Politics
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
One Seat, Six Candidates: Arcata City Council Race Makes a Special June Ballot Appearance
Posted By Kimberly Wear on Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 12:28 PM
The top vote-getter of the six candidates — Chase Marcum, Humnath Panta, Dana Quillman, Edith Rosen, Alexandra Stillman and Kimberley White — will serve out the term of former Vice Mayor Emily Goldstein, which runs through November of 2024. Goldstein stepped down March 1 for family reasons.
The four current councilmembers had three choices for filling Goldstein’s seat: call a June special election, appoint a replacement to serve until the November election or simply wait until the November election to have the seat filled as a two-year position with two other four-year terms also up for a vote.
In unanimously selecting the first option at a Feb. 9 special meeting, several cited a sense of urgency to have a full council with major projects in the pipeline, including the controversial Gateway Area Plan, coupled with perception concerns about having two out of five seats appointed rather than elected.
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
State of the State: Will Gov. Newsom do More to Reduce California Inequality?
Posted By Alejandro Lazo/CalMatters on Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 10:01 AM
From his first day in office in January 2019, Newsom called the manifestations of California’s inequality – homelessness, poverty and rising costs – “moral imperatives,” not just policy priorities. “So long as they persist, each and every one of us is diminished,” he declared.
Those inequalities persisted and were laid bare by two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, a tumultuous time that saw the governor overcome a Republican-led effort to recall him from office last September.
Now with the pandemic receding, the economy rebounding and no major political opposition standing in his way to reelection this year, Newsom has the opportunity to return to his original priority of reducing the stain of poverty on the state.
He is expected to address the issue today in the final State of the State speech of his first term. ”There is going to be an explicit call out on inequality, and the stakes,” said an aide, who spoke only if not named because they were not authorized to give a preview of the speech. “One of the themes of the speech is going to be democracy, and tying that to how unchecked inequality undermines democracy.”
Some experts and advocates say Newsom’s efforts to close the economic divide may determine his legacy – and help set him apart from his predecessor and fellow Democrat, Jerry Brown, who insisted state government could only go so far in closing the divide between rich and poor.
“If the comparison is past governors in California, he’s trying to do a lot,” said Chris Hoene, director of the California Budget & Policy Center, a nonprofit that researches policy affecting low-income Californians. “If the comparison is where we were when he took over as governor, and where we are today, he’s facing a ton of headwinds. And the urgency and the need drives expectations about him doing more.”
Nationally, the jobs recovery is in full swing, and though California has lagged other states, it could at last see improvements as mask mandates loosen and the economy returns more to normal. The pandemic – and record state budget surpluses – have given Newsom the opportunity to address the state’s inequalities. The Democratic leaders of the state Assembly and Senate leaders also say they want to use the budget to create a more inclusive recovery and more equitable economy.
But Assembly GOP leader James Gallagher of Yuba City said it’s the policies of Democrats that are driving inequality.
“We have a huge surplus because the wealthiest are doing so well,” he said. “That doesn’t tell the story of the middle- and low- income earners in this state.”
For instance, he said, families are getting hammered by the rapid increase in gas prices, which according to AAA has now topped an average of $5 a gallon – an increase accelerated by the Ukraine war. Gallagher and other Republicans also blame the state’s gas tax, which Democrats raised in 2017 under Brown to repair roads and bridges and expand mass transit. Newsom has proposed putting off a scheduled July increase, but the governor has met resistance from his own party in the Legislature. The climate change agenda of California Democrats has also driven up the cost of utilities, further deepening inequality, Gallagher said.
“I think he genuinely cares about this issue, but I think that his policies – the policies of either he, or Democrats in the Legislature – have made the problem worse,” Gallagher said. “The other problem is that the governor has a lack of follow-through. He’s big on pronouncements and announcing new programs, but pretty short on implementation and results.”
What’s Newsom’s record?
In his State of the State speech last year, Newsom returned to the theme of inequality, indicating his belief the pandemic was “widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots.” “California’s most acute preexisting condition remains income inequality,” he said.
In his three years in office, he has pushed through several significant initiatives:
- Newsom has steadily expanded Medi-Cal coverage to include undocumented people until they turn 26 and once they turn 50, and in his January budget proposed covering those previously excluded. But the expansion would still leave several hundred thousand undocumented immigrants unable to qualify because they earn above the program’s annual income thresholds.
- In 2019, Newsom expanded the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit and the Young Child Tax Credit to help boost the wages of low-paid workers and families. In 2020, he signed a law allowing anyone with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number to qualify for the expanded earned income tax credit. That made undocumented workers eligible to receive hundreds, or thousands of, dollars each year. Last year, he signed a measure giving $600 one-time payments to those who receive the state’s earned income tax credit, along with an extra $600 for certain undocumented taxpayers not eligible for some federal aid.
