Last week, the Times published a piece congratulating Brooklyn Judge Patricia DiMango for bringingher "brash style and forceful personality, not to mention her relentless efficiency" to the Bronx. The Times reported that she cut "by 40 percent the backlog of those [felony cases] over two years old...leading senior court officials to declare a partial victory after years of failed efforts." Nobody is sure whether the backlog will promptly return when she, and other outside judges brought in to try cases, head home.
I don't doubt that Judge DiMango has shaken things up, and it sounds like she's unclogged the felony case pipes. But now Robin Steinberg, Executive Director of the Bronx Defenders - one of the two Bronx public defender shops - is throwing a bit of cold water on this upbeat narrative. She notes that the systematic delays in Bronx misdemeanor cases - the overwhelming majority of prosecutions - effectively deny trial rights and grind up the lives of thousands of other Bronx residents. (Note: I was a PD very, very early on with the Bronx Defenders before left to teach at the University of Alabama in 1998.)
The reality is that mere misdemeanors devastate an individual's life. One need onlyconsider the difficulty a conviction poses for job applicants. Eric Holder is right to focus on the mass incarceration attending the War on Drugs. But the thousands of individuals who've picked up a few misdemeanor convictions are a less noticed but brutal legacy of this War. When a sizable portion of residents in a community are functionally excluded from large swaths of the job market, you have to ask whether the War was ultimately on behalf of the community - or against it.
Comments