| Amid Detailed Supervision in
SDNY Judge Berman Aims To Measure Recidivism
Benefits
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Exclusive, Patreon
BBC
- Guardian
UK - Honduras
- The
Source
SDNY COURTHOUSE,
April 29 – In the Federal
criminal justice system, terms
of imprisonment are followed
by Supervised Release.
In terms of news,
this is usually covered if at
all when a supervisee is
alleged to have violated the
conditions, and faces the
penalty of being
re-incarcerated.
But there
is another, less newsy part of
supervision: check-in meetings
between the supervisee, his or
her lawyer, the government
prosecutor and Probation
officer and the judge who has
overseen the case and imposed
the sentence.
Since it
came to cover the U.S.
District Court for the
Southern District of New York
on a daily basis, first in
connection with the United
Nations bribery cases of Ng
Lap Seng and then Patrick
Ho, which got
Inner City Press banned
from the UN without any right
to appeal, Inner City Press
has covered Supervised Release
like all other proceedings.
Now
there is a project afoot to
try to measure the efficacy of
hands-on judicial supervision.
At the
conclusion of a typically
detailed supervision session
by SDNY Judge Richard M.
Berman on April 29, with
supervisee Justin Acosta
charged in 2016 with cocaine
trafficking, Judge Berman
asked the Assistant US
Attorney to be sure to order
the transcript. More on Patreon
here.
The response was
that transcripts of such
proceedings were usually not
ordered, but upon Judge
Berman's request would be in
this instance.
Judge
Berman said that an intern in
his Chambers knowledgeable in
statistics has been reviewing
transcripts and outcomes,
presumably including
recidivism data, to access the
benefits of the type of
detailed supervision
proceedings conducted by Judge
Berman.
In the
April 29 proceeding, Judge
Berman asked Acosta about his
health - Inner City Press is
not publishing those answers,
voluntarily - and his jobs as
a superintendent and in a
separate union job which is
still paying him. He asked
about Acosta's three children,
and their health. Many judges
do not do this.
So what are the demonstrable
or documentable benefits,
beyond restoring some
defendant's faith in the
judicial system? Inner City
Press has requested
information and will continue
to report on this. More
on Patreon here. This
case is US v. Acosta,
16-cr-500 (Berman).
***
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