Noting the notable number of prosecutors now supportive of sentencing second looks

The Washington Post had this important and lengthy new article from earlier this week under the headline "A growing group of prosecutors, who say the job is more than locking people up, wants to help free criminals, too."  Here are excerpts from the start of the piece:

When Calvin McNeill was 16, he and a group of friends in Baltimore decided to rob a neighborhood dice game.  Things got chaotic, and McNeill shot and killed a man. It was 1981. The teen was sentenced to life in prison.  Over the next 39 years, McNeill became a model inmate and was approved for parole three times, but each time the Maryland governor vetoed his release. 

So Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby joined a defense motion to reconsider his sentence last summer.  A judge granted it, and McNeill was freed in July this year.  Since his release, “everybody that I have come across has opened up their arms to me,” McNeill said, “and said, ‘We’re glad to see you home.  And we understand that you were a baby when you got locked up.’”

On Monday, Mosby announced the launch of a sentencing review unit in Baltimore to address both mass incarceration and racial inequities in the justice system.  Of the 2,500 people serving life sentences in Maryland, 79 percent are Black, Mosby said, though African Americans make up only 30 percent of the state population.  In Baltimore, of the 815 prisoners sentenced to life, 94 percent are Black.

Also Monday, the newly elected district attorney of Los Angeles, George Gascón, announced at his swearing-in that he, too, is launching a sentencing review unit.  Gascón said he conservatively estimates that 20,000 prisoners will immediately qualify for resentencing.  He said he believes some were given drastically long sentences, others are older and unlikely to reoffend, and others should be released because of covid-19 concerns.

“The role of a prosecutor is not only one of seeking justice,” Gascón said in an interview, “but also of correcting injustice . . . This is going to be the first time in the nation where there will be this massive effort coming from the largest prosecution offices in the country.”  He said half of Los Angeles’s prisoners are rated low-risk to reoffend and if thousands are released, “there will be billions of dollars in savings” on incarceration costs. “This is gigantic,” Gascón said.

The push to begin revisiting lengthy prison sentences, as part of the justice reform effort being promoted by big city prosecutors around the country, is gaining momentum even in states like Maryland, where there is no formal mechanism for prosecutors to revisit settled cases.  Prosecutors in San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and Brooklyn are also launching sentencing review initiatives.

While a growing number of prosecutors also are seeking to uncover and reverse wrongful convictions, which occur in a small percentage of cases, the move to release those who were correctly convicted but have now served decades in prison could have a far wider impact.  More than 2 million Americans are in jail or prison, which is believed to be the highest incarceration rate in the world.

In Washington state, a bill allowing prosecutors to seek resentencing passed this year, and the district attorney in Seattle announced a sentencing review unit in June. But the office had already been quietly achieving prisoner releases since 2007, “with a bit of a wink to the judge,” King County District Attorney Dan Satterberg said.  “We knew no one was going to appeal it.”  In the District, the city has released 53 inmates since passing a law in 2016 allowing for resentencing if the offender was younger than 18 and served at least 15 years in prison.  Now the city council is considering expanding the group of eligible inmates to those who committed crimes at age 24 or younger and have spent 15 years incarcerated....

Last year in Prince George’s County, newly elected State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy created the state’s first conviction and sentencing integrity unit to review both convictions and sentencings that might deserve new consideration.  Seven people sentenced to life as juveniles have been released, an office spokeswoman said.

Extreme sentences, particularly those that wouldn’t be imposed today, divert resources away from the root sources of crime, turn prisons into elder care centers and alienate communities torn by mass incarceration, said Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, which helps organize and coordinate newly elected prosecutors. “When the system is out of alignment with communities,” Krinsky said, “people will stop trusting the system and stop cooperating, and then we’re all at risk.”

Prosecutors launching such efforts have devised a number of factors to consider for each case, such as the prisoner’s original crime, their rehabilitation in prison, their plan for reentry into society, their likelihood to reoffend and the opinions of the victims in their case.  A number of experts said that victims often don’t oppose the release of the offender and that the occurrence of new crimes by those released is low.

I cannot help but note that many years ago I gave a keynote speech at a conference focused on the work of prosecutors when I suggested they should be much more involved in reviewing past sentences. That speech got published as Encouraging (and Even Requiring) Prosecutors to Be Second-Look Sentencers, 19 Temple Political & Civil Rights L. Rev. 429 (2010).  It is nice to see that it only took about a decade for this idea to start coming into vogue.