Results matching “first”

The Manhattan Institute asked several of its scholars for the "top takeaways" from the President's State of the Union address.  Here is Heather Mac Donald's note:

The president called for reforming prisons to help inmates get a second chance at life after their release. That is a wiser approach to criminal justice reform than attacking "mass incarceration," a duplicitous term that ignores two crucial facts: first, that every prisoner is charged and sentenced individually through the due process of the law, and second, that the only criminals who end up in prison either have very long records or have committed very serious crimes. Incarceration played a crucial role in the twenty year crime drop from the early 1990s through the mid-2010s. But while the incarceration build-up was both procedurally fair and necessary, more can be done to try to help ex-cons become productive citizens. The main focus should be on having every prisoner work at a paying job while incarcerated that will give him usable skills on the outside. Universal work for inmates is costly and logistically difficult, especially with high-security prisoners; unions have fought prison labor to avoid competition. But it is a challenge worth taking on to try to break the cycle of recidivism.

I agree that in terms of in-prison programs, employment should be number one.  The long-standing fears that prison production will cost some law-abiding Americans their jobs should not be taken lightly, but surely in today's global economy segments can be identified where substantially all of the market is imported. 

The fact that the President did not include a call for large-scale reductions in sentencing was also quite encouraging.  His emphasis on the MS-13 gang was warranted, but domestic gangs cause great harm as well.  Helping the areas most afflicted by gangs will require domestic efforts as well as immigration enforcement.  Later, while discussing the drug problem, the President said, "We must get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge."  That does not sound like he is buying the line that drug dealer are harmless "non-violent offenders."

Helping the most afflicted areas will also require cooperation between state and federal authorities; the mindless "resistance" attitude of some local officials is killing their own people and needs to stop.

The liberal/libertarian contingent is all atwitter (so to speak) that President Trump might give a boost to prison reform in his State of the Union address.  See, e.g., this post from Sentencing Law and Policy, largely quoting an article in the National Review.

Aruna Viswanatha reports for the WSJ:

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told colleagues Monday he would leave his post effective immediately, according to a person familiar with the matter, after becoming a lightning rod for criticism from President Donald Trump and some congressional Republicans.

Mr. McCabe plans to take "terminal leave"--using leftover vacation time--until he is eligible in March to retire from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the person.

*      *      *

The White House said Mr. Trump played no role in Mr. McCabe's decision to step down. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president wasn't part of the "decision-making process" with respect to Mr. McCabe's departure.

*      *      *

Mr. McCabe first came under fire from Republicans in 2016 as a result of his supervisory role in the FBI investigation into former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's email server.

The alleged conflict of interest came after his wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, ran for Virginia state senate with financial support from the political organization of then- Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat and longtime ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

After crunching the numbers on yesterday's Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report from the FBI, I found pretty much the same thing I have been finding for the last several years.  In California, where "let 'em all loose" mania is more severe than in the country as a whole, crime trends are less favorable than in the country as a whole.  This should not surprise anyone.

The worst abuses of past independent and special counsels in USDoJ have resulted from investigations ranging far afield of the issue that prompted an appointment in the first place.  Time and again, in administrations of both parties, we saw these specially appointed attorneys come up with nothing to prosecute on the original issue and then go after someone for something only tangentially related.  After both parties had been burned in this way, the Independent Counsel Law was allowed to expire, unmourned, with no real effort to renew it.

So when it came time for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel, he should have learned from history, not repeated it, and strictly limited the special counsel's scope to the matters making an appointment necessary.  The special counsel should be looking into allegations of "the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election," as the lead paragraph of the appointment order says, and nothing else.  Anything else he discovers should be referred to Main Justice.  Instead, Mr. Rosenstein did just the opposite, giving Mr. Mueller a broad sweep including "matters that ... may arise directly from the investigation," a potentially limitless scope.

Sure enough, we now have reports that Mr. Mueller is intensely interested in events occurring after President Trump took office, including the firing of policy-making officers of the executive branch.  There are two reasons he should not be investigating these matters.

The FBI released its Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report for the first half of 2017 today.  The press release is here.

Among violent crimes, murders are up while rapes and robberies are down, and aggravated assault is essentially unchanged.

Among property crimes, burglary continues its decline of recent years while auto theft continues to climb.

...because making them legal will make them easier to get, so we'll have more of the sorts of experiences reported by the NYT in its story "1 Son, 4 Overdoses, 6 Hours."   

