Author: Kent Scheidegger

Biden Pardon Misuse Escalates to Murderers

by · Dec 23, 2024 1:14 pm

President Biden’s misuse of the pardon power during the post-election period continues. He began with his influence-peddling, cocaine-snorting son, continued with a variety of undeserving miscreants, noted here, and now has expanding to reducing the sentences of 37 murderers. Jess Bravin has this story in the WSJ:

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said.

Mistake? Biden is the one who has un-condemned these justly sentenced murderers. He is the one who has compounded the “unimaginable and irreparable loss.” This move is not based on any individual problems with the cases but only on long-standing criticisms of capital punishment. So why didn’t Mr. Biden do this much earlier? Like, before the election? Because he knew that would have diminished his own electoral chances, before he dropped out, or his party’s afterward.

The 3:25 pm ET version of the WSJ story has these reactions:

“Joe Biden is using his last days in office to spare the worst monsters in America,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) said on X. “Democrats can’t even defend Biden’s outrageous decision as some kind of principled, across-the-board opposition to the death penalty since he didn’t commute the three most politically toxic cases.”

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, called the commutations “a gross miscarriage of justice.” Scheidegger, whose group advocates for crime victims and supports capital punishment, said the Constitution should be amended “to suspend the pardon power during the lame-duck period, as that is when the worst abuses occur.”

Continue reading . . .

DA Recused in Trump Georgia Case

by · Dec 20, 2024 4:58 am

Yesterday, a divided panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals removed Atlanta DA Fani Willis from the case against President-elect Trump and others, reversing a trial court decision not to do so. The opinion is here.

Regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the underlying case, this decision strikes me as correct. DA Willis’s shenanigans severely undercut public confidence in this prosecution. “Odor of mendacity,” as the trial court described it, is an understatement. DAs have been recused for far less. The case in New York, on the other hand, is even worse, one of the clearest cases of prosecutor bias I have ever seen. Continue reading . . .

Corrupt “Kids for Cash” Judge Granted Clemency

by · Dec 15, 2024 6:00 pm

President Biden’s grant of mass clemency last week did not initially generate the degree of controversy as his earlier pardon of his son, partly because most people were not familiar with the cases. But as individual cases in this mass clemency are examined, very dubious examples are starting to emerge.

WaPo columnist Heather Long is appalled at one of the cases. “My jaw dropped when I saw Michael Conahan, a former judge involved in a notorious ‘kids for cash’ scandal in Pennsylvania, among the nearly 1,500 people President Joe Biden granted clemency to last week…. Conahan and fellow judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. were accused of receiving cash kickbacks in exchange for helping to construct two for-profit juvenile detention facilities in Luzerne County and then sentencing young people to those facilities to keep them full.”

Not only was the judge corruptly taking money to send delinquents to private rather than public lock-ups. That would have been bad enough, but it was much worse than that.

To maximize the payout, they often gave kids the harshest possible sentence. Young people who were first-time offenders and probably should have received a warning or community service would end up locked up. Some were younger than 13. What the judges did caused tremendous harm to thousands of young people and their families. One young man died by suicide. Many youths became depressed and dropped out of high school.

How did such an undeserving miscreant receive the grace of presidential clemency? This is, once again, a case insufficient investigation by an outgoing executive hurriedly handing out clemency during his “lame duck” period. Continue reading . . .

New Day in LA, Part 2

by · Dec 4, 2024 1:39 pm

Following up on this post, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office has this news release on the swearing in of Nathan Hochman.

DA Hochman announced a series of immediate policy changes that he said would promote public safety by holding the most dangerous offenders accountable. He said he would inform prosecutors that he is eliminating former DA Gascón’s special directives that prohibited or strictly limited the filing of certain charges and sentencing enhancements.

Prosecutors in the District Attorney’s Office will once again have the discretion to file charges based on the unique circumstances of each case, the crime committed, the defendant’s background, the impact on the victim and the law, he said.

“District attorneys must have only two things as their North Stars: the facts and the law,” DA Hochman said. “I reject blanket extreme policies on both sides of the pendulum swing – decarceration policies that predetermine that certain crimes and certain criminals are not going to be prosecuted and mass incarceration policies that also are not anchored in the facts and the law.”

Continue reading . . .

Santa Clara County Judges Line Up with DA on Death Sentence Reversal

by · Nov 21, 2024 10:58 am

Ron Matthias and Dolores Carr have this op-ed in the San Jose Spotlight with the above title.

Since August, local judges have been nullifying murderers’ death sentences one by one. But there’s a problem: The law the judges have been relying on to reduce those death sentences doesn’t apply to death sentences. And that’s not the only problem.

It’s easy for judges to make mistakes when they’re hearing only one side of the story, and that’s what happened here. The reductions are coming at the insistence of Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who has recently discovered he doesn’t like capital punishment. Unsurprisingly, the murderers feel the same way.

California law has a serious problem with statutes that effectively enable prosecutors to nullify existing sentences when they simply disagree with the law under which the perpetrator was properly sentenced years before. An initiative is sorely needed to fix this and other related problems, building on the success of the effort to enact Proposition 36 this year.

Continue reading . . .

New LAPD Chief Wants More Reporting of Crime

by · Nov 18, 2024 9:20 am

Speaking of a new day in LA, former County Sheriff Jim McDonnell is now the City Chief of Police. Richard Winton reports in the LA Times that the new chief expressed concern that the actual crime rate is higher than the official figures show because the people are reporting fewer of the crimes that are committed. This is a problem with crime statistics that we have noted many times on this blog.

Crime is trending down in Los Angeles, with homicides alone on track to fall 15% compared to last year, but newly sworn-in LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell is concerned that statistics aren’t telling the full story.

Speaking ahead of the ceremony Thursday to mark his arrival as the city’s 59th chief of police, McDonnell voiced concern about the perception of disorder — and the reality that crimes are going unreported because some believe nothing will be done to investigate. Continue reading . . .

A New Day Dawns in LA

by · Nov 18, 2024 9:02 am

LA DA-elect Nathan Hochman will be sworn in on December 2. Fox 11 has this story.

On day one in office, Hochman said he would eliminate Gascón’s extreme pro-criminal policies. Hochman said Gascón’s policies have led to a rise in crime throughout the county.

As DA, Hochman said his goal is to empower law enforcement, prosecutors, victim groups, store owners, and residents in LA County.

“They’re fed up with their cars being broken into, their homes being robbed. If they’re store owners with their stores being ransacked. And they want to bring back accountability. They wanted proportional, they wanted smart, they wanted common sense. They want the law enforcement officers to do a good job, but they want them to do that job,” Hochman said. Continue reading . . .

Racial Variation in Recent Changes in Victimization

by · Nov 14, 2024 10:45 am

The Council on Criminal Justice has a report by Thaddeus Johnson titled Violent Victimization is Decreasing–But Not for Everyone. The thrust of the report is based on the one-year changes in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) between 2022 and 2023.

New federal crime data show that nonlethal violent victimization decreased by 11% in 2023 for Americans aged 12 and older. But while the rate of robberies, aggravated assaults, and rape/sexual assaults fell for White and Hispanic people, it moved in the opposite direction for Black Americans.

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Victimization rates for Black Americans increased 37% from 2022 and 2023, driven by a 79% increase in robbery, 47% increase in rape/sexual assault rates, and a 16% increase in aggravated assault.

We will put to one side, for now, the variations in measures, which the report notes warrant caution. Even with that caution in mind, the reported increases are alarming. What caused these numbers to move in opposite directions?

The report is mostly statistics and not a discussion of possible causes. What little it does say, though, is a head shaker. Continue reading . . .