Oklahoma Criminal Defense Blog

The United States Supreme Court recently decided that citizens have a constitutional right to possess a firearm in their home, and that Second Amendment right applies to the states.  That means cities like Chicago have to change their laws regulating the possession of guns.

Four days after the Supreme Court decision invalidating Chicago’s gun ban, the City Council enacted new, gentler gun-control regulations.  The vote was unanimous for the 45 aldermen voting for the measure.  The council wanted to put new handgun law in place before the invalidated law disappears, and the city has no regulation at all.

Of course, Mayor Daly explained passage of the law as designed to keep guns out of the hands of “gangbangers and drug dealers.”  And, of course, the ordinance is explained as supporting adults who legitimately want a gun in their home for self-defense.  But some aldermen believe the new ordinance will have more impact on law-abiding citizens than on anyone intending to commit a crime with their gun.

The new law took effect 10 days after it was passed.  It will require anyone who wants to keep a handgun in their home lawfully to first obtain a permit from the City of Chicago. The permit requires the holder to complete firearm training and a record without any convictions of a violent crime, any record of violent use of a firearm, or two or more charges of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Each gun must be registered by the city, and a person can register only one weapon each month.  A permit-holder may have only one handgun in readily operable condition at one time. The permit requires the handguns be kept only in the home, and the ordinance excludes garages, porches, and exterior stairs from the definition of a home.

The ordinance prohibits gun sales, firing ranges or shooting galleries inside the City of Chicago.  The ban on sales is expected to be challenged in court, as are other provisions of the ordinance.  The council knows that.  Aldermen were quoted as saying they could not imagine how anyone could possibly question the reasonableness of their regulations, but they know the challenges are coming.

One of the aldermen, Leslie Hairston, said he thought the Supreme Court was wrong in their opinion upholding the Second Amendment just like the Court was wrong about segregation.  Historically, he’s right, but he forgot that it was the Supreme Court which turned the country around in the matter of segregation, beginning with the decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Wichita.  Only after years of decisions from the Supreme Court following the Brown decision did the executive and legislative branches address segregation significantly, the partial integration of the armed forces during World War II being a significant – but isolated – exception.

During consideration of the ordinance, several aldermen expressed the belief that the Supreme Court would never have overturned their gun law if the justices were more familiar with urban violence.  This comment shows the myopic viewpoint council, one incapable of looking beyond their routine horse-trading, pragmatic approach to everything.  These same aldermen would be the ones to fault any court-ordered restrictions to police handling of public demonstrators because the police need to protect public order.  They are unaware of the importance of protecting free speech by the First Amendment to the Constitution.  All countries have crowd problems and crime problems.  Only the United States has the Bill of Rights, including what is left of the Fourth Amendment.

After constant problems in New York’s youth prisons, the Department of Justice threatened to take over the state juvenile system.  The state of New York and the Justice came to a compromise, putting four of the youth problems under federal supervision.

A settlement agreement was filed in U.S. District Court, formalizing the agreement between federal and state officials.  The federal inquiry began in 2007 after a number of incidents, including the death of an emotionally disturbed 15-year old in 2006.  The problems in New York facilities might be even worse than those attacked in a lawsuit pending in federal court against the Oklahoma Department of Human Services.

The settlement will place four of New York’s most dangerous prisons under strict federal control.  There will be tight limits on the use of physical force by guards.  Also dozens of psychiatrists, counselors, and investigators will be hired for the juvenile facilities.

The majority of the juveniles in custody have drug or alcohol problems, developmental disabilities, or other mental health problems, yet the state did not have even one full-time psychiatrist on the staff.  Henceforth, guards, known as youth counselors, will be not be allowed to use physical force on those in custody except in cases of escape or in cases of danger to a person’s physical safety.

On occasion guards force a youth face down to the ground.  This is a controversial method, and the guards will be allowed to use it only for three minutes with evaluation by a doctor within four hours on each occasion.

The Justice Department insisted the state take significant steps to fix the problems in the system so bad many inmates never receive any treatment or services that would help them adust to life out of custody.  The Department of Justice threatened to take over the entire state juvenile justice system unless the state did so.