PEMBROKE, N.H. -- The first time Patrick Griffin overdosed one afternoon in May, he was still breathing when his father and sister found him on the floor around 1:30. When he came to, he was in a foul mood and began arguing with his father, who was fed up with his son's heroin and fentanyl habit.

Patrick, 34, feeling morose and nauseated, lashed out. He sliced a love seat with a knife, smashed a glass bowl, kicked and broke a side table and threatened to kill himself. Shortly after 3, he darted into the bathroom, where he shot up and overdosed again. He fell limp, turned blue and lost consciousness. His family called 911. Emergency medical workers revived him with Narcan, the antidote that reverses opioid overdoses.

Throughout the afternoon his parents, who are divorced, tried to persuade Patrick to go into treatment. His father told him he could not live with him anymore, setting off another shouting match. Around 4, Patrick slipped away and shot up a third time. He overdosed again, and emergency workers came back and revived him again. They took him to a hospital, but Patrick checked himself out.

No, even the Ninth Circuit won't buy that argument.

Stabbing Suspect Deported 7 Times:  A habitual criminal arrested for an unprovoked knife attack at a Santa Rosa market is a Mexican citizen who has been deported seven times.  Alex Pappas of Fox News reports that Ricardo Velasquez-Romero, who also goes by the name of Eulaio Miniz Orozoco, has been charged with attempted murder for the December 21 stabbing of a 61-year-old man seven times in the neck at Lola's Market.  Santa Rosa is in the sanctuary county of Sonoma, California.  The victim was hospitalized with life threatening injuries.  Velasquez-Romero has multiple prior convictions for felony drug and weapons charges.  A recent report from DHS indicates that 372,098 non-U.S. citizen offenders were removed from the United States after conviction of an aggravated felony or two or more felonies," between October 2011 and September 30, 2017.  With the exception of Fox News and the widely panned Daily Caller, no other news organization bothered to report the immigration status of this violent offender.

"Tourniquet Killer" Execution Set for Today:  The Houston murderer who became known as the "Tourniquet Killer" is scheduled to be executed this evening.  CBS News reports that the execution of Anthony Shore was postponed last October to allow an investigation into a scheme by another death row inmate to get Short to take credit for his crimes.   While he has admitted to raping and murdering Laurie Tremblay, 15, found beside a trash bin outside a Houston restaurant in 1986; Diana Rebollar, 9, abducted while walking to a neighborhood grocery store in 1994; and Dana Sanchez, 16, who disappeared in 1995 while hitchhiking to her boyfriend's home in Houston, he will be executed for the 1992 strangling of  21-year-old Maria del Carmen Estrada whose body was dumped in the drive-thru of a Dairy Queen in Houston.  Shore, a habitual sex offender, got his nickname for the way he strangled his victims to death using a rope tightened with a stick similar to a tourniquet.

Update:  The Tourniquet Killer finally paid for the four people he strangled to death at 6:28 pm Thursday night.

Few politicians have been as disappointing, following a promising start, as now-departed New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.  Now we learn that on his way out the door, Gov. Christie signed a particularly bone-headed piece of legislation.  Corinne Ramey reports for the WSJ:

Changes to criminal-justice laws in New Jersey now require an analysis of their impact on racial and ethnic minorities, making the state among only a handful in the nation to do so.

A bill mandating the analyses, which outgoing Republican Gov. Chris Christie signed Monday, requires the state's Office of Legislative Services to prepare so-called racial-impact statements for policy changes that affect pretrial detention, sentencing and parole.

To justify such legislation, the soft-on-crime crowd trotted out its favorite warhorse, the Fallacy of the Irrelevant Denominator.

New Jersey has the largest disparity between white and black incarceration rates in the country, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates reducing the prison population.

The state's prison population is 61% black, 22% white and 16% Hispanic, data show. The state's general population is 14% black, 69% white and 18% Hispanic, according to census data.

What is the relevance of the general population figures?  Most of the general population, across all racial and ethnic groups, consists of law-abiding people.  Prison is for felons, not law-abiding people.  The relevant first-order comparison would be prison population versus felons.  If the ethnic distribution of prisoners is out of line with the distribution of people committing the kinds of crimes for which prison sentences are regularly imposed, that would at least raise a suspicion that something might be amiss and warrant further investigation.  Comparing prison population with general population, though, indicates absolutely nothing.

