Criminal Courtesy

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Marty Ryan

Last week, a deputy sheriff in Linn County was given citations for leaving the scene of an accident and failing to stop within the assured clear distance.  He wasn’t driving a patrol car; he was off duty at the time and was driving his Ford pickup truck.

Deputy James Crawford allegedly rear-ended a motorcycle at an intersection.  No one was hurt, but Crawford was gone when Marion police arrived at the scene.  Crawford is on paid administrative leave pending an “internal investigation”.  According to news accounts, the incident occurred at 6:45 p.m.  However, Crawford waited until later that evening to bring himself in to the Marion City police and face the consequences.

This suspicious behavior leaves some unanswered questions.  A law enforcement officer knows that leaving the scene of an accident is a crime.  It’s a simple misdemeanor, but it’s still a crime.  Was the deputy intoxicated?  What other reason could explain this odd conduct?

But what is stranger is the reaction of the Marion Chief of Police, Harry Daugherty.  Daugherty refused to comment because he said it would “taint Sheriff Brian Gardner’s internal investigation, because only a few people know the truth.”  Huh?  Sheriff Gardner is acting suspicious himself.  He said that it’s an “ongoing personnel matter”.  No, he’s incorrect.  It’s a criminal matter and should be treated as such.  Especially since Daugherty admitted that there is “some professional courtesy going on,” and that most of this “stuff would (normally) be released, but when it’s internal, it gets a little sticky.”  Really?

Fawkes-Lee & Ryan support civilian review boards (a.k.a. police review boards and a few other monikers).  When law enforcement officers act like this they don’t provide a lot of good argument for opposing review boards.  This is downright blatant.

Perhaps the time has come to make an exception to the exceptions in the public records statute, Chapter 22.  When a criminal matter (or potential criminal matter) and a personnel matter clash, the public should have the information available.  How can citizens take public safety seriously when a wink and nod supersedes the ethical behavior of those we rely upon to keep dangerous people off the roads?

© Copyright 2011. Fawkes-Lee & Ryan

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Keep Your Fingerprints Off My Ice Cream

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Marty Ryan

This week the Iowa House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow owners of ice cream trucks to conduct background checks on their potential employees.  The bill passed 96-0.

House File 696 is a legislative measure that began with an Iowa-based company that owns and manages a fleet of ice cream trucks in eastern Iowa.  The company wants to run federal background checks on potential employees, but the federal government prohibits fingerprint checks unless the state has included the specific occupation as one in which employers are able to receive the information from a single contact repository.  Under the proposed law, ice cream truck drivers could be equated to certain employees of a homemaker, home-health aide, home care aide, adult day services, or other provider of in-home services; particular employees of a hospice, many employees who provide direct services to consumers under a federal home and community-based services waiver; certain employees of an elder group home; and some employees of an assisted living program  The information received by the business accessing the single contact repository includes information relating to the following: Iowa criminal history, the sex offender registry, the child abuse registry, and the dependent adult abuse.

Fawkes-Lee & Ryan opposes House File 696 because it offers a false sense of security to parents and society.  The practice of relying upon background checks may have an adverse effect.  A background check on a potential employee or current employee should not be a substitute for parents paying attention to their children, and that is what this bill suggests.  It breeds complacency.

Like many laws that have been created in the past 10 to 20 years providing for background checks, it fails to identify first-time abusers.  But there are other reasons why this legislative proposal is terribly flawed.

HF 696 does not require a background check; it only provides that a business owner, vendor, contractor, etc. “may” require an employee to undergo such a process.  An owner/operator does not need to comply with the provisions of the law, and most vendors throughout Iowa will not.  One major flaw in this measure is the question of who pays for this background check.  The language is unclear.  There should be some indication of who pays the costs of the background check, and the burden should be on the hiring party.  Having to pay for a background check on yourself is adding insult to injury, especially if the rate of pay is minimum wage.  Really, how many people are willing to go through this intimidating process for the sake of a temporary, seasonal, minimum wage job?  If this is the best Iowa can do with creating jobs, we’re in bad economic shape.

Another fear that this legislation carries is that the ‘may’ could easily and eventually become a ‘shall’.  At that time it becomes another burdensome and needless regulation of government for small businesses in this state.

