Category: Probation and Parole
by Michael Rushford · Nov 10, 2020 10:20 am
A serial rapist who sexually assaulted five young women in the Southern California community of Del Mar in the 1990s will be eligible for parole next year. Teri Figueroa of the Los Angeles Times reports that although Robert Rustad was sentenced to 326-years-to-life for the assaults, because he was under 23-years-old when the committed the crimes, he will eligible for parole after serving first 25 years of his sentence in 2021. The law in question, SB 394 was signed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2017. That same year, Brown signed another law (AB 1308) which raised a defendant’s age to 25 when the crimes were committed to be eligible.
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by Bill Otis · Jul 23, 2020 5:59 pm
Underincarceration and the drumbeat for “sentencing reform” that lies behind it are the catalysts for tragic and avoidable murder. No humane society should tolerate such a thing, but ours does, routinely, simply to genuflect to demands by criminals and their swooning spokesmen to treat them as if our behavior were the problem, not theirs.
This is false, foolish, immoral, and lethal. Here’s the latest example.
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by Bill Otis · Jun 7, 2020 1:37 pm
My friend Paul Mirengoff writes today about two criminals we caught and convicted, then fecklessly released, only very predictably to see them commit more crime, in one case a murder. This sort of thing should be a scandal. Instead, it barely sees the light of day in the mainstream media, because the MSM is dedicated to its ideology that criminals are victims and the rest of us are Puritanical, bourgeois dolts (at best). We are lectured ceaselessly about the costs of incarceration, but our opponents are just too dishonest and too dug in to tell us about the costs of decarceration.
Paul writes: Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Apr 22, 2020 7:01 am
Jason Riley has this column in the WSJ denouncing “coronavirus opportunism on both sides of the aisle.”
Mr. Trump will catch grief for using the coronavirus scare to push a mostly unrelated immigration agenda, but his political opponents are playing similar games. Springing criminals from jails and prisons to protect them from catching the virus is one of many examples, and potentially the most dangerous one. Since when did the well-being of convicts become more important than the safety of society? Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 5, 2020 3:56 pm
The debate over the use of algorithms to “help make decisions about whom to release before trial, whom to release from prison on parole or who receives rehabilitative services” continues. Zhiyuan Lin et al. have this op-ed in the WaPo defending the value of using algorithms.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 24, 2020 11:38 am
The Virginia Legislature has passed, and today the Governor signed, a bill creating the possibility of parole for anyone who commits any number of murders if the killer is even one day short of his eighteenth birthday at the time of the last crime.
Among the beneficiaries of this ill-considered legislation is Lee Malvo, the younger of the D.C. Sniper pair who murdered twelve people during their 2002 reign of terror. Malvo’s case is presently before the Supreme Court, but in light of the legislation the parties have stipulated for it to be dismissed.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Jan 31, 2020 2:46 pm
Today’s “how not to do it” lesson comes from our neighbors to the north. Stephane Giroux reports for CTV in Montreal:
A parolee charged with murder had been allowed by his case manager to meet women for sex.
In 2004, Eustachio Gallese killed his wife, Chantale Deschenes, by beating her with a hammer before repeatedly stabbing her. A judge sentenced him to life in prison in 2006. After serving 15 years, in Sept. 2019, Gallese was granted day parole. Last week, while out on parole, Gallese entered a Quebec City hotel where 22-year-old sex worker Marylene Levesque gave massages. Police later arrested and charged him with her murder.
Gallese was on parole despite a moderate risk of reoffending, his case manager had written.
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