Category: General

California Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D-Moreno Valley) has introduced a bill that would bar the use of police dogs in arrests, apprehensions and crowd control.  Evan Symon of the California Globe reports that the purpose of AB 742 is to end the disproportionate number of African Americans and people of color that are apprehended and injured by police dogs.  “We have to understand that the use of police K-9s has been a mainstay in this country’s dehumanization and it’s cruel and violent history,” said Assemblyman Jackson.  The problem is, a ban on police dogs will not reduce African American exposure to police, and will almost certainly increase shootings of suspects of color.  The disproportionate number of police encounters with blacks is the result of the disproportionate number of crimes committed by blacks.  In Los Angeles for example,  blacks commit forty-four percent of all violent crime, though they’re nine percent of the population.

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The state of Missouri is set to execute Leonard Taylor for the November 2004 murders of his girlfriend Angela Rowe and her three children.  Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that Governor Mike Parson today declined to halt Taylor’s execution which is scheduled for tomorrow, February 7.  Taylor, a habitual felon with priors for dealing cocaine, fraud and forcible rape, continues to claim that he is innocent although he admitted the murders to his brother, who shared this with his girlfriend.  The brother has since recanted that testimony.  The victims were believed to have been murdered on November 22 or 23.  Their bodies were discovered on December 3, after Rowe had not shown up for work nor her children for school.  The mother was shot several times.  The 10 year old boy and 6-year-old girl were shot twice in the head.  The 5-year-old boy was shot once in the head.  On November 26, Taylor flew to California under an assumed name to visit his wife.  He was arrested three weeks later in Madisonville, Kentucky at the home of another girlfriend.   The facts are described in a 2009 Missouri Supreme Court decision on direct appeal.  UPDATE:  Taylor was executed without incident at 6:16 PM.

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On Monday Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux asked California Governor Gavin Newsom to lift his moratorium on the death  penalty for the members of the drug gang that executed six people including a 16-year-old mother and her 10-month-old son.  The Sacramento Bee reports that during a press conference yesterday the Sheriff told reporters “I would like him (Newsom) to lift the ban on the death penalty in cases where small children are murdered.  This should be a death penalty case.”  All of the victims in the January 16 murders were members of the same family.  The Sheriff said that the killings were a “cartel-style execution,” likely involving a criminal gang distributing drugs for a Mexican cartel.

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On November 14, 1996 Alan Peterson, a Southern California contractor, was leaving a Jack in the Box with his lunch when 16-year-old gang member Lawrence Cottle shot him in the chest while attempting to carjack his pickup.  A short time later Peterson died in the hospital.  The next day Cottle robbed a man at gunpoint,  then held his gun to the head of a little girl while stealing her mother’s purse.  Cottle ended his crime spree with an armed carjacking before crashing into a police car while attempting to flee.  For these crimes Cottle was sentenced to life without parole (LWOP).  In May of last year, Alan Peterson’s daughter learned that her father’s murderer was eligible for release on parole and would go before the parole board in June.  She was devastated to learn that California has passed a law (SB 394) making murderers under 18 sentenced to LWOP eligible for parole after serving 25 years.  Dozens of other families have gone through the same trauma of learning that the murderers of their loved ones have been set free under this law.   A committee of the Virginia Senate has just passed out a bill (SB 842) that would make all murderers and all violent criminals eligible for release after serving 15 years.

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If a pipeline owned by Dow Chemical or Chevron had leaked toxins that caused the death of 1,000 Americans in a single year, the entire force of the U.S. Government would have descended upon them, immediately shutting down the operation, followed by federal criminal charges being filed by the Justice Department.  It would not matter at all what political party controlled the White House or Congress.   But when toxic chemicals manufactured in China and sold to Mexican drug cartels are put into pills that appear to be widely-prescribed drugs such and Xanax and Adderall and kill thousands, the government response is mostly crickets.  These pills are trafficked across the U.S. southern border and end up in every American city.  In 2021, 70,000 people in the U.S. were poisoned by the fentanyl in those pills or by cocaine laced with the drug.  For perspective, 58,209 Americans were killed over the 19 years of the Vietnam War.  In the face of this massacre, did the federal government shut down the southern border?  Did the President and his State Department sanction China or Mexico for this crime?  Did Congress take any decisive action?

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The Oklahoma Department of Corrections has denied a condemned murderer’s request to have his spiritual advisor with him in the death chamber during his execution Thursday.  Sean Murphy of the Associated Press reports that Rev. Jeff Hood of Arkansas will not be allowed to be with double-murderer Scott Eizember during the lethal injection process because of his multiple arrests for anti-death penalty outbursts.  Attorneys representing Eizember filed a lawsuit Monday to stop the execution until Hood is allowed in the death chamber.  They cite the U.S. Supreme Court’s March 2022 ruling in Ramirez v. Collier which announced that state’s were required to allow a murderer’s spiritual advisor to be physically present in the death chamber.  Whether this requirement includes allowing anti-death penalty activists who may use the execution as a protest opportunity is yet to be determined.  UPDATE:  Oklahoma relented and allowed Rev. Hood to be in the death chamber as Eizember was executed yesterday, as reported by CBS News.

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Shootings along with homicide rates in most large cities have increased significantly since the national crime surge accompanying the George Floyd riots.  While anti-second amendment democrat politicians including the President, the Mayor of New York City, California’s Governor and Attorney General are focused on “gun crimes” by criminals as justification to increase restrictions on gun ownership by the law-abiding public, knife crimes are not receiving the same level of political attention.  The seriousness of knife attacks was highlighted in a series of early 2022 fatal stabbings of young women beginning in January 12, when a repeat felon walked into a high-end furniture store in the very expensive Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park and fatally stabbed Briana Kupfer, a college student working there.  The autopsy report indicated that Kupfer suffered from 26 stab wounds, eleven of which were to the 24-year-old’s chest.  Kupfer was also stabbed in her abdomen, pelvis, arms, and legs.

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A North Carolina man facing trial for murdering a little boy made a plea-bargain today to avoid a possible death sentence.  Andrew Mark Miller of Fox News reports that Darius Sessoms plead guilty to the August 2020 murder of five-year-old Cannon Hinnant, in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole (LWOP).  The murder occurred when Sessoms walked up to the little boy as he was riding his bike in front of his home and shot him in the head at point-blank range.  Both of the child’s sisters witnessed the murder.  There is no known motive for the crime and the victim’s father told reporters that he considered Sessoms a friend to his family.  This plea deal would not have been available in a states which do not have a death penalty.

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When she commuted of death sentences for every condemned murderer in Oregon last week, outgoing Governor Kate Brown may have given the state’s worst murderers the opportunity for parole.  An article in CNS News by Hans Bader reports that murderers who killed their victims before 1989, the year that the state adopted true life without parole (LWOP) as the alternative to a death sentence, can petition for parole because they are not eligible for LWOP.   The state’s other thirteen condemned murderers could become eligible for release under the state’s Second Chance Law.  The Oregonian reports that the law (SB 819) was adopted last year to give prison inmates a pathway to early release.  The measure was promoted by progressives who believe that no criminal should serve more than 20 years behind bars regardless of their crime.  Governor Brown signed that bill into law.

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