Monthly Archive: June 2022

A California Superior Court judge ruled Friday that a statute passed by the Legislature to give parole eligibility to murderers sentenced to life without parole for murders committed before their eighteenth birthdays is unconstitutional. The law providing for juvenile life-without-parole (JLWOP) sentences was enacted by the people by initiative, and the legislative statute ran afoul of a state constitutional provision limiting the Legislature’s ability to amend initiative statutes.

Section 190.5(b) of the Penal Code was enacted by Proposition 115 of 1990. For the types of first-degree murder that would be capital crimes if committed by an adult, that law gives the trial judge discretion to choose between a sentence of life without parole or 25 years to life. In 2017, the California Legislature enacted SB 394, which added subdivision (b)(4) to Penal Code section 3051. That subdivision authorizes parole after 25 years to inmates sentenced to life without parole under section 190.5(b). The bill’s sponsor told the Legislature that this change was necessary because the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed life without parole for juveniles in Miller v. Alabama (2012). That was a patent falsehood. Miller held no such thing. Last year in Jones v. Mississippi, the high court further clarified that for juvenile life without parole “a State’s discretionary sentencing system is both constitutionally necessary and constitutionally sufficient.” Continue reading . . .

That is the title of my post today on Substack.  Frequent readers here will have no problem figuring out the answer.  What works is not gun control (which has no predictable effect on the number of murders nor the murder rate), nor going soft on crime, whether it be called “criminal justice reform” or something else equally fuzzy and opaque.

From more than fifty years’ experience, we know that what works is getting tough and staying tough.  The decades of evidence simply leave no room for doubt.

With just over a month to go for gathering signatures to qualify his recall for the ballot, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon is claiming that the effort is being driven by fear mongering “conservative, very right wing forces.”  Ronn Blitzer of Fox News reports that Gascon’s remarks were made in a recent podcast on “How We Win,”  a pro-democrat site.   “They have sort of created this false narrative about this is anti-safety, with is kind of the same fear-mongering tactics frankly that you can go back to the Nixon era, right, you now Willie Horton.” said Gascon.   The only thing wrong with this is that none of it is true.

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No.  A piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by Jason Riley notes that “Mass shooting casualties are less than 1% of all gun deaths and their have been 13 mass school shootings since 1966. These data points are cold comfort to those morning the shooting victims in Uvalde, but they ought to inform any public policy response under consideration.”

While gun control advocates, politicians and a complicit media have insisted for decades that the only way to stop school shootings is to ban firearms, they do not have the data to support that demand.  As Mr. Riley notes:

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