Category: General

A study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) reports that police officers in ten large urban police departments are retiring or resigning at unprecedented levels.   A story by Fox News reporter Peter Aitken quotes LELDF President Jason Johnson, “In the wake of the anti-police movement and Floyd protests, cops —unwanted and unappreciated by their political leaders —are running for the exits. Resignations and retirements at the largest police agencies in the United States are skyrocketing while recruitment is tanking.”  The study compiled data from police agencies in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Austin, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Jose, Los Angeles County, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Miami-Dade from June 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021.

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Despite appeals from the Pope and racial activists including Congressman Cori Bush,  triple murderer Earnest Johnson was executed by lethal injection Tuesday evening.   Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that Johnson  was sentenced to death for the February 1994 murders of three at Casey’s General Store in Columbia.  Johnson, who intended to rob the store for money to buy drugs, waited until closing time before pulling a gun on the manager, 46-year-old Mary Bratcher, and demanding that she open the safe.  After Bratcher tried to flush the safe key down a toilet, Johnson shot her and employees Mable Scruggs, 57 and Fred Jones, 58.  When all three survived the gunshots, Johnson attacked them with a claw hammer and a screwdriver.  A mountain of evidence left the jury with no question regarding Johnson’s guilt.

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In recent years the gap between fact and fiction in American journalism has become so wide that articles citing completely false “facts” are routinely featured in once-respected news sources.  One recent example is a September 29 article in the San Francisco Examiner by Opinion Editor Gil Duran.  The piece focuses on the tragic September 4 sexual assault and murder of 61-year-old Molly Tibbitts in Sacramento.   Habitual felon Troy Davis was arrested for these crimes along with killing the victim’s dogs and setting fire to her home.   Davis had been arrested for stealing a car last June and was released without bail.   As one might expect, the Tibbitts family, her friends and neighbors and law enforcement leaders wanted to know why a repeat felon on parole got released on zero bail after stealing a car three months before the murder.  Duran contends that the Sacramento County’s “pro-Trump” Sheriff “may deserve some of the blame.”  He also suggests that if this crime had occurred in his former home of San Francisco, or in Los Angeles, Republicans would have blamed the progressive Chesa Boudin and George Gascon, both of whom support zero bail.

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A Canadian woman visiting Los Angeles got a first hand look at the everyday violence happening in the nation’s largest “woke” city earlier this month.  Carl Samson of NextShark reports that Jennifer Chen was sitting alone waiting for a friend in her car in a parking lot near Beverly Hills at 4:25 p.m. on September 15,  when a middle aged white man walked up and slugged her in the face while saying “f***ing Asians.”   Chen chased him down and when confronted, he denied hitting her.  Parking lot video had captured the incident but under current California law the assault is misdemeanor battery, carrying little of no consequences.   Down the road a couple of miles, CBS News reports that a neighborhood in the beachside community of Venice has become home to a large homeless encampment where drug addicts, gunshots, screaming and threats of violence have become common.

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A good example of the mainstream media narrative regarding the unprecedented surge in homicides, which started last year and has continued unabated this year, is this June article from the Washington Post which reported that racist police,  inequality and the economic and social impact of the pandemic are the root causes.   “Experts have attributed the increase to a variety of new and long-standing issues—-including entrenched inequality, soaring gun ownership, and fraying relations between police and the communities they serve—all intensified during the coronavirus pandemic and widespread uprising for racial justice.”  It’s guns and racism that’s causing all those murders folks.  Virginia lawyer Hans Bader has this piece in Liberty Unyielding debunking this claptrap.

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According to a recent study, “close to half of all new U.S. gun buyers since the beginning of 2019 have been women” the Wall Street Journal’s Zusha Elinson reports. The study, 2021 National Firearms Survey, found that over 3.5 million women were first time gun purchasers between January 2019 and April of this year. What caused this sharp increase in women buying firearms?

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The  Chicago Sun Times reports that 64  people were shot in Chicago last weekend (9/3-9/5) with 9 killed.  There were more deaths last weekend than over the three-day Labor Day weekend.  Among those shot with nine children ranging in ages from 12 to 16.  There were two mass shootings including a random attack at people leaving a birthday party Saturday night, killing a woman and injuring three others.  Hours earlier another mass shooting killed a 24-year-old man and injured three others.  According to the New York Post, New York City fared better over the weekend with only 35 shootings and no deaths so far.  In one incident two shooters fired randomly into a group of roughly 100 people listening to music outdoors at a housing project at about 12:30 am Monday morning.  Six were injured.  At least 15 people were shot in 11 incidents Friday,  13 in 9 incidents  Saturday, and 7 in 4 incidents Sunday.   Shootings in New York are up from 1,087 at this point last year, to 1,163 this year.   Weekends in these “woke” cities are more dangerous than a month in Beirut.

This morning the California Court of Appeal (3rd Appellate District) dismissed Daniel Marsh’s appeal in an unpublished opinion (found here). A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post that detailed this appeal’s convoluted procedural history (here).   The Court of Appeal agreed that the juvenile court’s reinstatement of the original 2014 criminal judgment was final before SB 1391 went into effect.  Because it “did not constitute a new judgment from which to appeal,” the Court of Appeal found it was not appealable, and thus “the appeal must be dismissed.”

In 2020 California voters resoundingly rejected a state law eliminating cash bail for most people arrested for crimes.   Yet in Los Angeles and San Francisco thousands of arrestees are routinely released without bail.  A piece by Thomas Elias in the Napa Valley Register discusses the no-bail policy implemented by Los Angeles DA George Gascon.   Under Gascon “Offenses legally defined as nonviolent and non-serious including things like solicitation to commit murder, many felony assaults, felony domestic violence resulting in a traumatic condition, resisting a peace officer, molesting a child over 15 and sexual penetration of a mentally or developmentally disabled person” will be released without bail.  “Most Californians would consider any of these crimes both serious and violent,” notes Elias.  “Most folks would probably also believe a suspect arrested for sucker-punching an elderly Asian woman in a hate crime may have committed a serious offense.  But that suspect would be freed pending trial if deputies follow Gascon’s orders.”

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