Author: Michael Rushford

A legislative measure signed into law in 2017 by then-governor Jerry Brown has resulted in the parole of a Monterey County drug dealer who killed a young woman in 1989 to prevent her testimony in a case implicating him in an earlier double-homicide.  To make  sure she would not survive, Bradly Hardison, then 25, shot 23-year-old Sonjii Johnson five to six times in the upper body with a .357 magnum, while she was sitting in a car in front of her parent’s home.  One of the bullets passed through Johnson and lodged in her younger brother’s spine, but he survived.  Tom Wright of the Monterey Herald reports that the state Board of Parole has granted parole to Hardison, who, in 1990, pleaded guilty to the murder to avoid the possibility of receiving the death penalty.  The plea deal resulted in Hardison receiving a sentence of 25-to-life prison plus six additional years for the use of a gun and assault on Johnson’s brother as detailed in this 2003 District Court decision.

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Over the past two election cycles rich white liberals, such as George Soros, have pumped millions into passing ballot measures, and electing political candidates, including district attorneys that will reduce sentences for criminals, restrict prosecutions and essentially empty out jails and prisons based upon the myth of over-incarceration.  The expressed motive behind this fiction is that consistently enforced laws against crime and increased sentences for repeat offenders is racist.  The proof:  blacks and Hispanics, which commit crime at higher levels that other races, are more frequently arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated than other races.  Their narrative leaves out the which commit crime at higher levels part, and so does most of the national media.  But to sell a lie over a long period of time, one must prevent the majority from finding out the truth.  Today’s Wall Street Journal provides a case in point.  The powerful Democratic City Committee in Philadelphia has voted not to endorse progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner’s reelection this year.

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CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger will be delivering oral argument remotely to the California Supreme Court Tomorrow morning (April 7) at 9:00 am.

The argument will be live streamed at this link:  https://www.courts.ca.gov/35333.htm

The name of the case is In re Friend (Jack Wayne) on Habeas Corpus, S256914.

This will be the first case argued tomorrow and you should be able to click on it to watch it occur.
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This is probably not news for anyone who regularly looks at reporting standards at the New York Times, but Manhattan Institute Scholar Heather MacDonald puts the paper’s double standard regarding its coverage of crime and crime related stories in stark relief.  Her piece in the City Journal notes the way the Times reported last month’s police crackdown of the riot-like rampage of mostly black spring breakers at Miami Beach was to characterize the shootings, street brawls and property damage as “by and large, nonviolent.”  The Times went on to report that the only reason the police were confiscating guns and arresting the revelers is because most of them were black.  It was racial bias.  Responding to this claim, Miami’s Mayor, a Democrat, told the Times “we do not target race, we targeted conduct.”

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For at least the last few months a major focus of the national media has been on the increase in assaults on Asians.  The narrative, featured here by CNN, is that white supremacists egged on by President Trump’s characterization of Covid-19 as the China virus, are engaging in random violent attacks against Asians.  Setting aside the fact no credible scientist denies that the virus originated from Wuhan, China, there is little evidence that people randomly attacked Asians after the Hong Kong Flu killed roughly 4 million in 1968, or that Spaniards were set upon after the Spanish Flu killed over 20 million in 1918, what proof does the media offer for its latest narrative regarding attacks on Asians?  Damn little.  In fact most of the available evidence points in a different direction.

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Media coverage of yesterday’s unanimous the California Supreme Court ruling in In re Humphrey, mostly applauded the court’s holding that the Constitution requires judges to consider a suspect’s “ability to pay” when deciding if he can be released on bail.  The Associated Press story by Don Thompson was picked up not only by most California newspapers and broadcasters,  but by the Miami Herald,  U.S. News, the The Chicago Tribune,  The Baltimore Sun, NBC News and many more.   The ruling was characterized as “landmark” because the court added a requirement to the decision to set bail, not provided under state law, noting that setting a bail amount the suspect cannot afford “accords insufficient respect to the arrestee’s crucial state and federal equal protection rights against wealth-based detention as well as the arrestee’s state and federal substantive due process rights to pretrial liberty” (emphasis added).

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California Governor Gavin Newsom has filled the Attorney General’s seat left open after Xavier Becerra’s confirmation as federal HHS Secretary with Oakland Assemblyman Rob Bonta.  According to Wikipedia, Bonta joined a San Francisco law firm after graduating from Yale Law School and worked with the ACLU to develop anti-racial profiling restrictions for the California Highway Patrol.  He also served as a Deputy City Attorney of San Francisco and spent one year on the Alameda City Council before his election to the state Assembly.   Paul Rogers and Robert Salonga of the Mercury News report that Assemblyman Bonta co-authored SB 10, a bill signed in 2018 by Governor Jerry Brown which abolished cash bail in California.  State voters adopted a referendum to reject that law at the 2020 general election by over 56%.  In announcing Bonta’s appointment Governor Newsom told reporters, “Rob has become a national leader in the fight to repair our justice system and defend the rights of every Californian.”  What this means with regard protecting the public from criminals, which is supposed to be the Attorney General’s job, is anybody’s guess.

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol reports that two Honduran nationals with prior convictions for sexually assaulting children in the U.S. have been caught trying to reenter the country.  Jose Moreno was apprehended with a group of eight trying to cross the border near Mission, Texas last Friday.  Moreno had been deported after serving nine years for raping a child in New York in 2007.   A day earlier Jonathan Rosales-Rivera was caught crossing the Texas border.  Rivera was deported after being convicted of second-degree sexual assault on a child in Wisconsin.  With the current surge at the southern border, which has forced agents from patrolling the border and apprehending illegals to processing and servicing the thousands who are now turning themselves in, some are estimating that more than half of those crossing the southern border are not being caught or identified.   How many are convicted criminals like Moreno and Rivera?