With California's Legislature and Governor hell-bent on passing as much pro-criminal, anti-victim, anti-law-abiding-people, anti-law-enforcement legislation as they possibly can, I have begun to wonder if there is any bottom. Is there any depth below which they will not sink? Is there any depth below which the voters will wake up and vote the bums out?
Maybe. The pro-criminal forces recently sneaked a major change in criminal law through the Legislature by tucking it in to a "budget trailer" bill having to do with funding health programs. With the sloppy wording that has become so common in pro-criminal legislation, the bill would allow any judge to "divert" any criminal, including murderers and rapists, from prosecution merely upon a finding that the defendant has a mental health diagnosis and that it "played a significant role" in the offense.
The state's district attorneys are, naturally, up in arms. Mental disorder is a broad category, and it gets broader with each edition of the psychiatrists' manual. We are presently on the DSM-5; if present trends continue we will all be mentally disordered by the DSM-8. "Significant role" is so broad and vague that it could mean just about anything.
Don't think for a minute that every judge would apply mental health standards with appropriate discretion. Back in 2005, a federal judge in Connecticut tried to hold up the execution of a notorious serial rapist/murderer because he thought the "diagnosis" of sadism was powerfully mitigating. See this post.
The outcry is so loud that even Governor Brown may be backing down. A fix is reported to be in the works to ram through the Legislature in its waning hours. We'll see.
On another front, the police unions are correctly outraged about a bill that would severely limit the use of deadly force relative to current law and greatly expand the exposure of officers to homicide prosecutions. We will see if they can get this bill killed. If not, it will be yet one more reason for anyone seeking a career in law enforcement to leave California and go elsewhere. And when they are gone, "who ya gonna call?"
I do not see in the cleanup legislation as anyone flinching. I see it as the legislature dumping this poison pill in the Penal Code to force the DAs to come to the table to mitigate the damage. The adults in the room will do their best to fix it but from a bargaining position where they are on the defensive and motivated by the reality that the Legislature’s version will spill blood eventually.
The police bill is atrocious and they’ll probably get out of it. But there’s still a long way to go. There is the legislature’s attempt to substantially reduce the murder population with SB 1437 which will retroactively rip open thousands of murder cases. There is also the attempt to bring back lids. In short, SB 1279 rewards offenders who commit multiple crimes in a crime spree by capping the sentence they can get to no more than double the most serious crime, no matter whether they have two or twenty crimes. We already give a 2/3 discount for every felony after the first. Now our legislature wants to simply give a 100% discount after the third or fourth crime. Try explaining that to a victim, but sadly the legislature doesn’t have to, the line prosecutors do.
Then there is the constant attack on final judgments with ways to rip them open with “modern sensibilities” as opposed to any argument of innocence or constitutional violation.
Yes, I can't imagine who would want to be a police officer in a state where you can't shoot a man to death for standing in his grandmother's back yard holding a cellphone. What is this country coming to.