MS-13 Member Admits Killing Girl:  An 18-year-old female member of the notorious MS-13 street gang pleaded guilty on Monday to the brutal stabbing murder of a 15-year-old girl.  Travis Fedschun of Fox News reports that Venus Romero Iraheta, who does not speak English, admitted through an interpreter that she and other gang members abducted Damaris Alexandra Reyes-Rivas from her Maryland home in January 2017, marched her into a snowy Virginia field without shoes or a shirt, then stabbed her 19 times in the abdomen, chest, and neck.  Iraheta told police that the murder was revenge for the victim's relationship with her boyfriend.  She will be sentenced for first-degree murder, abduction, and gang membership.  She would have been eligible for the death penalty if she had been 18 at the time of the murder. 

Teens Arrested In Brutal Baltimore Carjacking:  A 69-year-old man was carjacked, thrown to the ground, and run over by a group of teens in front of his home last week.  Jonathan  McCall of CBS Baltimore reports that the attack, which occurred on the morning of January 3 in a quiet middle-class neighborhood, was caught on video by a Comcast worker.  The victim, Jim Willinghan, suffered a broken pelvis after the teens, aged 15-16, drove over him with his car.  Four of the teens have been arrested and police are still looking for two others.  Three of the suspects will be charged as adults for attempted, murder, assault, and carjacking.   As noted in earlier posts, Baltimore set a new record last year for homicides, as it's police department operates under a federal consent decree which restricts proactive policing.

Readers might think that I've finally gone over the edge by posting that the Justice Department can overrule the Supreme Court's holding in Miranda that, in order effectively to preserve the Fifth Amendment, police must give a specific set of warnings to a suspect in custody, on pain that any ensuing statement he gives will be suppressed even if the facts show it was voluntary.

Some of my law professor friends (including Doug Berman, whom I had the pleasure to see at the AALS convention in San Diego a few days ago) have been asking when Attorney General Sessions is going to make more of a push for the death penalty.  The answer came today from, among other outlets, the Wall Street Journal:

"The Justice Department has agreed to seek the federal death penalty in at least two murder cases, in what officials say is the first sign of a heightened effort under Attorney General Jeff Sessions to use capital punishment to further crack down on violent crime. In a decision made public Monday, Mr. Sessions authorized federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty against Billy Arnold, who is charged with killing two rival gang members in Detroit. The decision followed the first death-penalty authorization under Mr. Sessions, made public Dec. 19, when he cleared prosecutors in Orlando to seek a death sentence against Jarvis Wayne Madison, who is charged with fatally shooting his estranged wife in 2016. The Justice Department is also considering seeking death sentences against Sayfullo Saipov, accused of killing eight people in November by driving a truck onto a Manhattan bike lane, and against two defendants in the 2016 slaying of two teenage girls by MS-13 gang members on Long Island, outside of New York City, according to people familiar with the deliberations. Mr. Sessions views the death penalty as a 'valuable tool in the tool belt,' according to a senior Justice Department official. The official said the death penalty isn't only a deterrent, but also a 'punishment for the most heinous crimes prohibited under federal law.' The Justice Department under President Donald Trump expects to authorize more death penalty cases than the previous administration did, the official said." 

Murder increased in Philadelphia last year, contrary to the overall trend of America's big cities.  But hang on, there's more.  The people of the city lost their collective minds in the last election, choosing a DA with a pro-murderer mindset.  After only a few days in office, he has taken a major step to make the city safer for murderers and less safe for decent people.

Chris Palmer, Julie Shaw & Mensah M. Dean report for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner ousted 31 members of the office Friday, a dramatic shake-up and the first major staffing decision announced by the city's new top prosecutor, just three days after he was sworn in.

*     *     *

The sweeping change affected lawyers of all ranks and could represent a 10 percent reduction in the number of prosecutors. Names were not released, but current and former employees -- none authorized to publicly discuss the moves -- said the group included trial attorneys and some supervisor-level staff, many with decades of experience. As many as a third of the office's homicide prosecutors were asked to leave, sources said.

The announcement was the first bombshell in what some of his supporters have hoped -- and his critics have feared -- would be a wave of drastic changes accompanying the installation of the career civil rights lawyer to the city's top law enforcement job.

