Report from governmental affairs. First Step or Only Step?

• Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
• Pages: 67-68

injured workers. He is chair of the ABA

Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights

& Responsibilities and the  rst Hispan-

ic to serve as president of the State Bar

of Texas. He also served as president

of the American Bar Foundation and

Austin Bar Association. He received

the Joseph C. Parker Jr. Diversity

Award in 2018.

“I’ve never thought of myself as

being the  rst Hispanic or the  rst

minority; I just thought of it as, ‘This is

an opportunity for me to do a good job;

let’s get it done and go on to the next

thing.’ Another thing I’ve learned, it’s

not the titles you have but the people

you meet along the line and the people

whose lives you can change. That’s why

we keep going.”

Donald K. Tamaki is managing part-

ner of Minami Tamaki in San Francis-

co . He served on the legal team that

reopened the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court

case of Fred Korematsu, overturning

his criminal conviction for defying the

removal of almost 120,000 Japanese

Americans. He was recently on the team

that  led an amicus brief in Trump

v. Hawaii on behalf of Korematsu’s

daughter and the children of Gordon

Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, two

other Japanese-American plaintiffs

in Supreme Court cases challeng-

ing curfews.

“My father once told me when he

was a kid he wanted to be a lawyer, but

it was impossible. To this day, I keep

his [college] diploma. It is wrapped in

a mailing tube that was addressed to a

concentration camp. The fact that now

I’m getting recognized, it’s important to

me, I’m honored, but it’s important for

the entire public to remember how far

we’ve come.” Q

REPORT FROM

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

First Step

or Only

Step?

The status of criminal justice

reform one year later

BY KENNETH GOLDSMITH

More tha n o ne year has

passed since President

Donald Trump signed

the First Step Act into

law —the most signi cant federal crim-

inal justice reform passed in a decade.

It was hailed as landmark legislation

that would start rolling back draconian

criminal justice policies of the 1990s .

Thousands of inmates have since

been released from prison based on new

calculations for good-time credit and

sentencing reforms for certain drug of-

fenses. Among other things, the FSA has

improved opportunities for individuals

to make successful transitions back to

their communities after completing their

sentences. While the FSA is not yet fully

implemented, it already has produced

notable successes.

But not everyone in favor of criminal

justice reforms supported passage of

the FSA. Some organizations opposed

the bill because they did not believe

the changes went far enough. Congres-

sional proponents assured them that,

consistent with the bill’s title, the FSA

was only intended to be a  rst step. But

more than one year later, these organi-

zations and national coalitions formed

to support criminal justice reforms have

seen little new progress, leading some

to wonder if the FSA should have been

titled the “Only Step Act.”

U.S. House and Senate Judiciary

Committee leaders have assured advo-

cates that additional reforms are on the

way, but they have held off to  rst focus

on oversight of FSA implementation.

Their caution seems warranted, given a

lack of transparency and initial delays

by the Department of Justice in making

many FSA bene ts available to those

in custody. Federal prosecutors also

have reportedly contested the release of

certain inmates.

While most provisions of the FSA

have been implemented, both chambers

of Congress continue to scrutinize on-

going efforts, with the House Judiciary

Committee holding a Bureau of Prisons

oversight hearing in October. The FSA

provision that will have the greatest

ABA Insider | REPORT FROM GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

Photos courtesy of American Bar Association, Shutterstock

ABA JOURNAL | FEBRUARY-MARCH 2020

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