Attorney and Author Dan Conaway and Mike Brooks Radio show "Arrested"
Attorney and Author Dan Conaway and Mike Brooks Radio show "Arrested"
First Step Act - What is it? Attorney Dan Conaway and Mike Brooks on "Arrested"
Attorney Dan Conaway and Mike Brooks, from the radio show, Arrested, discuss this bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that was just passed.
Welcome to arrested the only live and local show that takes you into the belly of our criminal justice system, cohosted by Mike Brooks and Atlanta criminal defense attorney Dan conaway of Conaway and Strickler PC. Good morning everybody. Thanks for joining us on Arrested. We appreciate you being with us Saturday morning. And uh, we got a lot of good stuff to cover today. Dan, where to start off? Well, we've talked about this. We've touched on this a little bit before in one of the other programs. Some people call it criminal justice reform, but it's actually the First Step Act. Now. Some people say what is the first step act and, and I tell Ya, I think it's one of the biggest pieces of news that has come out of the trump administration, but it really hasn't got gotten much press has really gotten much play in the, uh, in the mainstream media. But I tell you what, when it comes to criminal justice reform, this is a huge, huge first step. So what is the first step act? What is it? What is it do, what are its goals? And are there going to be more steps after the first step?
Speaker 3:Uh, Mike, all great questions obviously. Um, yeah, and I would like to address the, the interesting, interesting point that there has been limited media exposure on this kind of thing. I'm one of the reasons is that it is truly a bipartisan piece,
Speaker 2:right? And that's why you think, you know, you have, because we're always like, oh, you know, the Democrats or Republicans, they can't reach across the aisle. But with this they actually have legislation, you know, and it's going into law. It's, it's huge. They actually been getting been getting much play at all.
Speaker 3:So, uh, you know, people talk a big game about bipartisan, uh, legislation. But the truth of the matter is that, especially with the media, I would say they, like people arguing and yelling and screaming at each other more than they do actually agreeing on something. Um, so in this particular act here, I mean, here you have a, just as an example, your van Jones from CNN and jared Kushner both working together to make the first step act happen, uh, with the support of the trump administration and Donald trump and the support of key democratic leaders, right, and cure Republican leader
Speaker 2:Van Jones, who actually penned a, uh, a piece for CNN on 10 reasons to celebrate the first step.
Speaker 3:Exactly. And uh, and, and working with jared Kushner who is part of the trump voters, right? So, you know, so this is a true, a true bipartisan situation. Uh, okay. So what is it, the first Hep Act? It's actually an acronym. I think it's an interesting acronym. First step stands for already formally incarcerated. Reenter society transformed safety safely transitioning every person act first step. All right, so first step back. Okay. So, and it's aimed at drastically reducing its overall goal is drastically reducing the national recidivism rate by rehabilitating more prisoners while they are incarcerated. And it's considered a major success for bipartisan federal prison reform, right? Uh, it establishes a system, uh, to assess the risk that a person will re offend as well as a person's needs throughout their sentence. And this really piggybacks onto, um, steps that are taken and are already there within the federal system that exists within state systems to. Sure, uh, but so it's really building that up to provide better evaluation, better support, uh, so that people are less likely to offend again. And, uh, the goal is that I'm not only will it lead to better lives for former inmates, were there become productive citizens, uh, but also, uh, will protect the community because they won't be committing crimes. And finally, uh, it's projected and we never know, but we hope that the projections are right by the congressional budget office projects. It should save about$414, million dollars, taxpayer dollars over the next 10 years. So it does a lot. Now. There's a bunch of benefits to it. Sure. Uh, the key, one of the biggest key benefits includes giving more discretion to federal judges when sentencing drug offenders.
