States with medical marijuana laws have fewer traffic fatalities than those without, especially among younger drivers, says a new study.

Researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found on average an 11 percent reduction in traffic fatalities when examining places that have enacted medical-marijuana laws–in total, 28 states and the District of Columbia.

There was also a strong correlation between the presence of medical marijuana dispensaries and fewer traffic fatalities, claimed the study, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health.

The presence of medical marijuana laws seemed to have the biggest effect on the number of traffic fatalities for individuals between the ages of 15 and 44, with special emphasis on those aged 25 to 44 years.

Dr, Silvia Martins, a physician and associate professor who was a senior author of the study, told the Washington Post that the lower traffic fatality rates could be related to lower levels of alcohol-impaired driving as people–especially younger people–substitute weed for booze.

“We found evidence that states with the marijuana laws in place compared with those which did not, reported, on average, lower rates of drivers endorsing driving after having too many drinks,” Martins said in a written statement.

However, not every state experienced a substantial reduction in traffic fatalities. California and New Mexico, for example, both experienced gradual increases in traffic deaths after initial reductions of 16 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively.

“These findings provide evidence of the heterogeneity of medical marijuana laws and indicate the need for further research on the particularities of implementing the laws at the local level,” said Julian Santaella-Tenorio, a doctoral student in epidemiology at Columbia, and the study’s lead author. “It also indicates an interaction of medical marijuana laws with other aspects, such as stronger police enforcement, that may influence traffic fatality rates.”

While medical marijuana laws have seemingly influenced these rates, they may not be the sole factor driving the change.

According to Martins, other factors that might help explain the correlation could be the “strength of public health laws related to driving, infrastructure characteristics, or the quality of health care systems.”

Researchers used National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data on traffic fatalities from 1985 to 2014 to conduct the study. Factors such as whether the states had graduated driver licensing laws, as well as median household income, unemployment rates, laws increasing the speed limit to 70 mph or more, laws on enforcing the use of seat belts, and bans on using cellphones and texting while driving were all taken into account.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Columbia University made history last week when it became the first U.S. university to divest its endowment from the private prison industry. A student-led activist campaign has put pressure on the Board of Trustees to divest since early 2014 when a small group of Columbia students discovered that the school was investing in G4S, the world’s largest private security firm, and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the United States. After a vote last week, Columbia’s $9 billion endowment will now be void of its shares in CCA and its estimated 220,000 shares in G4S. Divesting from an industry that makes its money by breeding human suffering is a move that should be loudly applauded.

The divestment vote occurred within the larger discussion of mass incarceration and the tribulations that stem from the systemic injustices that American prisons propagate. While local jails and state and federal prisons all seem to value a punitive rather than rehabilitative approach, private prisons are by far the cruelest. There is an inherent conflict between the supposed goal of the criminal justice system–rehabilitation–and companies’ profit motives. For-profit, private prisons make up a multibillion-dollar per year industry. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that as of 2013, there were 133,000 prisoners in private prisons, or 8.4 percent of the U.S. prison population. These numbers break down to 19.1 percent of the federal prison population being detained in privately owned prisons, and 6.8 percent of the state prison population.

Since 1990, violent crime in America has dropped 51 percent, property crime has fallen 43 percent, and homicides are down 54 percent. But incarceration rates since 1990 have increased by 50 percent. If crime is down, why do we have so many more people in prison? Due to the war on drugs and the increase of harsher sentencing laws, more low-level and non-violent offenders are sent to prison. Almost half of state prisoners are serving time for non-violent crimes, and more than half of federal inmates are imprisoned for drug offenses. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote, “This prodigious rate of incarceration is not only inhumane, it is economic folly.” The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prison population. We incarcerate a greater percentage of our population than any other country on Earth, and our compulsion to incarcerate costs taxpayers $63.4 billon per year.

The overcrowding of jails and prisons across the country and a reluctance to adequately finance these correctional facilities precipitated the movement toward private prisons, which proponents claimed could result in overall prison cost reductions of 20 percent. However, allowing the facilities to be operated by the private sector has resulted in a meager 1 percent cost decrease. With crime rates on the decline, private prisons began doing everything they could to increase imprisonment rates so that they could stay in business and continue to make money. From 2002 to 2012, CCA, GEO Group, and Management & Training Corporation (MTC), a contractor that manages private prisons, spent around 45 million dollars lobbying state and federal governments, arguing for harsher laws and more arrests. These corporations also poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the election campaigns of governors, state legislators, and judges in order to ensure that their plans become laws that guarantee more people will be incarcerated, so they can continue to make money.

