WELCOME & RESOURCES
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Welcome
Welcome to new NACMP member Barbra Bachmeier from Indianapolis, IN. Good luck with your monitoring, Barbra!
Sample Brochure & PowerPoint PresentationWe recently had a request for a sample court monitoring program brochure. You'll now find a link to WATCH's brochure at the bottom of our training page. You'll also find a link there for a PowerPoint presentation on the basics of court monitoring. Would you like to see more PowerPoint presentations on our website? Let us know.WATCH Newsletter
Read the latest edition of WATCH's newsletter the WATCH Post.
Need Help?
Have other questions or need additional resources? Ask us.
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REPORT:
CHRONOLOGY OF AN OFFENDER
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Scott Allen Youngmark, 41, has a history of criminal
violence going back 23 years. Besides assaulting and
threatening five intimate partners, two of their family
members, and three acquaintances, he has victimized
eight members of his own family, including his parents,
grandmother, a cousin, an aunt, and three of his uncles.
The first charge brought against Youngmark was for raping
his 45-year-old aunt when he was only 19. The next set of
charges stemmed from violence toward an intimate partner
and included second degree assault, terroristic threats, two
charges of violating an order for protection (OFP), and
six counts of fifth degree domestic assault. The victim in
these cases eventually moved to an undisclosed location to
escape Youngmark's violence. After she fled, Youngmark
called police to report her "missing," and a week later her
mother called police to report that the car her daughter
had left behind had been set on fire. Read more...
------------------- WATCH provides training on creating defendant chronologies. Contact us today to schedule a webinar.
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| Join the Court WATCH Connection mailing List
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PURCHASE A MANUAL
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For everything you need to start a court monitoring program, purchase WATCH's Developing a Court Monitoring Toolkit. The comprehensive resource takes you through a step-by-step process for starting your own monitoring program and includes a CD with sample presentations and monitoring forms.
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WATCH
bringing a public eye to justice
608 2nd Ave S. #465
Mpls, MN 55402
(612) 341-2747
watch@watchmn.org
www.watchmn.org
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SAVE THE DATE:
MONITORING SEXUAL ASSAULT CASES WEBINAR
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Date and time: Thursday, July 30th at 11:30am (CST)*
Topics:
This one hour presentation will provide an
overview of court monitoring and address specific ways you can document how your courts handle sexual assault cases and advocate for change.
Cost:
$35 for NACMP members
$50 for non-members
Contact: Anna Light or (612) 341-2747 x7.
*9:30 a.m. Pacific, 10:30 a.m. Mountain, 12:30 p.m. Eastern
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BRIGHT IDEA:
JUDICIAL FEEDBACK PROJECT
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In response to a survey in which many judges
said they would like to receive more regular communication from WATCH, we
developed a Judicial Feedback Project. Thirty one of 60 judges opted
to participate. For the project, WATCH compiles monitor notes on judges'
courtroom demeanor and decorum, and provides individual judges with a
confidential report on a quarterly basis. We began collecting information in
February and distributed the first letters in May.
This low cost and confidential project is an excellent way to provide feedback to your criminal justice system. The project doesn't have to be limited to judges--consider including clerks, bailiffs, probation officers, or attorneys. If you already
have monitors going to court, it's as easy as sending out a letter to your criminal justice system asking if they would like to participate, keeping track of the feedback, and then compiling and sending it to your participants.
Hopefully your criminal justice system staff will respond like this Hennepin County judge, "I am always interested in knowing how I am doing in the eyes of people watching. I would appreciate any feedback from your volunteers."
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Want to create your own judicial feedback project? Contact WATCH court monitoring coordinator Sarah Coulter who manages this project. You can reach her by phone at (612) 341-2747 x6.
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REPORT:
THE IMPACT OF MINNESOTA'S FELONY STRANGULATION LAW
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It is not uncommon for battered women to minimize the violence they experience in a strangulation assault, or for abusive men to deny the violence they have perpetrated.
Victims have been heard to say, "He didn't really choke me, he just had me in a headlock and I couldn't breathe." Defendants make similar comments such as, "Why are you arresting me? All I did was choke her."
In 2005, Minnesota became one of just six states (now 10) with a statute making strangulation of a family or household member a felony-level crime. The law went into effect
on August 1 at 12:00 a.m., and approximately 10 minutes later, a Minnesota man was arrested and charged under the statute.
To gauge the initial impact of the law, WATCH reviewed
59 strangulation cases charged in Hennepin County during the first six months of the law's implementation and published a report with results and recommendations in January 2007.
WATCH conducted a comparable study of Hennepin
County strangulation cases charged two years after the
first set (August 1, 2007 to January 31, 2008) to assess
the ongoing impact of the law. In the follow-up study, we
reviewed 96 cases and monitored about 60 hearings
involving 45 of those cases. Read more...
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Would you like WATCH to speak to your group about the impact of Minnesota's felony strangulation law? Contact us today.
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BRIGHT IDEA:
CREATIVE WAYS TO SAVE COPYING FEES
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Compiling and copying criminal complaints and police records can be a daunting task for small programs on tight budgets. In the past WATCH has
collaborated with the clerk's office to streamline the complaint compiling process. WATCH was given a code to the
court copier and interns were provided access to the records office.
The court would then send us a bill every month for the cost of the
copies. This process was efficient for WATCH and decreased the workload
for court staff.
Recently, the cost of copying felony complaints in our jurisdiction went up from .10 per page to $5 per document. Since WATCH gathers between 20 and 30 complaints a week, the fee increase brought this well-run system to an end. This issue also came up
during a recent webinar when a participant mentioned that her clerks
were charging fees for copies and for the
clerk's time. Both these situations made gathering complaints cost prohibitive.
With court budgets
slashed across the country some locales are looking for any way to save
or raise funds. But are these charges appropriate?
The first thing to consider when dealing with exorbitant copy fees is what your state statute says about access to public records. Records have to be made available to the public but that does not mean they have to be made available for free. However, if the process or the fee is so prohibitive that, in essence, the records are unavailable, your courts may be in violation of the statute. Talk with your staff, a data practices expert in your state, or possibly an attorney, to consider what options you have.
To bring costs down, WATCH tested out a new way to gather complaints, using a small hand-held scanner and a laptop computer. With permission of the clerks, WATCH interns take the scanner (which cost $130) and laptop to the records room. They pull the complaints, pass the paper copies through the scanner, and the paper complaint is stored as an electronic document on the laptop. Interns then come back to the office and print out the complaints for inclusion in our files.
This new system is working beautifully; the copies produced from scanning are better quality than photocopies and the scanner paid for itself the first time we used it. We're also saving the electronic versions and thinking about ways we may be able to use them for future research projects.
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See what a document scanner looks like by clicking here. Do you have money saving tips on gathering court documents? Let us know.
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