Criminal and Civil Justice Policy Priorities: Nino Marchese on ALEC Breakdown
We want to provide legislators with the insights on what is a fair practice in the civil and criminal justice systems.
Nino Marchese, ALEC Civil and Criminal Justice Task Force Director, sat down with Lars Dalseide, ALEC Director of Policy Advancement and Media Relations, talking about the recent model policies passed in both task forces including the Veterans Justice Act and lawsuit reform. In addition, Marchese discusses ALEC’s Essential Policy Solutions for 2024.
We’re dealing with lawsuit reform, tort reform, regulatory reform and donor privacy issues. That’s our focus for civil justice. In criminal justice, we focus on the individual who’s caught up in the justice system, ways that we can get people out of the criminal lifestyle and get them back on their feet into society.
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[The Veterans Justice Act] was one of our more recent model policies that we passed in the summer of 2023. This was an act which provided veterans with an avenue within the judiciary to bypass traditional means of prosecution. What it does is it provides judges with the option to divert [veterans] from traditional prosecution if certain types of rehabilitation programs are met. One of the things that we’ve written about and discussed is a veteran who did exactly that and ended up training and serving other veterans, including police officers that arrested him during the time of his own incident.