Category: News Scan

In an unpublished ruling released earlier this month, a divided panel of the California’s First District Court of Appeal overturned the murder conviction of DeAngelo Cortijo, a well known Bay Area  criminal justice reform advocate.   The San Jose Mercury News reports that a jury found Cortijo guilty of the fatal shooting of 26-year-old Oakland resident Jamad Jerkins in 2016.  At trial, Jerkins’ girlfriend testified that he had told her about an earlier incident where Cortijo had pulled a gun on Jerkins.   The judge sustained the defense objection that the girlfriend’s statement was hearsay, and instructed the jury to ignore it, but he refused Cortijo’s request for a mistrial.   Cortijo later testified that he had confronted Jerkins in an apartment parking lot, pointing a loaded gun at him,  and claimed that when Jerkins tried to slap the gun away, it went off.

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The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has postponed the execution of murderer Tracy Lane Beatty due to the corona virus.  Blake Holland of KLTV reports that Beatty was scheduled to be executed today for the 2003 murder of his 62-year-old mother.  The Texas Daily Independent reported that Beatty had previous convictions for drug possession, theft, weapons possession, a brutal assault against a child under two years of age, and prior assaults against his mother, a correctional officer, and others. While incarcerated, Beatty had a physical altercation with a corrections officer and was found with a shank. He had also joined a prison gang.

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Three weeks after California’s March 3rd primary election, the outcome of several races across the state remains uncertain due to the state’s multiple “election reform” laws.  Motor Voter, Jungle Primary, provisional balloting and ballot harvesting have turned the state election process into a template for incompetence, corruption and fraud, where the final vote count is not known for several weeks and its accuracy never confirmed.    With several million mail-in and provisional ballots uncounted the day after the election some contests that were not even close on March 4, may completely change weeks later.

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Attorney General William Barr told reporters Tuesday that the Justice Department is investigating a reported cyber incident directed at computers at the Department of Health and Human Services.  Michael Balsamo of the Associated Press reports that a “denial of service” attack was attempted on HHS computer networks but the networks were not penetrated.  This came days after federal officials identified an effort by a foreign entity to spread misinformation about a nationwide quarantine in response to the coronavirus.  The Attorney General said the FBI and other agencies are investigating both incidents and threatened severe action for any foreign government behind disinformation campaigns attempting to spread panic among Americans.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals announced today that the state will delay the execution of triple-murderer John Hummel for 60 days due to the health crisis caused by the coronavirus.  Jerry Lambe of Law and Crime reports that, according to state prosecutors, Hummel’s attorneys offered “no evidence whatsoever” that the concerns about the virus would threaten prison employees or cause any impediment to the execution.  Hummel was sentenced to death in 2011 for the stabbing murder of his pregnant wife and the baseball-bat beating deaths of this 5-year-old daughter and his father-in-law, before setting fire to their home.  Hummel’s execution had been scheduled for Wednesday.

In a divided decision announced today the Arkansas Supreme Court has upheld a condemned murderer’s request to end the appeal of his conviction and sentence.   Andrew DeMillo of the Associated Press reports that Jerry Lard, convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer during a traffic stop in 2011, was found competent by the court to waive his right to post conviction relief.  Lard’s counsel argued that a mental review by a psychologist had concluded that Lard suffered from mild intellectual disability which should make him ineligible for execution.  The court held that because an execution date had not yet been set, the question of Lard’s eligibility for execution was not yet ripe for review.  Dashcam video from Officer Jonathan Schmidt’s patrol car showed Lard shooting him in the face, and the officer can later be heard begging for his life, before he was killed.

Progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who took office in January, announced policy changes Friday to reduce racial disparities in arrests and sentencing.  Mary Jane Johnson of the San Francisco Examiner reports that Boudin’s office will no longer prosecute for drugs, guns or anything else, including a nuclear device, found during  “pretextual” traffic stops, and will not seek sentencing increases for habitual felons or gang members.  The new policy adopts reforms recommended by the Obama Justice Department in 2016 to address racial bias in policing.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a habitual felon’s challenge to the sentence he received under Armed Career Criminal Act.  Alexandra Jones & Tim Ryan of Courthouse News report that in Borden v. United States, a criminal with three prior convictions for aggravated assault, claims that the nine-year sentence he received as a felon in possession of a firearm under the Act violated his right to due process.  The Act defines crimes involving a “reckless trigger” as crimes of violence subject to sentence enhancements.  Borden argues that a divide among the federal circuits on Act’s enforcement required a Supreme Court review of his constitutional challenge.   The case will be argued this fall.

The  early warnings about New York’s lenient bail reform law, which took effect in January, have come true according to a Fox News story published today.   The New York Police Department reported a 22.5% increase in major crime in February, compared to last year.  While murder was down, robbery, assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto thefts were all up. The Department noted that in the first 58 days of the year, 482 offenders arrested for felonies were set free under the new law and then rearrested for committing 846 new crimes, 299 of which were major crimes.  According to police, all of these offenders could have been held in jail prior to bail reform.

Nathaniel Woods, convicted in 2005 of the murders of three Birmingham police officers, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection tonight.  Bill Hutchinson of ABC news reports that death penalty opponents and some civil rights activists are demanding that Governor Kay Ivey grant Woods a reprieve.   A jury found that Woods and accomplice Kerry Spencer lured four officers serving an arrest warrant into a suspected crack house in Burmingham on June 17, 2004 where Spencer shot them all with a rifle, killing three.  The forth officer survived to testify at Woods’ trial.  On appeal Woods claimed that his trial attorney was ineffective and misinformed him about a possible plea bargain.  A 2016 Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals decision indicates that witnesses heard Woods threaten to kill the police if they came back to his house, and the he pointed out one of the officers coming in a back door so  Spencer could shoot him.  Among the celebrities calling Woods innocent and insisting his execution be halted is Kim Kardashian West.   Update:  Woods was pronounced dead at  9:01 PM Thursday.