Charitable Giving...

As you know, I generally only put in plugs for The Bronx Defenders, my alma mater and the finest public defender office in the world, but today, a quick departure from that general rule to encourage readers to donate to Peter Wagner's Prison Policy Initiative, an impressive organization devoted to exposing the social costs of our prison policy. For the next three days they've got a donor who will match any contribution up to a total of 10,000. If you're so inclined, (I just sent them a few hundred bucks) You can donate here.

Dancing on the graves of the poor

Want to know what judges do when they're thinking about getting elected? They slam poor people convicted of crimes.

A study in Pennsylvania by Gregory A. Huber and Sanford C. Gordon found that “all judges, even the most punitive, increase their sentences as re-election nears,” resulting in some 2,700 years of additional prison time, or 6 percent of total prison time, in aggravated assault, rape and robbery sentences over a 10-year period.

Charming.

We Rock Estonia

This from the hollywood reporter:

"Olle Mirme, director of programming and acquisitions at Kanal 2 in Estonia, liked the new Steven Bochco-produced legal drama "Raising the Bar"

Very Nice.

Left in her cell for four days...

An innocent woman who was left in a courthouse cell for four days won't be prosecuted. Wow. Seriously here's the announcement :



A woman who was forgotten in a courthouse holding cell for four days without food or water will not be prosecuted on the charge that landed her there, a prosecutor in Fayetteville said. A charge of selling pirated recordings was dropped after prosecutors were able to verify Adriana Torres-Flores’s alibi, Deputy Prosecutor Mark Booher said.

A whirlwind...

Jets, stars, green rooms and sweet suites.

The last 24 hours have been astonishing. I sat on the floor of the Hammerstein Ballroom under a massive screen and watched TNT's "Upfront" presentation this morning. The upfront is where the network sells ad-space on their upcoming shows and so it's also where they previewed our show.. My view was pretty much what you see above (and if you look closely you can see the stars of our show on the far left hand side of the stage there).

I'll leave out for now any lengthy descriptions of traveling by private jet, or even the head spinning coolness of the green room, the hospitality suite or even the hotel room (at the London) and say instead, that for the first time, as I watched our show fill that enormous screen, I was moved and awed at the reach of this medium and really excited to be doing a show with a point of view that been ignored for far too long.

You wonder why they hate the police...

This interesting piece in the New York Times claims that newly released data Shows an Increase in Street Stops. That alone is interesting, but here's the bit that gets me:

The 145,098 stops from January through March — up from 134,029 during the same quarter a year earlier — led to 8,711 arrests. That means that in 94 out of a 100 cases, the cops were harassing an innocent person. (Calls into question "reasonable suspicion" doesn't it?) And given that blacks are stopped in wildly disproportionate numbers it explains why there is such a sense of over policing in poor communities of color.

Worth Watching...