- During the pandemic, California expanded eligibility for several safety net programs, including food assistance, allowing for more people to participate. In particular, the state paused the recertification process in the state’s CalFresh program, which provides food benefits to some 2.6 million low-income households. And the state last year created a universal free school meals program, doing away with a previous income requirement.
- When taking office, Newsom announced plans to assist working parents with a six-month, paid family leave program. He has so far extended the program to eight weeks per parent. In 2020, he signed a bill expanding unpaid family leave to include smaller employers, but in 2021 vetoed a bill intended to extend the program to low-income workers. The governor has also made progress on his goals to expand preschool, with a plan to provide universal transitional kindergarten for four-year-olds by 2025.
- Experts and activists say making higher education more affordable is important to reducing inequality in the state. Last year, the administration eliminated age and time-out-of-high-school requirements for Cal Grant scholarships to community colleges. But the governor vetoed a bill that would have made Cal Grants more broadly available. Lawmakers last year also signaled the intent to expand a scholarship for middle-class students in the state, as well as more slots in public universities for California students, though lawmakers must agree this year to fund those promises.
- The governor’s efforts with economic recovery, trying to target funds regionally could help the Central Valley and other parts of the state that are struggling. Such work might not be easy; a legislative effort to retrain oil workers has already sparked a political fight among some of the state’s labor unions.
Still, advocates say the state could be doing more to shrink the economic divide.
“It does seem like Newsom is treating a commitment to reducing poverty as one of his key legacy commitments.”
David Grusky, director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
What do the numbers show?
While recessions tend to widen income disparities between rich and poor, earnings have increased for low-income workers while unprecedented government relief kept millions from falling into poverty. That’s despite the sharp downturn in 2020, and the disproportionate number of pandemic-related job losses hitting low-wage sectors. During the recovery, some of the biggest gains are in the leisure and hospitality sectors, according to Sarah Bohn, a vice president and policy research chairperson with the Public Policy Institute of California.
“Wages are picking up the most at the low-end of the spectrum, even though we’re still in a recovery period with elevated unemployment,” Bohn said. “It might be that inequality is actually decreasing during the pandemic – which is kind of crazy, and we’ll know more soon – but when you just look at the wage statistics, the sectors that are lowest paid have the highest increase in wages.”
Nationally, data from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank shows typical wages for the bottom 25 percent of earners growing faster than other income groups. Meanwhile the Biden administration has highlighted research from two influential U.C. Berkeley economists underscoring that economic growth has been broadly shared since he took office in January 2021.
In California, income inequality statistics for 2020 are not yet available, but the trend has been one of dramatic widening over the long run, with the modern economy placing a premium on highly educated workers. Analyzing pretax income and including cash from some safety net programs, the PPIC found income growth for the bottom 10 percent of families in California lagging significantly behind the top 10 percent from 1980 to 2019.
Monday, February 28, 2022
California Senate to Introduce Bill Divesting Funds from Russia
Posted By Iridian Casarez on Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 2:24 PM
“The world is watching the atrocities taking place in Ukraine. It’s sickening,” Mike McGuire said. “We must stand strong for the people of Ukraine. That’s why we all must mobilize to stop Russia in its tracks. California has unique and remarkable economic power in this circumstance. As the fifth-largest economy in the world, we must use this power for good. We can help stop this autocratic thug, Putin, by advancing this critical legislation and enacting our own financial divestments.”
The legislation would call on all state agencies, including California’s massive pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, to divest from any and all Russian assets immediately, following in the federal government's tracks as President Joe Biden imposed and expanded sanctions on Russia. The legislation would also block the approval of state contracts to any company conducting business with Russia.
According to the release, it’s believed that California has Russian investments exceeding $1 billion, primarily in its pension funds.
Friday, February 25, 2022
State Threatens Auditor-Controller with $5K Fine for Delinquent Fiscal Report
Posted By Thadeus Greenson on Fri, Feb 25, 2022 at 5:15 PM
Paz Dominguez’s letter comes a day after she was sent a “final demand letter” from Deputy Attorney General Julianne Mossler on behalf of the State Controller’s Office (SCO), which had launched an investigation late last year into Humboldt County’s still delinquent 2019-2020 Financial Transactions Report. The state government code mandates these annual financial reports be filed with the state and on Feb. 26, 2021, the SCO sent Humboldt County a letter advising its report was delinquent and giving it 20 days to come into compliance. The letter reportedly received no response, so on June 1, 2021, the SCO followed up.
According to Mossler, Paz Dominguez responded to this second notice on June 14, 2021, stating the delinquent audit was in the works and offering to complete it using “unaudited information” within two weeks. The SCO agreed to the offer and on June 21, according to the letter, Paz Dominguez advised the needed data was being collected and processed and the matter was an “urgent priority.”
“You have never submitted the report,” Mossler states in her Feb. 24, 2022 letter to Paz Dominguez, adding that the report is now more than a year overdue and, according to the SCO, Paz Dominguez’ office has also failed to comply with a deadline for the county’s 2020-2021 report, as well.
