WJI is taking a look at justice-related bills adopted during the 2019-20 session. Act 144 made mail theft its own crime. Mail theft is defined as taking a letter, postcard, or package from a home or other building. Taking fewer than 10 piece of mail now is a misdemeanor punishable by up to nine months in jail and a $10,000 fine; stealing 10 to 30 pieces of mail is a felony punishable by up to 3½ years in prison and a $10,000 fine, and stealing 30 or more pieces of mail is punishable by up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine. That last penalty also applies if the stolen mail belongs to an at-risk adult. The law was introduced as Assembly Bill 734. The companion bill was Senate Bill 656. The lead authors of AB 734 were Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield) and Scott Allen (R-Waukesha). The lead sponsors of SB 656 were David Craig (R-Big Bend) and Alberta Darling (R-River Hills). The Assembly adopted the bill, 84-13. All the Republicans supported the bill, as did 21 Democrats. The Senate adopted the bill without dissent. Gov. Tony Evers signed it into law on March 3. Fiscal estimates: No fiscal estimates were filed. Excerpts
Testimony for: Hutton – More shoppers than ever before are skipping the lines at brick and mortar stores instead choosing to shop from the convenience of their homes.... Unfortunately, this trend has also led to the rise of so-called "porch pirates"-thieves who steal delivered packages from a person's doorstep. According to a recent study, as many as one in four people have had a package stolen from their residence. Our laws should keep up with the shift in consumer trends and the resulting criminal trends. Under current law, it is illegal to steal mail or any other item. However, while the act of theft is in current statute, the act of stealing multiple items from multiple residences cannot be considered under the same charge. Repeat criminals are often released after paying a small court fee because the value of the packages stolen falls below the threshold of more serious theft offenses. This bill will create a penalty for individuals who steal packages from porches and other locations near a residence. It also allows for multiple package thefts to be charged as one crime if they occur as a course of action. It further clarifies that theft of any package or piece of mail delivered by any carrier to any building would be charged as mail theft. John Milotzky, Wauwatosa Police Department – If you order a package from a retailer and it is stolen from your porch, you’ll be inconvenienced by having to report the theft and wait for a replacement product. Now imagine that it’s not just a replaceable object that is stolen, but that it’s your identity or your banking information. What the media didn’t necessarily show in their “porch pirate” stories are the numerous crimes that occur following the theft of mail – crimes that can have a long lasting impact on the victims…. Once in possession of a victim’s checks, suspects can change the payee and cash the check, which is a one-time crime. But we also see them use victim’s checks to create counterfeit checks using the same routing and account information…. Testimony against: None Registering for the bill: Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association, Wisconsin Independent Businesses Inc. Registering against the bill: No one.
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The Milwaukee Common Council on Tuesday unanimously approved spending $100,000 to fund a lawyer to represent indigent defendants in Municipal Court. The money will come from the city's federal Community Development Block Grant allocation. The lawyer will be provided through a contract with Legal Action of Wisconsin. The funding proposal was part of a package that was approved without discussion. A short-term pilot project of the defense lawyer program last year was successful, but the city originally chose not to extend the program in 2020. The Wisconsin Justice Initiative advocated for the city to fund the pilot project and to restore the defense lawyer position. "This is great news and a big step toward fairness in Municipal Court," WJI Executive Director Gretchen Schuldt said. "Mayor Barrett and the Common Council deserve a big round of applause for their support." She noted the city took about two years to prepare a contract for the 2019 pilot.
"That kind of delay can't happen again," she said. "There are tickets issued during the George Floyd protests in the Municipal Court pipeline, some of them questionable. There needs to be a defense lawyer available to help those who need it." Alderman Michael J. Murphy, the budget amendment that created the pilot program, said he was pleased with the new council vote. “This program has been exceptional in helping indigent defendants who would otherwise be stymied in their ability to work their cases to a more positive outcome, because of poverty, unpaid citations, or driver’s license issues,” he said. The city is not legally obligated to provide defense counsel to Municipal Court defendants who cannot afford to hire their own lawyers. That obligation is limited to criminal courts – Municipal Court is considered a civil court and the monetary penalties levied there are considered civil forfeitures. By Margo Kirchner Criminal law rarely provides justice in cases of police brutality and violence because convictions are so difficult to obtain even with video evidence, according to a Villanova University law school associate dean. “It’s hard to win cases against police officers, and because plaintiffs usually lose, police are not deterred from their bad behavior,” said Teressa Ravenell, who also is a professor at Villanova’s Charles Widger School of Law. Ravenell made her comments during the American Constitution Society’s recent briefing call on police violence and systematic racism in the U.S. legal system. ACS held the call in response to the killing of George Floyd and waves of protest across the country. Ravenell said that federal law allows individuals to sue when their civil rights are violated by government actors, but that law has not prevented police violence either. The law, Section 1983, has become “another example of systematic failure,” she remarked. The statute is “not inherently flawed,” but the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the statute has caused it to fail, she said. Problematic interpretation of Section 1983 includes the judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity, Ravenell said. The qualified immunity doctrine protects public officials from civil liability unless their conduct violates a clearly established constitutional right about which a reasonable person would have known. The Supreme Court has written that the doctrine protects "all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law” and balances the need to hold public officials accountable when they act irresponsibly with the need to shield them from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably.
In a 2018 dissent, however, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the doctrine “tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.” The doctrine has recently shielded officers from liability for stealing $225,000 while executing a search warrant, shooting a 10-year-old boy in his backyard while pursuing a suspect, and slamming to the ground a woman who turned to walk away from an officer toward her daughter, rendering the woman unconscious. Ravenell set forth five large hurdles plaintiffs face under current law, which in her view result in continued racist law enforcement. First, the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment cases give police officers too much power to stop, investigate, and arrest Black people. Police may legally stop someone if an officer has reasonable suspicion to think that criminal activity is afoot, and that standard can be met when a person acts evasively in a high-crime area. Ravenell called “high-crime area” a “fancy way” of saying poor, Black neighborhoods. As a result, Blacks are more likely to be stopped by police. Further, Blacks are pulled over for traffic violations more than any other group, she said. Second, the Court’s Fourth Amendment cases give police officers too much license to use force. The court has allowed officers to use deadly force when they reasonably believe a person poses an immediate threat of harm to the officer or others, and too often officers view unarmed Black men as threats, Ravenell said. Ravenell proposed that the qualified immunity standard should at the least be transformed from considering what a reasonable or average officer would do to what a well-trained officer would do in the situation. Third, Ravenell said, under current law plaintiffs face too many causation problems because they must establish which specific officers harmed them. For instance, a protester shot by a rubber bullet must show which officer fired the shot. But that is impossible if officers will not testify against each other, she remarked. Fourth, the qualified immunity defense protects officers in too many situations when the law was not clearly established at the time the officers acted. “Many people are writing about this right now,” she said, adding that “we need to eliminate the qualified immunity defense.” Fifth, even when plaintiffs succeed, verdicts against officers fail to alter conduct because officers do not pay the verdicts against them; taxpayers do. Ravenell closed by noting that the failure to fire violent officers also played a role in creating the current crisis. The officer who killed George Floyd had 18 prior complaints against him, she noted. Ravenell compared the vastly greater money spent on monitoring parolees with that spent on monitoring police. “We need to ensure that police departments have the incentive and the means to terminate the recidivist officers,” plus a database to track them so they are not hired by other communities, she said. Another call participant, Taja-Nia Henderson, a professor at Rutgers Law School and dean of the Rutgers Graduate School, discussed the historical predicates for police abuses today. Henderson described how policing in the United States has always been linked to property interests and the control of black and brown bodies. |
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