Paul Seeman is the founder and principal of Kanawha Consulting. He advises on voter protection hotline management, criminal justice reform, and non-profit governance. Paul Seeman earned a BA with Highest Honors in Sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1976. He went on to earn his juris doctor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1979. As an attorney he focused primarily on criminal and juvenile trials and appeals.In 1991, he accepted an offer to become a juvenile court referee pro tem with the Alameda County Superior Court. After more than a decade in that position, he was hired as a court commissioner in 2004, and eventually became a judge of the Alameda County Superior Court in 2009. In that capacity, Judge Seeman spearheaded a number of innovative juvenile court programs, particularly in bringing collaborative court principles to juvenile drug court and mental health court initiatives.After resigning from the bench and losing his bar license in 2013, he opened Kanawha Consulting.
The newly created California System-Involved Bar Association – CSIBA – has as its mission to increase access to legal education and State Bar of California licensure for people with prior criminal justice system involvement. The brainchild of Frankie Guzman and James Binnall, themselves attorneys with histories of criminal justice system involvement, CSIBA hopes to harness the energy and…
An experienced judge who served on the Alameda County Superior Court of California for eight years, Paul Seeman is a juris doctor graduate of Boalt Hall, the University of California, Berkel…
A retired legal professional, Paul Seeman served the Alameda County Superior Court as a court commissioner from 2004 to 2009, and as a judge from 2009 to 2013. During his first year as a judge, Pau…
In 2018 the Florida electorate approved Amendment 4 to the Florida constitution, restoring voting rights to citizens with felony criminal records. A few months later, the Republican-led Florida Senate drew up a payments bill, requiring those citizens to settle all financial obligations before they could register to vote. Governor DeSantis signed the bill into law in June 2019, and shortly…
EXPUNGEMENT OF CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY
EXPUNGEMENT OF CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS: AN EMPIRICALÂ STUDY
That is the title of a first-of-its-kind empirical study of the effects of state laws limiting public access to criminal records – commonly known as “expungement.” It is worth quoting the abstract in its entirety:
 “Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge of legislative…
In the classic game-theory “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” the puzzle is that two suspects questioned separately may end up getting harsher punishment when they both cooperate with law enforcement and implicate their accomplice than if they each stay silent – even though it appears they will get more lenient treatment if they cooperate.
The normal game is described in detail in Wikipedia:
A former judge, Paul Seeman served in the Alameda County Superior Court, where he helped create and lead the Alameda County Collaborative Juvenile Mental Health Court. Among his professional achievements, Paul Seeman was nominated for the American Bar Association's (ABA) Livingston Hall Juvenile Justice Award.
The Livingston Hall Juvenile Justice Award takes its name from Livingston Hall, who is a professor emeritus at Harvard University. Hall served as a chair of the Criminal Justice Section Juvenile Justice Committee and helped to establish the ABA Juvenile Justice Standards, which greatly shape the justice system today. Each year, the Livingston Hall Juvenile Justice Award celebrates individuals who, like Hall, are committed to the field of juvenile criminal justice and have contributed to its advancement, both in the courtroom and beyond.
To nominate an individual for the award, download the nomination form from the official website, www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/awards/hall. Prospective nominees must meet the following requirements: he or she must be an active member of the bar, demonstrate exceptional professionalism and skill in representing juvenile clients, and significantly impact the interests and rights of his or her clients. Submit the completed form along with the nominee's resume, other supporting documentation, and a letter that outlines how the nominee fulfills the nomination requirements. Incomplete submissions will not be reviewed.
The historic bail reform legislation passed in California last year, described in a blog post here in August 2018, is being challenged by the bail bond industry. As described by the LA Times,  a national coalition of bail agency groups has collected enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot in 2020 that would overturn the reform legislation and restore the money bail system.
 The Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences at UCLA
“In this talk, Ralph Miller will briefly review sources of non-pathological forgetting, including spontaneous decay with increasing retention intervals, displacement from short-term memory by irrelevant information, associative interference by similar but different information, and inadequate…
 “Too Tough on Crime? The Impact of Prosecutor Politics on Incarceration” is a new study by Ashan Arora, a Research Director at the University of Chicago Crime and Education Labs.  The study is statistically sophisticated (sample: “Estimates of the effect of DA identity are obtained by using local linear functions within a narrow bandwidth of close DA elections. I estimate standard RD…
The LA Times reports on the slow implementation of AB 1810 in San Diego County, in part due to resistance from prosecutors. The mental health diversion law, AB 1810, which was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last June 27, is intended to steer people with mental health conditions into treatment and away from jail or prison. It gives judges discretion to order defendants into a pretrial diversion…
Nevada is one of 12 states that restrict voting rights even after a person has served his or her prison sentence and is no longer on probation or parole. Based on the most recent estimates Nevada’s law disenfranchises over 89,000 people: 4% of the entire state-wide voting-age population but 11.76% of the adult black voting-age population. More than half of disenfranchised African Americans are…
Governor Jerry Brown today signed into law SB 10, the groundbreaking bail reform legislation that establishes a new system for determining a defendant’s custody status while they await trial based on an assessment of risk to public safety and probability of missing a court date rather than their ability to pay cash bail.
“Today, California reforms its bail system so that rich and poor alike are…
Like typewriters, carbon paper, and other relics of the analog age, the Sixth Amendment right to trivial by jury has become a historical curiosity. According to a recent study published by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “The Trial Penalty: The Sixth Amendment Right To Trial on the Verge of Extinction and How To Save It“, over the last fifty years, trial by jury has declined…
And in Los Angeles, the ACLU has partnered with LARRP, the Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership, on an “Unlock the Vote”  campaign to reduce barriers to registration and voting for justice-involved and justice-impacted folks in Los Angeles County as well as Orange County. The project volunteers go inside the LA and Orange County jails to to educate and register eligible voters, both the…
In Illinois, the  Governor has on his desk and is expected to sign the recently passed HB 4469,which requires every jail in the state to provide voter education and make in-person or absentee voting available to all eligible incarcerated voters. Currently only eight counties in the state have any voting process for people in pretrial detention. “There is confusion around how election code…
The Impact of Proposition 47 on Crime and Recidivism
The Impact of Proposition 47 on Crime and Recidivism
The Public Policy Institute of California has published a study analyzing crime data since 2010, designed to determine the impact if any of Proposition 47 on crime rates in the State. Prop 47, passed in 2014, reduced the penalties for certain lower-level drug and property offenses and was intended to reserve prison and jail space for higher-level offenders. The debate around the policy centered…
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