The Center for Public Integrity

A California attorney featured in a Center for Public Integrity investigation into school discipline will testify at a hearing at the Golden State’s Capitol in Sacramento on April 11. 

California’s Legislature is considering a number of proposals aimed at reducing student suspensions and expulsions, and paving the way for more use of alternatives to removing students.

Attorney Tim McKinley of Kern County, California, represented students whose experiences were recounted in the Center’s report on Kern, whose schools expelled more students than anywhere else in the state last year. The Center story included data showing that Kern’s schools expelled students at a rate four times greater than the California average and more than seven times the national average. 

Kern’s schools also had one of California’s highest rates of student suspension, a punishment that often paves the way for expulsion. Statistics released in March by the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection showed high rates of suspension and expulsion of black students, in particular, from Kern’s schools. Latino students are the largest ethnic group in Kern schools and are suspended and expelled at high rates as well.

Laura Faer, an attorney with the Los Angeles-based pro bono law group Public Counsel, helped organize witnesses to testify on April 11 before the California Assembly Education Committee. The group is sponsoring some of the discipline-related proposals before the Legislature, Faer said, and McKinley’s clients’ experiences illustrate a need for reforms.

A new report is adding fuel to a growing debate over the impact of deportations of illegal immigrants who have roots in communities and U.S.-born children.  Between January and June of 2011, immigration officials deported more than 46,400 people who said they were parents of children who were born in the U.S. and therefore U.S. citizens, according to a new study for Congress prepared by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

No solid information exists to measure what happens to deported parents’ children. Some leave with their parents, others remain here with family members or on their own and some may go into foster care.

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report with an estimate that about 100,000 parents of U.S. children were deported over the course of a decade between 1998 and 2007.

Congress directed ICE to begin tracking numbers to better gauge the extent of this phenomenon. The agency is complying, but officials say they do not verify each claim that a deportee has citizen children.

The new report, obtained by iWatch News from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, prompted some Democratic Latino lawmakers to attack the Obama Administration over continuing deportations of people with children who are U.S. citizens.  

Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Charles Gonzalez, a Texas congressman, said in a statement that many deportees are members of “mixed status” families, where a spouse, not just a child, may be a legal resident or a U.S. citizen.

In a report released this month, the Children’s Defense Fund has analyzed recent national data on gunfire deaths and produced some alarming figures on child casualties.  

The report also criticizes a wave of new state gun-rights laws that the Washington D.C.-based advocacy group argues put children in ever more peril.

The nonprofit advocacy group dedicated its report, “Protect Kids, Not Guns 2012,” to Florida teen Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead in February by a neighborhood watch volunteer.

George Zimmerman, 28, disregarded police advice and followed the unarmed Martin, 17, because Zimmerman thought the boy looked “suspicious.” Zimmerman killed Martin, who was walking to his father’s girlfriend’s home, during a confrontation and claims he acted in self-defense.

The Children’s Defense Fund report, which was released March 23, is based largely on U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from 2008 and 2009. The group’s analysis found that 2,947 children and teens died from gunfire in 2008 and 2,793 died in 2009.

Over time, the report’s charts show, child gunfire deaths rose from the early 1980s to a peak of 3,625 in the homicide category alone in 1993. Gun deaths of children overall began falling until 2004, when homicides and suicides again began to fluctuate.

The group acknowledges that its analysis found that the total number of children and teens injured by gunfire fell in 2009 to 13,791 from a high over the last decade of 20,596 in 2008.   

Among the report’s other findings:

In 2004, the National Rifle Association honored Republican Florida state legislator Dennis Baxley with a plum endorsement: Its Defender of Freedom award.

The following year, Baxley, a state representative, worked closely with the NRA to push through Florida’s unprecedented “stand your ground” law, which allows citizens to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” their safety is threatened in a public setting, like a park or a street.

People would no longer be restrained by a “duty to retreat” from a threat while out in public, and would be free from prosecution or civil liability if they acted in self-defense.

Florida’s law is now under a cloud as a result of the controversial February shooting of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Sanford, Fla. The 28-year-old shooter, George Zimmerman, who was licensed to carry a gun — and once had a brush with police — claims he acted in self-defense after a confrontation with Martin, and some legal experts say Florida’s law could protect Zimmerman, who has not been charged. The case has inflamed passions nationwide in part because Zimmerman is Hispanic and Martin was African-American. Baxley, whose state party has benefited from large NRA donations, contends his law shouldn’t shield Zimmerman at all because he pursued Martin.

The NRA has been curiously quiet on the matter since the shooting as the nation takes stock — in light of the Martin case and other similar examples — of whether “stand-your-ground” laws are more dangerous than useful to enhance public safety. The gun-rights organization did not respond to requests for comment. But the group’s silence contrasts sharply with its history of unabashed activism on stand-your-ground legislation. Since the Florida measure passed, the NRA has flexed its considerable muscle and played a crucial role in the passage of more than 20 similar laws nationwide.

It’s any parent’s nightmare: Getting a call with the news that your child has been killed. So it’s not hard to imagine the anguish being experienced by the parents of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.   

Deeply disturbing information is emerging about the course of events leading up to a man’s Feb. 26 shooting of Trayvon, a Florida high school student, after the man called police and then failed to heed a dispatcher’s request for him not to follow a “suspicious” person.   

