Posted on 12/14/2018 8:33:44 PM PST by Olog-hai
In a rare step, the California Supreme Court has blocked Gov. Jerry Brown’s attempt to issue a pardon to a 37-year-old Cambodian refugee who killed a woman when he was 14 years old.
The court gave no reason for the rejection, but earlier noted it only had the authority to do so in the case of an “abuse of power.”
Brown’s pardon would have effectively stopped Borey Ai’s deportation to Cambodia, a nation where his mother was born but he has never seen.
The governor in the last 10 months has pardoned seven ex-convicts who otherwise faced the threat of deportation to Cambodia, drawing the ire of President Donald Trump, whose administration has stepped up efforts to deport immigrants with criminal convictions. […]
Ai was charged as an adult and convicted in Santa Clara County 1997 of second-degree murder and also of a separate robbery. He was sentenced to 25-years-to-life in prison.
He spent 19 years in prison before parole officials decided he had turned his life around. He walked out of San Quentin prison in November 2016 and into the custody of waiting federal immigration agents who are trying to deport him to Cambodia. After prison, he spent 18 months in federal detention but was freed in May after Cambodia refused to accept him — for now. …
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
This guy has only been out of Ice detention a few weeks...complaining about his time there didn't accommodate his life goals. I'm convinced were he to remain here he will be an advocate to stop deportations as well.
Brown's pardon would eliminate extradition to Cambodia. He thought.
The pardon power is absolute and plenary. The remedy is impeachment. The court DOES NOT have this power.
Ahhh. Yes, para. a.(3) does tack a limit on the power. Thanks for bringing that up.
“Holiday In Cambodia”
Court’s generally have the power to review abuse of discretion by any administrative officer. A pardon for the purpose of thwarting federal laws is an abuse of discretion.
Or, if Cambodia won’t accept him, they could just drop him off halfway there. Seems fair to me.
It’s a(1) that is the problem “conditions that the Governor deems proper.” As in any exercise of a grant of discretion, exercise of discretion must be reasonable, i.e. for valid stated reasons. Avoiding deportation as a criminal is not a valid stated reason.
That’s true with respect to the US President. The California constitution appears to say something different with respect to its governor.
Still seems convoluted. It doesn’t surprise me that California’s constitution would read like a communist one; the supreme court there did not regard it as an “abuse of power” for to declare California a “sanctuary state” in violation of US Constitution Article IV’s Guarantee Clause (the same clause also gives the federal government the power to “guarantee to the states a republican form of government”; a socialist form of government is antithetical to this and could legally be removed by the federal government).
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