Night courts, a key part of Tony Blair’s attempt to tackle “yob culture” are to be abandoned after proving a costly failure.

"The courts were supposed to operate around the clock, to bring instant justice to criminals who terrorised city centres. But the huge cost of the scheme, opposition from workers in the criminal justice system and a failure to provide enough cell space for offenders, means the policy will now be abandoned."

"Instead of delivering swift justice to young offenders and drunken thugs, the courts dealt only with a few minor offences, such as begging, shoplifting and prostitution. Night courts were first suggested by Sir John Stevens, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who was impressed by the swift justice delivered by them in New York. The idea was seized on by the Prime Minister as part of new Labour’s tough law and order rhetoric in the last general election campaign. Mr Blair indicated his support in a speech decrying “yob culture”.

"Officials at 10 Downing Street pressed for pilot schemes to start as soon as possible, despite misgivings among many in the criminal justice system that the idea was a gimmick. Two schemes were launched in London and Manchester in May at a cost of £5.4 million."

“The US justice system places great reliance on plea bargaining and therefore quick justice, the British system does not. This expensive experiment must not be rolled out nationally as it would waste money that could be put elsewhere in the hard-pressed criminal justice system.”

"On some weekends when the courts were expected to be at their busiest, only ten people appeared. Many cases were adjourned because paperwork or evidence was not ready. Mr Fletcher said that during the pilot scheme it cost an average of £4,000 to process a defendant compared with £1,610 in an ordinary court."

This is our final post for the year--we wanted to end on an optimistic note, and we just came across the article below. Have a safe and happy holiday, we'll be back on a normal blogging schedule January 1.

428 legal scholars wrote a 3-1/2-page letter to outgoing Illinois Governor George Ryan today, saying there is legal precedent to defend him if he decides to commute the death sentences of all 157 inmates on death row in Illinois to life in prison.

"The purpose of the letter is to express a legal opinion that if the governor follows his conscience, and if his conscience tells him that large-scale commutation or commutation of all [157] guys in Illinois is appropriate, that he would be acting legally and within the vein of American legal tradition."

Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Jimmy Carter, among others, granted blanket clemency for people convicted of various offenses.

"The clemency power traditionally has been used not only to correct injustices in individual cases but also as a response to problems in the systemic application of law,'' the letter states.

The Judge in the case of the accused sniper, juvenile John Malvo, ordered the prosecution to turn over to the defense any statements Malvo made to law enforcement. We're wondering why Malvo had to go to Court to get them in the first place. The Virginia rules of criminal procedure, like those in almost every state, provide that an accused is entitled to have any statements he made to authorities disclosed to him. How else could he make a meaningful motion to suppress the statements, or prepare for a hearing on their admission or exclusion? We can't see any justification for the states' withholding of the statements.

The Times of London is reporting that the bomb seized from the baggage handler at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris was primed and "ready for action."

"The explosives and detonators that were allegedly found on Saturday in the car of Abderazak Besseghir, a French citizen of Algerian origin, amounted to a bomb that was "ready for action", police said today. The arsenal consisted of five sticks of plastic explosive, two detonators and a slow-burning fuse as well as an automatic pistol and a machine pistol."

"Mr Besseghir has not provided any information since his arrest at the end of his working shift on Saturday evening. He was detained by airport police after a member of the armed forces, who was passing through the airport, reported that he saw a man handling an automatic weapon in his car in one of the indoor car parks."

On the topic of airport security, we took two flights the other day, from two major U.S. cities, and neither one had screeners at the gate doing random security checks. A few people on the flight commented on their noticeable abscence. Does anyone know if this is permanent or just a fluke?

Congressman Dan Davis (D-IL) is concerned about inmates getting jobs when they get out of prison. He will be re-introducing his bill, the Ex-Offender Self-Sufficiency Act, which would create 100,000 units of housing for convicts featuring job training and social services on site.

"We've got a serious criminal justice challenge,'' Davis said, noting that nearly half end up back in jail within three years. His district, which includes much of the central city, near north, south and west sides, is home to 40 percent of those ex-offenders. Even though more than 70 percent of them were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, they are barred from many jobs.

"We need to have something for them to do,'' Davis said. "Otherwise it's almost inevitable they are going to be back in the penitentiary.''

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We're taking our New Year's break now and will be mostly silent until January 1. We won't be updating the newsfeed before then, but you can access the news sites we frequent the most by clicking on the "media" link on the top right.

We've done a lot of posting this week, including this morning, so we encourage you to hang around, read some of what we have to say, and also visit the links on the right.

Happy New Year to all, we hope it rings in justice and peace.

Human Rights Watch ( HRW), based in New York, has written to President Bush, urging him to investigate allegations that suspected al-Qaeda and Taleban detainees are being tortured. Here are their allegations and the text of the letter.

The letter says that immediate steps must be taken "to clarify that the use of torture is not US policy." The group says that otherwise the Bush administration risks criminal prosecution in almost any national criminal court.

At issue are the CIA's "stress and defense" techniques that include "keeping prisoners "standing or kneeling for hours" while hooded or wearing spray-painted goggles, holding them in "awkward, painful positions" and depriving them of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights."

"Diane F. Orentlicher, a professor of international law at American University, said she believes the CIA techniques are a clear violation of international law. She noted that the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 1978 that the use by British forces in North Ireland of five similar techniques -- hooding, forced standing, deprivation of sleep, subjection to noise and deprivation of food and drink -- were not torture. But, Orentlicher said, the European court found that such methods were "inhuman and degrading," and therefore illegal under various treaties. "One way or the other, it's clearly prohibited," she said."