Monday, February 21, 2022
Meth, a Mother, and a Stillbirth: Imprisoned Mom Wants her ‘Manslaughter’ Case Reopened
Posted By Nigel Duara/CalMatters on Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 10:51 AM
Doctors detected no fetal heartbeat at 9:30 p.m. At 10:14 p.m., she tested positive for methamphetamine. Eight minutes later, Adora Perez of Hanford delivered a stillborn boy she named Hades, according to medical records shared with CalMatters by a member of Perez’s legal team.
“Affect appropriate for situation,” her medical chart noted. “Teary off and on.”
And then — on the morning of Jan. 1, 2018 — Perez was released from Adventist Medical Center in Hanford and arrested. Charged with murder, she eventually pleaded guilty to “manslaughter of a fetus” and was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Perez has served nearly four years of her sentence, but this week, she returns to court. On Tuesday, a Kings County judge will weigh whether to reopen the case. Perez’s attorneys argue that she didn’t understand the crime to which she was pleading and received ineffective counsel from her trial and appellate attorneys.
Since her guilty plea, Perez’s story has drawn national attention for her rare plea to manslaughter of a fetus – a charge that doesn’t exist in California law. Abortion rights advocates believe her case has broad implications for abortion access in California, potentially opening the door to criminal prosecutions of people seeking to terminate pregnancies.
“With the possibility that Roe (v. Wade) might fall this year, letting this stand could increase these types of prosecutions,” said Samantha Lee, staff attorney at National Advocates for Pregnant Women. “Those cases happen everywhere in the country.
“I would just emphasize that I felt that shock when I heard these cases happened in California.”
The four-year-old case also has pitted California’s attorney general against a long-time rural prosecutor.
In January, with Perez’s new court date looming in Kings County, Attorney General Rob Bonta issued an admonition to prosecutors statewide: Don’t file charges against mothers who miscarry or deliver a stillbirth.
“In California, we do not criminalize pregnancy loss, we do not criminalize miscarriages, we do not criminalize stillbirths,” Bonta, appointed last March, said in a press conference.
Bonta described his guidance as a “legal alert” to every county prosecutor.
Across the entire state in the last three decades, only one prosecutor has charged women who miscarry with murder: Kings County District Attorney Keith Fagundes.
Twenty-two months after he charged Perez, Fagundes filed a murder charge against 26-year-old Chelsea Becker of Hanford, who also tested positive for methamphetamine and delivered a stillbirth at the same hospital.
Becker was released in March after 16 months in jail. A Kings County judge dismissed the murder charge against her in May.
Perez’s legal team takes that as a good sign — even knowing that they have challenged the conduct of the local prosecutors, defense attorneys, trial court and law enforcement system that closed quickly around Perez on the night of her delivery.
They say they’re also encouraged by a June 2021 decision by a state appellate court, which ruled that a trial court cannot accept a defendant’s plea that isn’t based in fact – exactly what Perez’s pro bono attorney, Mary McNamara, argues is happening in Kings County.
“You can’t just plead to something you couldn’t have done,” McNamara said.
The New Year’s arrest
In the hospital, according to her nursing chart, Perez and the father of her baby were distraught.
Perez “was emotional, tearful and mixed emotions,” a nurse wrote. “(Father of the baby) appeared to have been crying and was solemn.”
Perez was given numbers to call for substance abuse and counseling for postpartum depression. Both parents were handed a brochure about grief and loss called Angel Babies.
“Pt anticipates d/c home,” a nurse wrote in hospital shorthand: Patient anticipates discharge to home.
In his discharge summary, Dr. Thomas Enloe recommended that Perez be put on one to two weeks of “pelvic rest,” and recommended a follow-up appointment.
But the hospital had already put Perez’s legal case into motion. At 11:30 p.m. on Dec. 30, 2017, a nurse at the hospital called Child Protective Services. Police were at Perez’s bedside within three hours and 10 minutes of her delivery.
“Adventist (Medical Center) was taking a very proactive role in contacting law enforcement,” McNamara said.
A doctor told a detective that the baby died of a placental abruption “due to extensive drug use by the mother,” according to Perez’s medical records, a statement which formed the foundation of the case against her.
“I would just emphasize that I felt that shock when I heard these cases happened in California.”
Samantha Lee, National Advocates for Pregnant Women
After she was charged, Perez was assigned an attorney who worked on a contract basis – Kings County, population 153,000, doesn’t have a public defender’s office. Perez argues now that the attorney failed to provide her with effective assistance, and led her to plead to a charge she didn’t understand.
She attempted to withdraw the plea, and argued her first attorney didn’t investigate the possibility that something other than methamphetamine might have led to the stillbirth. The judge denied her motion to withdraw the plea and, on June 15, 2018, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Perez appealed, but her appellate attorney filed what’s called a Wende brief, which tells the appeals court that the attorney found no issue upon which to appeal the case.
