Monthly Archive: October 2024

Early release program for aging inmates helps clear out California prisons, but at what cost?

by · Oct 28, 2024 4:39 pm

Joe Nelson has this Oct. 21 article in the San Bernardino Sun, now mirrored without the paywall at the East Bay Times.

Thirty years ago, before he was sentenced for repeatedly raping his 14-year-old niece in Moreno Valley, Cody Klemp told a probation officer that if he was ever released from custody he would kill the girl for reporting him.

It seemed like he would never get that opportunity when a judge sentenced him to 170 years in prison.

Now, however, Klemp awaits a parole hearing Thursday, Oct. 24, that could free him under a program designed to reduce California’s prison population and slash medical costs by releasing aging, often infirm inmates. The Elderly Parole Program offers parole hearings for those at least 50 years old who have served 20 continuous years of incarceration — even murderers and violent sex offenders.

Klemp’s status page on the California prison department site indicates he was denied parole for five years. But the Board of Parole Hearings has the authority to move that date up any time it feels like it. They are supposed to consider the victims in such decisions, but I have not yet seen any indication that they actually do.

And yes, you read that right. The California Legislature actually defined “elderly” as over 50. Continue reading . . .

Voting Fraud

by · Oct 28, 2024 3:48 pm

Yes, voting fraud does exist, despite what you may have read. WGAL reports from Lancaster, Pennsylvania:

Thousands of voter registration forms that are suspected of being fraudulent were dropped off at the Lancaster County Board of Elections Office, according to officials.

The Lancaster County Board of Elections, county commissioners and District Attorney Heather Adams held a news conference at the county administration building Friday morning….

Detectives in the DA’s office are investigating the fraudulent voter registration forms. Adams said they stem from a canvassing operation in the summer at various shopping centers, parking lots, parks and other areas. The investigation involves around 2,500 voter registration applications dropped off last week at two separate times, shortly before Pennsylvania’s voter registration deadline.

Adams said of the applications that have been examined, 60% were fraudulent. She said the remainder should be examined by the end of Friday.

“Staff noticed that numerous applications appeared to have the same handwriting (and) were filled out on the same day,” Adams said. “The confirmed indicators of fraud that detectives came across were inaccuracies with the addresses listed on the applications, fake and false personal identification information, as well as false names. Also, applications that had names that did not match the provided Social Security information.”

Continue reading . . .

The Unraveling of George Gascón

by · Oct 28, 2024 3:40 pm

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón threw a “hail Mary” last week announcing that he will seek the resentencing and release of the Menendez brothers.  Phil Helsel and Antonio Planas of NBC news report that at a press conference last Thursday Gascón told reporters, “I believe that they have paid their debt to society.”  Gascón has stated several times that no criminal should spend more than 20 years behind bars.

The cold-blooded shotgun murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez in 1989 by their two sons Erik and Lyle, who were 21 and 18 years old, was among the most notorious murder cases in Los Angeles history. Erik and Lyle snuck into their parents’ house with shotguns and came up behind them while they were watching television, shooting Jose 8 times and Kitty 10 times.  The brothers initially claimed that they discovered their parents’ bodies and suggested that burglars killed them. They later admitted the killings but claimed self defense due to their father’s alleged sexual abuse. The brothers were tried twice for the murders.  At the second trial a jury sentenced them to life-without-the-possibility-of-parole.

Continue reading . . .

Prosecutors Taking a Dive

by · Oct 28, 2024 9:51 am

The Anglo-American system of justice has always depended on having adversarial advocates to present both sides of any controversy. But what happens when a prosecutor “takes a dive” and joins a convicted defendant’s efforts to overturn his conviction? U. Utah Law Professor Paul Cassell has this op-ed in The Hill on that subject. He focuses particularly on the Glossip case from Oklahoma presently before the Supreme Court, in which he represents the victim’s family. See this post.

This is not to say that confessions of error are always inappropriate. Sometimes they are the right thing to do. The problem arises when political or ideological considerations enter into the picture. There is a strong basis for suspicion that is happening in the Glossip case, where the AG’s investigator never even asked the trial prosecutor about the meaning of cryptic notes that lie at the heart of the present case. In other cases, there is no doubt at all. Continue reading . . .

Recall of East Bay DA

by · Oct 25, 2024 4:06 pm

The big news in “progressive” prosecutor elections is in Los Angeles, but northern California also has a race worth watching. The East Bay Times has this editorial endorsing the recall of Alameda County DA Pamela Price. (Alameda Co. is Oakland and a number of other cities on the east side of San Francisco Bay.)

