Criminal Justice

By James Clark
ACLU of Southern California

Declaring that “justice has been delayed too long,” California state and county officials this week rushed into court to request execution dates for the first time in almost five years. To some, it might sound like the government is finally doing what it needs to do to get executions moving forward. But in reality, they are ignoring the law, setting up victims’ families for yet another painful disappointment, and causing even more delays.

By David Greenwald

The ongoing California budget crisis has put huge strains on large sectors of the economy as businesses and people are in financial trouble. In particular it is putting a huge strain on those entities that rely on state money to provide various services to the populations.  

The Vanguard has learned that several local Drug Treatment Facilities have stopped receiving payments going back to March of 2010. As a result, while they are not closing their doors, they are laying off staff members and releasing patients from their facilities.

One that has been particularly hard hit is the Cache Creek Lodge treatment facility located in Woodland. That facility provides residential long-term treatment and outpatient care to a variety of women with substance abuse and mental health problems. Cache Creek Lodge has operated since 1974 as a non-profit treatment program.

By Robert Cruickshank

On Saturday the California Democratic Party Resolutions Committee took up the question of November ballot initiative endorsements. After some debate, the committee narrowly rejected Tom Ammiano's proposal to endorse Prop 19, and then unanimously approved the original plan to remain neutral on that initiative.

The speakers in support of Prop 19 - Ammiano and Alice Huffman of the California NAACP - made powerful arguments in support of the measure. Ammiano cited the more than 20,000 signatures we at the Courage Campaign (where I work as Public Policy Director) gathered in support of the initiative, the stack of which you can see at right, alongside the strong case for Prop 19 on the merits - to provide prison reform, help fix the budget, and to admit that our policy of prohibition has failed.

By Scott Martelle
Protect Consumer Justice

This is one of the weirder cases bouncing through the courts, and it tracks like a John Grisham novel.

California 2nd District Court of Appeal Judge Victoria G. Chaney on Thursday threw out a $2.3 million jury verdict against Dole over its use of a pesticide in Nicaragua, filed by workers who said they had suffered sterility and other health issues. The pesticide, DBCP, has been banned in the U.S. but Dole allegedly continued using it in Nicaragua.

By Anuja Seith
New America Media

Even as the Obama administration seeks to block Arizona’s SB 1070 from taking effect, federal authorities are pushing cities in California and elsewhere to adopt a new “voluntary” program that will lead to the same kind of racial profiling as the Arizona law, immigrant rights advocates charged Wednesday.

The Secure Communities program, or S-Comm, was introduced in California in April 2009 and became active in San Francisco last month.

Counties around the Bay Area have been compelled to adopt the program, which requires local law enforcement to automatically and instantly share with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the fingerprints of any immigrant who is arrested, even if that individual is later proven to be innocent or is found guilty of an extremely minor offense.

By Aaron Glantz
New America Media

Is BART the most racist transit agency in the nation?

That’s a question Bay Area residents should be asking after the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday that it was opening an investigation into the transit agency’s handling of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle’s fatal shooting of Oscar Grant. The investigation, which the Justice Department confirms is being launched together with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco. But it is not the first effort by the Obama administration to rein in BART over civil rights.

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The involuntary manslaughter conviction of Johannes Mehserle in the shooting death of Oscar Grant is a near legal and political textbook example of a conviction that satisfies almost no one.

Grant’s family members and supporters were outraged at the verdict. To them, it was yet another in the long train of cases where a police officer wantonly guns down an African-American, gets a half-hearted prosecution before a jury with few or no blacks, and in the rare instances when the cop is convicted, gets a hand slap of a sentence.

By Robert Cruickshank

Field Polls were released last week, always a kind of California political Christmas in July (or whatever month it happens to be), with new numbers on four of the major propositions on the fall ballot, which you can see below. They are Prop 18, the $11 billion water bond which may or may not be on the fall ballot, Prop 19, which would legalize cannabis, Prop 23, which would repeal AB 32 and destroy our green jobs economy, and Prop 25, the majority vote budget initiative.

               Yes  No
Prop 18:    42    32
Prop 19:    44    48
Prop 23:    36    48
Prop 25:    65    20

By James Clark

California’s governor has proposed closing the state’s $20 billion budget gap with a drastic cuts-only approach, slashing funding for vital human services without working to increase revenue. Yet one state program seems to be immune from these cuts: the death penalty. 

We think the time has come to CUT THIS.

By Steven Maviglio
California Majority Report

The Kamala Harris for Attorney General campaign released yesterday an online ad asking Republican Attorney General nominee Steve Cooley three key questions:

•    Why did Cooley shut down the Environmental Crimes Unit in the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office?
•    Why does he think Californians want to overturn health care reform?
•    What does he have against laws named after "females"?

The ad can be viewed here.