Author: Michael Rushford

Darrell Brooks, the posterboy for progressive sentencing reform, was found guilty today of six counts of first degree murder and 61 other felony counts.  Michael Ruiz of Fox News reports that the jury held Brooks accountable for driving an SUV through the Waukesha, Wisconsin Christmas Parade on November 21 of last year, killing six and injuring dozens.  Brooks, a habitual felon with a 50-page rap sheet, chose to represent himself at trial, insulting the judge and intimidating witnesses.  It took a day-and-a-half for the jury to reach its unanimous verdict.  In Wisconsin a conviction of intentional first-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence.  Days before he ran down paradegoers, a Milwaukee judge released Brooks on $1,000 bail after he ran over his child’s mother with the same SUV during a domestic dispute.  At that time, he was free on bail awaiting charges of illegally carrying and firing a gun during an argument with his nephew.

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An Oklahoma man who in 2004, was angered that his nine-month-old daughter’s crying was interrupting his video game, killed her by bending her backwards until her spine was broken.  That murderer was executed Thursday by lethal injection.  Olivia Land of the New York Post reports that lawyers for Benjamin Cole claimed that their client was mentally incompetent due to his long exposure to drugs and alcohol.  A state panel rejected Cole’s bid for clemency last month.  Cole was one of four Oklahoma murderers who in 2015, challenged the state’s lethal injection process, claiming that it violated the Eighth Amendment bar against cruel and unusual punishment.   In its June 20, 2015 decision in Glossip v. Gross a 5-4 Supreme Court majority rejected the claim, holding that a murderer who challenges a state’s method of execution, shall be required to present an available alternative method.   The CJLF brief in this case argued for that holding.   Cole was the sixth Oklahoma murderer put to death since the state resumed executions in 2021.  The Glossip decision made it possible.

The City of Los Angeles is about to select its next mayor.  The contrasts between two candidates are profound.  Karen Bass, is a liberal former community organizer, three-term Democrat state assemblywoman elected Speaker in 2008.  She left Sacramento for Washington with a 2010 election to Congress, and served from 2011 to 2021.  While in Congress she was elected chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and appointed to Chair the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations and the United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.  During her political career, Bass has avoided the “in your face” approach to racial justice issues, although frequently shared her view the criminal justice system is systemically racist.  In August of 2020, as the the George Floyd riots were winding down, Bass was asked about her thoughts on defunding the police. Bass replied, “I say it a little different. Instead of saying, “defund the police,” I say, “refund the communities.  Communities [should] reinvision what public safety is like.”  Whatever this means exactly, it still sounds like taking funding from the police and spending it elsewhere.

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This week California Attorney Rob Bonta announced a multi-agency crackdown on illegal marijuana grows and marketing in the state.  Last week President Biden told reporters that he will pardon all people convicted under federal law of possession of marijuana.  While these announcements are unrelated, they may draw much needed attention to lies told to the public about marijuana.  The first lie is that marijuana is relatively safe.  In an August 4, piece in Deseret News Daryl Austin discusses research from major universities and journals that detail the harmful effects of regular use.

“Negative outcomes include research that suggests a connection between smoking marijuana and respiratory symptoms like chronic bronchitis. The drug also tends to impact school performance. `Since marijuana use impairs critical cognitive functions … many students could be functioning at a cognitive level that is below their natural capability for considerable periods of time,’ one review from the New England Journal of Medicine notes.”

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In a unanimous ruling on September 28,  California’s Second District Court of Appeal announced that the San Luis Obispo District Attorney’s Office cannot prosecute seven Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters because the District Attorney’s “well publicized association with critics of the Black Lives Matter Movement.”  According to the North Coast Times, in July of 2020 Tianna Arata allegedly lead roughly 300 BLM demonstrators onto Highway 101, blocking all lanes for an hour.  Some of the demonstrators attacked cars, smashing the window of one car with a skateboard, shattering glass on a four-year-old child in the back seat.  Arata was charged with a felony and several misdemeanors.  Six other BLM protesters were also charged.   But, later that year, Superior Court Judge Matthew Guerreo disqualified Dow and every prosecutor in his office, citing a campaign email from Dow and his wife which stated that the District Attorney was leading the fight against the “wacky defund the police movement and anarchist groups that are trying to undermine the rule of law and public safety in our community.”

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Last week progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner told a local news anchor that his approach to crime, which involves not prosecuting criminals is “working.”  The anchor noted that a thousand people had been killed over the past 20 months, with the city hitting the highest murder rate in its history.  “It is working,” replied Krasner.

In an article published in today’s Daily Mail, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald observes, “Krasner apparently defines a policy as working when it contributes to the highest number of murders and the highest rate in the city’s history, a record number of carjackings, the routine looting of stores, and savage beatings of innocent pedestrians.  Krasner has a knack for denying the undeniable.”

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With homicides in Philadelphia on track to eclipse last year’s record-setting 562 murders according to AXIOS,  District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office is working to reduce sentences for convicted murderers.  The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that last week a federal judge rejected Krasner’s effort to reduce the death sentence of a 1984 double-murderer, in a decision highlighting the fact that his office had attempted to mislead the court.  Shortly after the former criminal defense attorney’s election as district attorney in 2018, Krasner fired 31 deputies, including a dozen experienced homicide prosecutors.  Since then. his office has partnered with defense attorneys to petition Philadelphia judges to resentence condemned murderers to life in prison without parole.  Earlier this year the DA joined the defense attorney for Robert Wharton, who murdered a young couple in 1984, to petition Federal District Judge Mitchell Goldberg to overturn his death sentence on a claim of ineffective assistance of council at the sentencing hearing.

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Last week California Attorney General Rob Bonta released state crime data for 2021.   In a statement to the press, Bonta noted that  violent and property crime rates “remain significantly below their historical highs,” then admitted that homicides increased 7% last year. This follows a 31% increase in homicides from 2019 to 2021. The largest single-year increase in state history.

Taking the Attorney General at his word that “Good data is a cornerstone of good public policy,” the latest Crime in California report strongly suggests that current policies are taking the state in the wrong direction.

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Oklahoma executed convicted murderer James Coddington this morning by lethal injection.  Stephanie Pagones of Fox News reports that Governor Kevin Stitt declined to commute Conddington’s death sentence yesterday, despite the murderer’s apology and the state parole board’s recommendation that his sentence be reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  A 2006 decision by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals describes how Coddington beat his friend, 73-year-old Albert Hale to death with a claw hammer and robbed him of $525 in order to buy cocaine.  Hale’s son found his body later that day and rushed him to the hospital, where he died from his injuries.  After murdering Hale, Coddington went on to commit least six armed robberies of gas stations and convenience stores across Oklahoma City.   Following his arrest, he admitted to the robberies and the murder.  His execution was the fifth Oklahoma has carried out since the state resumed enforcing the death penalty last year.