*     *     *

Violent Crime Spikes in San Jose:  Robert Salonga of the San Jose Mercury News reports that the Bay Area's largest city was on track for a 7% increase in violent crime for 2017.  This follows a 14% jump in 2016.  While the mayor of San Jose still considers the city one of the safest in the nation, he admits the trend is causing concern.  The story notes that the Bay Area cities of Hayward, Fremont, Oakland, and Palo Alto also suffered two-year increases in violent crime.  It should be noted that San Jose was among the first cities in the state to fully adopt policies encouraged by AB109, offering split sentences, home confinement, and rehabilitation programs rather than jail time for theft and drug offenders.

When a jury convicts on one charge and hangs on another, what should the court tell the second jury about the first case?  The California Supreme Court decided yesterday in People v. Hicks, S232218, that it is error to tell the jury specifically about the prior conviction, but the court may instruct the jury upon request:

Sometimes cases are tried in segments. The only question in this segment of the proceedings is whether the prosecution has proved the charge of murder. In deciding this question, you must not let the issue of punishment enter into your deliberations. Nor are you to speculate about whether the defendant may have been, or may be, held criminally responsible for his conduct in some other segment of the proceedings.

Opinion by Justice Chin (6-1), Justice Liu dissenting.

There were few judges in the federal courts more consistently pro-criminal than the late Harry Pregerson.  Nominated for the Ninth Circuit by President Carter, Judge Pregerson was particularly noteworthy for being asked point-blank in his confirmation hearing whether he would vote for his own opinion about the outcome of a case or a contrary result required by the law, answering that he would vote his own opinion, and being confirmed anyway.  Give him points for candor, at least, both in that answer and remaining true to it until this year.

Today, on the very last day of the year, a divided three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit overturned the conviction in a California capital case, with Judge Pregerson casting the deciding vote.  Judges Reinhardt and Pregerson voted to grant the writ of habeas corpus, reversing District Judge Ronald Lew and effectively reversing the California Supreme Court.  Judge Jacqueline Nguyen dissented.  The four federal judges to review this case, therefore, divided evenly, yet the decision is to overturn the judgment of the state courts.

But wait.  Judge Pregerson died November 25.  Doesn't that matter?  Apparently not.  "Prior to his death, Judge Pregerson fully participated in this case and formally concurred in this opinion after deliberations were complete," the opinion says.

Lester Black has this article at FiveThirtyEight with the above title:

But here's a word of warning for those looking to dive head-first into these brand-new legal weed markets: The data behind the first four years of legal pot sales, with drops in retail prices and an increase in well-funded cannabis growing operations, shows a market that increasingly favors big businesses with deep pockets. As legal weed keeps expanding, pot prices are likely to continue to decline, making the odds of running a profitable small pot farm even longer.

Washington offers a cautionary tale for would-be pot producers. The state's marijuana market, for which detailed information is available to the public, has faced consistent declines in prices, production consolidated in larger farms and a competitive marketplace that has forced cannabis processors to shell out for sophisticated technology to create brand new ways to get high.

Hmm.  How to keep the pot industry safe for small business?  How about this?  Maintain federal prohibition, repeal the legislative restriction on enforcement efforts, but maintain a "small potatoes" threshold for enforcement as a matter of policy.  Then when a pot operation gets too large, the feds swoop in and forfeit its assets.  Small businesses keep the business, users have nothing to worry about, the price gets a boost to provide at least some discouragement of consumption, and, most importantly, no weed business gets large enough to engage in large-scale marketing efforts.

We don't yet know what murder statistics will be for 2017 (they were awful in 2015 and 2016, the largest two year spike in decades).  There is evidence that murders are down in NYC, Chicago, and Washington, DC.  They are up in Baltimore, St. Louis and the densely populated Northern Virginia suburbs.

Joe Palazzolo and Sarah Nassauer report for the WSJ:

Until recently, a first-time shoplifter caught in any of about 2,000 Wal-Mart stores got a choice: pay hundreds of dollars, complete an education program and all will be forgiven--or don't and potentially face prosecution.

Corrective Education Co. and Turning Point Justice, Utah-based companies that provide the programs, emerged in recent years as alternatives to the often-overtaxed criminal justice system. They spare law-enforcement resources and hold offenders accountable without leaving the scar of a criminal conviction, their supporters say.

But Wal-Mart Stores Inc., one of the biggest clients of Turning Point and Corrective Education, suspended the programs earlier this month as more local officials questioned the legality of asking people for money under threat of criminal sanctions, though it said it found the programs effective at reducing shoplifting and calls to police.

The move followed a ruling from a California court in August finding that Corrective Education's program violates state extortion laws.