“We don’t need you to do that,” the dispatcher in Sanford, north of Orlando, replied when George Zimmerman, an aggressive neighborhood-watch volunteer, told the dispatcher he was following a “black male” who looked like “there was something wrong with him.”   

Trayvon was black, unarmed, wearing a “hoodie.” His shooting and the aftermath — no arrest of 28-year-old Zimmerman — has triggered outrage nationwide. Late Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced an investigation into this case, which has exposed a current of distrust and fury at police in Sanford. 

There’s also talk about the risks black youths, especially, face because of racial profiling, whether it’s by authority figures or ordinary citizens. Trayvon was staying at his father’s girlfriend’s home in the same complex where Zimmerman lives, and was walking back from buying some snacks.

As the nation’s highest court prepares to hear oral arguments today on the constitutionality of sending juvenile killers to life in prison with no chance for parole, an unlikely trio of Bostonians is hopeful the justices move quickly to abolish the sentence.

“I would give my life for Hassan and he would do the same for me,” said retired Massachusetts Juvenile Court Judge Mark E. Lawton, speaking about a teenage killer he sentenced more than 20 years ago — but has now become Lawton’s close friend.

“If he were the devil incarnate I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, but he is a great tool for goodness,” Lawton said last week, as he prepared to introduce Hassan Smith, now 40, to his juvenile law class at New England School of Law in Boston.  

Smith, now a father of three who mentors troubled inner-city youth, believes firmly teenagers — like the one he once was — deserve a chance at redemption no matter how serious their mistakes.

It is that very question the high court is being asked to rule on in the appeals of two-14-year-old killers. Like Smith, who was 16 when he shot Jeffrey Booker in Boston, both inmates are black.

One of those defendants, Evan Miller, from Alabama, was 14 in 2003 when he and an older boy fatally beat a drunken neighbor to death in a trailer park, lit the victim’s home on fire and fled.

The second defendant appealing to the high court, Kuntrell Jackson, was convicted in a 1999 armed robbery in which another youth fatally shot an Arkansas convenience store clerk. Both Miller and Jackson were sentenced to life without parole.

Tuesday is a big day for juvenile justice in this country. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments both challenging and defending the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole for cases of homicide. 

The high court will examine the cases of two men convicted of homicide for two separate killings, in Arkansas and Alabama. Both men were 14 years old at the time of the incidents, and they are represented by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. The group represents indigent defendants, including juveniles, and defendants its lawyers feel have faced unjust treatment or racial bias.

The initiative is arguing that life without the possibility of parole for minors — or “death in prison” — amounts to the sort of “cruel and unusual” punishment outlawed by the Constitution.  

Arguments challenging the constitutionality of such sentences will touch on questions of child development and brain science, and the ability of youths to transform and succeed in efforts at rehabilitation. 

The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, based in Georgia, has posted an in-depth story that includes details about the killings the two youths committed with other youths, the arguments put forth by the Equal Justice Initiative and the various directions the court’s ruling could eventually take. Currently, the story notes, there are about 2,570 convicts serving life without parole sentences they received as minors.  Seven states bar such sentences.

A newly released pool of federal data reveals that Kern County, California — whose schools were the subject of a recent Center for Public Integrity story — has exceptionally high rates of suspension and expulsions for minority students.

The new federal information dovetails with the findings of the Center’s investigation last December, which showed that Kern County, an oil and farm region in the Central Valley, is California’s expulsion capital. In 2010-2011, Kern’s schools had four times the state average for expulsions and more than seven times the last known national average in 2006. The raw number of students expelled in sparsely populated Kern was even greater than the number expelled in Los Angeles, which has nine times the student body.

Parents in Kern complained about high rates of removal for children and about the process for challenging decisions, and some black parents told the Center they felt schools were too quick to oust their children.

California state data analyzed by the Center demonstrated that the vast majority of Kern expulsions were not for “zero tolerance” violations that require expulsion, such as gun possession. The analysis showed that most of Kern’s expulsions were discretionary, and that the schools had unusually high rates of expulsion for defiance, disruption and obscenity. More than one in four expulsions statewide for obscenity or vulgarity took place in Kern.

Ethnic disparities

The state data, however, did not include a breakdown of the ethnicity of students. The new federal statistics do contain ethnic breakdowns, and confirm some parents’ concerns.

Three guards at a girls’ prison in Georgia have been cleared on a disturbing allegation, but one was fired and two were disciplined in connection with other misbehavior, our colleagues at the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange report.

It’s the latest in a series of allegations of violence, employee misconduct, corruption and other trouble inside Georgia’s juvenile detention system. The state’s new Juvenile Justice commissioner is scrutinizing its problematic history and suggesting reforms. One problem: The system’s guards are comparatively low-paid and there is frequent turnover.

A male ward in an Augusta, Ga. detention center was indicted in November and accused of beating another ward to death.

The latest scandal involving girls stems from an assault on a girl by another female ward inside a Rome, Ga., detention center in December. The victim, who has lacerations and a broken nose, alleged that the attack was instigated by guards; she alleged that the assault was payback because the victim had previously confided in her mother that guards had offered her food from outside the prison if she would fight another girl.

Guards passed lie-detector tests and were exonerated after insisting that this accusation and similar allegations of food bribes by other witnesses were false.