Sacramento Bee Ends 150-Year Support of Death Penalty
The Sacramento Bee on Sunday wrote: “For most of its 162 years as a state, California has had laws on the books authorizing the death penalty. And for nearly all of its 155 years as a newspaper, The Bee has lent its support to those laws and use of capital punishment to deter violence and punish those convicted of the most horrible of crimes.”
“That changes today,” they wrote and they apparently mean it. Not content to issue a single editorial they have a week-long series of editorials. They argue: “The death penalty in California has become an illusion, and we need to end the fiction – the sooner the better. The state’s death penalty is an outdated, flawed and expensive system of punishment that needs to be replaced with a rock-solid sentence of life imprisonment with no chance of parole.”
West Sacramento and Other Local Jurisdictions Need to Revisit Vehicle Pursuit Policies – 
Many locales have used money from realignment to hire more prosecutors, more law enforcement officers, and even build more local capacity for the county jails. Reports the San Francisco Chronicle this week, “The state gave San Francisco $5.8 million for the first nine months of the program. While some district attorneys around the state hired more prosecutors, [San Francisco District Attorney George] Gascón hired Luis Aroche with a portion of his office’s $91,000 share.”
Senator Leland Yee has been pushing for the end of life without parole sentences for juveniles for several years now and his legislation, SB 9, awaits the governor’s signature. In the meantime, the State Supreme Court has overturned a death sentence based on prosecutorial misconduct by a former DA, now a Santa Clara judge.
It is relatively easy to gauge the impact of social media on some levels of law enforcement. Simply watch expert testimony at gang trials as they cull incriminating photos of youths dressed in particular colors, adorning specific tattoos or slashing specific hand signs, and you can see how the advent and proliferation of social network sites, first MySpace and now Facebook and Instagram, have impacted law enforcement.
I had my first and only conversation with Chief Deputy DA Jonathan Raven in January of 2010. We had just launched Yolo Judicial Watch and I was interested in having some sort of dialogue with the District Attorney’s office. It was a strange and meandering conversation.
I will never forget the feeling as we were watching reporters, cameras and news crews lined up to watch a high profile trial that everyone was covering. Everyone but us. We climbed past them, walked the other way.
UC Davis student Thomas Matzat, who is also one of 12 protesters facing bank blocking charges, and here facing five felony counts along with another 15 misdemeanors, opted to take a plea agreement on Wednesday to a single charge stemming from an alleged incident at Starbucks on Orchard Road in Davis.
Judge David Reed on Friday denied the defense request for a Pitchess motion, citing a lack of evidence linking the officers’ conduct in the November 18 pepper spray case to the current case. However, defense attorney Alexis Briggs told the judge that she has additional information that she believes will lead the court to see the matter in a different light and may re-raise the issue at that time.
By George Gascón
The key witness described the scene that took place at the Woodland Arco AM/PM as one in which she could tell something was about to go down. She saw a number of youths running around and acting rambunctious. However, she was late into a day of driving her daughter to college and wanted to get her gas and move on.
It seems that every week or so another wrongful conviction is overturned in the courts somewhere in this country. The most recent was David Wiggins, who was convicted in 1989 for a sexual assault of a 14-year-old in Fort Worth, Texas.
by Bill Pursell
Critics Call For New Legislation Protecting Child’s Rights, and the Overhaul of the Family Court System