them with mentors for one year, to help them successfully adjust and reorient their lives.

Amber Blankenship, peer-entry program coordinator with the REACH Initiative, said most people typically have "zero support" after their often traumatizing experiences in the criminal justice system. She added that many are also struggling with substance-use disorders.

"When they're released, we just expect them to make all these decisions and be responsible, and it's just, their brain has to heal," she said. "They have to train their brain back to do that."

Housing, health care and employment all are challenging to find for people coming home. A survey this year by Race Matters and the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy found nearly half of respondents said their biggest worry after leaving prison was coping with the social stigma around their conviction and incarceration.

Blankenship emphasized that the mentorship program is a starting point for creating community and healing.

"People in West Virginia are hurting, they're broken, and they need hope," she said. "They need another individual that has, maybe, a similar story that can build that relationship, build trust."

Sara Whitaker, criminal legal policy analyst at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, pointed out that prison sentences aren't served alone.

"There are obvious ways that this hurts the people who live with them and who rely on them for care," she said, "but it's particularly bad for children."

She added that one in 10 West Virginia kids has had a parent go to jail or prison. Research shows most incarcerated parents in the Mountain State have one or more children younger than 18 years of age.

Senate lawmakers are soon expected to vote on the Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access Act, legislation introduced this year by Republican Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

The bill would allow doctors to prescribe and pharmacies to dispense methadone for people with opioid-use disorder. Currently, methadone is tightly regulated and can only be accessed through certified opioid treatment facilities.

Jordan Scott, digital advocacy coordinator for the Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Network, said the regulations mostly affect people in rural regions who cannot get to methadone clinics or who end up using diverted methadone, which can lead to arrests and time in jail.

"There are some states, like West Virginia, where there's a state law in effect that places a hold on any new opioid treatment programs opening within the state," Scott pointed out. "And when we look at really rural areas, those numbers of how many people able to access methadone goes down even further."

Methadone is a Schedule II drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Critics of the bill argue methadone is an opiate which can be abused, and in some cases may be replacing one addictive medication for another, especially if used in isolation, without counseling or as part of a treatment program.

Scott contends the bill would make people less likely to rely on using street-supply substances with a high risk of containing fentanyl, if they know they can obtain methadone safely and locally.

"If my closest clinic is an hour-and-a-half, two hours away, but my primary care doctor is 20 minutes away, this act would allow me to be able to go to my primary care doctor," Scott emphasized.

The Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access Act would also require the federal government to track data nationwide on methadone prescriptions and the number of providers.

Government accountability groups want increased transparency in New York criminal court decisions. This comes after a new report finds only 6% of decisions are published annually.

Since the number of judges presiding over criminal cases isn't made available by the court system, it's uncertain how many judges aren't publishing decisions. Of the 600 New York criminal court judges publishing at least one decision, 20 were responsible for 28% of all decisions published.

Oded Oren, executive director of Scrutinize, a judicial accountability group, explained why transparency is so important.

"When decisionmakers or New Yorkers need to make a decision about whether to reappoint or re-elect a judge, it is important that they have information before them to understand how this judge is applying the law and what their decisions are," Oren said.

Without these written decisions, assessing judicial decision making and its impacts are much harder. One concern is a person's identity being made public in a published ruling.

Oren pointed out that, instead of putting a person's full name, judges can use a person's initials, their last name only or simply redact that information.

While laws are on the books about how decisions can be published, they're not being enforced. Reasons these decisions aren't being published include judges having high workloads, or feeling their day-to-day rulings aren't so important.

Rachael Fauss, senior policy analyst with Reinvent Albany, said there are ways to make it easier for judicial decisions to be published.

"Sometimes oral decisions are given, so a judge will say what the decision is and there's a transcript of that," Fauss said. "So, the transcripts could get published in the cases where there is not a written decision."

The report's recommendations include passing a bill requiring written decisions by criminal court judges to be publicly available online. This legislation will be introduced during the 2024 session of the New York State Legislature.


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By Caleb Bedillion for The Marshall Project.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Mississippi News Connection reporting for the Marshall Project-Public News Service Collaboration

Three months after Mississippi's Supreme Court directed judges in the state to ensure that poor criminal defendants always have a lawyer as they wait to be indicted, one of those justices acknowledged that the rule isn't being widely followed.

"We know anecdotally that there's a problem out there," Supreme Court Justice Jim Kitchens said during a state House of Representatives committee meeting on the public defense system last week.