“It was basically putting up the white flag,” McNamara said.
The appellate court upheld the lower court’s ruling. The California Supreme Court declined to hear her petition for review.
Perez is now asking the Kings County Superior Court to reopen her case.
District attorney defiant
The tallest building in Hanford is the courthouse, four stories of neo-classical revival in the seat of Kings County. It’s nearly as old as the county itself, built just three years after the county’s incorporation in 1893.
The history of the state is inscribed in this rural county’s history: Bloodied by 1880s gun battles between railroad bulls and squatters, it was briefly made rich by a 1928 oil strike and provided the backdrop for the 1933 cotton pickers’ protest.
But there, Kings County’s history begins to diverge from California’s more recent prosperity.
The oil strike uncovered the Kettleman North Dome Oil Field, but the site is nearly exhausted. More people are leaving here than arriving – the county has lost more than 2,800 residents to out-migration in the last five years, according to the California Department of Finance. An estimated 2,000 births each year is the only thing keeping the county’s total population from shrinking.
A significant number of the adult population has voted for Fagundes.
In the last decade, Fagundes, the district attorney, has enjoyed a healthy mandate. After a 12-year career as a deputy district attorney in Tulare and Kings counties, he won the race for Kings County District Attorney in 2014 and 2018 with more than 68% of the vote, and he’s running for reelection this year.
When Bonta held his Jan. 6 press conference on the Becker and Perez cases, joined by abortion rights groups, a representative of Planned Parenthood decried “rogue district attorneys.”
Fagundes was listening.
“The AG of the state has no business being asked by political groups to give such statements,” Fagundes said.
“He took an oath to uphold the law and enforce the law, not interpret it for his own political ways.”
“The AG of the state has no business being asked by political groups to give such statements.”
Keith Fagundes, Kings County district attorney
Fagundes’ neatly combed hair and ready smile belie a puncher’s mentality. Raised in a working class Catholic family of seven, Fagundes said abortion was never a topic his family discussed. His father, Richard Fagundes, has been on the Kings County Board of Supervisors since 2008.
“Through the college years and I still maintain today, I don’t have a uterus. I’m not going to make decisions for women in that regard,” Fagundes said. “I’m not going to tell them what’s best for their baby or themselves.”
A Democrat for much of his life, Fagundes switched to the Republican Party in 2014 as he prepared to run for office in this heavily Republican county, where 64% of registered voters wanted to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom in September.
But the decisions to charge the mothers, he said, came not from his own political leanings but from the opinions of the doctors who treated them and the pathologists who examined the fetuses.
“It’s like, look, under what circumstances can we do something?” Fagundes said. “These women are coming in and they are high on drugs.
“If they had come in beaten up and their fetuses were suffering from being beaten up, we would be charging the fathers. Why aren’t we charging folks for this?”
The staredown with state AGs
In nearly every instance, the California attorney general’s office supports the work of county district attorneys.
The Perez and Becker cases have reversed that dynamic.
Bonta and his predecessor, Xavier Becerra, now the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, have consistently called for the women to be freed.
“I think our position is very clear,” Bonta told CalMatters. Trial courts and attorneys “should know there’s no legal standing for such a charge,” he said.
Becerra said in a 2020 friend of the court brief that Fagundes misinterpreted the law and that a Kings County Superior Court judge was incorrect in deciding not to dismiss the charge against her.
More recently, Bonta filed a petition to the state Supreme Court, asking the justices to review Perez’s case. His office has also joined coalitions of state attorneys general opposing restrictions to abortion access in Texas, Mississippi, Arizona and Indiana.
California law regarding deaths of a fetus dates back to 1970. A man was convicted of murder for severely beating his estranged pregnant wife, who lost her baby. His conviction was overturned by the California Supreme Court, which ruled that a fetus is not a human being under the law.
In response, the Legislature added language to California’s murder statute: The killing of a fetus was punishable. But they added a condition: The murder statute didn’t apply if the act was “solicited, aided, abetted, or consented to by the mother of the fetus.”
Perez’s attorneys argue that her charges are therefore invalid because, under California law, a fetus cannot be the victim of a criminal act if the act is committed by the mother, or with her consent. They say the prosecutor erred in charging Perez, and the judge wrongfully allowed Perez to plead to something legally impossible. They contend the original attorney assigned to Perez failed her by allowing her to plead to a lesser charge, manslaughter of a fetus, that doesn’t exist in California law.
“Ms. Perez pled guilty (to manslaughter) because she had been led to believe that she could be convicted of murder, which was not true,” her attorneys wrote in a brief asking the state Supreme Court to review the case.
“In California, we do not criminalize pregnancy loss, we do not criminalize miscarriages, we do not criminalize stillbirths.”
Rob Bonta, California attorney general
Medical experts introduced by Perez’s new legal team also have testified that there is no science supporting the idea that methamphetamine causes stillbirths.