Some people try to justify this system with the thought that people who are in prison are there for a reason. But this wishful thinking is untrue. About 50 percent of immigrants who are in prison are detained in privately owned prisons, and the majority of these people are simply being detained while waiting for their cases to be decided in court. In other words, immigrants who have not been convicted of any crime are being housed in violent, corrupt, dangerous private prisons while they wait for months for courts—that are often illegally being paid off by corrupt companies like CCA to keep people in prison—to decide their fate. The private prison industry has an incentive to keep people in jail. If their business plans included imprisoning to rehabilitate and treating people for mental health or drug addiction issues that may have contributed to their arrests, the industry would collapse. Instead, private prisons are rampant with abuse, neglect, and misconduct; private prisons understaff their facilities to save money, ignore pleas for help and prisoner-on-prisoner violence within the prison, and even refuse healthcare to inmates. In order to make the most profit, the private prison industry wants harsher drug laws, longer sentencing, and wants to increase recidivism rates.

In New York, about $60,000 of government money is spent per year to keep just one inmate imprisoned, while just under $20,000 is spent to educate an elementary or secondary school student. This trend extends nationally: no state in the country invests more—or even an equal amount—on educating an individual student than on housing a prisoner. Maybe if we relaxed drug laws and unreasonable sentencing, focused more on rehabilitation than punishment, did not allow prejudiced and ill-intentioned companies like CCA to spend millions on lobbyists, and we invested more on education than on our corrupt criminal justice system, the United States would be a happier, healthier place.

Columbia University’s divestment from the private prison industry will not solve the issue of mass incarceration. It will not redesign the broken system that we call criminal “justice” in America. It won’t even put CCA or G4S out of business or make a sizeable dent in their net worth. But what divestment will do is beyond economic comprehension. Refusing to reap benefits from companies founded upon violence forced on people by virtue of their race, class, or citizenship status is a social stance that proves a complete rejection of everything private prisons stand for. When you stop investing in something, you’ve stopped believing in it. And no one should believe in the private prison industry.

Emily Dalgo

Emily Dalgo is a member of the American University Class of 2017 and a Law Street Media Fellow during the Summer of 2015. Contact Emily at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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The Columbia University student accused of raping Emma Sulkowicz, dubbed by some “the mattress girl,” has filed a lawsuit against the school, alleging it violated Title IX and intentionally discriminated against him “on the basis of his male sex” by allowing his accuser to repeatedly harass him.

Sulkowicz, a fourth-year visual arts major, has been schlepping around an XL twin-sized dorm mattress–the same kind as the one she says fourth-year Paul Nungesser raped her on their sophomore year–since the beginning of the school year as a performance art protest titled “Carry That Weight.” She has vowed to carry the mattress everywhere she goes until Nungesser is either expelled or chooses to leave the university, and has even said that she’ll carry it to her graduation ceremony if necessary.

Emma Sulkowicz’s Accused Rapist Is Suing Columbia University for Discrimination: http://t.co/Tgt8sHpU0m pic.twitter.com/FNguixD0cx

— Marie Claire (@marieclaire) April 24, 2015

Both she and Nungesser have confirmed that they had sporadic consensual sex prior to the alleged rape, during which Sulkowicz claims he choked and slapped her before forcibly anally penetrating her as she repeatedly said “no.” Despite her claims Nungesser was found “not responsible” for sexual misconduct in a hearing conducted by the university. Now Nungesser’s attorney, Andrew Miltenberg, says that his client’s college experience was destroyed because he was made a “pariah” on campus. Miltenberg told BuzzFeed News,

Columbia should not have, after having found him not responsible, actively engaged in the character assassination of Paul Nungesser.

In the lawsuit Nungesser, a German national, seeks unspecified damages, claiming that this viral scandal has “severely jeopardized” his job prospects and ability to remain in the United States. However, it’s not just the university that he’s suing. The lawsuit also names Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger and Jon Kessler, the visual arts professor that approved Sulkowicz’s “Mattress Performance” project, as co-defendants. Emma Sulkowicz’s name is notably absent from the list of defendants, which seems odd, especially when she’s the source of the alleged defamation and harassment. This could potentially be because the university and university officials have bigger check books than the college student, which would come in handy in the event of a cash settlement.

The most disturbing parts of the lawsuit are the transcripts of conversations between Sulkowicz and Nungesser that were included to establish the type of relationship the pair had. The messages paint Sulkowicz as a sexually promiscuous jilted lover who asked Nungesser for anal sex. The messages have even led some to begin comparing her to the University of Virginia’s “Jackie” who has been widely accused of fabricating or embellishing her own high-profile rape allegations.