That means Mississippi's "dead zone" - the period during which poor people facing felony charges are left without a lawyer while they await indictment - persists in many counties.

At the first court hearing after someone is arrested for a felony, a judge is supposed to decide whether the defendant can be released from jail and should appoint a lawyer if they can't afford one.

In many Mississippi courts, that lawyer stays on the case for a short time to handle initial proceedings, including a possible motion for bond reduction, and then exits. Only after the defendant is indicted, which often takes months, is another lawyer appointed. In the meantime, no one is assigned to the case, even if the defendant is in jail.

"Mississippi stands alone as the only state that has this problem," public defense expert David Carroll said at the state House hearing.

Carroll is the executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, a nonprofit that studies state public defense systems and advocates for improvements. The center released a report in 2018 that found many defects in Mississippi's public defense system, including the dead zone.

The Supreme Court's rule, approved in April, was supposed to eliminate this problem. It says a lawyer can't leave a case unless another one has taken over. All courts in the state must follow it.

Individual judges could face sanctions for not complying with the rule if someone files a complaint against them, Kitchens told legislators. Beyond that, however, Kitchens said it's outside the purview of the Supreme Court to monitor local courts. "It's not for us to go out and investigate whether that rule is being complied with," he said.

When the rule went into effect in July, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica found that many courts were unprepared to comply. Some local court officials were unaware of it. Others suggested that their practice of appointing lawyers for limited purposes would satisfy the rule, even though those attorneys do little beyond attending early court hearings.

State Rep. Nick Bain, a Republican from northeast Mississippi's Alcorn County, convened the hearing on the weaknesses in the state's public defense system. He also practices as a defense attorney in about 10 counties and regularly talks with lawyers who work around the state.

"There are wide swaths all over Mississippi where that rule is not being followed," he said at the hearing.

In one circuit court district that did take action in response to the Supreme Court's rule, there are signs that appointed defense attorneys are not doing much more than they did before.

In the 1st Circuit Court District, which covers seven counties in northeast Mississippi, chief Circuit Judge Paul Funderburk issued an order in July directing lower court judges in the district on how to meet the new requirements for indigent representation. He said an attorney in the lower court, where defendants first appear, must stay on the case until the defendant is indicted.

State Sen. Daniel Sparks, a Republican from Tishomingo County, represents those defendants in the county's Justice Court, which hears misdemeanors and some early felony matters. He acknowledged that under the new Supreme Court rule and Funderburk's order, he remains the attorney for indigent clients until they are indicted.

He said that although he will take calls from defendants and offer advice after they appear in justice court, he believes there is usually little defense work to do before an indictment. "I don't think it changes my work dramatically," he said of the Supreme Court's rule.

He believes problems linked to the dead zone have been exaggerated by reform advocates.

Lee County Justice Court, based in Tupelo, is in the same circuit court district as Tishomingo. In July, the Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica reported that the part-time appointed counsel for Lee County Justice Court, Dan Davis, typically did little more than file for a bond reduction for defendants who remained in jail for more than a month. After the new rule became effective in July, Davis told the court he didn't want the job anymore.

Bill Benson, the administrator for Lee County, said last week that it's not clear when a replacement will be available. "We're trying to find someone who will stick with the defendants all the way through like the rule says," Benson said.

Funderburk said he expects strict adherence to the new indigent defense rule and warned that courts "ignore it at their peril."

Courts across Mississippi have ignored a broader rule regarding public defense, the Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica have found. That rule, part of a 2017 push to standardize how courts across the state operate, requires judges to send to the Supreme Court their policy on how they fulfill their constitutional obligation to provide lawyers for poor criminal defendants. Just one circuit court district, covering three rural counties in southwest Mississippi, has complied.

"The counties need to come up with a plan," Kitchens told lawmakers. "The justice courts, the circuit courts, the supervisors - all of them need to collaborate and come up with a plan."

He called on lawmakers to fix problems with public defense that the Mississippi Supreme Court has been unable to remedy by imposing rules on local judges. The state is responsible for ensuring that its public defense system is adequate, he said. "The bottom line is the counties cannot do it alone."

Bain, whose term ends in December after a primary defeat, said Mississippi must eliminate the dead zone and address other problems, including a lack of full-time public defenders and payment arrangements that encourage lawyers to cut corners.

"I think Mississippi is really stretching the limits of our constitutional obligations," he said.


Caleb Bedillion wrote this article for The Marshall Project.




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