Category: General

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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Virtue signaling hypocrisy is on display in Seattle as an ice cream parlor which enthusiastically supported the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that shut down several square blocks of the city, is now suing the city over the damage and loss of business resulting from the shut down.  Jeffery Clark of Fox News reports that during the summer 2020 BLM protests over the death of George Floyd rioters created a BLM zone in a 10-block section of the city where a Molly Moon’s ice cream parlor was located.  The zone was renamed CHOP, (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) after armed protesters barricaded streets and prohibited police and fire-rescue officers from entering.   The city eventually agreed not to allow patrols in the area.  During the 24-day life of CHOP, there were multiple shootings with two deaths along with reports of “narcotics use and violent crime, including rape, robbery, assault, and increased gang activity.”  From June 2 to June 30, Seattle Police logged a 525 percent increase in violent crime compared to June 2019.

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A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge has ruled that a man charged with the brutal stabbing murder of a 24-year-old college co-ed can no longer represent himself at his murder trial.  The judge’s order came following an outburst in the courtroom where Shawn Laval Smith continuously cursed the judge and jumped out his seat, requiring his removal from the hearing.  My News LA reports that Smith will be confined to a security chair and represented by a public defender for his next court appearance.

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The state of Missouri executed double-murderer Michael Tisius by lethal injection Tuesday evening.  He died ten minutes after receiving a fatal dose of the anesthesia pentobarbital.  Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that Tisius was 19-years-old in 2000 when he murdered two guards at the Huntsville County Jail while helping a friend escape.  In the years since his conviction, his attorneys claimed that Tisius’ sentence should be reduced to life-without-parole because of his neglected childhood, and because one of the sentencing jurors was illiterate.  His attorneys also claimed that the murders were unintentional, although Tisius came to the jail armed with a gun and shot one of the guards multiple times.  It was the twelfth U.S. execution this year.  Last year seven murderers had been executed by June 8th.

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s vision of transforming 171 year-old San Quentin prison into a Norwegian rehabilitation campus, where inmates can wear their own clothes and cook their own food while attending classes to get college degrees and licenses in trades like plumbing and truck driving, is apparently dead.  A story in the Davis Vanguard reports that neither the Senate or the Assembly was willing to vote in support of a $360 million down payment to create a friendlier and happier place for the state’s worst criminals.  The amazing aspect of this news is that perhaps the most progressive group in the state,  Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), which advocates for closing prisons, was strongly opposed, because Newsom’s proposal “does nothing to address the systemic racism and violence that prisons perpetuate.”  Law enforcement and victims groups have been opposed to this plan since it was announced earlier this year as a criminal-coddling pipe dream.  CURB opposes it because it does not coddle criminals enough.   Go figure.