Kansas City speeders plead to lower offenses

Michael Mansur of The Kansas City Star used computer-assisted analysis of court records to show the court repeatedly allows thousands of speeders and red-light runners to reduce dangerous moving violations to defective-equipment pleas. That means tickets for serious violations are pleaded down to offenses such as broken taillights, which means no points against a driver's record. The legal tactic — called "buying points" — is common in the metro area, but is spinning out of control in Kansas City, resulting in problem drivers continuing to speed, even when their licenses should be suspended or revoked. "Currently, a driver older than 21 who hires an attorney and agrees to pay a slightly higher fine can get two defective-equipment reductions in a calendar year. That allows some of the worst drivers to get as many as four in a 12-month period — such as two in December and two in January — without any questions. " One driver used the tactic six times in one year, the paper found, while 250 did it three times or more.

Jason Grotto of The Miami Herald analyzed more than 100,000 cases of sexual crimes, reviewed court cases, state records and documents and conducted dozens of interviews to show that seven years after the passage of the Jimmy Ryce Act, Florida's program for screening, confining and treating the worst sexual offenders is failing. The four-part series reveals that, while the state has spent millions placing 825 men at the Florida Civil Commitment Center, at least 600 offenders who were passed over by the screening process were later arrested for new sex crimes — many against children. "Even when offenders are placed at the center, more than 60 percent still receive no treatment because the Legislature has not fully funded the program and because a loophole in the law allows the men to refuse therapy." Meanwhile, hundreds of offenders have been freed from the facility without completing a comprehensive treatment program — including nearly 100 who didn't participate in a single hour of therapy.

Jonathan Schuppe and William Kleinknecht of The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger analyzed homicides in Essex County between 1998 and 2003 and found killers went unpunished more often than they went to prison. In the cases in which a defendant was convicted, more than a quarter led to prison sentences of 10 years or less. "Essex County is New Jersey's homicide capital. One in three of the state's killings occur in Newark and surrounding towns. But while taking a life is the most serious criminal offense on the books, police and prosecutors have struggled to put murderers behind bars. " The Star-Ledger, in reviewing the cases and interviewing police, prosecutors, lawyers, community leaders and others during the past six months, found a series of glaring deficiencies in the criminal justice system. The story includes a sidebar about how this story was investigated.

Fredric N. Tulsky, with staff writers Julie Patel and Mike Zapler, data analyst Griff Palmer and research librarian Leigh Poitinger, of the San Jose Mercury News , reviewed every criminal appeal originating out of Santa Clara County Superior Court for five years to show that the Santa Clara County's criminal justice system is systemically troubled by serious flaws that bias the system in prosecutors' favor and, in the worst cases, lead to outright miscarriages, in a five-day series that was three years in the making. The investigation found that a third of the 727 cases analyzed were marred by some form of questionable conduct on the part of prosecutors, defense attorneys or judges and that California's Sixth Appellate District routinely found prosecutorial and judicial error to be harmless to criminal defendants — in dozens of instances, resorting to factual distortions and flawed reasoning to reach their conclusions. "The examination identified nearly 100 instances of questionable behavior within the study period, and dozens in additional cases, involving more than two dozen prosecutors."
Also see: More about how the story was reported.

Brad Branan of the Tucson Citizen used court records to show that Arizona school bus drivers with criminal records or multiple moving violations are escaping state regulatory enforcement and putting children and other motorists at risk. The investigation found that drivers with criminal records or multiple traffic violations are among the most accident prone at Tucson-area school districts. "A Vail Unified School District driver — one of two school bus drivers to transport students while under the influence of drugs or alcohol last school year — was state certified despite numerous traffic violations and a license suspension." The investigation found a number of loopholes in the state system for licensing and certifying school bus drivers including that a school bus driver has to commit two DUIs or other major traffic offenses in a personal vehicle to automatically lose his bus license and that the Arizona Department of Public Safety doesn't check for criminal backgrounds after a driver is certified.

Will Evans of the Center for Investigative Reporting, writing for Salon.com, reviewed court and financial records and found that a judge nominated by President Bush to one of the highest courts in the nation has apparently violated federal law repeatedly while serving on the federal bench. Judge James H. Payne, a Bush-appointed chief judge in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, New Mexico and Oklahoma, took action and issued more than 100 orders in at least 20 cases that involved companies in which he or his wife owned stock. "Federal law and the official Code of Conduct for U.S. judges explicitly prohibit judges from sitting on cases involving companies in which they own stock — no matter how small their holdings — in order to uphold the integrity of the judicial system." Some plaintiffs in Payne's cases, when told of his conflicts, assumed the judge had been swayed by his stock holdings.

Paul Moses of The Village Voice reports that New York City's falling crime rate may not entirely credible. "The number of lost-property reports filed with police jumped by 44 percent from 1997 to 2004, according to a document the NYPD released to The Village Voice in response to a freedom-of-information request. Nearly half of that increase occurred in the last two years of that period. And 2005 was on pace, as of Nov. 1, to beat out the previous year. " The investigation found police are taking complaints that once would have been treated as grand larceny or another property crime and reporting them as "lost property." Grand larceny is one of the closely watched seven major "index" crimes monitored in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and it makes up nearly 60 percent of the reported index offenses, so police commanders know that if they are going to get their numbers down, they have to report fewer thefts. (Editor's note: For other reporters interested in evaluating crime rates, IRE offers Understanding Crime Statistics: A Reporter's Guide.)

Keith Epstein and Doug Stanley of the Tampa Tribune analyzed Supreme Court voting data archived by Michigan State University political science Professor Harold J. Spaeth, finding that “since 1953, the Supreme Court has formally ruled on abortion, a privacy issue, only 29 times. Abortion-related cases account for only 0.5 percent of all rulings handed down by the court since then.” The paper’s analysis suggests that senators interested in probing nominee Samuel Alito’s views would do better to ask about topics such as “search and seizure, on which the court ruled 244 times, corporate liability (187 times), federal taxation (162 times) and antitrust cases (161 times).”

Amy Goldstein and Sarah Cohen of The Washington Post, with a team of reporters and researchers, categorized Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s rulings and compared them to other federal appeals court judges, finding that “Alito has taken a harder line on criminal and immigration cases than most federal appellate judges nationwide, including those who, like him, were selected by Republican presidents.” The analysis used data from the Appeals Court Database Project; a methodology is available. The full list of Alito’s cases used in the analysis is published on the Post’s Web site.

Jim Miller of The (Riverside, Calif.) Press-Enterprise used geographic information system (GIS) software to study the impact of a proposal by Gov. Schwarzenegger and others to prohibit registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school in California. The analysis shows that "At least half of California's urban areas would become off-limits to registered sex offenders" and they "could be confined to scattered urban islands or to lightly populated rural areas."