Felon Free Under Realignment Charged With Rape:  An habitual felon with multiple priors has been has been charged with a series of rapes and robberies in Santa Monica.  Brian Day of KTLA reports that Fernando Venancio, Jr. was arrested on July 22 by police responding to a robbery and attempted rape, and is linked to two other sexual assaults and another robbery beginning in early June. At the time of his arrest Venancio was scheduled to appear at a hearing to consider revoking his Post Release Community Supervision, the punishment he received for a 2018 assault conviction.  His priors include 2016 convictions for burglary, forgery and a felon in possession of ammunition.  In 2014 he was charged with carjacking, robbery, burglary, attempted assault, sexual assault auto theft, but the charges were reduced to taking a vehicle without the owner's consent.  I am sure that the three rape victims were glad that Realignment (AB109) kept this "low risk" offender on the street.   

Newsflash: Death Penalty Opponents Dislike Federal Restart:  Attorney General Barr's decision to restart the federal death penalty and change the protocol to a single-drug euthanasia with pentobarbital, is "deeply troubling" to the ACLU, anti-death penalty law professors and defense attorneys.  For a July 29 article, writer Josiah Bates of Time rounded up folks from these groups to express their concerns which include: Barr's failure to run the new protocol through the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) process; the use of undocumented pentobarbital that may be a bad batch; and concerns about "race and innocence and the most vulnerable people ending up on death row."  For the sake of argument, the new protocol is a simplified version of the previous protocol and need not be subject to the time consuming APA process.  Pentobarbital is the preferred and widely-used euthanasia drug which has been approved by the Supreme Court.  Execution via a fatal dose of this drug provides the worst federal murderers with a death more painless than most non-murderers will suffer.  The "bad batch" argument is my favorite.  Any lab can easily verify the ingredients of this widely-used drug.  Concerns that the executions of the Dayton and El Paso murderers get carried out with a bad batch are galactically misplaced.