Speaker 2:So they're basically going to be changing the federal sentencing guidelines
Speaker 3:and eliminating some of the mandatory minimum stringent mentor minimums and allowing some mechanisms already exists like a thing called safety valve. I'm not getting into all the technical aspects of that safety valve all was already exists, but it increases the discretion under safety valve so that judges have more discretion and this is in line with moving forward, giving judges federal judges more discretion in sentencing has been something that's been going on now for almost two generation since the mid two thousands that there was a series of opinions by this Supreme Court that gave back federal judges their sentencing powers that had been stripped almost entirely away in 1987 by the federal sentencing guidelines. So we kind of rebalanced it and this works to rebalance it again both by changing the guidelines again, expanding safety valve, limiting the impact of mandatory minimum sentencing in some ways and whom it applies to and things like that.
Speaker 2:So depending on the charge, whether it be a for, let's say, a drug charge where the offender, no weapon, there was no violence involve, uh, there were certain mandatory minimums depending on the amount of drugs someone would have. Does this mean that the judge, that he or she can basically, they don't have to go by, that they can make up, they're not make, I don't want to say make up their own rules, but that they have more discretion on whether they can, they want to have either upward or downward departure on the time that, uh, their sentencing someone to.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Okay. And it's really a situation where the, by giving the federal judges more discretion in sentencing, you're eliminating two concepts, not eliminating them, can't eliminate them completely. And at times they can be useful. I'll say that at times that can be useful, but there's two things that I really don't like. One is our zero tolerance policies. I understand them. They are sometimes necessary, especially at the level of law enforcement we need to police. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Real big into, you know, the whole zero tolerance policies. Uh, no matter what it is, to be honest,
Speaker 3:I think the hamstring police officer discretion especially, and this is discussed and books like thinking about crime, very famous book of Britain in the 19 seventies, that was then, it's kind of a formation of a lot of things that the Giuliani Administration and Bratton took on back in the nineties to help reform the criminal justice and the way the police operated in New York, the whole broken windows, broken windows policing is partly based upon at least limiting zero tolerance policies to give the police and prosecutors, but especially the police because it always starts with the plates right there on the front lines. Giving them greater discretion to this helps meaning the first step act helps eliminate the thing that I really don't like more than anything else. And being a criminal defense lawyer, this makes perfect sense. Sure. And that's called what I call one size fits all justice and was part of the problem with one size fits all justice, is that it is encouraged by both sides. It's not a liberal argument. It's not a conservative argument. It's actually both at times. Conservatives like those who like not all conservatives, like for like zero tolerance policies or one size fits all sentencing, right? Yeah. Uh, and not all liberals like them either, right? But you have an argument for that on both sides of the spectrum. On the conservative side, the argument is law and order. So they weren't mandatory minimums for law and order. Holistic mandatory minimum sentencing. So they want law and order. They want everybody treated the same. One size fits all on the left. They're worried about equal treatment. They don't want the person of color or the young poor treated differently from, uh, the son of the wealthy family that belongs to the country club like that. So they want equal justice. So therefore, in a way mandatory minimums, one size fits all in my mind, one size fits all justice is where you get a lot of injustice when it comes down to the individual defendant. Because every defendant is different. Every person is an individual human being and the person that has to make the ultimate decision in a case where a person is found guilty of what they're accused of or they plead guilty to what they're accused of is the judge and judges have to judge. It's their job to judge, right? It's not my job to judge the defense lawyer it my job to defend the prosecutor's job is not the judge is prosecute. Sure. The police officer job is not to judge your police officer job is to arrest probable cause and lock somebody up. Oh right. Everybody has their own power under the separation of powers concept in a courtroom, right? All part of the criminal justice system, all part of the criminal justice system. So who judges the judge? Well, the legislation should sort of tried to do is take that discretion in judging away from the judge and create one size fits all justice and then nobody complains about it because everybody kind of wants to support it for one reason or another, but at the end of the day, that's where you get a lot of injustice in this deals with that meaning the first step act really does a good job of dealing with that because it eliminates some of that and gives more judicial discretion.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Now, you know, I know that, you know, under the, uh, 19, 94 crime bill, you know, and, and the war on drugs back when, uh, you know, crack was king on the streets of our major cities. You know, that a lot of, there were, there's a, there's thousands serving, which some people would say outdated sentences for these crimes. Will talk about that at a whole lot more. Dealing with the first step back when arrested continues or the neutral one, oh, six, seven.