Posted on 12/17/2007 4:49:18 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
Who's to blame for 'revolving door'? No easy answers
Corey Lakes has been arrested about three dozen times.
His list of offenses in metro Atlanta, according to public records, goes from the relatively benign — drug possession and theft — to the heinous — rape and kidnapping.
Until now, Lakes spent little time in custody. Since July, though, he has been in Fulton County Jail with no bond.
Still, Lakes, 31, is another example of a system that police, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys agree is in trouble. He is one of numerous offenders who are arrested time and again.
"I don't know if it's getting worse or getting better, but we run into the same people over and over," Atlanta police Chief Richard Pennington said in an interview. "[These criminals] learned how to manipulate the criminal justice system."
Each entity of the Fulton justice system dances around the question of blame. None will directly point the finger at anyone else, but they will hint at it. The police say they make the cases and it's up to prosecutors to punish the people they arrest. Prosecutors say they need evidence and they have to balance the astounding numbers of nonviolent cases — which most likely have addiction or mental illness at their core — against the relatively fewer numbers of violent crimes.
Defense attorneys, especially those assigned to indigent defendants, try for the least punishment for their clients and rarely have time to consider whether mental health services or drug or alcohol treatment would be better long term.
And the judges say they cannot make decisions based on what might happen but only on what has occurred.
"In individual cases, you can probably point fingers at individual people or offices," said Carl Greenberg, a metro public defender. "But generally, it's the system. We're overloaded. The case load is crushing so you can't spend the time that's necessary ... on individual cases."
Lakes is an example, Pennington said, of suspects released on signature or low cash bonds who "continue to operate" as usual while they wait for their next court dates.
"It's to the point where when we start seeing patterns in crime, one of the first questions is 'have we checked to see who is out of jail?' " said Atlanta police Maj. Lane Hagin, who commands police Zone 5, which takes in much of downtown and Midtown and many of Lakes' haunts. "We look at the same recidivist offenders because we know once they get out they're going to do it again."
Atlanta has no statistics showing the extent of repeat offenders in the city, but each zone has a team of officers assigned to keep tabs on them. Nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, most charged felons are released on bond while awaiting trial and in that time almost one-third of them will be charged with new crimes.
In Zone 5, the repeat offender list has about 20 names. Hagin gets weekly reports on each person so he will know if each person is in jail or out, waiting to go to court or clear of any charges.
"They [police officers] have pictures of them in their cars. They have their pictures in the precinct. They know them when they see them," Hagin said.
Many observers are not surprised that so many criminals recycle through the system so often.
"It's not a shock to see people ... over and over," Fulton Superior Court Chief Judge Doris Downs said.
One defense attorney agreed officers know repeat criminals well and have little trouble finding a reason to arrest them.
"The police do get very frustrated," said Greenberg, deputy director of the state-funded Metro Public Defender Office. "They arrest somebody and they know he's going to be out again. That's a common national problem."
Eric Cavins is another example. Records show APD has arrested him about a dozen times between May 2004 and last August on theft, burglary and larceny charges, to list a few. In one police incident report, the arresting officer described Cavins as a "known theft suspect."
"He's killed me for years," Hagin said of Cavins. "It's the revolving door of our justice system. We work hard to arrest the bad guys and put them in jail with the intention we want them to stay there. But it doesn't always work that way."
Cavins has open charges that he stole copper from church air conditioner in 2005 and he has been in jail since August on burglary and aggravated assault charges from separate incidents.
"A number of defendants are arrested repeatedly for small property crimes and drug-related offenses," Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said. "Our system is faced with a dilemma and that dilemma is what to do with them. The question becomes how much prison space do you afford to someone arrested for theft by taking or whether or not you reserve that space for somebody who is a more violent offender?"
According to his criminal history dating to 1993, when he was 17, Lakes was a nonviolent offender with arrests and convictions for nonviolent crimes like trespassing, drug offenses and failure to appear in court.
Until this year when he was charged with rape in April.
But he was released on a signature bond from the Fulton County Jail three months later because Howard had not taken the case to a grand jury. Howard said there was no case once his office discovered information overlooked by the police that weakened the case. The alleged victim had an undisclosed prior relationship with Lakes and there were inconsistencies in her story.
"We had no reason to hold him," Howard said. "We cannot hold somebody in jail when evidence shows something to the contrary."
On July 27, three days after Lakes was released from jail, Lakes allegedly raped a young woman from Dalton.
Hey judge! With a sufficient sentence, you'd only see them once.
What’s that expression - you get the government you deserve? I’m not familiar w/Atlanta politics, but I remember reading that that the mayor is a race baiter. So she probably sets the tone for the entire city’s politics in general.
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