Trial begins this week in Superior Court for Capt. Gualter Botas, 39, of Pawtucket, and Lt. Kenneth J. Viveiros, 56, of North Providence. The two ACI Correctional Officers face seven counts and four counts, respectively, of simple assault involving four inmates.
Edward Fitzpatrick reports for the ProJo:
During Superior Court testimony on Wednesday and Thursday, former inmate Matthew S. Gumkowski testified that Botas “sucker-punched” him after he made a vulgar suggestion to the captain on June 8, 2005.
At the time, Gumkowski, 27, of East Greenwich, was serving sentences on drug delivery and weapon possession charges, and he was caught with a $20 bill at the minimum-security facility. Paper currency is prohibited at the prison unless inmates are on work release. […] Gumkowski said the punch landed near his right eye and cheek bone and he began bleeding. “It was split open,” he said. “He threw some napkins at me and said, ‘Go ahead and do something and I’ll call a code.’ […]
In February 2007, District Court Judge Madeline Quirk found Botas, Viveiros and correctional officer Ernest Spaziano guilty of assaulting Gonzalez, an inmate who was serving a sentence on a drug conviction. The three officers appealed their convictions to Superior Court. Spaziano, 40, of Burrillville, was the first to go to trial in Superior Court, and earlier this year he was found not guilty of assaulting Gonzalez. Now, Botas and Viveiros are receiving a Superior Court trial. Originally, the trial was to include allegations that Botas forced inmate Michael Walsh to taste his own feces.
But Michael J. Healey, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said Procaccini granted a defense motion to sever that allegation from the others. He said the judge told prosecutors they could either try all the allegations at once while not using evidence that Walsh was “allegedly made to eat his own feces” — or they could use that evidence and try the Walsh allegation separately. Prosecutors chose to have a separate trial.
So, yeah. COs, meet my friend, Justice. Play nice, boys.
The New York Times has
a piece today on a
RI Training School program that puts juvenile offenders to work restoring old New England diners through the
New Hope Diner Project. The youths restore the diners’ decrepit buildings, work the griddles and cash registers, and will (eventually, hopefully) manage the actual businesses sometime in the future. Pam Belluck writes:
“The whole poetry behind it is that these are kids who have been pretty much cast away emotionally and criminally, getting a chance to restore beloved eateries that have been cast off from society, too,” said Daniel Zilka, the acting director of the American Diner Museum, who rescues decrepit diners and helps run the project. “If they continue on the path that they’ve been moving upon they would end up in an adult correctional facility. This is probably their last opportunity.”
The offenders at the detention center, some as young as 13, have been convicted of crimes like sexual assault, armed robbery, breaking and entering, and drug offenses, and sentenced to serve 6 to 18 months. The center, the Rhode Island Training School, also has maximum security for offenders including murderers, but offenders qualify for the project only if they behave well enough to move to the regular detention population. They must also have, or nearly have, a high school equivalency diploma.
Work release is an important reentry mechanism for many offenders, but should these youths be encouraged to spend their time studying and developing more general skills before jumping into this line of work? Or do programs like this create order, stability, and options for young people with seemingly no way out?
Prisons are supposed to make us safer, right? Prisons are supposed to be places of rehabilitation, reflection, and order, right?
The AP reports:
CRANSTON, R.I. (AP) - An inmate at the state prison is facing a felony assault charge for allegedly beating another prisoner. George Ortiz is scheduled to be arraigned in District Court in Warwick on Monday afternoon on a charge of felony assault. He’s serving a sentence for domestic assault.
Ortiz is accused of assaulting Robert Bainter during a fight Friday in the prison’s minimum security building. Bainter was taken to Rhode Island Hospital with a serious head injury and was listed in critical condition. The Rhode Island State police are investigating the incident and say some kind of argument between the two led to the assault.
State police Maj. Stephen O’Donnell said yesterday that on July 4, Ortiz and Robert Bainter, 20, got into an argument, and then Ortiz hit Bainter in the head three times. Bainter fell, striking his head and suffering severe head trauma, O’Donnell said.
Apparently, Ortiz assaulted Bainter with a sock full of Combination Locks. Do our inmates have rights to life, safety, and security? Yes, and this tragedy underscores the ways in which the hollow austerity of the ACI does little to rehabilitate offenders and disregards the well-being of it inmates.
As I mentioned in
a prior post about the Garrahy Judicial Complex, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in that facility’s Courtroom 4C, where arraignments for RI’s 6th District take place. The judges at arraignment give a shpiel about the meaning and consequences of a plea whenever someone pleads out at that stage of the game, and I often take much of that shpiel for granted.
An important part of what they must instruct the defendants is that any criminal conviction or guilty plea will affect any immigration status or proceedings. For many, this means that deportation is inevitable. One thing missing from the shpiel, however, is consideration of how a guilty plea and prison sentence will affect the defendant’s status in Family Court. All too often, defendants are counseled to accept a shorter sentence with time served only to be served with Family Court subpoenas on charges of neglect—neglect that occurs while these parents are behind bars—or deportation papers.
