Friends of Justice

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“Dealing with the parole board is an agonizing affair. You can spend months, if not years, preparing. Taking all the re-entry approved programs the state has to offer. Obtaining support letters from family, friends and potential employers. Then, the day finally comes for you to speak to them. They immediately begin to ask you questions about the crime you were charge with and the subsequent trial. It is at this point you realize, all they want to do is retry your case in the hearing, and they fully intend on giving you more time. Nothing you have done through the years of your incarceration matters. Not the community service hours you have amassed, the educational course you have taken, the career preparedness programs, nor the self improvement programs the state gets money for providing to inmates.”

Read the rest of Shane’s post.

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Donate to the cause.

-Bob

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“When an inmate is accused of breaking an institutional rule, the incident is written up by the charging staff member as a conduct report (a.k.a. “a ticket”). Minor offenses are handled by a hearing officer, which is a unit sergeant. Major offenses are referred to the Rules Infraction Board (R.I.B.) by the unit sergeants. Whether a ticket is handled by a hearing officer or R.I.B., the inmate has the right to call witnesses, present evidence, and a few other things much like a court of law. Among the reasons this is so important is that the Parole Board can deny parole to an inmate for rules violations, educational programming can be denied, inmates can be rejected for institutional work assignments, and judicial releases can be turned down by judges.”

Read the rest of Shane’s post.

Visit Shane’s web site.

Send Shane a note of encouragement.

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For a few years, I have been corresponding with an Ohio prisoner, John A. Scartz.

I just don’t have the time to be an adequate pen pal, and because of his lengthy incarceration, he has lost touch with most friends and family. John tells me, “I just want someone to be a friend to correspond with, who will not be judgmental.

John is 45 years old and widowed. He has a son who, tragically, is very recently deceased, leaving John in even more need for support.

You can write John:

John a. Scartz
A465-477
Mansfield Correctional Institution
POB 788
Mansfield OH 44901

You can also correspond via Jpay.com. To establish contact, you just need his name, his state (Ohio), and his prison ID (A465-477).

-Bob

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Bob Halsey turns 91–or possibly 92–on February 18th. I am surprised he is still alive. He has been in bad health for years.

Bob is an innocent man who has been in prison since September of 1993. His lawyer tried to obtain him a compassionate release. But there was no place for him to go.

Bob was railroaded by many of the same characters who sent Bernard Baran to prison. Baran’s prosecutor, Dan Ford, was the trial judge. Jane Satullo was the chief interrogator of the children.

You can learn more about his case.

Here is the address for cards:

Robert C. Halsey
W-55045
POB 1218
Shirley MA 01464

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Anyone who knows a prisoner knows how important it is to them to receive mail, especially at this time of year. Many prisoners receive no outside support at all.

I don’t care if you send a Christmas card, a holiday card, or whatever. Neither will they.

Here is a list of prisoners who’d be delighted to get a card:

https://bobchatelle.net/please-write-to-a-prisoner

Unfortunately, New Hampshire prisoners are not allowed to receive greeting cards of any sort, picture postcards, or any typewritten or printed material. Only handwritten letters on stock paper are permitted.

-Bob Chatelle

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In the Texas courthouse 100 miles east of Dallas that day in September 2012, the prosecutor turned to his expert witness and asked whether he believed the child’s injuries could have been the result of an accident.

“The pattern of her burn injuries is what I would call a forced immersion,” the expert, Dr. Matthew Cox, said, indicating that someone must have intentionally held the child in scalding water.

Later, when pressed by a defense lawyer, Cox was unequivocal: “Absolutely, this is child abuse.”

Following that testimony, the girl’s grandparents, Kenneth and Shelley Walker, 55 and 60 at the time, were both convicted of injury to a child and sentenced to 25 years in prison. They assumed they would die behind bars.

Read the article by Mike Hixenbaugh in the Houston Chronicle.

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“In a case that came down to one man’s word against another’s, jurors believed the police officer. Because of his prior offenses, Vara was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

“What happened to Vara has been unconstitutional for more than 50 years.

“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1963 that prosecutors must tell anyone accused of a crime about all evidence that might help their defense at trial. That includes sharing details about police officers who have committed crimes, lied on the job or whose honesty has been called into doubt.”

Read the article by Steve Reilly and Mark Nichols in USA Today.

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Lou is a longtime follower of this blog. I followed a case that he was personally involved in several years ago. Although all charges were eventually dropped, it was a terrible experience and it prompted Lou to do extensive research on our child protective services. This has resulted in a book, that he is in the process of self= publishing.

Recently, I received this email from Lou:

Bob,

I am on your mailing list and am asking for your help. I just finished my book about US Child Protective Services and am attaching a copy of the introduction. I have started a kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds necessary to pay for self publishing my book about the U.S. Child Protective Services System. The book is a way to reach a wider audience than I have been able to achieve with the litigations I have participated in.

I ask for your support in raising funds. Please make a pledge to reserve a copy of my book. But more importantly, I ask you to please tell anyone else you may know who will be interested in this important news. I know that you have a mailing list of people who support your cause and believe that many of those people would support my book as well. If you would be kind enough to read my introduction, and if are so inclined, to send an email to your supporters and anyone else who you think may be able to end this abusive and unjust system telling them about my book.

In the next 18 months 600,000 children and 1.2 million parents will be exposed to this unconstitutional and destructive system in a way that will negatively effect their children and their marriages. With your support that can change.

The URL to see my site and make a pledge is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1041803268/childrens-rights.

Please help me expose the corruption and change the way CPS does business!!!

Best regards.

Louis A. Piccone

I cannot attach his introduction to this blog post, but if you would like to read it, let me know and I will email it to you. You can email me at [email protected].

-Bob

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Yet like the system of wealth-based detention they are meant to help reform, ankle monitors often place poor people in special jeopardy. Across the country, defendants who have not been convicted of a crime are put on “offender funded” payment plans for monitors that sometimes cost more than their bail. And unlike bail, they don’t get the payment back, even if they’re found innocent. Although a federal survey shows that nearly 40 percent of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to cover an emergency, companies and courts routinely threaten to lock up defendants if they fall behind on payment. In Greenville, S.C., pretrial defendants can be sent back to jail when they fall three weeks behind on fees. (An officer for the Greenville County Detention Center defended this practice on the grounds that participants agree to the costs in advance.) In Mohave County, Ariz., pretrial defendants charged with sex offenses have faced rearrest if they fail to pay for their monitors, even if they prove that they can’t afford them. “We risk replacing an unjust cash-bail system,” Steinberg said, “with one just as unfair, inhumane and unnecessary.”

Read the article by Ava Kaufman in the New York Times Magazine.

And its bad technology, These things also very frequently fail.

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“Virtually everything about this spectacle except the tentative, then stoic intervention of Ford reeks of bad faith. Wisdom crouches in the corner, silent. Yet wisdom—have we forgot?—is the fundamental and ancient criterion for a judge. Kavanaugh has failed the test of wisdom not by what he is accused of doing when he was 17 and drunk but by his adult neglect of reflection and his indifference to suffering, something this moment puts in a sharper light. He does not deserve to be on any court, much less the Supreme Court.”

Read the full article in Counterpunch by JoAnn Wyypijewski.