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Thread: California Capital Punishment News

  1. #361
    Senior Member CnCP Legend FFM's Avatar
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    The enemy knew their thugs were about to start getting executed after the stays in federal court were lifted, so their leader stepped in and stopped short of commuting the sentences of all the thugs. This is why you take careful steps to make sure a rogue governor doesn't have that full range of power (e.g. Ohio). They will probably do a 'study' next and wait until it is done. Or blanket commutations.

  2. #362
    Senior Member Frequent Poster schmutz's Avatar
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    In three and a half years Californians will have the chance to put in a governor with a different policy. Given past trends, it is unlikely a Republican will even emerge from the "jungle" primary.

  3. #363
    Moderator Dave from Florida's Avatar
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    The last recall that removed Governor Gray Davis was in 2003.
    Three liberal, anti death penalty California Supreme Court justices were removed by the voters in the 80s. But, the state is very different today big time.

  4. #364
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Family members of murder victims slam California Gov. Newsom's moratorium on death penalty

    A group of family members of murder victims in California, along with a number of district attorneys from across the state, gathered in Sacramento on Thursday to denounce Gov. Gavin Newsom's recent moratorium on the death penalty.

    At a press conference led by Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, the family members and district attorneys slammed Newsom’s move to put a moratorium on the executions of the 737 inmates currently incarcerated in the Western Hemisphere’s largest death row and called on the California governor to rescind his executive order.

    “Governor Newsom took a knife and stabbed all the victims and all the victims’ families in the heart,” Spitzer said.

    Spitzer also criticized Newsom for travelling to El Salvador this week instead of meeting with murder victims’ families. Newsom is in the Central American nation in an attempt to counter the Trump administration’s harsh immigration stance and recent moves to cut millions of dollars in U.S. aid to the country.

    “The governor decided to spend the week out of state, out of country, to meet with people he thinks are victims, when he could have met with victims in his own state,” he said.

    Newsom’s office did not immediately return Fox News’ request for comment.

    The press conference comes a day after prosecutors in the state announced they will seek the death penalty if they convict the man suspected of being the notorious "Golden State Killer," who eluded capture for decades.

    Prosecutors from four counties, including Orange County, announced their decision on Wednesday during a short court hearing for Joseph DeAngelo. He was arrested a year ago based on DNA evidence linking him to at least 13 murders and more than 50 rapes across California in the 1970s and '80s.

    Ron Harrington, whose brother Keith Harrington’s murder is one of those linked to the alleged Golden State Killer, castigated Newsom’s decision. Keith Harrington, along with his wife, Patti, were found bludgeoned to death in August of 1980 inside their home in a gated community just outside Dana Point, Calif.

    “The Golden State Killer is the worst of the worst of the worst ever,” Ron Harrington said Thursday during the press conference. “He is the poster child for the death penalty.”

    Harrington added: “Gov. Newsom, please explain to the Golden State Killer’s victims how they should be lenient and compassionate.”

    Steve Herr – whose son, Sam Herr, was murdered and then dismembered by Daniel Wozniak in May 2010 inside an apartment in Costa Mesa, Calif. – also criticized Newsom.

    Wozniak, who was sentenced to capital punishment in 2016, killed Herr and his college friend and tutor, Julie Kibuishi, as part of a plan to steal money Herr had saved from his military service in Afghanistan so that he could pay for his upcoming wedding and honeymoon.

    Wozniak then staged the crime scene to make it appear as though Kibuishi had been sexually assaulted by Herr and that Herr had gone on the run.

    The convicted murderer also dismembered both victims by cutting off the hands of both and removing Herr’s head.

    “Gov. Newsom wasn’t there when I walked into my son’s apartment and found the body of Julie Kibuishi absolutely defiled,” Herr’s father said. “He wasn’t there when I walked into the mortuary and saw my son all sewed up.”

    Newsom’s moratorium, which he signed last month, is seen as largely a symbolic move as California has not executed an inmate since 2006 amid legal challenges, but it still marked a major victory for opponents of capital punishment given the state’s size and its national political influence.

    “I’ve gotten a sense over many, many years of the disparity in our criminal justice system,” Newsom said during a press conference on Wednesday. “We can make a more enlightened choice.”

    Newsom also ordered in March that the equipment used in executions at San Quentin State Prison – the facility where capital punishment was carried out for men in California – be shut down and removed.

    “We cannot advance the death penalty in an effort to soften the blow of what happens to these victims,” Newsom said. “If someone kills, we do not kill. We’re better than that.”