Twelve days ago, I noted that "the Government won a preliminary skirmish in the Supreme Court in the battle over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program."  Today the Government won a battle, but the war goes on.

In the case of In re United States, et al., No. 17-801, the Government asked the Supreme Court for relief from an order to add to the administrative record a broad array of vaguely described documents.  Today, the high court held:

Under the specific facts of this case, the District Court should have granted respondents' motion on November 19 to stay implementation of the challenged October 17 order and first resolved the Government's threshold arguments (that the Acting Secretary's determination to rescind DACA is unreviewable because it is "committed to agency discretion," 5 U. S. C. §701(a)(2), and that the Immigration and Nationality Act deprives the District Court of jurisdiction). Either of those arguments, if accepted, likely would eliminate the need for the District Court to examine a complete administrative record.

In other words, there is no need to compile a mountain of paper if the case can be resolved without it.  The Supreme Court also wants the Court of Appeals to supervise the District Court more carefully.

The tent has finally folded on the Reginald Clemons circus.  As with so many other poster boys for the anti-death-penalty crowd, he is indeed guilty.  Robert Patrick and Joel Currier report for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Reginald Clemons, who was sentenced to death for the 1991 killings of two sisters at the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge before his conviction was overturned in 2015, pleaded guilty to murder and other charges Monday in exchange for multiple sentences of life in prison.

Clemons, 46, pleaded guilty to five counts in all: two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of rape and one count of first-degree robbery.

Clemons admitted that he and three others met Julie Kerry, 20, and Robin Kerry, 19, and their cousin on the closed bridge late on the night of April 4, 1991.

They robbed the cousin, Thomas Cummins, of cash and a watch, Assistant Attorney General Gregory Goodwin said in court. They then raped the Kerry sisters, forced all three through a manhole and onto the substructure of the bridge and pushed the Kerrys off, he said. They forced Cummins to jump from the bridge at gunpoint, Goodwin said, but Cummins survived.

Sentencing Law and Policy has this story of a scandalous sentence that had to be corrected by a higher court.  We shouldn't need that kind of correction, and can't always count on getting it.  When we have sentencing judges who can consider a 12 year-old girl the sexual aggressor ("against" an adult man), you know right there that we cannot allow sentencing judges 100% discretion 100% of the time.

DNA Solves 1989 Murder:  A 50-year-old Washington man has been arrested for the 1989 rape and murder of a coed.  Travis Fedschun of Fox News reports that the Thanksgiving Day rape and murder of 18-year-old Mandy Slavik went unsolved until detectives matched the DNA of a neighbor, Timothy Bass, with DNA found on the Slavik's body.  While Bass was not a suspect during the initial investigation, police later suspected that he was involved.  That suspicion was confirmed when a co-worker at local bakery gave detectives a drinking cup Bass had used which provided a DNA sample.  Mandy Slavik left her parent's house to go jogging with her dog just before 2:00 pm on November 24, 1989, in the small rural town of Acme.  Hours later the dog returned alone.  Mandy's nude body was later found along a nearby river.  Bass has been charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping and rape.

Suspects Claim Bias in Stash-House Stings:  A panel of federal judges is holding hearings on claims that stings to lure drug thieves to rob fictitious stash houses, which have primarily targeted black neighborhoods in Chicago, are racially biased.  Associated Press writer Michael Tarm reports that the claim was made by lawyers representing 43 defendants charged in 12 stash house stings carried out by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.  The hearings will feature a report by Columbia Law School Professor Jeffery Fagan, which found that roughly 80% of the stings were carried out in predominantly black neighborhoods, which he says proves a "pattern of discrimination."  The government's lawyers argue that stings target only criminals with violent priors who unequivocally wanted in on the robberies.  They note that the districts targeted for stings are those with the most drug trafficking and that race plays no part.  Max Schanzenbach, a professor at Northwestern who examined Fagan's data, concluded that "a straightforward comparison of the stash house defendants to reasonable comparison groups--those arrested for similar crimes, in particular a home invasion involving a firearm--finds no statistical evidence of discrimination."

Special Counsels, and Independent Counsels before them, were created because the Nixon era showed us that the public cannot attain the high degree of confidence in investigations of powerful officials, particularly the President, that is needed to entrust those investigations to the Justice Department.  DOJ's highest officers are, of course, themselves politically appointed, and thus accountable, in a potentially unwholesome way, to the man in the Oval Office.