The letter is a reaction to last week's Washington Post article which we wrote about at length here.

For our post on the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute which Bush refused to sign thereby preventing the U.S. from participating in the promulgation of the Court's rules, go here.

Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle justly takes Bush to task for the puny mercy he exhibited in the limited pardons he granted last week.

"Those sentences are peanuts compared to the sentences being served by many first-time nonviolent drug offenders in the federal system this Christmas. Laws that were supposed to put away drug kingpins have been subverted so that drug dealers can turn in the help and get soft time, while their gofers may serve decades-long sentences."

"If, in 1986, Congress had told the public that it was passing a sentencing law that looked to be tough on kingpins but in fact would enable the biggest drug players to avoid long sentences, Americans would have been appalled. If the public had understood that the only true check on prosecutors who are harsher on petty criminals than high-level drug dealers would be the presidential pardon, Congress (one would hope) would have been too ashamed to pass the legislation."

"If Congress didn't know what it was doing then, federal law enforcement knows all too well now what the law has wrought: Get-out-of-jail-free cards for kingpins; and despair for their dupes."

"Only one man in America has the power to end these injustices and insure that the punishment fits the crime. How it breaks my heart that George W. Bush, who is such a giant, has limited himself to meting out pardons to bootleggers and a man who rolled back an odometer. It is beneath him."

We just took the Libertarian test that we found on Radley Balko's The Agitator, and here are the results:

"You would feel most at home in the Southwest region You advocate a large degree of personal freedom and a large degree of government control over the economy. Your neighbors include such folks as Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Hilary Clinton, and Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, and may refer to themselves as "liberals," "left-wing liberals," "civil libertarians," "democratic socialists," "egalitarians," or "anarcho-socialists."

We always knew we were to the left of Jesse Jackson.

Michigan Governor John Engler has signed the bill approved by the state legislature that eliminates mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. The bill is effective March 1 and will apply to those already in prison.

Under the new law, Judges can use sentencing guidelines to impose sentences based on a range of factors in each case, rather than solely drug weight. The bill also replaces the lifetime probation requirement for the lowest-level offenders with a five-year term of probation. The board will have the discretion to grant early to some inmates.

The passage of this bill was years in the making. Major kudos are due FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums). Laura Sagar, FAMM's executive director had this to say:

"Harsh mandatory minimums, originally intended to target drug "king pins" warehoused many nonviolent, low-level drug offenders at a very high cost to taxpayers. Now judges can use their discretion under sentencing guidelines to more closely fit the punishment to the crime and the offender."

"This change is being closely examined by states across the country as they grapple with the unintended consequences of their own mandatory minimum sentences."

"This historic act is also a victory for a grassroots movement for justice. "It is the culmination of years of grassroots lobbying efforts by thousands of FAMM members affected by mandatory minimums that were among the harshest in the nation. These families brought the human face of sentencing injustices to lawmakers and convinced member of both parties that change was urgently needed."

The bill was a bipartisan measure supported by groups such as the "Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, the Michigan Judges Association, the Michigan Association of Drug Court Professionals, the Michigan Catholic Conference, Michigan's Children, and the NAACP (Detroit Branch), among many others."

Why did the prosecutors go along? David Morse, President of the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, said:

Michigan's prosecutors recognize that an effective drug policy is a combination of criminal justice strategies, readily available drug treatment programs, incarceration where appropriate, and prevention activities in schools, businesses, and homes. That is why we support a responsible approach to replacing the mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes with sentences that are appropriate for the crime."

Former Michigan Republican Governor William G. Milliken has said his signing mandatory minimum drug sentences into law in 1978 was "the worst mistake of my career" and campaigned for their repeal.

This is FAMM's second win in Michigan. In 1998 they led the drive to repeal a law that mandated life without for anyone convicted of delivery or conspiracy to deliver 650 grams or more of heroin or cocaine.

FAMM's analysis of the new drug sentencing laws is here.

The Telegraph of London reports on LA Police Chief Bill Bratton's attempts to rid LA of street gangs and crime. They call him the blunt super-cop, because he has promised to:

"...flood the districts where gangs operate with foot patrols, ending a policy that advised officers not to get out of their vehicles for their own safety in what were essentially unofficial "no go" zones.

To try to disrupt the gangs' territorial nature he has also ordered daily cleaning of the coded graffiti by which they mark their sphere of influence, and in a series of high-profile raids his officers have already seized several caches of assault rifles.

Mr Bratton, 54, described the gangs' activities as "homeland terrorism", and added: "It is time to fight the internal war on terrorism as well." It is an approach that has resulted in the Los Angeles Times nicknaming him "supercop" and gained him the full backing of the local police officers' union."

Bratton has his detractors, but many, particularly mothers and relatives of the many murdered young men,"have embraced the possibility of a new dawn."

"This news is sweet," said Alice Brown, who recently led a demonstration of dozens of women in support of the crackdown. "We are watching our children die like dogs. We have to stop this."

The article has several links to other articles about Bratton, including this one by TalkLeft.

Former NYC cop Charles Schwarz has begun serving his five year prison term for his role in the brutal assault by his partner, Justin Volpe, on Abner Louima.

He will be serving his time at the Federal Prison Camp in Deluth, MN.