Monthly Archive: August 2022

George Soros Doubles Down

by · Aug 3, 2022 3:00 pm

In a August 1 Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal progressive hedge-fund billionaire George Soros explained why he has been bankrolling the elections of what he calls “reform” prosecutors over the past eight years. Telling us that our criminal justice system is “rife with injustices,” Soros points to the fact that “black people in the U.S. are five times more likely to be sent to jail as white people.”  He complains that America sends too many people to jail and that “we need to invest more in preventing crime with strategies that work—deploying mental-health professionals in crisis situations, investing in youth job programs, and creating opportunities for education behind bars.”  He credits the “reform-minded prosecutors” he helped elect for implementing an agenda which focuses “the resources of the criminal justice system to protect the people against violent crime….and seeks to end the criminalization of poverty and mental illness.”

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California Legislature Ramming Through Another Pro-Murderer Bill

by · Aug 3, 2022 11:46 am

Today, there was a hearing scheduled on California Senate Bill 300, a bill to change the state’s “special circumstance” law in favor of the murderers, with an implication that it applies retroactively to overturn cases already properly tried. However, the “hearing” has been limited to people stating if they support or oppose, with no opportunity to give the reasons, making it pointless. So here is what I would have said.

In California, first-degree murder with “special circumstances” is punishable by death or life in prison without possibility of parole. The law is subject to the criticism that the special circumstances are not special enough, and I have proposed some pruning myself in the past. SB 300 would limit special-circumstance murder for accomplices to those who can be proved to have intended to kill. In 1990, Proposition 115 added a “reckless disregard of human life” alternative for accomplices convicted of first-degree murder under the felony murder rule, implementing an option allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Tison v. Arizona (1987).

Applied to future cases, that would not necessarily be a bad change. It would have virtually no effect on capital punishment, as today’s juries seldom-to-never impose the death penalty on accomplices without an intent to kill. The huge problem is imposing such a fact-finding requirement retroactively. This is not speculation. We have been there and done that. It was the key issue in the first capital case I ever briefed. Continue reading . . .

Federal Appeals Court Overturns Murderer’s Death Sentence

by · Aug 1, 2022 3:37 pm

A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned the death sentence of a South Carolina man who murdered four people in two states.  Associated Press writer Jeffery Collins reports that in its July 26 ruling the Appeals court concluded that the judge in Quincy Allen’s 2005 sentencing hearing had excluded, ignored or overlooked the murderer’s “serious mental illness history of childhood abuse” which the court believes had a “substantial and injurious effect or influence on the outcome of the sentencing proceeding.”   The ruling came a week before a judge hears a lawsuit brought by several other condemned South Carolina murderers who argue that the electric chair and the firing squad, utilized by the state, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.  The state has been forced to use these execution methods because anti-death penalty groups, including the European Union, have pressured drug manufacturers not to sell the state lethal injection drugs.

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