Monthly Archive: May 2022

Arizona to Execute Murderer

Murderer Clarence Dixon is scheduled to be executed today in Arizona for the brutal killing of Deana Bawdion, a 21-year-old Arizona State University co-ed.  The New York Post reports that, absent a last-minute stay, Dixon will be the first Arizona murderer put to death in almost eight years.   A 2019 Ninth Circuit opinion upholding Dixon’s conviction and sentence indicated that he was living across the street from Bawdion on January 6, 1978 , when she returned from a local bar at 12.30 AM.  At about 2:00 AM her boyfriend discovered her partially nude body on her bed.  She had been stabbed several times and strangled with a belt.  An autopsy revealed semen in her that could not be matched to any suspect at that time.  In June of 1985 Dixon was convicted of aggravated assault, kidnapping, sexual abuse, and four counts of sexual assault of a Northern Arizona University student.  He received a sentence of life in prison for those crimes.  In 2001 a cold-case detective ran the DNA from the Bawdion murder through the FBI database and found a match to Dixon.  After seven years of pre-trial maneuvers Dixon was finally tried and sentenced on January 15, 2008.  It was noted at sentencing that the day before Deana Bawdion’s body was discovered, Dixon was released from custody after a court found him not guilty by reason of insanity for attacking a teen-aged girl with a metal pipe.  His attorneys have unsuccessfully claimed he was mentally incompetent in the trials and appeals of the NAU co-ed rape and assault case and the Bawdion murder case.  In last-minute appeals, they are still making that claim.  UPDATE:  Dixon was executed at 10:51 AM today.

The Abortion Case and Criminal Law

The big news in law is, as we all know by now, the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion (per Alito, J.) overruling Roe and Casey.  The central holding of the draft is that the Constitution simply has nothing to say about abortion, and therefore that whether and in what ways it should be regulated are matters left to the political process.

CJLF takes no position on abortion, and neither for present purposes do I (a mere guest contributor here in any event).  But there is potentially very important news for criminal law in the draft opinion.

Continue reading . . .

The Bloodshed Continues As Illinois Doubles Down on Progressive Reform

CWB News provides an unflinching video of two criminals robbing and shooting a young man in the Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood last Friday.  There is nothing unique about this brazen crime which, once again, puts the racist criminal justice reform policies of progressive politicians and district attorneys in sharp perspective.   As reported by ABC 5 in Chicago, the 23-year-old culinary student was ambushed, robbed of his cellphone and shot by a pair of criminals police believe are responsible for eight armed robberies in the neighborhood over a two-day period.  Does anybody believe that these two robbers are first time offenders?

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LADA Gascón Targets Judge

Progressive (read pro-criminal) Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón is labeling a superior court judge who refused to drop “special circumstance” allegations against a double-murderer, as an opponent to the interests of the people of Los Angeles County.  A story by Roger Grace of the Metropolitan News Enterprise reports that Gascón has ordered all of his deputies at the Pomona Branch to file a peremptory challenge against LA Superior Court Judge Rob B. Villeza in every criminal case assigned to his court—claiming under penalty of perjury that the judge is biased against their client ie, the residents of the county.   This appears to be retaliation to the judge’s refusal to abide by Gascon’s policy of dropping additional charges called enhancements provided under state law to increase the sentences of cold-blooded gang murderer.

Continue reading . . .

Gascón Recall Update

The campaign to recall LA DA George Gascón has collected 400,000 of the needed 566,857 signatures with two months to go, Fox News reports. In practice, they need more than the minimum as some signatures will always be invalid.

Putting Radicals on the Bench

Last January, during oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Ohio v. OSHA,  involving the state’s challenge to the agency’s testing and vaccine mandates, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”   This was entirely wrong, earning four Pinocchios from the unabashedly liberal Washington Post.  The Post noted that about 5,000 children were hospitalized with suspected covid, with few if any on ventilators.  Was the Justice acting as an advocate or a judge when she made this false statement?  Jason Riley has this piece in the Wall Street Journal, discussing the danger in appointing political radicals as judges.  He cites President Biden’s nomination of Nusrat Choudhury to the Federal District Court for New York’s Eastern District.  For most of her legal career, Choudhury has been a racial justice advocate for the ACLU.  Last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee she was asked about a speech she gave at Princeton in 2015.

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Court: San Francisco Cannot Restrict Drug Dealers

In a story that fits the category of “only in California” a state court of appeals has ruled that the City of San Francisco cannot restrict a group of known drug dealers from a 50-block neighborhood known as the Tenderloin.  Evan Symon of the California Globe reports that four drug dealers filed a lawsuit against the city after the City Attorney issued a public nuisance order barring 28 known dealers from visiting the neighborhood.  For years the Tenderloin has been the epicenter of drug dealing and fatal overdoses, and the city Attorney issued the order because under, California law, street dealing is a misdemeanor which carries no real consequences.  Progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin does not even prosecute misdemeanors.

Continue reading . . .

Another Increase in LA Murders

According to data released by the LAPD, homicides in the city of Los Angeles have increased this year after reaching a 15-year high in 2021.  Kevin Rector of the Los Angeles Times reports that the 397 murders recorded last year were the most since 2006.   Like last year, news stories covering the increases in murders reflexively follow the same narrative, ie: The bloodshed remains far below that of the early 1990s, when the city had more than 1,000 homicides per year.”  This leaves out the fact that between 1974 and 1994 homicides in California doubled under sentencing reforms adopted in the late 1960s.  The annual increase in homicides over the past two years is unprecedented.  If California’s recent host of “compassionate” sentencing reforms are not rejected, the state is well on the way to matching its 1994 murder rate.  The story also reports the violent crimes in LA through April were up 7.2% and property crimes were up over 11%.  The actual number of property crimes is unquestionably much higher.  With little or no consequences for most property crimes in California,  many victims are not even reporting them to police.

Supreme Court Declines Case of Missouri Murderer

Update (5/4): The execution was carried out on the evening of May 3, CBS/AP report.

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to review, again, the capital sentence of Missouri murderer Carman Deck, whose long-overdue execution is scheduled for tomorrow.

Deck and an accomplice planned to burglarize the home of an elderly couple, James and Zelma Long. They knocked on the door and pretended to need directions. After the Longs admitted them into their home, Deck pulled a gun and demanded their valuables. Even though they complied with his demands, he shot and killed both of them.

Deck had to be sentenced three times. The first sentencing was marred by an error of his own attorney, failing to object to the fact that a portion of the jury instructions was missing. The second sentencing was conducted in accordance with all the rules in effect at the time, which severely limited the shackling of defendants in the guilt phase of the trial. The rationale of that precedent was that shackling impaired the presumption of innocence, making it obviously inapplicable to the penalty trial. The U.S. Supreme Court took his case up and extended its precedent into the penalty phase, moving the goalposts after the trial. Continue reading . . .