RePath Round Up--Deceiving Appearances
Plus Mental Health Courts, Susan Smith's parole hearing, and monster sheep
Welcome to part of the future. The “podcast” audio file above is completely AI generated based upon the human generated content in this post. Feel free to listen, read the post below, or just quietly contemplate how fast the AI future is approaching.
Failures to Appear in Illinois: One year after eliminating cash bail across the state, various stakeholders and media are reporting general success with a failure to appear rate between 5 and 12% with no significant rise in crime rates. But, is this the whole story? The Cook County clerk of court doesn’t think so. On September 17, 2024, Iris Martinez sent a letter to the Board of Commissioners of Cook County explaining that the reported data is wildly misleading. The state publicly boasts of an appearance rate of 95% in all circuits outside of Cook County and an 88% appearance rate in Cook County. These appearance rates are calculated by subtracting the warrants issued for failing to appear from the total number of cases. But Martinez says the majority of failures to appear don’t result in warrants. Most of the failures to appear result in a “notice to appear” which is a postcard sent via mail to instruct the defendant to appear at another court date. So, if the warrants don’t tell us the failure to appear rate, what is it? Martinez says that the actual failure to appear rate in Cook County since the elimination of cash bail is 74% (over 600% higher than reported by official government data dashboards).
Martinez says that there has been a failure to appear in 67,416 cases out of 90,872 cases in the past year in Cook County and that many of these cases involve serious charges including domestic violence, sexual assaults, and attempted murder. She recommends an independent analysis to assess the true failure to appear rate and that all County leaders recognize the “financial and human impacts that 67,416 failures to appear . . . have on case procession, staffing, victims/witnesses cooperation, and on our law enforcement partners.”
A non-failure to appear: While 74% of defendants have failed to appear in Cook County, Illinois, one Oklahoma man made sure that he was on the other side of that statistic. He was so conscientious about his court hearing that he stole a truck at a gas station and drove it 30 miles to the courthouse in Pawnee County. He was arrested as soon as he arrived and admitted to “borrowing” the truck. At least the trooper allowed him to attend his original hearing before booking him. That original charge— vehicle theft.
Mental Health Courts: Yesterday, the Manhattan Institute published a deep dive into Mental Health Courts in the Era of Criminal Justice Reform. The report notes that mental health courts:
are a species of the genus “specialty courts,” “specialty dockets,” “therapeutic courts,” “treatment courts,” “accountability courts,” or “problem-solving courts”
embrace plea-based adjudication
have spread from “only a few” in the late 1990s to about 650 today. There are about 1,800 drug courts
are technically voluntary but are best seen as part of a “continuum of coercive care” through which the government works to reduce the rate of untreated serious mental illness
use both carrots and sticks (“leveraged treatment”), but their spirit is more carrot than stick
often boast high graduation rates
attempt to confront the reality that an estimated 1 million individuals with a mental illness are under community or correctional supervision
have a modestly positive effect on recidivism with expected reductions to recidivism in the range of 20-40%
are small-scale programs, and should remain so
exist in a political climate that may limit their expansion where they could make the best improvements and may be hitting their limits of positive impact in areas where they have been operating for years.
Revisiting Susan Smith: It’s hard to forget the story of Susan Smith and how she murdered her two sons 30 years ago. Smith’s story became a national sensation when she said her car had been hijacked by a black man with her two sons inside. "You guys have gotta be so strong," she said in one of many TV appearances. "I just feel in my heart that you're OK, but you gotta take care of each other." After 9 days of an intense manhunt and investigation, Smith finally admitted to police that she strapped her 3 year old and 14 month old sons into their car seats and rolled the car into a lake. The man she was having an affair with at the time apparently didn’t want kids.
Smith was sentenced to life in prison with her first parole hearing set for November of 2024. While in prison, Smith had multiple sexual relationships with guards (who were all charged and lost their jobs) and she was sanctioned for drugs and mutilation.
Smith believes that she should win her parole next month. She plans to argue:
that she grew up in a sexually abusive household and didn’t really know right from wrong
that she was suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness at the time of the murders
that she was a victim regarding the sexual encounters with prison guards
that she has turned her life around and should thrive outside of prison
Smith’s former husband has not spoken to her since her confession 30 years ago, but he plans to attend the parole hearing and do everything “in his power” to see that she is stays behind bars.
Sometimes it’s the boring stuff: While Gov. Hochul of New York joins many other stakeholders in championing criminal justice reforms, her office of parole appears to be mired in an understaffed quagmire resulting in an inexperienced, overworked and underperforming department. Several of her appointees have failed to pass confirmation and others have been fired for failing to show up (or just sleeping on the job). Each commissioner is forced to consider nearly 1,000 cases per year because there are so many vacancies on the commission and 11 of the 16 current commissioners are “zombies” whose terms have expired. Three of these zombie commissioners had their terms expire over 5 years ago and are serving without reappointment or renomination. It may be fun to talk about reforming systems, but it might make sense to apply some competence to the current system.
Stranger Stuff:
Operation, the game: A surgeon in Switzerland performed a surgery on a pig in Hong Kong using a controller from a Playstation 3.
Monster baa: A breeder in Montana has been sentenced to 6 months in jail for illegally importing body parts from giant sheep from Kyrgyzstan to create a massive hybrid sheep for trophy hunters. His one successful clone called “Montana Mountain King” will be sent to a zoo where he will ruthlessly bully all the local normie sheep.
Delayed reaction: A Japanese airport reopened last week after a WWII bomb exploded and damaged a runway. The 550 pound bomb had been dropped over 80 years ago by allied planes, but remained inert until a plane taxied past it last Wednesday.
Blue Zones fraud: As it turns out, all those areas of the world from the Netflix shows where people live to be over a 100 and we are all supposed to mimic their diet and lifestyle are really just areas with the most pension fraud and bad record keeping. The people in those areas don’t live the longest, they just lie about it the most.
Taps the sign: Everyone knows that you can’t have metal near an MRI machine, right? Right? Well, an LAPD officer’s rifle was sucked in an MRI machine during a bungled raid in which he ignored all of those pesky “no metal” signs and walked around the machine with his rifle unsecured.
Safety what?: “Texas JROTC students help rush to aid student resource officer after his gun discharged, striking him,” is a bit of a strange headline given that the real story is that a school resource officer shot himself in the leg on school grounds and in front of students.