Monthly Archive: March 2024

California Governor Gavin Newsom plans to transfer 457 murderers, whose death sentences he postponed, out of San Quentin’s death row and into other prisons across the state. Hannah Wiley of the Los Angeles Times reports that the murderers will be released into the general population at two-dozen high-security prisons where they will have access to more rehabilitative programs and treatment services.  The  goal is to complete these transfers by this summer.  The effort to close down death row follows the Governor’s vision of transforming San Quentin into a Scandinavian-style campus where inmates would be allowed to wear their own clothes and cook their own food while attending classes and participating in job training programs. One wonders how safe it is going to be for the inmates serving time in the prisons where the state’s worst murderers are transferred.

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As serious and violent crime is slowly retreating from their 2022 highs, juvenile crime has sharply increased.  Liberty Unyielding has this article examining what happened in New York after the legislature passed the”Raise the Age” law in 2017.  That law reduced the punishment for 16 and 17-year-old criminal offenders.  The Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who immigrated to the U.S. from Africa, witnessed the impact of that law.

“Since that law passed, youth gun crime statewide has doubled—and youth gun victimization has nearly tripled. About 75 percent of violent felony cases now get handled in family court, which returns teens to the streets, where they often commit new crimes or become victims themselves of tit-for-tat gang warfare. “We witnessed the murder of a young man at the hands of another young man that had gone through the family court Raise the Age process . . . a minimum of three times,” Soares told local legislators in July. This was a system that was never designed to handle or deal with violent—super, super violent—youth.”

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In 2020, while most Californians were struggling with Governor Newsom’s pandemic lockdown and George Floyd rioters were tearing up our cities, the Legislature passed and Governor Newsom signed AB 2542 into law. In the Monday, March 4 Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald wrote, that under the new law (the California Racial Justice Act), “every felon serving time in the state’s prisons and jails can now retroactively challenge his conviction and sentencing on the ground of systemic bias.”

“To prevail, the incarcerated prisoner need not show that the police officers, prosecutors, judge or jurors in his case were motivated by racism or that his proceedings were unfair. If he can demonstrate that in the past, criminal suspects of his race were arrested, prosecuted or sentenced more often or more severely than members of other racial groups, he will be entitled to a new trial or sentence.” Continue reading . . .