Tuesday’s hearing will take up the question of whether Perez was denied her constitutional rights to due process by the actions and inaction of her original attorneys. If a judge agrees with Perez, her manslaughter plea will be vacated, and she could be released on bail. She would still face the original charge of murder.
Fagundes believes he’s done the best thing possible for the residents of his county, including Becker and Perez.
“This may be way out of line to say, but I credit our practice to (Becker’s) recovery if she stays recovered,” Fagundes said.
He argues that jail for Becker – and prison for Perez – provided them their longest periods of sobriety.
“How do you disagree that our practice worked for her in this moment? You can’t. No other practice helped her.”
The mothers today
Today, Perez is inmate number WG0595 at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. Since she’s in prison for killing her infant, McNamara said she’s been assaulted.
“When you go into a prison with the moniker ‘baby killer,’ it’s similar to a man going to prison for pedophilia,” McNamara said. “You’re marked. She’s been beaten up, she’s been ostracized, she’s been in and out of the mental health ward.”
Drugs are readily available in the women’s prison, McNamara said, though she declined to say whether Perez, now 34, has maintained her sobriety during her incarceration.
“Prisons are filled with drugs, and to be able to survive in a situation like that as a sober individual is extraordinarily difficult,” McNamara said.
Becker, the other woman charged with manslaughter of a fetus, declined to comment through her attorney, Dan Arshack.
“(Becker) is a brilliant young woman with a troubled past and a bright future,” Arshack said. “Even though she didn’t know what the law was, in her heart she knew she shouldn’t have been criminalized.”
Arshack said Becker, now 27, is working full time and taking college courses. When she graduates, he said, she plans to apply to law school.
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
Is This Another Way to End California’s Death Penalty?
Posted By Alexei Koseff/CalMatters on Wed, Feb 9, 2022 at 10:54 AM
Unable to persuade California voters to do away with capital punishment altogether, the movement to abolish the death penalty is quietly shifting its strategy to shrinking the nation’s largest Death Row.
With the possibility of executions off the table for the foreseeable future under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2019 moratorium, advocates are focusing instead on narrowing the scope of when death sentences can be sought by prosecutors, plus other policies to make them a less normal part of the criminal justice system. The changes, advocates hope, will lay the groundwork to ultimately convince a majority of Californians that the death penalty is no longer necessary.
“The less it is used, the more likely it is that voters and elected leaders will be ready to get rid of it forever,” said Natasha Minsker, a longtime political consultant with the abolition movement.
But recent backlash to an unrelated plan by the Newsom administration to dismantle the historic Death Row facility at San Quentin State Prison underscores how elusive that goal remains and why the Democrats who control state government may be reluctant to embrace even modest proposals.
Though the San Quentin move has no practical effect on executions, Republicans quickly seized on it as another example of Democrats watering down punishments and favoring criminals over victims, a key message in the 2022 election as polling shows rising anxiety among Californians about public safety.
Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham, a San Luis Obispo Republican and former prosecutor, said Newsom and other lawmakers pushing to end the death penalty are disrespecting the will of California voters, who upheld capital punishment three times in the past decade. He predicted the “giant political disconnect” would eventually backfire.
“It just seems so out of touch to me,” Cunningham said. “It’s insulting to the memories of the victims and the families of those victims.”
Executions paused, but death sentences continue
Capital punishment exists in a strange limbo in California, the result of decades of pitched political battles.
The California Supreme Court, for example, was the first court in the country to declare the death penalty unconstitutional. Its decision, issued Feb. 18, 1972, was overturned by voters just nine months later through a constitutional amendment sponsored by then-state Sen. George Deukmejian.
Local district attorneys continue to seek death sentences and, each year, California juries send another handful of people to Death Row. There are nearly 700 condemned inmates in the state — 673 men and 21 women.
Prosecutors argue that it’s important to maintain death as a punishment for the most heinous crimes and as a tool to help secure plea bargains in other serious cases. Voters narrowly rejected an initiative to abolish the death penalty in 2012 and again in 2016. That year, they also passed a competing measure intended to expedite executions, which contains a provision about rehousing inmates that Newsom cited as the basis for his plan to repurpose the Death Row facility.
No one in California has been executed since 2006, however, after a federal court ruled the state’s lethal injection procedure unconstitutional. In addition to suspending capital punishment, Newsom in March 2019, just two months after he became governor, closed the death chamber at San Quentin and withdrew from a regulatory process to develop execution protocols that could pass legal muster.
“The steps he took right when he entered office were so significant and so dramatic,” Minsker said. “He is the most effective spokesperson in educating people about the flaws of the death penalty.”
The conflict, driven by deeply divided public sentiment, is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.
A poll conducted last May by the Los Angeles Times and the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found declining support for capital punishment among California voters. But while more respondents favored repealing the death penalty than allowing executions, it was still fewer than half.
