Free Republic

Prop 30: Your Wallet or Your Kids. NO Either approve $36 billion in higher sales and income taxes or else Gov. Brown threatens to shoot the schools. Don't worry, the income taxes are only on the "very wealthy," but it turns out the "very wealthy" include many small businesses filing under sub-chapter S, meaning lower wages, higher prices and fewer jobs. California already has one of the highest overall tax burdens in the country and yet has just approved a budget to spend $8 billion dollars more than it's taking in. Moral of the story: it's the spending stupid. Prop...

November 2012 Statewide Ballot Measures Proposition 30 Initiative Constitutional Amendment 1578. (12-0009) - Final Random Sample Update - 06/20/12 Temporary Taxes to Fund Education. Guaranteed Local Public Safety Funding. Initiative Constitutional Amendment. Qualified: 06/20/12 Proponent: Thomas A. Willis c/o Karen Getman (510) 346-6200 Increases personal income tax on annual earnings over $250,000 for seven years. Increases sales and use tax by ¼ cent for four years. Allocates temporary tax revenues 89 percent to K-12 schools and 11 percent to community colleges. Bars use of funds for administrative costs, but provides local school governing boards discretion to decide, in open meetings...

RANCHO CUCAMONGA - Old Fire arson suspect Rickie Lee Fowler was sentenced this week to three life sentences in his jailhouse sodomy case. Judge Stephan G. Saleson denied defense attempts to get a new trial and sentenced Fowler on Monday to three terms of 25 years to life in state prison, according to court records. Fowler, of San Bernardino, was found guilty in February of three felony counts of sodomy by force on another inmate at West Valley Detention Center. The incidents occurred in August 2010. Jurors also found "true" each of Fowler's two prior strikes, thus allowing each count...

Man arrested for 3rd suspected DUI in 1 week IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif. -- An Imperial Beach man was arrested for suspected drunken driving three times in five days, deputies said Sunday. Sheriff's deputies were called to a report of a drunken driver on Seacoast Drive in Imperial Beach about 6:30 a.m. Sunday. When they arrived they found the driver, David Lakarnafeaux, 44, had walked inside a bar on Palm Avenue and Seacoast Drive, Sgt. Ted Greenwald said. When deputies arrested him, they discovered that Lakarnafeaux had already been arrested for the same charge twice last week: on Tuesday by San...

The woman who is accused of robbing the hotel room of the “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek could face a life sentence under a California law for repeat offenders. Lucinda Moyers, 56, who last week was arrested on charges of felony burglary and receiving stolen property after Mr. Trebek pursued her from his room, has two previous burglary convictions on her record, a district attorney’s spokeswoman told The San Francisco Chronicle. Ms. Moyers herself told The Chronicle that the two convictions stem from incidents at San Francisco hotels in 1990 and 1991, and that she would now be charged under California’s...

The U.S. Supreme Court stunned California on May 23 when it ruled that the state must depopulate its overcrowded prison system by tens of thousands of inmates. The decree, written by Californian Anthony Kennedy, reignited the state's perennial debate over crime's causes, effects and remedies. While liberal critics of the state's criminal justice system hailed it as a long overdue wake-up call for reform, conservatives raised the specter of felonious hordes being released to prey upon the public. A day later, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced that the state's rates of homicide and other violent crimes had continued a...

Los Angeles -- To hear him tell his story, John Wesley Ewell was the victim of an overly harsh criminal justice system. The South Los Angeles hairstylist complained to journalists over the last decade about the unfairness of the state’s tough three-strikes law, saying he lived in fear that even a small offense would land him back in prison for life. He even appeared on the “The Montel Williams Show” to argue the case against three strikes. A caption that flashed on the screen when Ewell spoke read: “Afraid to leave his house because he has two ‘Strikes.’” But Ewell...

A Yolo County judge on Monday sentenced a man who walked out of a store with a package of cheese in his trousers to seven years and eight months in prison. Prosecutors had originally sought a life sentence for Robert Ferguson under the state's "three strikes" law. They dropped that bid last month, saying a psychological report had convinced them that a life sentence wasn't warranted. At Monday's hearing, Deputy District Attorney Clinton Parish urged Judge Thomas Warriner to consider at least one of Ferguson's prior strikes – one for burglary and another for assault with a deadly weapon –...

-snip- Castro is accused of killing his girlfriend's cocker spaniel with a ball-peen hammer in 2007. Because he has previous felony convictions, prosecutors say if the 48-year-old Castro is convicted again he could be sentenced to life in prison under the state's three-strikes law.

