Human trafficking of adults is not “serious”?

by · May 5, 2023 3:42 pm

The Public Safety Committees of both houses of the California Legislature have long been known as graveyards. Strong criminal justice bills are buried there. A bill regarding human trafficking, SB 14, emerged from the Senate Public Safety Committee last week, but the extent to which it had to be watered down to survive is an appalling commentary on the present state of the California Legislature.

The base offense is defined in section 236.1(a) of the Cal. Penal Code. “A person who deprives or violates the personal liberty of another with the intent to obtain forced labor or services, is guilty of human trafficking ….” In other words, we are talking about actual slavery in the twenty-first century. Who could possibly be against throwing the book at present-day slavers? Continue reading . . .

Indirect Consequences of Crime

by · May 4, 2023 2:16 pm

Map of San Francisco Shopping Closures

Shopping Closures Map from SF Chronicle

A huge but common mistake in public policy is to consider only the direct effects of a policy and ignore the indirect effects. Crime harms the direct victims most, but ultimately the indirect effects corrode the structure of society.

San Francisco’s once-famous shopping scene is imploding, and crime is a major reason why.

In the latest blow to downtown, Nordstrom, an upscale anchor store in the Westfield San Francisco Centre, will depart at the end of its lease. Continue reading . . .

No Second Chances for Victims of Repeat Chicago Killer

by · May 2, 2023 11:15 am

The mantra of death penalty opponents for all of my adult life has been Blackstone’s ratio:  “better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.”  But what if one of the guilty allowed to escape is a murderer?   William Lee of the Chicago Tribune reports that last month the posterboy for compassionate release, Steven “Mustafa” Hawthorne, was arrested for the double murder of his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend.  In 1984, Hawthorne was convicted of killing two people and sentenced to life-without-the-possibility-of parole (LWOP).  Because he was 17-years-old at the time of the murders, Hawthorne was allowed to petition for re-sentencing  after the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Miller v. Alabama.  In 2017, based upon findings that he had been rehabilitated, Hawthorne was released from prison.   As noted by Hans Bader in Liberty Unyielding, the sentencing reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, celebrated Hawthorne’s release noting that “there are  too many people in Illinois serving long prison terms that don’t make communities safer.  More of them need the same chance that Steven got.”

Continue reading . . .

Soros-Bankrolled DA Facing Recall

by · May 1, 2023 1:13 pm

A campaign  to recall progressive Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price has generated over 15,000 signatures toward a goal of 25,000 as reported by Rachel Schilke of the Washington Examiner.  Price, who assumed office in January, has implemented multiple progressive policies aimed to reduce sentences and substitute “healing” and programs for jail or prison sentences.  She has also fired 20 prosecutors and placed six others on administrative leave.  She sparked a backlash in March when her office offered a plea bargain to give accused murderer Delonzo Logwood a 15-year sentence for killing three people in a murder-for-hire scheme.   The judge in the case rejected the deal stating that Price provided no explanation for offering such a deal.  In most other CA counties a triple-murderer could receive a death sentence or life-without-the-possibility-of-parole.  Logwood’s trial begins this month.

Continue reading . . .

Manhunt For Illegal Alien Murderer of Texas Family

by · May 1, 2023 10:19 am

The man wanted for killing five members of a Cleveland, Texas family last Friday is an illegal alien who has been deported from the U.S. five times.  Danielle Wallace of Fox News reports that there is an $80,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Francisco Oropesa, a Mexican national identified by video at the scene of the execution-style murders of three women, a man and an eight-year-old boy.  Oropesa was also identified by some of the five other family members who survived the attack.  ICE reports that he was deported five times between 2009 and 2016.  In 2012, he was deported after serving time in jail for drunk driving.  Police told reporters that a member of the family had asked Oropesa to stop firing his rifle into the air late Friday night.  In response he walked into the neighbor’s home and began shooting.  Two of the female victims were murdered while lying on top of children to protect them.  Once again, while some politicians and the media will blame the gun for these killings, it was the refusal by Congress to fully secure the southern border that allowed the murderer to repeatedly enter the U.S.  Strict enforcement of immigration laws would have prevented this tragedy.

Recidivism of Violent Women

by · Apr 28, 2023 12:48 pm

Say “violent criminal” and most people will picture a man, for the obvious and valid reason that the rate of violent crime is much higher for men than women. But there are violent women as well. Today the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report, Recidivism of Females Released from State Prison, 2012–2017. The press release is here. Using a five-year follow-up period, the recidivism rate for violent women was somewhat lower than the corresponding rate for violent men, but still high — 55% versus 66% for men. Continue reading . . .

Racializing Crime

by · Apr 26, 2023 3:19 pm

A little publicized 2021 public opinion survey by the Skeptic Research Center asked respondents to self identify as very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal or very liberal.  The researchers then asked “how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?”  20.28% of very conservatives believed that between 1,000 and 10,000 or more black men were killed by police.  13% of conservatives believed this.  25.8% of moderates thought so, while 38.7% of liberals and 53.5% of very liberal agreed.  In 2019, twenty-five unarmed black men were killed by police. The same survey asked “what percentage of people killed by police were black.”  The responses ranged from 60.4% from very liberal to 37.8% from conservatives.  Even the very conservatives thought 44.5% of those killed by police were black.  The actual percent was 24.9%.   How could so many people from all political stripes have been this wrong?  The fact is that for decades the public has been fed a steady diet of lies by liberal politicians and the mainstream media characterizing the police as racially-obsessed bigots randomly slaughtering innocent black men.   In an article from today’s City Journal, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald painstakingly deconstructs this propaganda.

Continue reading . . .

The “True Threats” Doctrine

by · Apr 21, 2023 2:15 pm

On Wednesday the United States Supreme Court heard oral argument in Counterman v. Colorado, No. 22-138 (transcript here, audio here).

The issue in this case involves how courts should determine what constitutes a “true threat.”  True threats are not protected by the First Amendment.  The question before the Court is whether a state may define speech to be a “true threat” if it would be regarded by a reasonable person as a true threat, or whether the First Amendment requires a state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the speaker subjectively intended the communication to be a threat.

In this case, Billy Raymond Counterman, was convicted of stalking and was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for sending thousands of private Facebook messages to a local singer/songwriter named C.W. C.W. found the private messages to be “weird” and “creepy” and did not respond to any of them. She blocked Counterman from her Facebook accounts, but he created new accounts and continued to message her. As time went on without response from C.W., Counterman’s messages became more angry and alarming, causing C.W. to become extremely fearful and scared. Counterman also alluded to making physical sightings of C.W. in public. Continue reading . . .

Forbidding Candid Speech About Crime

by · Apr 20, 2023 1:41 pm

From an op-ed in the WSJ:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal bureaucracy with a vast jurisdiction, is testing a novel approach to crime and punishment. In a lawsuit against Townstone Financial, a small Chicago-area nonbank mortgage firm, the CFPB is signaling that it may attempt to punish anyone who complains about neighborhood crime.

The article is by John Berlau and Stone Washington of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The essence of the CFPB complaint is that candid speech about high crime areas discourages people from those areas from applying for mortgage loans, with a disparate impact by race. Continue reading . . .