This new Law360 piece, headlined "2nd Look Law Needed To Fix Broken Criminal Justice System," gives attention to a recent ABA panel discussing second-look sentencing reforms. Here are excerpts:
To address the mass incarceration that has resulted from older policing practices, which has disproportionately impacted Black men, federal and local governments should adopt so-called second look laws that allow incarcerated individuals to petition judges to reevaluate their sentences after a certain period of time, experts said Thursday at the American Bar Association's annual fall criminal justice conference.
Mary Price, general counsel at Families Against Mandatory Minimums, or FAMM, a nonprofit advocacy organization seeking to end mandatory sentencing, said that our criminal justice system has been addicted to putting people in prison to manage problems leading to mass incarceration, and this needs to stop. "I don't think we are going to be able to achieve justice in the system until we not only reform the police and practices, but we also ensure that the legacy of older policing — in the form of people serving sentences that are way out of proportion with their conduct, and also people who are thrown away because the nature of the offense or the addiction — is also addressed," Price said.
Last year, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., along with Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., introduced the Second Look Act of 2019 that proposes allowing any incarcerated individual who has served at least 10 years to request that their sentence be reevaluated to determine if they are eligible for early release or a sentence reduction, but the bill hasn't passed in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives yet.
David Singleton, the executive director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, said during a panel titled Second Look & Incarceration with Price at the ABA conference that a challenge to getting a federal second look law passed is that lawmakers want carveouts that would exempt certain crimes, such as murder or sex offenses, from the law. Singleton said carveouts defeat the purpose of the law because they leave people behind. "We have to move away from these carveouts," Singleton said. "If we accept carveouts, the advocates of change, we are throwing people under the bus."...
Booker reinforced the panelists' words during his keynote speech at the conference on Friday, saying that criminal justice reform needs to be throughout the country's entire justice system. "We must commit ourselves to continuing the work of reforming a savagely broken system and that means everything — our policing to what happens with sentencing to what happens inside our prisons to what happens upon release," Booker said.
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