The state of Missouri executed double-murderer Michael Tisius by lethal injection Tuesday evening.  He died ten minutes after receiving a fatal dose of the anesthesia pentobarbital.  Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that Tisius was 19-years-old in 2000 when he murdered two guards at the Huntsville County Jail while helping a friend escape.  In the years since his conviction, his attorneys claimed that Tisius’ sentence should be reduced to life-without-parole because of his neglected childhood, and because one of the sentencing jurors was illiterate.  His attorneys also claimed that the murders were unintentional, although Tisius came to the jail armed with a gun and shot one of the guards multiple times.  It was the twelfth U.S. execution this year.  Last year seven murderers had been executed by June 8th.

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s vision of transforming 171 year-old San Quentin prison into a Norwegian rehabilitation campus, where inmates can wear their own clothes and cook their own food while attending classes to get college degrees and licenses in trades like plumbing and truck driving, is apparently dead.  A story in the Davis Vanguard reports that neither the Senate or the Assembly was willing to vote in support of a $360 million down payment to create a friendlier and happier place for the state’s worst criminals.  The amazing aspect of this news is that perhaps the most progressive group in the state,  Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), which advocates for closing prisons, was strongly opposed, because Newsom’s proposal “does nothing to address the systemic racism and violence that prisons perpetuate.”  Law enforcement and victims groups have been opposed to this plan since it was announced earlier this year as a criminal-coddling pipe dream.  CURB opposes it because it does not coddle criminals enough.   Go figure.

“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth. ”

— Abraham Lincoln, 1863

A Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge ruled last week that arrestees for non-violent felonies and misdemeanors must be released without bail.  CBS affiliate KCAL reports that Judge Lawrence Riff issued a preliminary injunction blocking judges from requiring bail for all but the most violent offenses.  The Jerry Brown appointee held that requiring bail for arrestees who cannot pay is a “serious constitutional violation.”  Among those who will be released without bail under this ruling are virtually all thieves, including car thieves, drug dealers, and most people who commit assaults, including domestic violence.  The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times praised the judge for bringing “back sanity in L.A.”  Did the Times miss the historic spike in crime that hit Los Angeles when bail was suspended in 2020?  That’s the same year that 56.4% of voters rejected zero bail (Proposition 25) at the November general election.

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