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What did Democrats sacrifice to win gun control? | page 1, 2, 3
These provisions include creating a new death penalty for animal-rights activists and eco-terrorists who kill, one of Sen. Orrin Hatch's pet causes due to recent violence in his home state of Utah. "Senators were laughing on the floor [of the Senate] when that was being voted on, it was so ridiculous," Feingold reports. "Even its supporters. We were frivolously voting for an expansion of the death penalty -- it reminded me of when I was in the [Wisconsin] state Legislature, the seriousness with which we passed a Girl Scout week resolution." Another provision under fire from liberal groups includes establishing mandatory minimums for young criminals. "We don't like mandatory minimums for anyone," says the ACLU's King. "But especially for children. Lots of things drive children to commit crimes -- it's unhealthy to take away a judge's ability to do something more creative or useful for a specific" juvenile offender. "When this bill passed, Senate Republicans were saying, 'We can't believe they voted for this.'" The juvenile justice bill also makes it easier to prosecute children as adults, and unlocks the criminal records of juveniles, heretofore sealed once they reach adulthood. The most controversial measure in the bill, however, and the provision that was the largest obstacle to S10 reaching the floor of the Senate last year, would repeal a requirement that states assess and make plans to combat what is called "Disproportionate Minority Confinement." In 1988, Congress passed a law requiring states to assess and implement strategies to combat the fact that larger proportions of minority youth, especially African-Americans, are locked up than whites. Hatch wanted this law repealed. But juvenile offenders who are African-American are treated with more severity in every step on their path in the justice system, supporters of the 1988 provision say. According to statistics from the Department of Justice, black kids between the ages of 10 and 17 constitute 15 percent of the U.S. population, 26 percent of juvenile arrests, 32 percent of the referrals to juvenile court, 41 percent of those kids detained in delinquency cases, 46 percent of the juveniles secured in correctional facilities and 52 percent of the juveniles transferred to adult criminal courts. Minority kids on the whole constitute 68 percent of the kids in juvenile detention facilities -- a percentage that far exceeds that of minority kids at the beginning of the process, when they're first arrested. And as Wellstone pointed out on the Senate floor, "black males and females were six times more likely to be admitted to state juvenile facilities than their white counterparts -- same crimes, six times more likely. Property crimes: Black males were almost four times more likely to be admitted to state juvenile facilities than white males, and black females were almost three times more likely to be committed than white females. Drug offenses: Black males were confined at a rate 30 times that of white males. In fact, among all offense categories, black youth were more likely to be detained than white youth during every year between 1985 and 1994 ... These are damning statistics." Not, apparently, to Hatch, who -- throughout the S10 debate in 1997 and 1998 -- insisted the Disproportionate Minority Confinement requirements be removed from law altogether. In the 1998 debate over S10, "Hatch and [Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff] Sessions and a bunch of other senators and staffers wanted that stuff out of there," reports Jason Ziedenberg, a policy analyst with the liberal Justice Policy Institute. "It got to the ludicrous point that Republican Senate staffers suggested that instead of the word 'race,' the bill should use the word 'class.' So we had these Republican staffers turning around and becoming Marxists." The suggestion didn't take. "It died on that issue," Ziedenberg says. "In the final hours, the Republicans wouldn't allow any mention of race, and the Democrats wouldn't allow the issue of race to die." Not so this year. According to Ziedenberg and others, Patrick Leahy -- the ranking Democrat on Judiciary -- didn't put up half as much of a fight on the issue this time. "Leahy's staffers were front and center last year," Ziedenberg says. This time, he says, "they folded their cards." Leahy press secretary David Carle insists that this year's bill was much improved from last year's, and explains that Democrats tried to refine it even further during the amendment process. And indeed, on May 19, Wellstone, Kennedy, Feingold and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced an amendment to restore the "Disproportionate Minority Confinement" requirement. "You still can't ignore the fact that these kids are committing crimes," countered Hatch, who hails from a state that is 1 percent black, during debate over the Wellstone-Kennedy amendment. "Just because you would like the statistics to be relatively proportionate, if that isn't the case, because more young people commit crimes from one minority classification than another, it doesn't solve the problem by saying states should find a way of letting these kids out ... If there is literally a civil rights violation or a discrimination against minority youth, then that is a problem I think would need fixing. But I don't think that is a case that has been made so far."
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