Monthly Archive: July 2023

A bill moving through the California Legislature aims to eliminate racial bias by reducing consequences for turnstile jumping on public transit.  Golden Gate Media reports that while San Francisco’s Bart,  Los Angeles’ Metro and Sacramento’s RT are all crime-ridden and losing money, Los Angeles Assemblyperson Isaac Bryan (D. Los Angeles) introduced AB 819 to improve racial equity among transit riders.  According to Bryan “enforcement of fare evasion is discriminatory. People who face criminal charges for not paying their transit fare are disproportionately people of color and face harsher penalties when they are stopped.”  So allowing more freeriders on public transit is going to improve racial justice.  As one BART board member responded, “More decriminalization for BART makes the system less safe.”  It is already too dangerous for many to voluntarily choose take a train or bus in Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Unfortunately, most people commuting on public transit have no other option.

The Oakland, CA chapter of the NAACP issued a statement Thursday titled End Oakland’s Public Safety Crisis.

Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis.

African Americans are disproportionately hit the hardest by crime in East Oakland and other parts of the city. But residents from all parts of the city report that they do not feel safe. Women are targeted by young mobs and viciously beaten and robbed in downtown and uptown neighborhoods. Asians are assaulted in Chinatown. Street vendors are robbed in Fruitvale. News crews have their cameras stolen while they report on crime. PG&E workers are robbed and now require private security when they are out working. Everyone is in danger.

Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.

For far, far too long there has been a widespread delusion that being soft on crime is somehow “pro-civil rights” and, conversely, that those of us calling for effective law enforcement and proportionate punishment for serious crimes are somehow “anti-civil rights.” It is a breath of fresh air to see a chapter of this venerable organization recognizing that the opposite is closer to the truth. The paragraphs above read very much like statements that CJLF has made over the years. Continue reading . . .

A habitual felon arrested in April has been released on probation after pleading guilty to 54 commercial burglaries.  Michael Ruiz of Fox News reports that Christopher Jackson, nicknamed the Snake Burglar, has gotten away with $150,000 in a string of burglaries in Riverside County.  Prior to his release yesterday, after serving three months of a seven month jail sentence, Christopher served just ten days in jail for his guilty plea to 23 previous burglaries.  Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin, one of the toughest DAs in the state, has been unable to send Christopher and other habitual thieves like him to state prison because California’s Proposition 47, and dramatic reforms adopted by the Legislature (AB109) classify commercial burglary as a non-serious felony which does not qualify for a prison sentence.   “More time has been put in by our officers and detectives investigating Christopher Jackson’s crimes than the amount of time he spent in jail,” said the Riverside Police Department.   The Governor and the overwhelming majority of state legislators believe that most Californians are too stupid to understand why crime is increasing.

The state of Illinois and Los Angeles County are eliminating the requirement that misdemeanor and non-violent felony suspects post bail to gain release from jail prior to trial as reported by The Chicago Sun Times and The California Globe.   In both cases the new laws will remove cash bail as a condition that could be set by a judge when considering whether someone was likely to return to court for their hearings or posed a danger to the public.  As one Los Angeles Superior Court judge explained ” A low-risk arrestee should not be held in jail simply because they cannot post the necessary funds to be released pending arraignment.”

Continue reading . . .

To make amends for “racial bias that has historically permeated our criminal justice system” a bill before the state Senate seeks to require judges to consider the race of convicted criminals when determining sentences.  The bill (AB 852) was introduced by Assembly Public Safety Committee Chair Reggie Jones Sawyer (D. Los Angeles) and cleared the Assembly in May on a 53-13 party line vote.  It was Chairman Sawyer who last week killed a bi-partisan Senate bill which made sex-trafficking children a serious crime under California law.  He did this by joining the five other democrat members of the eight member committee in refusing to vote.  The backlash for that action forced the Assembly Speaker and the Governor to demand reconsideration.  So Sawyer had his committee reconsider the bill and pass it by a 6-0 vote, with two democrats abstaining.  When the clerk called for a voice vote, Sawyer defiantly yelled out “Aye.”  His bill injecting racial bias into sentencing is likely to pass in the Senate.   A piece in Liberty  Unyielding by attorney Hans Bader offers a scholarly discussion on the constitutionality of such a law.   Excerpts follow the break.

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Leslie Van Houten, one of the Manson family cult members convicted of murdering a Los Angeles couple in 1969, was released from prison yesterday.  The LA Times reports that, like previous governors, Gavin Newsom had rejected the state parole board’s recommendation that Van Houten be released, but earlier this year a divided State Court of Appeal overruled the Governor, who chose not to appeal that ruling to the state Supreme Court.   The day after cult leader Charles Manson ordered the brutal murders of actress Sharon Tate and four others in her Benedict Canyon home, Manson accompanied Van Houten and five other cult members to the home of Los Feliz couple Leno and Rosemary La Bianca.  After Manson had tied the couple up and put pillowcases over their heads, cult member Tex Watson stabbed Lino to death.  Watson then ordered Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel to hold down Rosemary.  Watson stabbed her several times, then gave the knife to Van Houten, who stabbed the woman at least fourteen times.  The women then wrote “death to pigs” on the wall and “healter skelter” on the refrigerator door with Leno’s blood.

Continue reading . . .

On July 5th, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused a request for en-banc review of Johnson v. City of Grants Pass,  a ruling which voided local ordinances allowing the city  to clear out homeless camps on public property.   In the Johnson ruling announced last September, a divided panel of the court expanded an earlier Ninth Circuit ruling (Martin v. City of Boise) which discovered that the homeless have a constitutional right to camp in parks and on sidewalks.   As reported in the Anchorage Daily News, the full court’s refusal to reconsider that holding was met with an unusually harsh dissent by 16 Ninth Circuit judges.  Among the dissenters Senior Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlian noted that no other federal court of appeals has discovered a constitutional right to sleep or camp on sidewalks and other public property.  The Eighth Amendment is “not a boundless remedy for all social and policy ills, including homelessness. It does not empower us to displace state and local decisionmakers with our own enlightened view of how to address a public crisis over which we can claim neither expertise nor authority, and it certainly does not authorize us to dictate municipal policy here,” he wrote.  The City of Grants Pass plans to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal of the Johnson ruling.