Death penalty supporters have already written another initiative to get the system back on track — by limiting the governor’s ability to grant a blanket reprieve for executions and move appeals from the California Supreme Court, where they are bottlenecked, to state appellate courts — but are withholding it from the ballot until they sense a more favorable political environment.
Opponents of capital punishment do not currently have plans to put the abolition back on the ballot, an increasingly expensive undertaking.
A November report by the state Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, which unanimously recommended repealing the death penalty, laid out another path: While working toward that “difficult goal,” officials could take other steps to reduce the size of Death Row, such as granting clemency, recalling capital sentences and removing people who are permanently mentally incompetent.
Legislation to chip away at capital punishment
Three of the report’s recommendations are already in a pair of bills moving through the legislative process.
Assembly Bill 256 by Assemblymember Ash Kalra, a San Jose Democrat, would extend a 2020 law that makes it easier to challenge convictions and sentences as racially biased. The measure would apply retroactively, potentially opening a door for inmates seeking to overturn their death sentences by pointing out that people of color disproportionately receive capital punishment in California. AB 256 passed the Assembly last year, but was held in a Senate committee, where it could be revived this session.
Senate Bill 300 by Sen. Dave Cortese, a Campbell Democrat, would limit punishment for people who are convicted as an accomplice in a homicide. Under current law, someone who commits a felony that results in a death can be charged with murder, even if they are not the actual killer, and receive the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole, if a prosecutor determines they were a “major participant” in the underlying crime and acted with “reckless indifference to human life.”
The measure would also give judges discretion to dismiss the special circumstances that qualify cases for capital punishment and instead hand down a sentence of 25 years to life, which would make the defendant eligible for parole.
“It’s important for the Legislature to make a declaration like other governing bodies have done that this is just not something we’re going to do,” Cortese said. “Moratoriums can be reversed.”
Tough votes for vulnerable lawmakers
Though it would affect only a handful of people on Death Row — Minsker called it “a modest reform to address a very extreme injustice” — SB 300 could be a major test of the appetite at the Capitol to take on the death penalty.
Because it would amend an initiative approved by voters in 1990, the bill requires a two-thirds majority vote in both the Assembly and Senate to pass. That likely means the measure would need support from nearly every member of the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority.
While it squeaked through the Senate last session, SB 300 has not yet come up in the Assembly, where bills to reduce criminal sentences typically face greater resistance and where five Democratic seats are vacant until a series of special elections that could last until June. Groups representing district attorneys, police chiefs and law enforcement officers are opposed.
This year’s election has further raised the stakes for members. All 80 seats in the Assembly and half of the 40 seats in the Senate are up for grabs in newly redrawn districts as the national political mood appears to be turning against Democrats. Cortese said many of his colleagues worry about being seen as too soft on crime by voters.
“Their world view, on even the case of the death penalty, ultimately come down to 100 feet in front of and to both sides of their front door,” Cortese said. “Tomorrow morning, something could go down in any one of these neighborhoods that becomes a punching bag for the opposition.”
In recent elections, California voters have supported a series of ballot initiatives to roll back the state’s legacy of harsh criminal sentencing policy, but Republicans are betting this will be the year when the pendulum swings back in the other direction. They plan to make it a central part of their messaging as they seek to flip enough legislative and congressional seats to deny Democrats another supermajority in Sacramento and help the GOP regain control of Congress.
“People are fed up,” said Cunningham, the Republican Assemblymember.
He said a bill such as SB 300 could easily become a liability in a competitive race, fodder for a mailer slamming a legislator for voting to water down sentences for murderers. He predicted that Democrats would try to prevent it and other potentially controversial measures from coming up at all this year.
“Even if you think those are the right policies, those are tough votes to take,” he said.
The end of California’s Death Row?
Those dynamics were previewed last week when the Associated Press reported that Newsom wants to clear out Death Row at San Quentin and transform it into a space for rehabilitation programs. The news drew massive public attention and some expected ridicule from Republicans, though experts on both sides agree that the significance of the proposal was overblown.
Prison officials plan to transfer California’s condemned inmates into the general population over the next two years, making it easier for them to work and pay restitution as required by Proposition 66, the pro-death penalty initiative approved by voters in 2016. The men could move from San Quentin to other maximum-security prisons, while female inmates, who are housed at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, would live in less restrictive units in the same prison. None will be resentenced.
“We preach justice. But as a nation, we don’t practice it on Death Row.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom
The program, which has not yet been finalized, would extend a two-year experiment that ended in January and rehoused more than 120 people. A $1.5 million funding request to pay for a consultant to repurpose Death Row was a blip in Newsom’s nearly $300 billion budget proposal last month.
“It’s not a dramatic moment in the history of the death penalty,” Minsker said.
Kent Scheidegger, legal director and general counsel for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation and one of the authors of Prop. 66, said the governor was following through on the initiative’s intent. Because of the small cells at San Quentin, inmates must be held in single units on Death Row, he said, driving up the cost of supervising them and providing opponents a frequent argument against capital punishment.
