Word: lawness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Moreover, Barnard charges, Rostenkowski has threatened to scuttle any attempt to pass a House resolution granting his subcommittee the authority to get the records on its own. The IRS insists that it has complied as fully as the law allows by turning over 12,000 pages of documents and making available 75 agency employees as witnesses. Says IRS spokeswoman Ellen Murphy: "It's unfortunate that the cooperation we have given is ignored because the law prohibits us from talking about a couple of obviously interesting cases...
...Equal Justice Under Law," reads the motto atop the U.S. Supreme Court building. The words are lofty, but for the thousands of people who trudge through the criminal-justice system daily and who speak no English, the phrase means literally nothing. For many of these defendants, the words are also legally empty. American justice for those who do not comprehend English is anything but uniform, let alone understandable. There are no nationwide standards for court interpreters, little training and virtually no monitoring. "Everybody gets a piece of due process," says David Fellmeth, a senior court interpreter in New York City...
Administration officials contend that an expansion of federal prisons, as well as recent changes in the law, will ease the burden on hard-pressed state and local officials by making it easier to charge drug offenders under federal statutes. Federal prosecutors are instructed to avoid offering plea bargains in such cases, making a prison term harder to dodge. Says White House aide Roger Porter, who helped design the package: "The people who are committing these crimes are not dumb. They know what the chances are of getting caught and getting sent to prison, and as we increase those odds...
...Many law-enforcement experts point to the drug war as an example of the hopelessness of curing crime by locking up an ever larger number of criminals. In September, New York City unleashed a tactical narcotics team to make | undercover drug buys, allowing police to slap dealers with felony charges for selling narcotics. The result: a 30% upswing in drug arrests. And the ripple effect: severe overcrowding at the city's squalid holding pen on Rikers Island. Prisoners often sleep on the floor in receiving areas where 90 men may share a single toilet...
...city is under court order to remedy the situation, but New York prison authorities are forbidden by law to resort to a simple release of surplus prisoners to alleviate overcrowding. Instead, the city is scrambling to speed up inmate processing, so that accused criminals awaiting trial can be released on bail, while it is also spilling inmates into the overcrowded state system...