Monthly Archive: March 2020

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.