With that in mind, we should all be very careful before launching a full-blown character assassination on Sulkowicz based on these recovered messages, even though that’s the very same thing that he’s alleging she has done with her campus performance piece.  Ultimately they do not prove that the pair’s last sexual encounter was consensual, although they do bring up some very valid questions. While this case could end with a settlement, it will probably do little to improve the accused rapist’s reputation.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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It was clear when the Charlottesville police department announced that it had found “no substantive proof” to support the UVA gang rape detailed in Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” that the magazine had made some serious mistakes in its reporting. As a result, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was tasked with investigating the magazine’s story in order to figure out just where Rolling Stone went wrong. The report, which is being called “a piece of journalism about a failure of journalism,” outlines a list of fundamental journalistic failures on individual, procedural, and institutional levels. The controversy has forced Rolling Stone to issue a formal retraction.

Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely began her article intending to showcase the pervasiveness of rape culture on college campuses using the story of an alleged gang rape survivor known as Jackie. Jackie’s horrific story of sexual assault and her campus administration’s lack of action resonated with readers and launched a national dialogue about rape. But just a few weeks after the story was published, details from Jackie’s story were called into question, leading to a formal police investigation into the alleged rape. While police found that they could not authenticate Jackie’s claims detailed in the article, they did not refute that something had potentially happened to her.

Columbia University followed suit with its own investigation in order to uncover what faulty journalistic practices led to such a scandal. The group summarized their findings writing:

Rolling Stone‘s repudiation of the main narrative in ‘A Rape on Campus’ is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all. The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from.

While a combination of failures including fact checking and corroboration attributed to the article’s inauthenticity, the takeaway is that Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake was that they trusted Jackie way too much. The article’s editor Sean Woods claimed they were “too deferential” to their rape victim stating:

We honored too many of her requests in our reporting. We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice.

Working with rape victims can be understandably challenging, especially when there’s the potential to re-traumatize them by having them retell specific events. Despite this, there still needs to be a way to hold sources accountable while preserving journalistic integrity. Rolling Stone failed to provide a balanced account of the events by only featuring the victim’s side of the story. This misstep now opens the door for other articles’ authenticities to be questioned, especially those written by Erdely, or others involving anecdotal evidence.

Surprisingly Erdely and her editors will not lose their jobs even in light of the report’s findings–apparently Rolling Stone views the report’s public embarrassment as punishment enough. However, that decision may not stand with an impending lawsuit against the publication on behalf of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in the works. Publicly Rolling Stone needs to prove that its credibility remains after this massive disservice to journalistic integrity.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Rolling Stone Retracts Story About Alleged UVA Rape appeared first on Law Street.

A custody battle between a famous skier and his former girlfriend has opened up a national discussion on respective paternal and maternal rights. In 2012, the Olympic skier Bode Miller, 36, had a brief relationship with a 27-year-old former Marine and firefighter, Sara McKenna. They dated for just a few months after they had met through an online dating service, when McKenna discovered that she was pregnant with Miller’s child. When she informed him she was going to an ultrasound appointment in June, Miller claimed that he didn’t want to be involved, and that she had made the decision to keep the baby against his wishes. She was living in California at the time of conception, but was considering a move to New York to attend Columbia University on GI Bill benefits, a possibility of which she informed Miller in October.

McKenna went ahead and moved to New York City when 7 months pregnant. In the meantime, Miller had gotten married, to a beach volleyball player named Morgan Beck, in October. In November, Miller began to seek custody proceedings. So, after the baby was born this February, McKenna went to a New York Family Court to seek custody of her child, Samuel Nathaniel Bode Miller-McKenna. (I will refer to the child as Sam, as that is the first name recorded on the birth certificate, despite the fact that Miller calls his son Nate) The Family Court determined that, despite the child being born in New York, which would normally establish that Court’s jurisdiction, the case should be dealt with in California.

The New York court claimed that McKenna’s choice to move from California to New York while pregnant was  “unjustifiable conduct,” that she committed “appropriation of the child while in utero” and that it was “reprehensible.” Then, the California court gave full custody to Miller.

So, this November, McKenna brought the case back to New York, where an appeals judge ruled that McKenna’s rights were violated. They stated, “putative fathers have neither the right nor the ability to restrict a pregnant woman from her constitutionally protected liberty.” And on Monday, she received temporary custody of her son again, at least until the next hearing takes place on December 9th.

There are so many things wrong here, I barely know where to begin. Let’s start with the clear blurred lines that New York Family Court created in the distinction between fetus and child. It is illegal to bring a child across state lines if it violates a custody agreement or something of that nature. But she didn’t do that, she, as an autonomous adult who also happened to be pregnant, moved. These blurred lines are concerning in a time where the rights of a mother versus her unborn baby can be tricky at best. A University of Florida law professor, Lee-Ford Tritt, noted, “I’ve never heard of a restriction on a pregnant woman telling her that she can’t move to another state.”

This case is also upsetting in regards to what it could mean for the child. At this point, a child under the age of one has already been bounced from his mother to his father back to his mother again. It is entirely possible that there will be more moving between the two as the hearings progress. For the good of Sam, (or Nate), this case needs to be solved soon.

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Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Voyager via Wikipedia]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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