“Governor Newsom has removed one of the arrows from the quiver of the people arguing for repeal,” Scheidegger said in an email. “That is the only thing he has done right in criminal justice since taking office.”
The change, like any involving the death penalty, nevertheless carries symbolic weight for many Californians.
Advocates for capital punishment said his actions were another slap in the face of the families of murder victims who have been denied closure for decades.
Matthew Rushford, president and CEO of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which has also defended California’s death penalty procedures in court, said he regretted the transfer and restitution provisions in Prop. 66.
Though they were included to make the initiative more appealing to voters, they were largely ignored during the campaign. Rushford said he does not believe they were ultimately necessary and lamented that they are now being used to move inmates to better living conditions with more access to benefits, such as rehabilitative programming.
“We’ve learned from this governor that you leave any wiggle room and he’ll use it,” Rushford said.
During an appearance in Los Angeles last week, Newsom defended the plan as a natural outcome of the requirements in Prop. 66, before engaging in his usual long-view philosophizing. The governor said he looked forward to “advancing more leadership on reforming the death penalty,” a practice he has long opposed and referred to as “government-sponsored premeditated murder.”
“We talk about justice. We preach justice,” Newsom said. “But as a nation, we don’t practice it on Death Row.”
Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Why Single Payer Died in the California Legislature, Again
Posted By Alexei Koseff/CalMatters on Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 8:53 AM
The single-payer measure, Assembly Bill 1400, was the latest attempt to deliver on a longtime priority of Democratic Party faithful to get private insurers and profit margins out of health care. Because it was introduced last year, when it stalled without receiving a single hearing, it needed to pass the Assembly by Monday to continue through the legislative process. But even the threat of losing the party’s endorsement in the upcoming election cycle was not enough to persuade the Assembly’s Democratic supermajority to advance the bill for further consideration, effectively killing the effort for another year.
After several tense hours Monday afternoon, during which a scramble of meetings took place just off the Assembly floor, Assemblymember Ash Kalra, the San Jose Democrat carrying AB 1400, announced that he would not bring up the measure for a vote.
Kalra declined multiple requests to discuss his decision and whether he would seek another path forward for his proposal. Following the floor session, he waited on a members-only balcony outside the chamber until a group of reporters was told to leave by a sergeant-at-arms.
“I don’t believe it would have served the cause of getting single payer done by having the vote and having it go down in flames and further alienating members,” Kalra said on a Zoom call with disappointed supporters later in the evening, in which he shared that he believed the bill, which needed 41 votes to pass, was short by “double digits.”
Stuck between powerful interests
The political obstacles to such a radical restructuring of the health care system remain enormous, even in a state as putatively liberal as California.
The influential California Chamber of Commerce, which represents business interests in the state, labeled AB 1400 a “job killer” shortly after it was reintroduced in January, indicating it would be a top priority to defeat. Its lobbying campaign — joined by dozens of insurers, industry groups and the associations representing doctors and hospitals — included social media advertisements and a letter to members denouncing the “crippling tax increases” that would be needed to pay for the system. After the bill stalled Monday, the chamber declared it would be ready if ideas from the “dangerous proposal” resurfaced.
Republicans were eager to make it into an election issue this year. Though Kalra’s bill was largely conceptual, with a separate measure introduced to address the financing, they attacked it as a massive tax hike on Californians. (Kalra proposed a series of taxes on businesses and high-earning households to fund the single-payer system, estimated by legislative analysts to cost between $314 billion and $391 billion annually.) A 4,000-page petition signed by voters who opposed AB 1400 sat in the back of the chamber on Monday for Assembly Republican Leader Marie Waldron of Escondido to use as a prop in a floor debate that never happened.
Democrats also faced a squeeze from the left flank of their party. Activists with the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus said last week they would push to withhold endorsements from members who did not vote for the bill. That ultimatum generated fierce anger in the Assembly caucus from members who felt cornered, though many refused to speak publicly about their frustration.
Backlash from activists
The decision not to bring up AB 1400 for a vote on Monday may have been about protecting members from having to take a position one way or the other on the bill, as Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon did with the last single-payer measure in 2017.
Legislation to move the state toward a government-run health care system passed the state Senate that year, but was held by Rendon without a hearing because the bill included no plan to pay for it. That put him in the crosshairs of single-payer supporters, who blasted him on billboards.
This time, Rendon said he supported the effort, but he was not closely involved in rounding up votes for AB 1400. He declined to answer questions after the floor session on Monday and, in a statement, he pushed the blame onto Kalra.
“The shortage of votes needed to pass this bill out of the Assembly indicates the immense difficulty of implementing single-payer healthcare in California,” he said. “Nevertheless, I’m deeply disappointed that the author did not bring this bill up for a vote today. I support single-payer and fully intended to vote yes on this bill.”
The explanations are unlikely to assuage the measure’s most enthusiastic proponents.
