You may have heard the Governor of California (you know the one who wants to be President of the United States) got into a little quarrel with a cashier at a Target store. Newsom spotted someone leaving the store without paying for an item. By his own account he asked the clerk why no one was doing anything. The clerk not knowing it was Newsom responded, “The governor had lowered the threshold” for charging a theft, and, as a result, “there’s no accountability.” Newsom argued with the employee that he was not at fault for raising the minimum for a felony arrest to $950. He is surely responsible for other laws, especially two in particular that have just become helpful to criminals.
In 2020, Newsom signed into law the California Racial Justice Act. From the law, “The express purpose of the Racial Justice Act is ‘to eliminate racial bias from California’s criminal justice system because racism in any form or amount, at any stage of a criminal trial, is intolerable [and] inimical to a fair criminal justice system.’” One might think that a law like this was overkill in a state like California. It certainly was a reaction to the 2020 George Floyd incident. This law addressed criminal charges going forward.
Then in 2021 another act was passed and signed by Newsom. From the website the bill’s author (Assemblyman Ash Kalra) stated, “Yesterday, AB 256, the California Racial Justice Act for All, was signed by Governor Newsom. AB 256 will allow persons with convictions or judgements prior to January 1, 2021, to petition the court and seek relief if racial bias was proven to be present in their case. AB 256 builds upon landmark legislation in 2020, the California Racial Justice Act, AB 2542 (Kalra, Chapter 317, Statutes of 2020), which allowed individuals to challenge racial bias in criminal charges, convictions, and sentences but was limited to cases after January 1, 2021.”
The website then goes on to say, “When we passed the Racial Justice Act, we did so with a promise to not leave behind those with past criminal convictions and sentences that were tainted by systemic racial bias, both explicit and implicit, in our courts.” The key word is implicit. One would hope that a court system in California that is stacked with Democrat judges would assure that no cases would put a person in prison when there was overt racism.
This law certainly will steer people (so inclined) to read into a case some subliminal racism that they state is there but not apparent to the naked eye. What could go wrong there? One must wonder what the need was to pass the original law. It prohibited the state from seeking or obtaining a criminal conviction or from imposing a sentence based upon race, ethnicity, or national origin. Was this a rampant problem in California court rooms? In the eyes of the DEI crowd anytime anyone other than a white or a Jew is prosecuted there is a racial tinge to it.
The new act passed in 2021 set up standards for doing lookbacks on those already in jail. The following timetable was established for providing potential retroactive relief:
• January 1, 2023: individuals facing deportation or sentenced to death.
• January 1, 2024: individuals incarcerated for a felony.
• January 1, 2025: others with a felony conviction entered after 2015.
• January 1, 2026: all others with a felony conviction
In less than two years from now, everyone convicted of a felony may make a claim that their conviction was due to explicit or implicit racism and/or distaste for their ethnicity or country from which they originated. What will stop any person in prison from making this claim, hiring a court appointed attorney (you are paying for) and flooding the courts to revisit their case? Who would know whether the original evidence is still available, not to mention the original witnesses? At minimum you can see many criminals go free based on many factors defined above or just because the state hasn’t enough staff to argue against their release. Who will be addressing the current criminal acts while the staff attorneys are buried with all these lookbacks?
The State Bar of California has on its website that it adopted a DEI policy. It is fair to assume that everyone in the process — the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, and the judges — are abiding by that policy and believe that there is no innate bias in any decision being made in the criminal justice system? Anyone can claim there is implicit bias against any black or ethnic individual no matter what the evidence is in the case. The system “made” him shoot or rape that woman. If it weren’t for our exploitative system, he would have never robbed that jewelry store.
These California laws are in direct violation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 1987. McCleskey v. Kemp defined that the defendant must have encountered overt discriminatory purpose. This act clearly makes a defense of an unexpressed (subjective) standard. How times have changed.
When Newsom was having his firsthand experience causing the spat with the Target clerk, she may have been incorrect about who was responsible for the shoplifter just sauntering out of the store without paying. But she sure was correct that Newsom’s hands are dirty from altering the laws in California to favor the criminal class.