    Despite recent polling indicating that support for the death penalty is at its lowest level since the early 1970s, Newsom’s order still bucks the will of most California residents. California voters previously rejected an initiative to abolish capital punishment in the state and instead, in 2016, voted in favor of Proposition 66 to help speed up executions.

    Newsom’s move to halt executions was panned last month by President Trump, who has been a harsh critic of Newsom's ever since the governor took office earlier this year.

    “Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!” Trump tweeted.

    California has executed 13 inmates since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 and the state has the most people on death row in the country. Since the 1970s, 79 death row inmates have died of natural causes in the state and 26 by suicide. The last execution held in California occurred in 2006 when 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen, who was convicted of killing three people, was executed.

    Since then a series of stays of execution issued by the Federal District Court in San Francisco have held up any executions in the state, but there are now 25 inmates on death row who have exhausted all their appeals. Newsom said that none of the inmates currently on death row will have their sentences commuted, but will possibly be transferred back into the state’s general prison population.

    “I believe I’m doing the right thing,” he said. “I cannot sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings knowing that among them there will be innocent people.”

    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fam...-death-penalty
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  5. #365
    Senior Member Frequent Poster NanduDas's Avatar
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    California Supreme Court lets new death penalty cases proceed, despite Gavin Newsom’s moratorium

    By Nico Savidge
    The Mercury News

    SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court on Thursday rejected attempts from two men to block prosecutors from seeking the death penalty against them, indicating the court will not stop new death sentences from being imposed, even as Gov. Gavin Newsom has halted executions in the state.

    District attorneys have continued to pursue capital cases since Newsom this spring imposed a moratorium on the death penalty while he is in office and dismantled the state’s execution chamber.

    Attorneys in two separate cases from Los Angeles County petitioned the state Supreme Court this summer to block prosecutors from seeking death sentences against their clients in part because a future governor could reverse Newsom’s action.

    The court rejected both petitions Thursday, allowing the cases against defendants Jade Douglas Harris and Cleamon Johnson to proceed in Los Angeles County, and potentially clearing the way for those men or others to be added to California’s death row, even as executions are on hold.

    The justices did not make any further statement explaining their decision, as is typical when the court denies petitions for review, and the action does not officially create a precedent.

    But Cliff Gardner, a Berkeley attorney representing several defendants in death penalty appeals, said defendants in other capital cases can probably expect the same response from the high court.

    “Unless there is a dramatically different record that comes to the Supreme Court, this ruling indicates they are not going to stop death penalty trials from going forward,” Gardner said.

    He said the action also underscores how fleeting Newsom’s reprieve from executions could be if another governor decides to reverse his action.

    “It’s not stopping DAs from pursuing capital cases and trying to put guys on (death) row,” Gardner said. “Gov. Newsom’s action speaks for Gov. Newsom and his administration.”

    California last executed a convicted inmate in 2006.

    Harris has been charged with shooting three people to death at a business in Downey in 2012, while Johnson is accused in a series of gang murders from the early 1990s.

    In each petition to the Supreme Court, attorneys argued that it would be impossible for jurors to consider the weight of imposing a death sentence because Newsom’s moratorium has led them to believe it won’t ever be carried out.

    Jurors may wrongly conclude the death penalty has been abolished in California, attorneys for Harris wrote, meaning “the courts can no longer safely rely on the premise that jurors recognize a death sentence as an ‘awesome responsibility’ rather than a symbolic verdict.”

    Prosecutors from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office countered that jurors will be properly instructed that an execution could still be carried out if the jury orders it.

    “Nothing about the governor’s order alters the jury’s role in the system,” attorneys from the District Attorney’s Office wrote in response to Johnson’s petition.

    The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment Thursday on the court’s decision. Lawyers for Johnson and Harris did not respond to requests for comment.

    https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/...mpression=true
    "The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer." -Theodore Roosevelt

  6. #366
    Senior Member CnCP Addict johncocacola's Avatar
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    This will ensure a liberal majority on the California Supreme Court for decades.

    January 15, 2020

    Conservative California Supreme Court Justice Ming Chin to retire

    By Bob Egelko
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    California Supreme Court Justice Ming Chin, a conservative jurist who nonetheless cast a critical vote for abortion rights soon after his appointment, announced his retirement from the bench Wednesday.