The California Nurses Association, the main sponsor of AB 1400, slammed Kalra for “providing cover” for his colleagues by not holding a vote.
“Nurses are especially outraged that Kalra chose to just give up on patients across the state,” the association said in an unsigned statement. “Nurses never give up on our patients, and we will keep fighting with our allies in the grassroots movement.”
Amar Shergill, chairperson of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, said he would continue with plans to pull endorsements from Assembly members who did not publicly support the bill.
During the Monday night call, he and other advocates repeatedly criticized Kalra for setting back their movement and urged him to name the members who were opposed. “We are protecting them from negative scrutiny of a ‘no’ vote,” Shergill said.
Kalra said it would give him more time to work on winning over colleagues who were on the fence about AB 1400 and try again next year.
Where was Newsom?
One prominent Democrat who did not express support for AB 1400 was Gov. Gavin Newsom, who ran for office in 2018 on a platform to create a single-payer system in California but has since distanced himself from that pledge.
During a press conference in January to unveil his budget proposal, Newsom reiterated that he believed “the ideal system is a single-payer system,” but dismissed questions about Kalra’s approach.
“I have not had the opportunity to review that plan, and no one has presented it to me,” Newsom said at the time.
As AB 1400 marched toward defeat, the governor remained mum. His public remarks in recent weeks focused instead on several of his own budget proposals that he said would bring universal health access to California, including an expansion of Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for the poor, to all residents regardless of their immigration status.
The distinction he has drawn between universal access to health insurance and an actual universal health care system has infuriated the nurses’ union, one of his earliest endorsers during the 2018 campaign, who accused him of flip-flopping on single payer. It seems unlikely to cause him much trouble in his upcoming re-election campaign, however, where he has yet to draw a significant challenger.
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
McGuire Named State Senate Majority Leader
Posted By Kimberly Wear on Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 1:14 PM
He was named to the post by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins.
“With bold leadership along with the ingenuity and hard work Californians are known for, the Golden State is poised to emerge from this pandemic stronger. That’s why I am so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work with our exceptional Senate leader, Pro Tem Toni Atkins,” McGuire said in a release from his office.
“With Senator Atkins in the lead, we’re bringing forward one of America’s strongest climate action plans, building more affordable housing, increasing our wildfire resilience and advancing solutions to the homelessness crisis – and that’s just the beginning. Yes, we’re living in challenging times, but I’m more energized than ever to work with Pro Tem Atkins and the state Senate to ensure our best days are still ahead,” McGuire continued.
First elected to the state Senate in 2014, McGuire has served as assistant majority leader for the last three years.
“I am so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to serve in this new role. And, my top priority will always be the North Coast. We have been through so much together over the last several years – multiple wildfires, floods, extreme drought and this pandemic. Even through our darkest days, we never gave up and we never gave in. Together, we will never quit fighting for the future of the North Coast and the Golden State,” McGuire said.
Friday, January 7, 2022
DA Fleming Won't Seek Re-Election
Posted By Thadeus Greenson on Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 5:16 PM
"It has been a privilege to serve the people of Humboldt County; I thank the voters for the opportunity," she said in the release. "I believe that during my tenure as D.A., the Humboldt County District Attorney's Office has made many important advances in its efforts to achieve justice and enhance public safety. The current people in the office are a dedicated, collaborative group that provides excellent service to the county — it has been an honor to work with them."
Fleming was first elected to the office in 2014 and took over for Paul Gallegos, who served three terms, becoming the first woman to hold the position in Humboldt County's history.
See the press release from Fleming below, as well as a letter she sent staff today.
Thursday, October 14, 2021
Humboldt Residents Could See a Change in Representation Under Draft Redistricting Maps
Posted By Kimberly Wear on Thu, Oct 14, 2021 at 4:02 PM
The process happens ever 10 years after the federal government publishes census data to ensure the populations of the districts are evenly distributed.
The last go-around on the Congressional side placed Humboldt out of longtime Representative Mike Thompson’s turf and Jared Huffman, then a termed-out member of the state Assembly, easily won the election for the redrawn Second District, which includes Humboldt, Mendocino and Marin counties, which he has represented to date.
Now the California Citizens Redistricting Committee is once again looking at shaking things up when it comes to who speaks for Humboldt on the state and federal levels.
At its meeting tomorrow, the commission is slated to discuss and review boundary opinions, some of which move the county out of Huffman’s district, as well as those of state Sen. Mike McGuire and state Assemblymember Jim Wood by connecting Humboldt with counties to its east rather than those south along the coast.
View tomorrow’s agenda — the meeting runs from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. — the proposals and find feedback forms here.
Meanwhile, the county's Redistricting Advisory Commission is doing to same type of work, in this case looking at where the boundaries for the five supervisorial districts will fall.
It also has a meeting tomorrow at 10 a.m. to look at making recommendations for the final-round of draft maps. Find the meeting agenda here and more info on draft maps and how to give feedback here.
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