Colorlines magazine has a great piece this month on the intersection of systems—namely immigration, incarceration, and foster care. In “
When an Immigrant Mom Gets Arrested,” Julianne Ong Hing and Seth Wessler write:
Immigrant mothers are not the first to deal with the ways that different government agencies intersect, usually to their detriment. The experiences Black families have had with child welfare and criminal justice policy make clear what can happen to communities when family policy intersects with a set of other punitive policies.
Or so read the headline yesterday on one of my favorite blogs,
History Is a Weapon. And when you look at the late Senator’s resume, he’s left us little reason to mourn. Here are a few of his most remarkable achievements:
Fighting integration;
Opposing Martin Luther King day;
the Helms-Burton act, the centerpiece of the embargo against Cuba;
Disputing ALL Affirmative Action programs;
Voting to bail out the savings and loan industry AND to slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly, and wages for working families;
Hating all gay people;
Supporting apartheid in South Africa;
Routinely fighting against AIDS research from the beginning, blaming people suffering from the disease for it;
Leading the fight to discontinue Pell Grants for inmates;
And, in 1993, singing Dixie to the first African American senator, Carol Mosely-Braun, and promising to make her “cry.”
I think HIAW sums it up well, when they proclaim: “Hell burns hotter tonight.” Want some more inspiring food for thought? Check out “
The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” a speech given by Frederick Douglass in Rochester on July 5, 1852.
The honorable Matt Jerzyk has a post to this effect over at
RIFuture, as does Sir Ian McKellen Donnis
at N4N, but I feel the need to reiterate: what’s up with the AG? While 42 other attorneys general signed on to support the Free Flow of Information Act, which would create a qualified federal shield law for reporters, Patrick Lynch did not. Lynch, who on June 19 was elected president of the
National Association of Attorneys General, does justice (no pun intended) to that organization’s alias: the
National Association of Aspiring Governors.
I think a lot of Rhode Islanders take for granted an important lil’ Rhody anomaly: most states have
district attorneys and
attorneys general, these being two distinct positions and offices. We’re small enough that the two positions are lumped into one office. Our attorneys general, therefore, spend the majority of their time and energy prosecuting criminals and upholding severe criminal justice policies rather than representing the larger interests of all our citizens.
In March, I was privileged to attend the
11th Annual Liman Public Interest Colloquium at the Yale Law School. In keeping with the topic of the conference—”Liman at the Local Level: Public Interest Advocacy and American Federalism”—we had the opportunity to hear from Connecticut Attorney General
Richard Blumenthal, Ohio Solicitor General
William Marshall, San Francisco City Attorney
Dennis Herrera, and
James Tierney, Director of the National State Attorneys General Program. These four fellows have used their positions as state and city attorneys to compensate for the failings, negligence, and misguided decisions of the federal government and judiciary.
I understand one of his many vetoes this legislative session: the courthouse construction bill, a piece of legislation pledging $88 million to the construction of a new Blackstone Valley courthouse.
According to the ProJo, Carcieri said in his veto message, “Never, not even once, has any Rhode Islander — save a legislator or a judge — ever spoke to me of the pressing need to build a court-house in the Blackstone Valley.”
On the urgency of the project, however, Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank Williams declared in an April speech:
The need to better serve our citizens in northern Rhode Island and to decongest a severely overcrowded Garrahy Judicial Complex in Providence by building a Blackstone Valley Courthouse is not going to go away.
As a legal intern with the
RI Office of the Public Defender, I may not be privy to every aspect of life at the Garrahy complex. I do, however, work there 4 days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and I’m a bit perplexed by the congestion with which the Chief is concerned. In fact, things can get pretty slow around there, and I’ve taken to reading
The New Yorker in between Judge Higgins’ arraignments in Courtroom 4C, where I am usually stationed.
Those of us who missed Mayor Cicilline at Saturday’s Pride festivities should be placated by news of how he spent that day. The U.S. Conference of Mayors, gathered for their 76th Annual Meeting in Miami from June 20-24,
unanimously passed a resolution calling for city-coordinated drug overdose prevention efforts.
The Resolution championed
several strategies to reduce fatalities from drug overdoses, including:
Supporting the distribution of naloxone – an opiate antagonist medication effective in reversing the respiratory failure that typically causes death from opioid overdose;
Urging state governments to adopt “Good Samaritan” immunity policies that shield people who experience or witness an overdose and contact 911 from prosecution;
Calling on the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fund research to evaluate the effectiveness of overdose prevention interventions and develop model programs; and
Calling on the FDA to take steps to facilitate the testing and approval of nasal and/or over-the-counter formulations of naloxone and to consider recommending prescription naloxone concurrent with strong opioid analgesics.