But equally important, the bill has nothing to do with government oversight, the committee from which it came.  Already, there are abuses of bills coming from the House Legislative Oversight Committee that should have been dealt with in more appropriate committees.  The practice of moving unrelated bills out of Government Oversight is a terrible precedent in Iowa’s legislative process.  If this practice grows to become another detour around the funnel deadlines, it will be abused heavily by certain special interests that fear taking a bill through the regular stages.

HF 696 is expected to die in the Senate.  We hope it does!

© Copyright 2011  Fawkes-Lee & Ryan.  All rights reserved.

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Paying Attention

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Marty Ryan

Twenty-one years ago this week, Florida executed Jesse Tafero in the electric chair.  The significance of this state-sanctioned murder is that it was a continuing example of what can go wrong and why change was needed.  Unfortunately, the change made was not the change needed.  Tafero was tortured as the electric chair malfunctioned three times.  Tafero was still alive as flames jumped from his head.  Florida eventually ceased using the electric chair and began executing defendants with lethal injection.  The method doesn’t determine what is and isn’t humane – the death itself is not humane; it’s barbaric.

Perhaps politicians are beginning to understand the gruesome practice for what it is.  There were no bills introduced this legislative session in Iowa that would have reinstated capital punishment.  The death penalty was supposed to be a defining issue in political races of the past.  It’s not now, and it never was.

Governor Tom Vilsack proved that opposition to the death penalty is not a weight around the neck when running for public office.  Senator Vilsack strongly opposed the death penalty, and offered to filibuster on the floor of the Iowa Senate in 1995 to prevent House File 2 from being enacted.  It wasn’t necessary; there were more than enough votes to defeat the measure that year.

However, years later Vilsack ran for governor and the issue was nothing more than a minor mention during the campaign.  He didn’t hide the fact that he was a strong opponent of capital punishment.  With that in mind, he went on to win two terms as governor.  During the time he was governor, everyone knew that pushing a death penalty bill through the Iowa Legislature was a futile effort because Vilsack promised to veto such a bill.

You know what?  Tom Vilsack never once said the word “veto” in the same sentence as “death penalty”.  I cautiously watched for eight years.  Never did Governor Vilsack promise to veto a death penalty bill.  He did say, however, that he wouldn’t sign a bill reinstating the death penalty.

Today, Iowans should be proud that we held back those efforts in 1995.  Since that year, several states have abolished the practice for a number of reasons.  It’s too expensive.  It is not administered justly.  It is inhumane!  It is discriminatory in practice, and evidence is emerging that indicates some people who have been executed may have been innocent.

I’m proud to live in a state that does not tinker with the machinery of death, as former Associate Justice Harry Blackmun called it.

© Copyright 2011  Fawkes-Lee & Ryan.  All rights reserved.

Posted in Death Penalty, Issues | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A Stunning Development

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Marty Ryan

An electronic control device, better known as a stun gun – or Taser™, is a dangerous weapon.  The Iowa Department of Corrections has introduced a proposed rule that will allow sheriffs or detention facility administrators to use discretion in arming jailers with stun guns.  Changing the definition of what a weapon is or is not in an administrative rule does not change the fact that the Iowa Code defines an electronic control device as a dangerous weapon, “capable of inflicting death upon a human being.”

A federal district court in California came to the “conclusion that use of the X26 Taser and similar devices in dart mode constitutes an “intermediate, significant level of force that must be justified by the governmental interest involved,” The court pointed out that its holding “falls well within the national mainstream of the decisions which have examined the nature and quality of the intrusion posed by Tasers.”

Present language in the rule offers a vague description of how these weapons will be used.  The rule states that the weapons will have a “primary intended use”.  If there is a primary intended use then it must be argued that there will be a secondary intended use.  We hope not.  This is troublesome language, especially since the Code section in which this rule is designed to implement states that “[a] violation of a rule does not permit any civil action to recover damages against the state of Iowa, its departments, agents, or employees or any county, its agents or employees, or any city, its agents or employees.”  But what if it’s the department, an agent, employee or county, etc. that is the one that violates the rule?  Unfortunately for the detainee, the enabling statute covers only the possibility that an inmate will violate the rule.  The statute lacks protection for an detainee or inmate where a government body or government employee is the violator and is entitled to a qualified immunity defense.  “The doctrine of qualified immunity protects government officials from “liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” If this rule is adopted, the burden of proof shifts to the offender who is quite likely the victim as a result of a rule violation in this instance.

