Author: Michael Rushford

California’s Third District Court of Appeal has unanimously overturned the first degree murder conviction of a Sacramento man whose wife jumped from his pickup and died during his attempt to kidnap her.   The court’s ruling held that because the victim jumped from her husband’s truck while trying to escape him, under a recently enacted state law, he could not be held responsible for her death.   In 2018, the state legislature passed, and Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 1437 into law.  As reported by Metropolitan News Enterprise, the measure eviscerated the state’s felony murder rule, which had for decades, allowed accomplices to a felony such as kidnapping to be charged with murder if someone died during the commission of the crime.  Under SB 1437, only the actual killer; someone who aided, participated in or solicited the murder; or was a major participant in the felony who acted with reckless indifference to human life, could be convicted of the murder.

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With crime and violence raging across the state of New York, including cities outside of the Big Apple like Albany and Rodchester, and with fatal fentanyl overdoses at epidemic levels, the state legislature it taking action.  Maydoon Khan of the Associated Press reports that Governor Kathy Hochul signed a new law this week to strike the word “inmate” from state law and replace it with “incarcerated person” in order to remove the stigma of serving time in prison or jail for criminal behavior.  The bill’s sponsor, Bronx Democrat Senator Gustavo Rivera, told reporters, “This is another concrete step our state is taking to make our criminal justice system one that focuses on rehabilitation, rather than relying solely on punishment.”  I bet millions of New Yorkers already feel safer because of this new law.  A linguistics professor at MIT compared calling a person in prison an inmate with calling an African American born into slavery a slave.  By changing the words “you help people better understand who they are and how they got to be where they are,” he said.

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Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown acknowledged Monday that crime is spiking in every neighborhood in the city after another bloody weekend.  Lucy Collins of CNS News reports that among the shooting victims were two teenage boys who were approached on a sidewalk at 1:00 am.  A 29 -year-old man was shot and killed while riding a Chicago Transit Authority train early Saturday.  Last weekend 48 people were shot, five fatally as the city logs 399 murders so far this year.  This comes as police complain about a policy adopted in June that prohibits officers from chasing suspects unless they can prove that they believe the suspect had committed a felony or a class A misdemeanor.   Another new policy requires officers to call their supervisor for permission to pursue a suspect in their police car.  The brother of an 18-year-old murdered last summer wrote “I can tell you that criminals love the policy shift that’s taken place over the years in Chicago, where leaders have mistaken necessary criminal justice reform with soft-on-crime policies which are endangering the lives of residents from every neighborhood and demographic.”

In a August 1 Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal progressive hedge-fund billionaire George Soros explained why he has been bankrolling the elections of what he calls “reform” prosecutors over the past eight years. Telling us that our criminal justice system is “rife with injustices,” Soros points to the fact that “black people in the U.S. are five times more likely to be sent to jail as white people.”  He complains that America sends too many people to jail and that “we need to invest more in preventing crime with strategies that work—deploying mental-health professionals in crisis situations, investing in youth job programs, and creating opportunities for education behind bars.”  He credits the “reform-minded prosecutors” he helped elect for implementing an agenda which focuses “the resources of the criminal justice system to protect the people against violent crime….and seeks to end the criminalization of poverty and mental illness.”

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Bail reform has been a major element of the criminal justice reform movement advanced by progressive politicians, activist groups and much of the media, for at least a decade.  The narrative is that reducing or eliminating bail, even for violent arrestees, is necessary to address racial bias in the criminal justice system, because a disproportionate cohort of black and Hispanic suspects are held in jail on bail awaiting trial.  The fact that blacks and Hispanics commit a disproportionate amount of crime is ignored in this narrative.  Toward the end of the last decade several liberal state legislatures adopted no-bail laws, and during the pandemic, several others eliminated or reduced bail via executive orders.  In more than a few big cities such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and New York progressive district attorneys announced their own zero bail policies.   New York City had all of these elements.  The state adopted a bail reform law that took effect in 2020, and both the city’s mayor and district attorney enthusiastically enforced it.   In a recently-released study, Manhattan Institute scholar Jim Quinn takes a hard look at the effect that progressive bail reform has had on crime in the Big Apple.

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After a decade of supporting reduced sentences for even the most violent criminals, zero bail, abandoning pro-active policing, and endlessly lecturing Americans that police and prosecutors are racists,  democrats from the President on down are now declaring themselves to be the party of law and order.  This pivot is based on the assumption that the public is so stupid it can’t recall that democrat political leaders had justified the summer riots of 2020 sparked by the killing of George Floyd.  Those riots were followed by unprecedented and continuing increases in crime in most large American cities.  Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald penned this piece in the New York Post discussing the President’s new Safer America Plan announced last Thursday.  The plan promises to fund the hiring of 100,000 additional police officers, presumably to make up for the thousands of cops who have taken early retirement or just quit due to their treatment in cities where democrat political leaders have labeled them racists.  In many parts of the country it has become open season for attacking police officers, usually by black criminals left on the streets by laws and policies adopted by democrats to advance “racial justice.”  As MacDonald notes;

As recently as May 2022, Biden released an executive order alleging that the police disproportionately kill “Black and Brown people” and that there is “systemic racism in our criminal justice system.” The May 2022 order called for “ending discriminatory pretextual stops” — code for ending all remaining proactive stop activity. It called for increased investigations of police departments for civil rights violations.

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A lawyer who serves on the board of Just Communities Arizona (JCA), a radical “abolitionist organization,”  has been nominated to serve of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.  Houston Keene of Fox News reports that nominee Roopali Desai also serves on the Board of the American Civil Liberties Union, and has worked with teachers unions to indoctrinate children with critical race theory, promoting the narrative that American was founded on racism and that all U.S. institutions are racist.

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Much attention has been given to the dramatic spike in crime in large California cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles and the focus is often on the pro-criminal policies of local politicians and progressive district attorneys.  But crime in rural California has also increased, even though local political and law enforcement leaders often oppose soft-on-crime policies.  As reported by Fox News,  the CHP pulled over a suspicious vehicle in rural Tulare County on June 24, and found 150,000 Fentanyl pills and two kilos of cocaine.  The two men in the vehicle, both from Washington state, were arrested and charged with crimes which carry a prison sentence of up to fourteen years upon conviction.   Within twenty-four hours a county judge had released the traffickers without bail and instructed them to show up for a July 21st hearing.   Is anybody surprised that they left town?

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