UPDATE:
FROM THE OH, REALLY? SEZ YOU! FILE
Once again proving my contention that the world of city politics is just like high school, but with higher stakes, according to the LA Times, District Attorney Steve Cooley said today that he is going to prosecute marijuana dispensaries no matter what the city council decides. (See earlier post a couple of paragraphs below.)
The district attorney said his office was already prosecuting some dispensaries, and he promised to step up efforts next month. Cooley said he decided to weigh in today because he was irritated that the council had ignored the advice of the city attorney, Carmen Trutanich.“What the City Council is doing is beyond meaningless and irrelevant,” he said.
Alrighty then. That certainly settles that. Rough translation: Screw you, City Council.
******
Then later, Councilman Ed Reyes made his own statement in response to Cooley’s statement. It should be said that Reyes is, at the moment, sounding like the voice of sanity.
Here are some LA Times clips from the Reyes volley in this escalating ping-pong match:
Councilman Ed Reyes, who has overseen the development of the city’s ordinance, said he did not think Cooley’s comments would cause the council to rethink whether to allow sales. “This is not about Cooley versus Reyes, or Cooley versus the council. This is about the quality of life. We all have better things to do than to do this legal jousting,” he said.
[SNIP]
Once the council acts on the issue, Reyes said, “We expect the city attorney to vigorous defend our medical marijuana ordinance.”
Um, about that last thingy, Ed. Lots of luck.
KILLER OF FLOR MEDRANO WAS A SPOUSAL ABUSER WHO HAD BEEN DEPORTED TWICE
On Monday, officials released the name of the 23-year-old man, Daniel Carlon, who stabbed 30-year-old single mother, Flor Medrano, in her mid-city apartment before two LAPD officers were able to stop him. Carlon, it seemed, had a past of abusing women, and had been deported to his home country of Mexico twice in the past two years. But each time he returned.
Baxter Holmes and Andrew Blankstein report in the LA Times:
Alrighty then.
Carlon had also pleaded guilty to charges of domestic violence in two previous cases, both of which involved another woman, according to Michele Daly, a family violence prosecutor with the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, which had jurisdiction.
The first incident occurred in March 2005. According to Daly, who quoted from a police report, Carlon threatened violence against the victim if she reported the abuse to authorities. “If you call the police department, we’re both going to die. I’ll kill you if you call the cops,” Carlon told the victim
After pleading guilty to felony spousal abuse, Carlon was sentenced to 180 days in jail and was ordered to complete a 52-week domestic violence program. When he was released in the fall of 2005, he began stalking the same woman again, Daly said.
The woman filed a report in November stating that Carlon was harassing her over the phone and knocking on her window, which he broke. The woman also hid from him, Daly said. He was sent to prison in February 2006 for two years after he again pleaded guilty to felony spousal abuse.
There’s more here.
CITY COUNCIL COMMITTEES TO CITY ATTORNEY: “SMOKE ON THIS, BUDDY!”
After what has been described as a raucous four hour meeting, two separate committees from within the city council voted to reject the recommendation from city Attorney Carmen Trutanich, to label all retail sales of marijuana as illegal and criminal.
The city attorney and DA Steve Cooley recently reinterpreted the medical marijuana statute much more narrowly than most other legal professionals who have commented on the law.
The LA Times, has this:
After the members of the planning committee and Public Safety Committee voted, David Berger, a special assistant to City Atty. Carmen Trutanich, said it is up to the council to decide whether to accept the office’s legal advice. “Our duty is to advise them on what the law allows for and not to go on a whim,” he said. “They decided to go a different way.”
Councilman Ed Reyes, who has overseen most of the council’s consideration of the issue, expressed exasperation with the city attorney’s office. “I think they are very, very narrow in that they’re taking their prosecutorial perspective,” he said.
The long-delayed measure could be taken up by the full council as soon as Wednesday. “We need something on the books now. There is no reason why we should delay,” Reyes said
And John Guenther of Neon Tommy had this.
Councilman Ed Reyes, who has been driving the creation of dispensary legislation for the past two years, released some pent up frustration with the city attorney’s office.
“For two years, we have reached points of disagreement,” Reyes said. “We have a hearing here on Monday. And again it’s the same posturing that I’ve been enduring for the past two years in office and I find that very disconcerting.”
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY OFFERS NEW RIGOROUSLY EXCLUSIVE COLLEGE DEGREE—TO INCARCERATED FELONS.
Though community colleges and others, like Boston University, have long had inmate programs, the two-month-old Wesleyan program is one of a few in the country where the selection process is highly rigorous, where academic potential is the primary criterion and where past criminal conduct, however heinous, is not considered in admission.
Some 120 inmates applied at Cheshire for 19 spots in the program. The process required them to submit essays, some of which can be read here, on weighty matters like Frantz Fanon’s view that language helped “support the weight of a civilization” or Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on happiness.
Many states—California among them—dropped most of their college programs after the Clinton administration did away with Pell grants, that once upon a time used to help to help pay for the state programs. In California, the few educational programs remaining have been first on the chopping block due to the budget crisis.
But Wesleyan, it seems, is committed to making this program work. The New York Times has more about the prisoner/students, their admissions essays and their course work.
Photo by Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
Very interesting. I really recommend taking the time to read a few of their essays – some of them are quite good. One of them even use the term “anomie.”
Ed Reyes and Jan Perry both have lined up on the side of allowing marijuana to be sold. Perry is acting out spite in publicly ignoring legal advice on State and Federal law, because that’s the advice of her arch enemy Carmen Trutanich and his deputy David Berger, who called her “sleazy and corrupt” in an interview on the Mayor Sam Blog a couple of weeks ago. Berger also recently called Perry “intellectually challenged” and “plain stupid” on the Kevin James show.
Reyes is another story. He’s covering his tracks for cynically allowing 1,000 pot shops to open in Los Angeles. Reyes, as chair of the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, did not hear one single hardship exemption from the time the first one was filed in November 2007, all the way through to June 2009. During that time, around 800 pot shops opened up, mostly on the westiside of Los Angeles, which is an area that Reyes has publicly declared his hatred for.
Reyes debated Berger today on KPCC’s AirTalk, and accused the City Attorney of “not supplying legal advice” about whether anything could be done about insecticide in medical marijuana. When Berger told Reyes that “he clearly hasn’t read the ordinance” and pointed out that the ordinance does make insecticide in marijuana illegal under State law, Reyes became enraged and incoherent.
The “bad boyz” of City Hall, Perry and Reyes, have never had to deal with anyone who stands up to their inside deals and race-baiting divisiveness. So the super egos of Perry and Reyes are going to force the council into passing the Perry-Reyes Drug Sales ordinance. All because they’ve been shamed into revealing their bias and ignorance.
Is anyone surprised that L.A.’s law enforcement and DA’s office are acting like Nazis, and doing whatever they want despite what the people want?
From Wikipedia:
“For its first 70 years, Los Angeles was a Mexican city, part of a serene and confident nation long established in the arts and letters. Fifty years before Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, the people of Mexico had founded a university and printed books on their own presses.
The city changed rapidly after 1848, when California was transferred to the U.S. as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War. Much greater changes were to come from the completion of the trans-continental railroad in 1876. For the next 120 years of the city’s growth, it was plagued by often violent ethnic and class conflict, reflected in the struggle over who would control the city’s identity, image, geography, and history.”