We hope that the Department takes notice that the federal government has joined a suit in Franklin County, Ohio, to stop the misuse of stun guns in that county’s jail.  “Franklin County (home of the state’s capital – Columbus) jailers [used] the guns to shock naked and restrained prisoners and to punish inmates for routine rule violations.”  If misuse can happen in Ohio, it’s possible for misuse to happen in Iowa.  Granting discretion to sheriffs and facility administrators without requiring the need for training, and/or some sort of consequence, will lead to federal suits in Iowa.

In any case, the use of electronic control devices should not be allowed until personnel who intend to use it are trained in several areas.  The proposed rule is limited to giving a sheriff (or facility administrator) the discretion to allow staff to use the stun guns.  The rule addresses nothing about training or misuse of the weapons.  This is a bad idea that should be stricken from an otherwise decent rule.

© Copyright 2011 Fawkes-Lee & Ryan.  All rights reserved.

 

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Advisory Or Enforcement?

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Marty Ryan

Public records are public.  Government does not own them, but manages them.  However, it’s difficult to understand who owns these records by listening to government lobbyists at the Iowa Capitol.  It’s almost funny, and certainly shameful, to see several government representatives oppose a bill that expands the enforcement and oversight of government compliance with the two chapters of the Iowa Code that pertains to public records and open meetings.

A bill is moving through the legislative process (SF 430) that creates an enforcement board to ensure compliance with the open meetings/public records chapters – Chapter 21 & Chapter 22.  For years, there has been a back and forth argument between the Senate and House about whether the matter of compliance should be overseen by an advisory committee or an enforcement board.  The enforcement board appears to have won out.  But that’s not the end of the argument.  Lobbyists for political subdivisions of the state want an advisory committee, and they don’t seem to want to stop complaining until they get one.

The problem with an advisory committee is that it becomes another tentacle of state bureaucracy.  The committee is filled with wise people saying brilliant things, but in the end, it’s the staffing that makes all of the decisions.  This has been repeated far too many times.  In a word search of the Iowa Code the word “advisory” shows up 384 times.  The phrase “advisory board” shows up 180 times, and the phrase “advisory committee” appears 138 times.  Advisory bodies are a dime a dozen and seldom are they taken seriously.

The staff prepares the agenda with the chair’s help.  Staff does all the research, makes suggestions for recommendations, and performs most of the work before and after meetings.  The committee members show up and discuss matters for hours, often leaving with a lack of any accomplishment.  The attendance at so many of these types of meetings is poor, especially if there is very little to do but approve items that will be included in a report that no one notices – or reads.

The current situation is not the ideal setup for improving the expectations the public wants or needs as it pertains to open meetings/public records.  In most instances, the enforcement is provided by the county attorney, the top law enforcement official in each county.  The appearance of a conflict of interest is exposed each and every time a matter of a possible violation comes up in a political subdivision of the state.

There are 940 communities in Iowa.  There are 99 counties.  Each has its own legal counsel.  That means there are potentially 1,039 different opinions on issues involving public records and open meetings.  Enforcement, education, compilation of complaints, and compliance with the law needs to be centralized in one place.  The ongoing effort of the Citizens’ Aide/Ombudsman and Attorney General is admired, but it scatters these essential efforts and promotes duplication.  One body, speaking one language, is necessary to the perseverance and equal application of Iowa’s dedication to openness in government.

© Copyright 2011  Fawkes-Lee & Ryan.  All rights reserved.

Posted in Issues, Open Meetings/Public Records | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

From License Plates To Toilet Paper

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Marty Ryan

Ever since I was a young boy I knew that license plates were made in prison.  However, as I grew older I wanted to know what happened when there are no license plates to make.  I found out about 10 or 15 years ago when I was introduced to the director of Iowa Prison industries (IPI), Roger Baysden.  Roger retired a few months ago, but his development of IPI has made a difference in the lives of many.

The business of manufacturing license plates in Iowa is conducted by the Iowa Prison Industries (IPI).  But IPI is much more than an occasional license plate maker.  IPI is a program within the Iowa Department of Corrections that provides inmates with meaningful jobs “to develop within those inmates willing to accept and persevere in such work;

  • Positive attitudes which will enable them to eventually function as law-abiding, self-supporting members of the community;
  • Good work habits that will assist them in eventually securing and holding gainful employment outside the correctional system; and
  • To the extent feasible, marketable skills that can lead directly to gainful employment upon release from a correctional institution.”