The four facilities placed under federal supervision are the Lansing Residential Center and the Louis Gossett Jr. Residential Center in Lansing and two residences at Tyron Residential Center in Johnstown, New York.  Federal investigators had found that the staff routinely used physical force to discipline the youth at that the four facilities.  The force resulted in broken bones, shattered teeth, concussions and dozens of other serious injuries over a two-year period.

Governor Peterson had been trying to fix the problems in the system.  He introduced a bill last month that would allow a judge to sentence juveniles to the youth prisons only if the juveniles had been found guilty of a violent crime or a sex crime or were otherwise found to be a serious danger to themselves or to others.

The federal oversight plan will include two monitors jointly chosen by federal and state officials who will watch the implementation of the plan.  The monitors will make regular reports over the next two years to a federal judge, who then must approve the settlement before it goes into effect.  Funding for the improvements was included in the state budget just approved.  Those improvements include one full-time psychiatrist at each of the four facilities, five licensed psychologists and about a dozen nurse practitioners and social workers.

The changes in the settlement are similar to the suggestions made in the recommendations made by a state task force, which found recommended expanding mental health care and replacing most of the residential youth prisons with a system of smaller centers closer to where the incarcerated youths live.

“Don’t taze my granny,” Lonnie Tinsley cried.  He was yelling at the police he had called to help his 86-year-old grandmother in his home in El Reno.  Actually, he had called for help for his grandmother, thinking medical personnel would arrive.  The police arrived.  But the police didn’t listen to him.  When the grandmother, Lona Vernon, ordered the police out of her home, they decided she was being aggressive-as she lay in her bed-and used their tasers on her.

Tinsley had called for help, expecting he would get help from medical technicians.  But he got the police who had their own agenda, a dozen of them.  Police used their tasers on Mrs.  Vernon because she had taken an aggressive posture lying in her hospital bed.  One taser wasn’t enough, however, so another police officer shot her.  But the tasers followed a special move that was based on “officer safety.”  Officer safety required stepping on Mrs. Vernon’s oxygen hose until she suffered oxygen deprivation.

Meanwhile, the police saw what they thought was obstructive behavior from the grandson, so the police took him from the room, threw him to the floor, handcuffed him, and took him out to a police car.

Aggressive hospital bed posture is not a crime familiar to most citizens, but when police need to excuse their excesses, they must get creative.  When they’re in a hurry, however, their creativity gets transparent.  Suffocating grandmothers in their beds is a little hard to sell, except to the hard-core “police-are-right-no-matter-what” crowd.  No facts will sway this crowd.  They will find some cover to excuse the police no matter, no matter, no matter what the police do.  To them, everything the police do that is ethically questionable or even illegal has some way to justify it.

The police finished up on Leona Vernon by handcuffing her, roughly, of course, and taking her away, proud, no doubt, of nipping the aggressive hospital bed behavior that so threatened the peace and dignity of the commonwealth.

Some people just cannot imagine the police would do anything illegal.  Some people cannot imagine the police would lie under oath.  They’re just doing their job, they posit, so why would commit perjury?  Do they ever get caught?  No, so there is no risk to their perjury.  Whey would they abuse a citizen?   Because some police officers think the citizen had it coming.  Police deal in the blame business every day.  That judgmental attitude can make an impact on some police officers, those who come to have contempt for those whom they believe are criminals.  For those police officers, the legal system is an obstacle to their brand of justice, an obstacle they can circumvent on a daily basis.

When a police officer testifies he observed a traffic violation or a driver moving excessively in the front seat on a car, what judge will doubt him?  The police officer knows that.  It is futile for an arrested party to dispute it.  Only when external evidence challenges the statement of the police officer can some doubt be raised, never when it is a police officer’s word against the accused.  When this goes on for long enough, the result is all the wrongly-accused prisoner’s on death row in Texas.   It took irrefutable DNA evidence after years and years of questioning to prove these people did not commit the crimes of which they were convicted. What those reversed convictions show, however, is an underlying question about the truth in which convictions in all criminal cases rest.