Monthly Archive: February 2023
by Michael Rushford · Feb 7, 2023 1:21 pm
On July 17, 2015 a white police officer shot and killed 19-year-old Darrius Stewart, a black man with outstanding felony warrants, during a traffic stop in Memphis, Tennessee. The incident was captured on video and made national headlines sparking protests with charges of police racism. Both the Obama Justice Department and a Memphis Grand Jury declined to charge the officer in the face of evidence that Stewart had attacked the officer before attempting to escape. In spite of this, the racist stain on the Memphis Police Department resulted in significant changes in the recruitment and training of officers. Bernard Condon, Jim Mustain and Adrian Sainz of the Associated Press report that these changes included lowering the standards for experience, education and even ignoring prior criminal behavior, in order to recruit more officers. While the reporters are careful not to say it, these changes were made to put more officers of color on the force. One of the consequences of this was last month’s killing of Tyre Nichols.
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by Michael Rushford · Feb 6, 2023 3:07 pm
The state of Missouri is set to execute Leonard Taylor for the November 2004 murders of his girlfriend Angela Rowe and her three children. Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that Governor Mike Parson today declined to halt Taylor’s execution which is scheduled for tomorrow, February 7. Taylor, a habitual felon with priors for dealing cocaine, fraud and forcible rape, continues to claim that he is innocent although he admitted the murders to his brother, who shared this with his girlfriend. The brother has since recanted that testimony. The victims were believed to have been murdered on November 22 or 23. Their bodies were discovered on December 3, after Rowe had not shown up for work nor her children for school. The mother was shot several times. The 10 year old boy and 6-year-old girl were shot twice in the head. The 5-year-old boy was shot once in the head. On November 26, Taylor flew to California under an assumed name to visit his wife. He was arrested three weeks later in Madisonville, Kentucky at the home of another girlfriend. The facts are described in a 2009 Missouri Supreme Court decision on direct appeal. UPDATE: Taylor was executed without incident at 6:16 PM.
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by Michael Rushford · Feb 1, 2023 3:24 pm
In 2016, Governor Jerry Brown and progressive billionaire George Soros pooled just over $10 million to fool the public into passing Proposition 57, the so-called “Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act.” While it was billed as providing well-behaved non-violent felons with a means to gain early release from prison, District Attorneys warned that it would give the state department of corrections unbridled authority to release inmates with multiple violent prior convictions. Two years later a Los Angeles appeals court and a Sacramento judge ruled that this warning was correct. In May of last year Governor Newsom’s appointed head of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced new regulations giving over 70,000 prison inmates the opportunity for early release. A CJLF lawsuit to block these unconstitutional regulations has been dragging through the courts since last Summer. On Tuesday, January 31, a police officer in the small farming town of Selma was shot and killed by gang member sentenced last March to five years in prison for several felonies. He was released last November after serving seven months.
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