I realized this week that IPI is a very misunderstood segment of the Iowa correctional system.  My realization stemmed from a very unusual bill that popped up.  The bill, House Study Bill 218 by House Committee on Government Oversight, has 4 parts to it.  The first section of the bill requires the IPI to file reports.  That’s no problem: it’s been filing reports for quite some time now.  The second section requires the IPI to receive authorization from the Legislature before spending an amount of over $250,000 for a capital expenditure.  That’s not too much of a problem – it doesn’t happen often  Section four of the bill pertains to the effective date – not a problem at all.  But section three of the bill is a bit controversial.

It seems as though a wholesaler within the state may have been upset that sales of toilet paper to state correctional institutions would be drastically reduced, taking a cut from the wholesalers’ profits.  An educated guess will tell an experienced lobbyist that this is the impetus for the bill.  The bill’s 3rd section requires the IPI director to prepare and submit a report to the Government Oversight Committee “regarding the merits of the processing of toilet paper by IPI”.

This bill is not going to replace any Iowa jobs.  That’s because there is no Iowa manufacturer of toilet paper.  According to “Building Bridges To Success”, a Five Year Transition & Business Plan (2011-2015) prepared by Roger Baysden for IPI, the Iowa Department of Corrections “alone purchases over 1 million rolls of tissue paper a year.  Based upon market test (3 years in Missouri prison) IPI can manufacture tissue of the same or better grade of paper for about ten cents less per roll than what DOC is paying for it now.  This is a savings of about $100,000 to the state and it will add between 40-50 offender skill training opportunities.”  I believe the preparation of the report in section 3 has been completed.

Nonetheless, it was the comments of a business lobbyist that made me realize that there exists a huge misconception that inmates learn a particular skill while incarcerated; a specific skill that can be immediately transformed to an employment opportunity once released.  That’s not necessarily so.  Inmates don’t just get placed into a prison job.  They have to apply for it.  And that’s where IPI’s hidden secret lies.

Many inmates have never had the opportunity to apply for a decent job.  Often, they lack the basic skills necessary to complete an application form.  IPI assists these offenders with everything from how to dress for an interview to explaining their criminal record to a potential employer.  As they leave an institution, offenders who have participated in the IPI Program are presented with a 44-page handbook that helps them with their transition, especially as it focuses on their employment opportunities.  The former inmates leave with 1) marketable skills; 2) the development of a sound work ethic; 3) self confidence and pride of accomplishment; 4) a possible savings and family support; and 5) the handbook that will help them in their search for meaningful employment.

While incarcerated, participants have paid taxes, restitution, Victims’ Compensation, and reimbursed the General Fund of Iowa.  “IPI inmates paid more in child support in 2009 than all of the Iowa inmates combined earned in 1997.”

Here are some key points of IPI that go virtually unnoticed:

“IPI employs over six hundred offenders and generates over 25 million dollars in annual sales;

“IPI provides over 1.6 million hours of hands-on offender work skill training at no cost to the taxpayer;

“IPI receives no appropriations from the general fund [of Iowa];

“IPI hires staff and pays their salaries from the profit on sales of goods and services;

“IPI has plant operations at eight of the nine Iowa Prisons.”

Stephanie and I toured the woodworking shop of IPI inside the Iowa Penitentiary at Fort Madison.  We were in awe.  Some of the most beautiful handcrafted wood products are being produced daily.  We invite you to check into the IPI further.  Products created by IPI inmates are of high quality and virtually flawless.

Some of the products made by IPI inmates include solid hardwood desks, chairs and furniture; dolls; signs; toys; jail cells; and many other items almost too numerous to mention.  The IPI has a showroom, built and maintained without tax-payers’ dollars, located at 1445 East Grand Avenue in Des Moines.  The building is easily accessible right off I-235 on Grand between 14th and 15th Streets.  You may also take a quick look at IPI’s success by accessing its website at:  http://www.iaprisonind.com/

House Study Bill 218 is more than a profit loss to a toilet paper wholesaler; it’s an opportunity for education.

© Copyright 2011 Fawkes-Lee & Ryan.  All rights reserved.

Posted in Criminal Justice, Issues | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments