Repeat Offender: A Woman Found Dead After Burglary

by · Mar 30, 2021 3:18 pm

This article by Greg Norman of Fox News provides a prime example of why it is important to use incarceration to keep our communities safe. A 70-year-old woman, Patrice Ward, was found unresponsive in her townhome in Pasadena, California. Her husband was able to fight off the suspect and was transported to the hospital for his injuries. According to Norman, “Investigators say Ward suffered severe blunt force trauma to her head and that her home was found ransacked with numerous items missing — including two handguns”. The suspect to the murder and assault is Gilbert Viera, 35 years old. Viera is also the suspect in an additional home invasion in the same area. 

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Who’s Assaulting Asians?

by · Mar 30, 2021 2:31 pm

For at least the last few months a major focus of the national media has been on the increase in assaults on Asians.  The narrative, featured here by CNN, is that white supremacists egged on by President Trump’s characterization of Covid-19 as the China virus, are engaging in random violent attacks against Asians.  Setting aside the fact no credible scientist denies that the virus originated from Wuhan, China, there is little evidence that people randomly attacked Asians after the Hong Kong Flu killed roughly 4 million in 1968, or that Spaniards were set upon after the Spanish Flu killed over 20 million in 1918, what proof does the media offer for its latest narrative regarding attacks on Asians?  Damn little.  In fact most of the available evidence points in a different direction.

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NYPD cop-killer is now helping reform the police in New York

by · Mar 29, 2021 8:38 pm

The title of this post is the headline of a mind-boggling story from New York.  The gist is in the first two paragraphs:

He fatally shot an NYPD cop execution-style decades ago in a Queens bar — and now Richard Rivera is helping reform police in upstate New York as part of a state-mandated plan launched by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The cop-killer — who murdered off-duty officer and father-of-four Robert Walsh in 1981 — sits on a panel for Ithaca and Tompkins County as part of its “Reimagining Public Safety Collaborative.’’

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Supreme Court Summarily Reverses USCA6 in Capital Habeas Case

by · Mar 29, 2021 7:49 am

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning once again reversed a federal court of appeals, this time the Sixth Circuit, for exceeding the limits placed on its authority in Congress’s landmark 1996 reform of federal habeas corpus. Mays v. Hines, 20-507, involves a Tennessee murder case where the defendant was convicted on overwhelming evidence of stabbing to death an employee in a motel and stealing the motel cash, along with the employee’s car.

In state collateral review, the witness who discovered the body finally admitted that he had lied about the reason he was at the motel. He was there for an illicit rendezvous. But this had very little to do with the strength of the evidence that Hines was the murderer, and so the state courts left the judgment intact. Continue reading . . .

Biden’s Imprudent Pledge to Nominate a Black Woman to SCOTUS

by · Mar 28, 2021 8:28 pm

President Biden has pledged to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court if he gets an opening.  Using race and sex to select SCOTUS Justices strikes me as somewhere between imprudent and perverse.  What happened to the idea that the selection should be based on experience, knowledge of the law, temperament, discipline, and fidelity to the text of the Constitution?  What do your skin color and your body parts have to do with it?

The answer should be, nothing.  But because Biden is now immersed in identity politics, which is bad enough, he how wants to plunge us into identity law, which is even worse.  This is not to mention that his criteria would limit the nominee pool to six percent of the population, pre-emptively dismissing ninety-four percent.  Does that seem smart?

Fifth Circuit Judge James C. Ho has some thoughts.

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“Affordable Bail” Does Not Protect Public and Victim Safety

by · Mar 26, 2021 4:41 pm

If an arrestee can be “admitted to bail,” (meaning pretrial release is not precluded), California law authorizes four different methods of pretrial release, only one of which has a monetary requirement. Those four methods include (1) money bail; (2) release on own recognizance (“OR”); (3) OR under supervision; and (4) pretrial diversion. At an arrestee’s first court appearance, a judge will decide if he or she should be released on OR (with or without supervision) or on money bail.

The California Supreme Court’s Humphrey decision announced yesterday initially acknowledged OR as a type of pretrial release, but then they completely ignored it as they delved right into the unconstitutional disparities of money bail. The court also glossed over the fact that Humphrey requested OR release under supervision twice and was denied twice. The trial court denied his request for OR release due to the seriousness of the crimes committed (first-degree residential robbery, first-degree residential burglary, inflicting non-great bodily injury on an elder or dependent adult, and theft from an elder or dependent adult PLUS three prior strikes), the vulnerability of the victim (a 79-year-old man), and on the recommendation against OR release from pretrial service’s Public Safety Assessment Report. In addition to public safety concerns, the trial court was also concerned that Humphrey was a “flight risk.”

What is OR release? Had the court taken the time to examine it in a bit more detail, the public would better understand that it is a discretionary non-monetary alternative to cash bail contained in Article I, section 12 of the California Constitution. Continue reading . . .

Press Coverage on CA Supreme Court’s Bail Ruling

by · Mar 26, 2021 12:40 pm

Media coverage of yesterday’s unanimous the California Supreme Court ruling in In re Humphrey, mostly applauded the court’s holding that the Constitution requires judges to consider a suspect’s “ability to pay” when deciding if he can be released on bail.  The Associated Press story by Don Thompson was picked up not only by most California newspapers and broadcasters,  but by the Miami Herald,  U.S. News, the The Chicago Tribune,  The Baltimore Sun, NBC News and many more.   The ruling was characterized as “landmark” because the court added a requirement to the decision to set bail, not provided under state law, noting that setting a bail amount the suspect cannot afford “accords insufficient respect to the arrestee’s crucial state and federal equal protection rights against wealth-based detention as well as the arrestee’s state and federal substantive due process rights to pretrial liberty” (emphasis added).

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CJLF and Cal. AGs

by · Mar 26, 2021 11:51 am

The Associated Press has this article on Gov. Newsom’s nomination of Rob Bonta to fill the Attorney General vacancy.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation that has typically opposed previous Democratic attorneys general, said Bonta is “fully on board with the fundamentally wrong direction that California criminal justice has been taking in recent years.”

I appreciate the quote, but the description of CJLF’s relationship with past attorneys general is not correct. Continue reading . . .