AEquitas and the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) hosted a pop-up webinar to discuss application eligibility and the process for applying for FY’21 Innovative Prosecution Solutions for Combating Violent Crime (IPS) funding. The presentation focused on program requirements and highlighted examples of successful proposals.
Just Exits: Achieving Justice: The Prosecutor’s Role
The criminal justice system can serve as both an on-ramp to and an off-ramp from sex trafficking and exploitation. As gatekeepers within the criminal justice system, prosecutors are uniquely positioned to identify sexually exploited women and girls, make fair charging decisions, facilitate criminal record relief, and link survivors with services and support. In these ways, prosecutors can clear the way to a different life path and achieve justice for survivors.
The presenters bring their lived and professional experience to this presentation, which emphasizes prosecutors’ duties to achieve justice over convictions and to proactively remedy wrongful convictions. Presenters discuss strategies for engaging survivors, avoiding wrongful criminalization, and providing access to just criminal record relief.
Just Exits: Assessing Culpability: Context Before Conviction
Human traffickers assert force, fraud, and coercion against victims in order to profit from commercial sex or forced labor or services. Offenders use a variety of tactics designed to ensure that victims will do what they are told without resistance, questioning, or disclosure to law enforcement. This physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual control too often allows traffickers to escape accountability. This presentation is designed to improve responses to trafficking and exploitation while ensuring that victims are not inappropriately charged with crimes they are forced to commit.
Collaboration is key to any response to trafficking and exploitation, but imperative where the complexity of victim-offender dynamics is not easily understood or revealed. This presentation provides law enforcement and prosecutors with strategies to uncover the reality of the victim’s involvement in the trafficking organization or within the exploitation dynamic. Presenters provide a framework for assessing the culpability of individuals who may initially be identified as both victims and defendants. They also provide suggestions to assist prosecutors in making ethical and appropriate immunity and charging decisions as well as designing appropriate dispositions.
Just Exits: Being Trafficked: What You Need to Know About “the Life”
The criminal justice system can serve as both an on ramp to and an off ramp from sexual exploitation. To minimize on ramps and maximize off ramps, we must first understand the complex nature of sex trafficking and exploitation. Traffickers prey upon vulnerabilities that are often historic and systemic in nature. They use a variety of tactics designed to ensure that victims will do what they are told without resistance, questioning, or disclosure to law enforcement. This physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual control over victims too often allows traffickers to escape accountability. This presentation is designed to improve our understanding of what it is like to be sexually exploited and to illustrate how we can improve our response to victims, who often do not see the criminal justice system as a viable off ramp from “the Life”.
The presenters bring their lived and professional experience to this presentation, which will focus on factors that impact entry into “the Life”, the realities of sexual exploitation and trafficking, and the factors that impede or delay exits. The presentation will provide criminal justice professionals with tools for identifying individuals vulnerable to exploitation, limiting on-ramps, and providing viable off-ramps to achieve justice for survivors.
Criminal Jury Trials During COVID-19: Prosecution Leadership for a New Era
This webinar addresses the potential impact of pandemic safety measures on criminal jury trials and strategies for protecting the integrity of the proceedings. Presenters discuss strategies for triaging delayed cases; considerations of constitutional rights, including the 6th amendment right to a speedy and public trial, the 6th amendment right to confrontation, and the 1st amendment freedom of the press; the use of juror questionnaires as a way to minimize potential exposure to COVID-19 during jury selection; and methods for adapting prosecution strategies to virtual platforms.
Digital Evidence Part II: Now That You’ve Got It and Can Read It, What Can You Do With It?
This two-part webinar series presented by the Denver District Attorney’s Office, in partnership with AEquitas, explores the scope of data available from sources of digital evidence and strategies on how such data can effectively be developed with forensically-sound practices. Presenters discuss theories of admission, rules of evidence, and “real life” examples to demonstrate how to properly authenticate and introduce digital evidence in court proceedings. Part II of the series discusses how legally-obtained data can be analyzed, depending on the type of data in question. Presenters also discuss strategies for effectively presenting data at trial.
Digital Evidence Part I: The Investigative Stage — Recognition, Collection, Search
This two-part webinar series presented by the Denver District Attorney’s Office, in partnership with AEquitas, explores the scope of data available from sources of digital evidence and strategies on how such data can effectively be developed with forensically-sound practices. Presenters discuss theories of admission, rules of evidence, and “real life” examples to demonstrate how to properly authenticate and introduce digital evidence in court proceedings. Part I of the series explores the different types and sources of electronic data that are available to investigators; how such data can be properly collected, regardless of whether it is in a physical device or electronic records; and methods to facilitate searching and seizing data.
Gang-Related Violence Against Women
Gangs are notorious for perpetrating firearm- and drug-related offenses, but many gangs and their members also regularly engage in violence against women, including rape, physical violence, and human trafficking. Gang members use physical and sexual violence to control their victims and the communities within which they operate. Additionally, some gangs engage in trafficking to exploit gang members and non-members to increase gang profits. The pervasive nature of gang-related violence, combined with gang members’ habitual intimidation of victims and witnesses, present unique challenges to the effective investigation and prosecution of these cases.
This presentation discusses tangible strategies for improving the identification, investigation, and prosecution of gang-related violence against women. The presenter explores collaborative methods for supporting victims, enhancing community safety, holding gang offenders accountable, and preventing and effectively responding to witness intimidation.
Opioids and Drug Delivery Resulting in Death
The opioid epidemic has devastated communities across the United States, resulting in hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the past two decades. In response, state and local prosecutors have taken a multifaceted approach to the crisis: diverting defendants with substance abuse issues from traditional prosecution, educating communities about the dangers of opioid addiction; and increasingly, seeking to hold drug traffickers and dealers accountable for the deaths they cause. This webinar will spotlight one office’s efforts to tackle the opioid crisis. Tonya Lupinacci of the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office in Norristown, PA will discuss strategies that are broadly applicable to jurisdictions across the country, with a special emphasis on prosecuting Drug Delivery Resulting in Death and similar crimes. The session will focus on the evidence necessary for building these cases, theories of offender liability, and effective presentation of evidence at trial.
First, Do No Harm: Trauma Informed Interviewing During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This presentation identifies barriers to successful crime victim/witness interviews and explore techniques for overcoming those barriers, with a special emphasis on virtual interviews that are compliant with COVID-19 social distancing measures. The presenters discuss the limitations of a traditional fact-gathering approach and introduce alternative techniques to minimize re-traumatization and enhance our ability to re-create the reality of the crime at trial. An emphasis is placed on strategies for integrating a trauma-informed response from the first contact with a victim through the conclusion of the case, with realistic goals for interviews and virtual meetings at every stage of the process.