When a jury found Richard Allen Davis guilty of the murder of Petaluma's 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1996, Davis puckered his lips and extended a middle finger to TV cameras. Later, Davis was sentenced to death, and outraged California voters passed a three-strikes sentencing law. From death row now, Davis still is puckering up and extending his finger at the public - and the public is paying for it. It's 2009, yet it was only this month that Davis' first appeal was argued before the California Supreme Court. "Who would think it would take almost as long for this guy...

WASHINGTON – Hoping the third time will be the charm, President Barack Obama named former Washington Gov. Gary Locke as his nominee for Commerce secretary Wednesday. "I'm sure it's not lost on anyone that we've tried this a couple of times. But I'm a big believer in keeping at something until you get it right," Obama said, standing with the fellow Democrat in the Indian Treaty Room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House.

Two horrifying crimes have exposed serious weaknesses in Connecticut’s criminal justice system. But a “three strikes and you’re out” law proposed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Republicans in the Legislature would do more harm than good. Last July two recently paroled men broke into a home in Cheshire and tortured and murdered three people. Last month a man who served more than eight years for assaulting a 5-year-old — and had been out on probation for less than a month — broke into a New Britain home. He accosted two women, wounding one and killing the other. Republicans, led...

VANCOUVER -- A transient arrested Tuesday for shooting and killing a Vancouver police dog could go to prison for life under the state's three-strikes law if convicted. Ronald James Chenette, 38, appeared Wednesday in Clark County Superior Court, accused of harming a police dog and unlawful possession of a firearm in the shooting of Dakota, a 5-year-old German shepherd. The mood at the Vancouver Police Department's canine unit Wednesday was subdued, but the agency gratefully acknowledged the public outpouring of support. Officer Roger Evans, Dakota's handler, spent the day at home. "It's been very tough," said Kim Kapp, a police...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal appeals court upheld a mentally ill man's three-strikes sentence of 25 years to life today for shoplifting two bottles of liquor from a Southern California market, a sentence that a dissenting judge called "barbarous.'' In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed a Los Angeles County judge's sentencing of Cornel Ray Joshua, who walked out of a West Covina market with $62 worth of liquor in July 1999. He ran when a store employee approached but was grabbed and pulled to the ground, according to testimony cited by...

Mandatory minimum sentencing schemes do not work, at least not if the goal is to reduce violent crime and improve public safety. In the United States we know that, because we have tried them all. Canadians may therefore be surprised to learn that their government is mimicking this failed U.S. penal model, in the name of getting tough on violent crime.

Could the Governor's loose lips spring a man from prison? The National Latino Congreso held in Los Angeles last week may have laid out a blueprint for how Arnold Schwarzenegger could recoup some of his lost ground with Latino voters. The day before conference officials disinvited the Governor from giving a speech at the conference because of racially questionable comments, Congreso participants unanimously approved a resolution calling on Schwarzenegger to free a Latino prisoner imprisoned under California's three-strikes law for cheating on a Department of Motor Vehicles exam. The city of Richmond and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors have...

The Violent Crime Reduction Bill was unveiled by Labour last week. The Bill is misnamed: it contains nothing that will actually reduce violent crime, which is currently increasing at around 10 per cent every year. Instead, it contains a series of gimmicks. There is a plan to allow police officers and council officials to ban people they think are drunk (and about to behave badly) from pubs and clubs in the neighbourhood for up to two years; there is a clause that will raise the age limit for buying air guns and knives to 18; others will increase the penalty...

Supreme Court ruling puts '3 strikes, out' laws in doubt Court limits prior conviction evidence Tuesday, March 08, 2005 By Michael McGough, Post-Gazette National Bureau WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court, which last summer threw federal criminal sentencing into confusion with a ruling that it took seven months to clarify, created additional uncertainty yesterday with a decision dealing with the role of prior convictions in setting punishment for a new crime. At risk, at least in the view of some legal observers, are "three strikes and you're out" laws that impose harsh penalties on repeat violent offenders. In another decision,...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A California man sent to prison for 26 years for lying on a driver's license application won a new hearing on Friday in a case that revived debate over the state's "three strikes" law, which imposes lengthy terms on repeat offenders. Santos Reyes was convicted of perjury for filling out a driver's license under a cousin's name in 1997. Convicted of burglary in 1981 and armed robbery in 1987, he was sentenced to 26-years-to-life. Reyes appealed, arguing such a sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco...

The small joys of life when you live freely: walking into your kitchen for that first cup of coffee, driving down a curvy back road with no other cars in sight, choosing what you'll fix yourself for dinner. We take for granted these small freedoms -- yet they are freedoms we should value and recognize. A just society does not yank these rights from a young man for the rest of his life for a petty crime. The United States of America did just that when a federal court in Alabama sentenced Clarence Aaron to life without parole for a...