    Chin, 77, is the current court’s longest-serving justice, having been appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1996. His departure Aug. 31 will allow Gov. Gavin Newsom to make his first appointment to the court, which for the past year has had four appointees of Gov. Jerry Brown among its seven justices, the first Democratic majority since 1987.

    The court seldom divides along partisan lines, however, and issues many rulings unanimously, including the Nov. 21 decision overturning a California law that would have required President Trump to release his tax returns in order to appear on the state’s primary election ballot.

    “The judicial system has faced some major challenges in my time on the bench, but I believe the branch is now in a strong position,” Chin said. He said he is retiring because “I want to smell a rose” and spend more time with Carol, his wife of 48 years, and their family.

    Newsom said Chin’s career “exemplifies the promise of California, where a son of potato farmers could become a Supreme Court justice, and in turn help to grow the next generation of lawyers and jurists in our state.”

    Chin, the first-Chinese American to serve on the court, is the son of Chinese immigrants, and worked as a youngster on his family’s potato farm in Oregon. He graduated from the University of San Francisco and its law school, and later taught there. After law school, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army in Vietnam for two years, and was awarded a Bronze Star and the Army Commendation Medal.

    He was an Alameda County prosecutor for three years, then practiced law privately in Oakland before Gov. George Deukmejian appointed him to the Alameda County Superior Court in 1988. Two years later, Deukmejian named him to the First District Court of Appeal, where he served for six years before joining the high court.

    He has compiled a generally conservative record, including a dissent from the 4-3 decision by Chief Justice Ronald George in 2008 that overturned a state ban on same-sex marriage.

    He wrote a 5-2 decision in 2011 that allowed police to search arrestees’ cell phones without a warrant. And he was the lone dissenter in a 6-1 ruling in 2014 that said the public has a right to learn the names of police officers involved in shootings, unless there was evidence that disclosure would endanger the officer. Chin said the ruling would reveal “potentially incendiary information.”

    But Chin cast the deciding vote in 1997 when the court struck down a decade-old state law requiring parental consent for minors’ abortions.

    The court had upheld the law by a 4-3 vote in 1996. But the ruling was not yet final when Chin joined the court, and he voted for a rehearing, then joined a 4-3 majority led by George that overturned the law as an invasion of minors’ right to privacy under the California Constitution.

    Opponents of abortion, who had opposed Chin’s confirmation to the court because of his past statements, campaigned to defeat both Chin and George in the 1998 election. But they won new terms handily. Chin won another 12-year term in 2010, the year that George retired and was succeeded by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye.

    “I would not want to go through that again,” Chin said in an interview Wednesday, referring to the election campaign. During the campaign, he said, “I met people from all over the state who believed, as I did, that we should not have judges raising their hands to test the political winds every time they’re called on to make difficult decisions.”

    Asked what cases he wanted to be remembered for, he cited a 1996 ruling in which the court unanimously overturned a woman’s manslaughter conviction for fatally shooting her abusive partner and ruled that a jury could consider the traumatic effects of past abuse, known as battered-women’s syndrome, in deciding whether she had acted in self-defense.

    “I spent the early part of my judicial career in family law, and I saw up close and personal the problems with domestic violence,” he said.

    He also cited another unanimous ruling, in 2012, that increased California trial judges’ authority to evaluate proposed expert witnesses by deciding whether they would be relevant and reliable. Judicial colleagues regarded Chin as particularly knowledgeable on scientific issues, and, at the request of the National Institute of Justice, he led a working group that drafted an online training program for judges in science-related cases.

    “He has been a leader in helping our courts embrace technology to expand justice to all Californians,” said Cantil-Sakauye.

    https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/art...e-14977768.php
    Last edited by Moh; 01-19-2020 at 01:59 PM. Reason: Added link

  7. #367
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    Well goodbye death penalty in California. What a shame! California was very different when Arnold Schwarzenegger had control over it. I don’t even think he’d be elected in today’s climate there. The recall efforts to get rid of Newsom won’t work. One recall attempt has already failed. The other, won’t go anywhere. Why did they need two anyway? It just created confusion for people who wanted to sign it.

  8. #368
    Senior Member Frequent Poster joe_con's Avatar
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    You can thank the children of all the illegals that flooded into California for it becoming a party state.

  9. #369
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    Jerry Brown too I do have to commend Brown, he could’ve easily cleared death row when his term ran out.

  10. #370
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    No Brown couldn't of reduced any sentences, he deserves only scorn no thanks. The Governor in California can only delay executions he can do nothing about sentences.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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