Author: Michael Rushford

A habitual felon arrested in April has been released on probation after pleading guilty to 54 commercial burglaries.  Michael Ruiz of Fox News reports that Christopher Jackson, nicknamed the Snake Burglar, has gotten away with $150,000 in a string of burglaries in Riverside County.  Prior to his release yesterday, after serving three months of a seven month jail sentence, Christopher served just ten days in jail for his guilty plea to 23 previous burglaries.  Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin, one of the toughest DAs in the state, has been unable to send Christopher and other habitual thieves like him to state prison because California’s Proposition 47, and dramatic reforms adopted by the Legislature (AB109) classify commercial burglary as a non-serious felony which does not qualify for a prison sentence.   “More time has been put in by our officers and detectives investigating Christopher Jackson’s crimes than the amount of time he spent in jail,” said the Riverside Police Department.   The Governor and the overwhelming majority of state legislators believe that most Californians are too stupid to understand why crime is increasing.

The state of Illinois and Los Angeles County are eliminating the requirement that misdemeanor and non-violent felony suspects post bail to gain release from jail prior to trial as reported by The Chicago Sun Times and The California Globe.   In both cases the new laws will remove cash bail as a condition that could be set by a judge when considering whether someone was likely to return to court for their hearings or posed a danger to the public.  As one Los Angeles Superior Court judge explained ” A low-risk arrestee should not be held in jail simply because they cannot post the necessary funds to be released pending arraignment.”

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To make amends for “racial bias that has historically permeated our criminal justice system” a bill before the state Senate seeks to require judges to consider the race of convicted criminals when determining sentences.  The bill (AB 852) was introduced by Assembly Public Safety Committee Chair Reggie Jones Sawyer (D. Los Angeles) and cleared the Assembly in May on a 53-13 party line vote.  It was Chairman Sawyer who last week killed a bi-partisan Senate bill which made sex-trafficking children a serious crime under California law.  He did this by joining the five other democrat members of the eight member committee in refusing to vote.  The backlash for that action forced the Assembly Speaker and the Governor to demand reconsideration.  So Sawyer had his committee reconsider the bill and pass it by a 6-0 vote, with two democrats abstaining.  When the clerk called for a voice vote, Sawyer defiantly yelled out “Aye.”  His bill injecting racial bias into sentencing is likely to pass in the Senate.   A piece in Liberty  Unyielding by attorney Hans Bader offers a scholarly discussion on the constitutionality of such a law.   Excerpts follow the break.

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Leslie Van Houten, one of the Manson family cult members convicted of murdering a Los Angeles couple in 1969, was released from prison yesterday.  The LA Times reports that, like previous governors, Gavin Newsom had rejected the state parole board’s recommendation that Van Houten be released, but earlier this year a divided State Court of Appeal overruled the Governor, who chose not to appeal that ruling to the state Supreme Court.   The day after cult leader Charles Manson ordered the brutal murders of actress Sharon Tate and four others in her Benedict Canyon home, Manson accompanied Van Houten and five other cult members to the home of Los Feliz couple Leno and Rosemary La Bianca.  After Manson had tied the couple up and put pillowcases over their heads, cult member Tex Watson stabbed Lino to death.  Watson then ordered Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel to hold down Rosemary.  Watson stabbed her several times, then gave the knife to Van Houten, who stabbed the woman at least fourteen times.  The women then wrote “death to pigs” on the wall and “healter skelter” on the refrigerator door with Leno’s blood.

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On July 5th, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused a request for en-banc review of Johnson v. City of Grants Pass,  a ruling which voided local ordinances allowing the city  to clear out homeless camps on public property.   In the Johnson ruling announced last September, a divided panel of the court expanded an earlier Ninth Circuit ruling (Martin v. City of Boise) which discovered that the homeless have a constitutional right to camp in parks and on sidewalks.   As reported in the Anchorage Daily News, the full court’s refusal to reconsider that holding was met with an unusually harsh dissent by 16 Ninth Circuit judges.  Among the dissenters Senior Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlian noted that no other federal court of appeals has discovered a constitutional right to sleep or camp on sidewalks and other public property.  The Eighth Amendment is “not a boundless remedy for all social and policy ills, including homelessness. It does not empower us to displace state and local decisionmakers with our own enlightened view of how to address a public crisis over which we can claim neither expertise nor authority, and it certainly does not authorize us to dictate municipal policy here,” he wrote.  The City of Grants Pass plans to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal of the Johnson ruling.

A cross-dressing Black Lives Matter activist has been arrested for a mass shooting in a working class Philadelphia neighborhood Monday night.  Emily Crane and Andy Tillett of the New York Post report that Kimbrady Carriker surrendered after shooting at pursuing officers who had responded to shots-fired call in the city’s Kingsessing neighborhood.  Carriker had a rifle, pistol, police scanner and was wearing a bulletproof vest when taken into custody. According to police Carriker shot and killed four men in the street, after killing a fifth man in a house. He also shot and injured two children.  Carriker has no known connection to any of the victims.  During the George Floyd riots Carrkier posted a video of a burning a police car sprayed with “ACAB” which is shorthand for “All Coppers are Bast—ds.”  He had priors for illegal possession of a firearm and drug offenses and was sentenced to probation.  Continue reading . . .

This is off-topic for those who consider racial discrimination in college admissions a good thing, but for me and many others it qualifies as a crime resulting in real victims.    In one of the most thoughtful and concise opinions I have  ever read,  Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurrence in Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, demolishes the outright racism promoted by today’s progressives, the roots of which reach back to Jim Crow.   It should be required reading for every high school American history student and every college Constitutional Law class.

The notorious “pillowcase rapist” who terrorized Sacramento women in the 1980s, has been arrested in Bakersfield for attempting to abduct another victim.  The Bakersfield Californian reports  that 71-year-old Ronald Feldmeier was arrested in Kern County on Monday for kidnapping, after a woman he offered a lift jumped from his moving car to escape.  Feldmeier was convicted in 1986 by a Sacramento jury of nine counts of rape, five counts of oral copulation, sodomy, burglary and robbery, according to the Kern County District Attorney’s office.  He was sentenced to 67 years in prison for these crimes, but was released in 2019 after serving less than half of that sentence.  This was allowed by state law in 1986.

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A recently released survey  by the National Retail Federation indicates that shoplifting and organized retail theft cost nearly $95 billion last year, doubling the losses over the past eight years.  Mike Keenan of Security Info Watch reports that while retailers are trying to address the problem by locking merchandise in cabinets and checking customer receipts at exits, state laws reducing the consequences for thieves are driving the increases.

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(The following article was published in the June 21 edition of the California Globe)

As many Americans celebrated the end of slavery over the weekend leading up to June 19, called Juneteenth, dozens of people were wounded or murdered in violent attacks across the country.   The Associated Press reports on over 103 shootings in mostly major urban centers causing twelve deaths.  An exception was the apparently targeted murders of four people in an apartment in the small town of Kellogg, Idaho.  A 31-year-old suspect is in police custody.   There were over 60 shootings in Chicago alone, with four fatalities.  Twenty-three of the victims were shot at a Sunday morning Juneteenth celebration.  Twelve teenagers were shot with one fatality at a party in St. Louis Saturday night.  Another Saturday night shooting at a Washington state campground left two  people injured and two dead.

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