Category: Politics

Recalling a District Attorney

by · Dec 30, 2020 4:36 pm

Although George Gascón ran as a “criminal justice reform” candidate for Los Angeles District Attorney, a great many people are surprised and horrified at how far he is going to dismantle sentencing in criminal cases. As a result, many people are asking whether and how a district attorney can be recalled. The short answer is yes, but the process cannot be officially started until early March, and it is going to take either a big pot of money or a large army of volunteers to gather signatures. Continue reading . . .

The Marathon Bomber, the Death Penalty, and the Biden Administration

by · Dec 18, 2020 9:51 am

On April 15, 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother plotted a massacre as an attack on the country that had generously allowed him to come here and go to college. Tsarnaev intentionally chose children as his primary targets, setting his bomb down beyond a group of children near the Boston Marathon finish line.

Last month, AP reported that the President-elect’s spokesman said, “President-elect Joe Biden is against the death penalty and will work to end its use.”

Really? End its use means end it for all murderers, even the very worst. Does he really mean that? If so, he has a chance to show it right out of the gate. Continue reading . . .

First, They Came for the DA …

by · Dec 16, 2020 12:08 pm

Now, they are coming for the deputies.

Next, they will come for the judges.

But all is not lost.

The Metropolitan News-Enterprise has this article on an effort by the Los Angeles Public Defender’s Office to get its deputies to report deputy district attorneys who do not abide by new DA George Gascón’s directives and judges who refuse, among other things, to strike sentence-enhancing allegations. One deputy PD reported in a tweet that “our office received an email link from Mr. Gascón’s transition team instructing us to report every DA who is disobeying the new policy directives…with case details. It is very sad that the process has become Gestapo-like.” (Emphasis added.) Continue reading . . .

Feinstein Booted for Excessive Civility

by · Nov 24, 2020 3:40 pm

Under pressure, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.) announced today that she will not seek to retain her position as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. That position will be either committee chair or “ranking minority member,” depending on how the Georgia runoffs come out.

Kristina Peterson reports for the WSJ that Sen. Feinstein’s action follows “criticism from the party’s progressive wing over her handling of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Justice Amy Coney Barrett.” Continue reading . . .

Will Biden Throw in with Defense Bar Extremists or with America?

by · Nov 23, 2020 10:07 pm

There is understandably a good deal of speculation about whether Joe Biden intends to govern from the center-left or the far left.  Biden won the nomination largely as a centrist-sounding counterpoint to the left wing in his Party, represented by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and particularly by Sen. Bernie Sanders.  But his platform on criminal justice is anything but centrist, calling, for example, for elimination of the death penalty (a punishment a clear majority of Americans support) and an end to  — rather than merely a reduction in  —  mandatory minimum sentences, freeing judges to impose little to no punishment regardless of the savagery of the crime.

Which way will Mr. Biden go?

Continue reading . . .

Did “defund the police” deflate the “blue wave”?

by · Nov 18, 2020 6:49 pm

The past few years have been difficult for the advocates of justice. For most of the time I have been doing this work (since late 1986), the one thing we could always count on was that the people were with us. The courts might misconstrue the Constitution. The legislature might pass some harmful bills and kill all the good ones, but a solid majority of the people always had their heads on straight when it came to law and order.

That started to change when a well-funded and clever disinformation campaign convinced a large portion of the population that our prisons were chock full of harmless minor offenders who could be released without harm to anyone. That was false, but people bought it. Libertarians and many small-government Republicans climbed on board the “reform” movement, giving it a bipartisan cast.

I always knew that the tide would turn back, but how long would it take? How much innocent blood would be spilled before people realized they had been conned? We may have seen the inflection point this year. The pro-criminal crowd may have gotten so overconfident that they showed their true selves with “defund the police,” and the scales have fallen from the people’s eyes. Or at least started to. Continue reading . . .

Debate: Much Heat and Only a Little Light

by · Sep 30, 2020 1:12 pm

Last night’s presidential debate was a disappointment, to put it mildly. It could have done much more to illuminate the differences between the candidates on policy. Instead we got much boorish behavior, much evasion of questions and issues, and much less illumination than we should have gotten.

For what it’s worth, here are a few notes. A transcript is available at the Daily Mail. Video is available at C-SPAN. Continue reading . . .

Buying A District Attorney

by · Sep 29, 2020 2:46 pm

For the last three election cycles, ultra liberal hedge fund billionaire George Soros has been bankrolling the campaigns of district attorneys across America.  In 2016 he financed progressive, pro-criminal Kim Foxx’s election to Cook County State’s Attorney, the top prosecutor in Chicago.  Two years later his Illinois for Safety and Justice group underwrote  Larry  Krasner’s takeover of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.  Crime in both cities has skyrocketed.  As reported by Katie Grimes in the California Globe, this summer Soros dropped $2.5 million into the Los Angeles District Attorney’s race to put an anti-law enforcement progressive in  Office.  The candidate, former San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon, presided over that city’s transformation into an open air sewer, with thousands of drug-addicted homeless sleeping and going to the bathroom on the streets.

Continue reading . . .