by Kent Scheidegger · May 15, 2021 7:21 pm
Crime and Consequences Blog will be in maintenance for the rest of the weekend.
Comments posted during this time could be lost in transition. I suggest saving any posted comment in a plain text file on your own computer (such as Notepad on a Windows computer) so that it can easily be replaced if lost.
Update (5/17): Maintenance has been completed and the site appears to be fully operational. Please email ccadmin at the blog’s domain if you have any difficulties.
by Amber Westbrook · May 14, 2021 10:57 am
Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, joined by 40 other elected DAs, submitted this petition to the Secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to, “…repeal the temporary emergency regulations contained in the Minimum Security Credit and Inmate Credit Earning rule making action filed with the Office of Administrative Law (OAL) on April 8, 2021.” The regulations give 76,000 criminals in state prisons eligibility for early release.
by Bill Otis · May 13, 2021 8:41 pm
In the post immediately preceding this one, Amber Westbrook wrote of “Another Violent Felon Released from Prison Early to Commit More Crimes.” The piece I bring you now is in the same vein but much worse. It’s from the pro-criminal justice “reform” Washington Post. Its title is, “Released early after a murder conviction, D.C. man is charged in new homicide.” It’s yet another story of dishonest lawyers, both white, one an advocate and one a judge, who worked hand-in-hand to secure the early release of a violent thug in the prime of his criminal life. The released convict, Darrell Moore, went on to commit another murder a scant nine months later, by shooting his victim six times in the chest. The evidence suggests that the victim was black, as Moore’s first victim was.
What we have here is the nauseating combination of the poisons that have been taking over our criminal justice system — strutting elitist attitudes and shameless lying masquerading as compassion. But it’s not compassion. It’s the opposite. It starts with self-congratulatory virtue-signalling by elite-type lawyers (the great majority of whom are, as in this case, white). The next step is pro bono representation of a violent hooligan to obtain early release, thus to shortcut his supposed accountability for an earlier brutal crime. It proceeds by patently false representations about his New Life and Now Peaceable Character. The final chapter is another black man in the morgue. The white lawyers who made it all possible have — you guessed it — no comment.
by Amber Westbrook · May 13, 2021 3:10 pm
The Sacramento Bee has this story on Alberto Quiroz, who was sentenced to ten years in state prison for the events in the 2017 death of CHP Officer Lucas Chellew who died as a result of injuries sustained in a high-speed chase with Quiroz through South Sacramento. Quiroz had 5 previous failures to appear on unrelated charges and previous cases. He was arrested on May 5th for assaulting one of his family members with a semi-automatic weapon. So the question is, why was he released less than three and a half years into this sentence?? Below is the answer offered by corrections spokeswoman, Dana Simas.
by Bill Otis · May 12, 2021 8:48 pm
For years, we’ve been told that “the death penalty is dying.” And it’s true that, as the murder rate fell by more than 50% over a generation (1990-2014), support for death sentences likewise fell substantially (although not as much, from 80% in the mid-Nineties to 55% today (still a bigger share of popular support than Joe Biden got)). The number of executions also substantially fell, but is hardly disappearing, since over the last five years, we’ve averaged one execution every 17 days (see this bar graph).
So it’s just not true that the death penalty is dying. It became less frequent as the need for it became less frequent, sure. This is news? But the reason for its persistence is no big mystery. It’s not that America is a primitive, vindictive country. It’s not that we are callous or sadistic. It’s that there continue to be gruesome, atrocious murders for which a jail sentence, no matter what its length, would not strike a normal person as fitting the crime. The most recent example comes from a county and state that were crucial in President Trump’s defeat.
by Michael Rushford · May 12, 2021 3:45 pm
A Tennessee man convicted of murdering a young mother and her daughter is asking a state court to overturn his death sentence due to his claimed mental disability. Travis Loller of the Associated Press reports that Pervis Payne’s execution was halted by the Governor last November, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Payne filed his claim one day after the Governor signed a bill into law which prohibits the execution of “intellectually disabled” murderers. Payne had raised the same claim unsuccessfully in his 2014 appeal in the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals which upheld his conviction and sentence.
by Bill Otis · May 12, 2021 12:02 pm
Larry Krasner is a long-time, ideologically far Left defense attorney who, with the help of oodles of Soros money and a one-party jurisdiction, got himself elected District Attorney of Philadelphia. The city (like many other one-party big cities) has since seen a surge in murder and other violent crime. The victims are disproportionately black (although Krasner campaigned on improving the operation of the criminal justice system for minorities — raising the question whether getting murdered more often counts as an “improvement”).
Just as in other now-bloodsoaked cities with “progressive” DA’s (Los Angeles and San Francisco come most readily to mind), there has been pushback in Philadelphia. Krasner is facing a primary challenge from a former deputy DA in his own office. The challenge recently received a major, and perhaps decisive, boost.
by Kent Scheidegger · May 11, 2021 2:13 pm
The Federalist Society’s Annual Executive Branch Review is next week, Monday through Thursday, online. It’s free unless you need continuing education credits for the Wednesday session. There is a fee for the required CE materials.
There is no panel specifically on criminal law. We decided to separate the forthcoming “progressive prosecutor” panel to a stand-alone event. Stay tuned for details on that. However, there are a number of good programs on other topics of federalism and separation of powers on tap.
Thursday afternoon, there is is a panel on judicial nominations and confirmations, a matter of great interest to those who practice criminal law. The panel description follows the break: Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · May 10, 2021 4:12 pm
Michael Smerconish has this video report on CNN. With a focus on Philadelphia, he begins by noting the change from prosecutors who ran for office by touting how tough they were to the more recent “progressive prosecutor” model, heavily reliant on large sums of campaign cash from George Soros.
However, Mr. Smerconish notes, there are signs of a trend in the other direction, with a strong challenger to Philly DA Krasner and recall efforts against SF DA Boudin and LA DA Gascón. Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · May 10, 2021 10:44 am
The Atlantic has an article with the above caption as the HTML web page title. The article headline and subhead are “The Numbers Tell a Different Story About Police Killings of Minors: Exaggerated narratives could yield misguided policy responses—which would endanger many more kids.”
Sensational but rare events have always assumed outsize proportion in popular reaction. That reaction can often lead to wrong policy choices and sometimes disastrous ones. Author Conor Friedersdorf compares the perception to the reality and notes,
false or hyperbolic characterizations of police killings of minors carry a cost: They traumatize members of the public more than the facts justify, unfairly vilify cops, and mislead people about the best way forward.
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