FEDERAL JUDGES TELL GOV. BROWN HE MUST START COMPLYING WITH ORDERED CAP ON PRISON POP.
On Thursday, a panel of three federal judges—Stephen Reinhardt, Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson–— issued a 51-page court order demanding Gov. Jerry Brown immediately comply with a Supreme Court-imposed order meet a 137.5% population cap in CA’s severely overcrowded prisons. The panel said that if the governor doesn’t get with the program, he will be forced to release inmates from a list of low risk offenders. Thus far, the population has been reduced by about 20,000 through realignment, but according to the judges, the governor has not taken adequate additional steps to further reduce the population by the 10,000 necessary to meet the order. (Last month, he started the process to appeal the federal court order to the Supreme Court.)
LA Times’ Paige St. John has the story. Here are some clips:
Citing California’s “defiance,” “intransigence” and “deliberate failure” to provide inmates with adequate care in its overcrowded lockups, the judges on Thursday said Brown must shed 9,600 inmates —about 8% of the prison population — by the end of the year.
Unless he finds another way to ease crowding, the governor must expand the credits that inmates can earn for good behavior or participation in rehabilitation programs, the judges said.
“We are willing to defer to their choice for how to comply with our order, not whether to comply with it,” the judges wrote. “Defendants have consistently sought to frustrate every attempt by this court to achieve a resolution to the overcrowding problem.”
If Sacramento does not meet the inmate cap on time, the judges said, it will have to release prisoners from a list of “low risk” offenders the court has told the administration to prepare.
[SNIP]Thursday’s order requires, absent other solutions, that the state give minimum-custody inmates two days off for every one served without trouble and to apply those credits retroactively. Such a step could spur the release of as many as 5,385 prisoners by the end of December.
The court order also instructed the governor to check in every two weeks until December, upping the frequency from current once-per-month report.
Not surprisingly, the California Police Chief’s Association and the California State Sheriff’s Association were quick to announce objections to the panel’s demand that CA comply and their support for Gov. Brown’s request to stay the order.
GOV. AND LEGISLATURE BACK DOWN ON CHANGES TO PUBLIC RECORDS ACT
Gov. Jerry Brown, the CA Senate, and Assembly have all backed down on a controversial attempt to dilute the state’s Public Records Act by making it optional for cities, counties, and school districts to fulfill requests for public records (usually made by reporters and government watchdogs, but also a useful tool for students and average citizens).
The San Jose Mercury’s Mike Rosenberg has the story. Here’s a clip:
State lawmakers were hit with a torrent of criticism from newspapers around the state, as well opposition from everyone from liberal environmentalists to conservatives, who feared the change approved by the Legislature last week would have severely limited the public’s right to know what their government is up to.
After deciding last week to pull about $20 million for local agencies to respond to requests made under the California Public Records Act –signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1968 — Brown and Senate leaders reversed course Thursday, a day after the Assembly did the same.
The political firestorm proved too much to bear for state leaders, particularly in light of the relatively small amount of funding the state was looking to cut, which amounts to 0.02 percent of the state’s general-fund budget at a time when the budget has a $1.1 billion surplus.
[SNIP]Reporters and other watchdogs regularly file public records requests seeking data such as government salaries and email correspondence between public officials, and the information over the decades has led to the exposure of wrongdoing and in some cases criminal indictments. The law approved last week would have allowed cities, counties and school districts to essentially ignore those requests if they chose to.
They’re now required to send a response within 10 days.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Like most reporters working in California, we at WLA have regularly used the CPRA to persuade public agencies to fork over crucial copies of documents, stats, and other pieces information needed for the stories we are pursuing. For instance, we used the state’s public records law to get lists of the people who had donated to LASD Undersheriff Paul Tanaka’s Gardena elections campaigns. We also used the California Public Records Act to get the number and kind of force incidents for each of the county’s jails, over a multi-year period—to name two of many, many instances.
Thus it was perplexing that the governor and our lawmakers came as close as they did to damaging this instrument so essential to maintaining a healthy democracy.
All’s well that ends well, we guess— but, geeze, Jerry, what in the world were you thinking???
LOOKING BACK ON THE EVENTFUL 2012 SCOTUS TERM (IT’S NOT OVER YET!)
As part of Slate’s running tradition, legal reporter Emily Bazelon has a rather interesting review of the past year at the Supreme Court (and a glance toward the future). Here are two notable clips:
…what did you make of [Justice Scalia’s] impassioned cry for civil liberties in Maryland v. King? In that one, five justices (the other conservatives plus Stephen Breyer) ruled that states can collect DNA from everyone who gets arrested for a serious crime. Scalia dissented, warning of worse to come: “Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.” This is the kind of just-you-wait prediction he made 10 years ago to warn that preventing the states from criminalizing sodomy would one day lead to gay marriage. Next week, we will find out if he was right about that. Either way, what do you think of dire prediction as a rhetorical strategy?
[SNIP]Next week, we will of course talk about the court’s take on race in Ameica and whether it means life or death of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action. Any predictions? I will say that as a gay-rights supporter, I’m feeling optimistic about both of the gay-marriage cases. I think the court will strike down the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman for purposes of receiving federal benefits. And I think it will also find a way to get rid of California’s gay marriage ban, without foisting gay marriage on the rest of the states that have yet to vote for it.