While I applaud Loury’s defense of hip-hop and appreciate McWhorter’s defense of Obama, I take issue with the false dichotomy these scholars have erected between the two. Loury says hip-hop is politically-charged and Barack Obama’s message is destructive; McWhorter says hip-hop is destructive in a way that counters the positive message of Barack Obama. But hip-hop, at its roots, is political, and many of its leaders have long championed Obama’s message and agenda through their words and rhymes. Obama, in kind, has become one of few mainstream voices for the ideology that underlies hip-hop.
Indian-giver [sorry, couldn’t resist] Judge Susan McGuirl gave a suspended sentence to three Narragansett tribe members convicted of assaulting state police.
Projo’s got it:
The three Narragansett Indian tribal members convicted of assaulting and scuffing with state police during the 2003 raid on a tribal smoke shop will not have to spend time in jail. Judge Susan McGuirl issued a suspended sentence for one of the defendants and filed the case of Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas and the other tribe member, ordering them to provide community service by talking to school children about tribe history.
In legal news, velvet-tongued hook-master R Kelly was
acquitted on 14 counts of child sex crimes by a jury in his native Chicago after 6 years of courtroom drama. While a grainy video tape did show a man giving a young girl a golden shower, spawning the Dave Chappelle spoof
“Piss on You (Remix)”, jurors were unable to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that this man was Mr. Kelly.
Big ups to the legal system on this one. In celebration, let’s all watch
this video from Jay-Z and R Kelly, released before all this brouhaha started, in which Kells croons: “You can’t touch me, no you can’t touch me/ Jigga, Kelly, not guilty.” Or, if you want to relive the classics, peep this:
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that
he had posted the materials, which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as “funny.”
Today the Senate Judiciary committee passed S3014, by Rhoda Perry. The bill has been
discussed at length here and elsewhere: Essentially, it’d ensure that people weren’t put in prison for offenses for which they were ‘violated’ but never convicted.
Rhode Island’s probation violation structures are way out of the mainstream — among the two or three most regressive in the nation.
Several people testified over the course of 90 minutes or so, among them many relatives of people who are behind bars for crimes for which they’ve never been convicted: So compelling was their testimony that the committee, extraordinarily, passed the legislation upon its first hearing.
The House version of the bill, of which I’m the sponsor, passed overwhelmingly several weeks ago, and is also before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Congrats to DARE, the Family Life Center, the Public Defender’s office, and others who’ve advocated around this issue. And a sincere thank you to Senator Perry and her colleagues.
Rep. Gorham has a libertarian streak that makes me a little surprised that
he’s so opposed to this bill. (Not to mention the fiscally conservative impulse to not blow needless millions on the prison system.)
After reading whole sections of Carcieri’s veto message from last year, Gorham asked House Judiciary Committee Chairman Donald Lally who was for it and who was against it. In response, Lally said he believed “the public defender was in favor of it … and numerous other people.”
“The public defender was in favor of it? Wow, what a surprise,” said Gorham laughing.
From the back of the cavernous House chamber came a loud — “Ha Ha Ha” — from Rep. John Patrick Shanley, D-South Kingstown, which led Gorham to say: “Laugh all you want. You’re the one who’s going to vote for it so, you know, open the jail house doors a little wider.” (Explaining his actions later, Shanley said he believed Gorham’s own “ha-ha-ha” deserved a “ho-ho-ho,” but moreover, as a former probation officer, he believes judges should be able to make case-by-case sentencing decisions.)
In a state with a population that hovers just over 1 million people, approximately 33,000 of people are currently incarcerated, on probation or on parole. Community members have been busy collecting the names of these people on cloth ribbons. On the day of the rally thousands of ribbons, personalized with the names of these individuals, many of whom will not be able to join the rally, will be on display at the State House to visually represent the enormity of this issue.
Our state currently over utilizes prison and punishment. This has resulted in an excessive prison budget, communities that are held back instead of supported, and violations of basic human rights. By reducing the state’s prison population we can make valuable resources available for reinvestment in community based programs that can directly result in an increase in public safety.
Several pieces of legislation have been proposed this year that would help reduce the prison population and that could make RI a model for effective criminal justice policy. Come to the rally and show the legislators and the Governor that this is what the people want!
This event is being sponsored by Direct Action for Rights and Equality the Family Life Center and Miriam Hospital. For more information call DARE at 351-6960 or the FLC at 781-5808
Entries
Trial begins this week in Superior Court for Capt. Gualter Botas, 39, of Pawtucket, and Lt. Kenneth J. Viveiros, 56, of North Providence. The two ACI Correctional Officers face seven counts and four counts, respectively, of simple assault involving four inmates.
Edward Fitzpatrick reports for the ProJo: 
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that
Rep. Gorham has a libertarian streak that makes me a little surprised that