CJLF takes no position on the Masterpiece Cakeshop case that was argued Wednesday in the Supreme Court.  I generally avoid taking positions outside of our core mission, and I especially avoid the hot-button social issues.  Even so, it is an interesting case, and I have been following it.

Stephen Wermiel of American University has this interesting post at SCOTUSblog on the amicus briefs in the case.  As a frequent "friend of the court" there myself, I have a particular interest in the subject.

The Supreme Court is not alone in being divided, however. The closely watched case has also split the community of First Amendment lawyers who advocate free-speech rights in a broad range of lawsuits, friend-of-the-court briefs, scholarly articles and panel discussions.

Wisconsin Seeks Drug Testing For Food Stamps:  In a move guaranteed to spark multiple lawsuits, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is moving ahead with a rule change requiring able-bodied applicants for food stamps to first submit to a drug test.  Scott Bauer of the Associated Press reports that the state legislature had approved the change two years ago, but it was not implemented due to a 2014 federal court ruling blocking a similar requirement in Florida.  Under the Governor's plan, those who failed the drug test would be eligible for a state-funded drug rehab program.  Last year, Walker and 10 other governors asked the Obama Administration to permission to drug test food stamp recipients.   

Hitman Faces Death Penalty:  A Louisville drug dealer who boasted that he had murdered people for hire and had killed 10 men, will face trial on December 1 for killing a rival drug dealer twelve years ago.   Andrew Wolfson of the Louisville Courier Journal reports that RIcky Kelly is charged with the first degree murder for shooting drug dealer Lajuante Jackson in 2005.  The evidence included Kelly's 2010 description of the murder to a cellmate who was wearing a wire.  The prosecution told reporters that it has 20 cooperators including members of Kelly's drug-trafficking crew who can corroborate Kelly's statements regarding the killing.  A former prosecutor called Kelly "the most frightening person I've come across in 30 years of law enforcement." 

4 Time Drunk Driver Kills 4:   A California man who plead guilty to his 4th DUI in 2013 killed four members of a family in a car crash Saturday night.  Benjy Egel of the Sacramento Bee reports that Fred Lowe was driving drunk on a suspended license when he caused a deadly five-car pileup on a freeway near San Pablo.   According to the CHP Lowe's Mercedes struck a Nissan carrying the Horn family so hard it flipped the car over the median and crashed into three vehicles heading the opposite direction injuring five people, and killing four in the Nissan.  Lowe kept driving and exited the freeway before hitting a parked car.   He was arrested while attempting to flee on foot.  Lowe had four convictions for DUI and one for illegal drugs between 1999 and 2013.  In 2011 and again in 2014, California lowered the penalties for DUI and drug possession, and barred significant jail time no matter how many times an offender is convicted of them.    

Legalizing marijuana saves bushels of money because we no longer have to spend a dime on marijuana enforcement, right?  Um, not quite.  KCRA, Sacramento, reports:

The Sacramento City Council approved funding Tuesday night to enforce new marijuana laws set to take effect on Jan 1.

Sacramento police will get $850,000 for the first six months of 2018 in order to crack down on illegal marijuana grows in homes and neighborhoods.

That money would cover three sergeants, 12 officers and a city employee responsible for getting rid of the seized marijuana and cultivation equipment.

A quadruple murderer whom 11 out of 12 jurors believed should be executed has been let off with life in prison due to the state's ill-conceived single-juror veto law.  AP reports (emphasis added):

NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. -  A Florida man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, her new boyfriend and her parents has avoided the death penalty.

The Tampa Bay Times reports 11 of 12 jurors voted Tuesday for 32-year-old Adam Matos to be executed, but without unanimous agreement, Matos automatically received a life sentence. The jury convicted him last week of four counts of first-degree murder.

Authorities say Matos fatally shot Megan Brown and her father, Greg Brown, at their Hudson home in 2014. He also fatally beat Margaret Brown and Nick Leonard with a hammer, jurors heard.

When the Hurst-fix bill was going through the Florida Legislature, I told everyone who would listen that a single-juror veto system (1) is not constitutionally required; and (2) will lead to arbitrary results and miscarriages of justice.  Nobody was interested.  This is the result.

Once more, with feeling, the right way to do it is the way Arizona and California do it.  The jury must be unanimous one way or the other to reach a verdict, just like in the guilt phase.  If the jury hangs in the penalty phase, declare a mistrial and empanel a new jury, just like in the guilt phase.  Why can't everyone who isn't dead set against the death penalty see that?