It’s not surprising that Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price has tried to shake things up. That’s what she promised in 2022 when she campaigned as a criminal justice reformer.

But her actions have gone far beyond reform. Price has punished opponents, hired allies with questionable credentials including her own boyfriend, insisted on disturbing leniency for violent criminals, undermined public disclosure laws, demonstrated prosecutorial bias about cases and even, it is now alleged, made racist comments and tried to extort money from a political rival.

The EBT is part of the same media group as the San Jose Mercury-News, which is definitely not a conservative paper.

If the recall succeeds, the county board of supervisors will choose a temporary replacement to serve until the next general election in 2026. Continue reading . . .

Prop 47’s impact on crime in California

by · Oct 24, 2024 2:37 pm

When California voters passed Proposition 47 in 2014, the goal was noble: decrease incarceration rates for nonviolent offenders and redirect resources towards rehabilitation and public safety programs. The measure reclassified certain felonies to misdemeanors, thereby lowering the severity of penalties for certain offenses, and has been touted as a revolutionary step in California’s criminal justice reform. Proponents argued that this would lead to reduced recidivism and better community outcomes. However, a decade later, the reality is far from the success story many hoped for. A recent paper by the Manhattan Institute discusses some of the ways in which Prop. 47 has negatively impacted public safety and health and put strain on county resources.

Continue reading . . .

More Misinformation From Biden Administration

by · Oct 22, 2024 11:42 am

Last week we learned that the FBI grossly under-reported violent crime data for 2022.  In October of 2023 the FBI issued a press release announcing that “national violent crime decreased an estimated 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.” The Biden administration took credit for this decline and, during the September 10 debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, ABC moderator David Muir interrupted Trump’s statement that crime was increasing to tell the audience that the “FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”   Recently the FBI quietly revised its data for 2022 with new numbers showing that violent crime actually increased by 4.5% that year, meaning that several thousand more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults occurred.  Now, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report has blatantly mischaracterized school discipline rates. The report entitled “K-12  Education Nationally, Black Girls Receive More Frequent and More Severe Discipline in School than Other Girls,” suggests that schools systematically punish black girls for misbehavior more severely than girls of other races for the same types of offenses.

Continue reading . . .

U.S. Supreme Court Takes Up Supervised Release Revocation Case

by · Oct 21, 2024 9:27 am

The United States Supreme Court issued an orders list this morning, taking up one criminal case. In Esteras v. United States, No. 23-7483, the high court will ponder what factors a federal district court may consider when deciding whether to revoke the supervised release of a federal convict. It is, once again, a question of interpretation of federal criminal statutes which will have little, if any, impact on the state courts that handle most criminal cases in this country. Continue reading . . .

Shoplifters Gone Wild

by · Oct 18, 2024 2:55 pm

Marc Fisher has this story with the above title in The Atlantic, mirrored here on msn.com. It’s a long piece on the surge in shoplifting, well worth reading in its entirety. Here are a few highlights.

Whereas many on the right see the rise in shoplifting as proof of a nationwide moral collapse, many on the left deny that it’s even happening or that it is a meaningful problem. Shoplifting is one of the hardest crimes to measure, because only a tiny proportion of cases are ever reported to police.

Later in the article, the underreporting problem is backed up with striking evidence:

In one study, criminologists spent the spring of 2000 to the spring of 2001 monitoring surveillance video in a major national chain drugstore in Atlanta. They determined that about 20,000 incidents of shoplifting took place in that one store, compared with only about 25,000 larceny-theft cases reported to police in the entire city in 2001.

Wow. Actual incidents in a single store exceeded reported incidents in the entire city, and a large city at that.

Excuse-making from the cultural left is part of the problem. Continue reading . . .

Drugs, Treatment, Jail, and Indirect Consequences

by · Oct 18, 2024 11:58 am

The folks in favor of so-called criminal justice “reform” are fond of simplistic slogans such as “treatment, not jail” for drug offenders. However, as this story by Julie Watts at Sacramento’s CBS 13 indicates, “reform” measures can sometimes undermine treatment rather than promote it. This is one more example of a primary cause of bad policy — failure to consider the indirect consequences and considering only the direct consequences.

Once upon a time, drug courts were a key element of criminal justice reform. These specialized courts provide an alternative to people arrested for drug crimes, either possession or low-level dealing. If they agree to treatment and follow through to completion of the program, the criminal charges will be dropped. As described in the story, many people credit these programs with savings their lives.

But what happens when the criminal penalties for low-level drug offenses are lowered so far that the incentive vanishes? Continue reading . . .