This morning, in re William Taylor et al., the California Supreme Court struck down the provisions of Jessica’s Law that restricted registered sex offenders from residing within 2000 feet of a school or park.
The bottom line is as follows:
[W]e agree that section 3003.5(b)‟s residency restrictions are unconstitutional as applied across the board to petitioners and similarly situated registered sex offenders on parole in San Diego County. Blanket enforcement of the residency restrictions against these parolees has severely restricted their ability to find housing in compliance with the statute, greatly increased the incidence of homelessness
among them, and hindered their access to medical treatment, drug and alcohol dependency services, psychological counseling and other rehabilitative social services available to all parolees, while further hampering the efforts of parole authorities and law enforcement officials to monitor, supervise, and rehabilitate them in the interests of public safety. It thus has infringed their liberty and privacy interests, however limited, while bearing no rational relationship to advancing the state‟s legitimate goal of protecting children from sexual predators, and has violated their basic constitutional right to be free of unreasonable, arbitrary, and oppressive official action.
Nonetheless, as the lower courts made clear, CDCR retains the statutory authority, under provisions in the Penal Code separate from those found in section 3003.5(b), to impose special restrictions on registered sex offenders in the form of discretionary parole conditions, including residency restrictions that may be more or less restrictive than those found in section 3003.5(b), as long as they are based on, and supported by, the particularized circumstances of each individual parolee.
While the Orange County Register believes that it is unclear whether the ruling has effect outside San Diego County, it seems that a legal provision that is unconstitutional in one area of California is just as unconstitutional in another. Of particular interest is the impact of San Francisco, which, because of the layout of schools and parks in it, is essentially inhabitable to sex offenders under Jessica’s Law. This meant a large proportion of homeless and transient sex offenders, which, as one of them said to ABC news, “are actually walking time bombs out here because we are suffering from sleep deprivation”.
Death Penalty Representation: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Today’s ScotusBlog reports on a series of orders denying certiorary to the Supreme Court. The very last one on the list is Redd v. Chappell. The case raises a question that may, at first blush, seem technical: should capital punishment appellants be represented on appeal? Can the appellate courts deny hearing appeals from pro se (unrepresented) appellants?
A little bit of background: As Gerald Uelmen explains in this excellent and informative piece, while California presumably offers representation for capital punishment post-conviction proceedings (See Cal. Govt. Code Ann. §68662), the realities of this arrangement are pretty messy. In 1976, the California legislature created the State Public Defender‘s Office to handle all indigent criminal appeals. In the early 1990s, the governor asked the office to restrict itself to capital cases. Subsequent changes in budget and personnel contributed to the growing backlog of death penalty appointments, as did the special requirements to be counsel in cases of capital punishment: the unique expertise and level of experience required are hard to meet, which means the pool of qualified attorneys is limited. In 2009, when Uelmen wrote his piece, there was a delay of three to five years before a death row inmate had counsel appointed to handle his or her direct appeal. The wait for habeas counsel appointment was eight to ten years after imposition of sentence, and while continuity would be a good thing, it is very rare that attorneys accept representation for both the appellate and habeas process. The latter problem was only partially solved in 1998 with the creation of the Habeas Corpus Resource Center (HCRC), which represents approximately 70 clients in state habeas proceedings. And we haven’t even started talking about federal habeas.
Which brings us back to Redd v. Chappell. Redd was sentenced to death 17 years ago, and his conviction was affirmed on direct appeal more than four years ago. Now, he wanted to pursue habeas remedies, but up until now has not been appointed counsel. But ironically, the California Supreme Court refuses to consider capital inmates’ pro se submissions relating to matters for which they have a continuing right to representation–even if they don’t actually have representation! Presumably, despite having a right to counsel–which is NOT being honored by the state–in order to be taken seriously, and given the grim realities of the state’s failure to meet its obligation, Redd has to waive his right!
The result from the Supreme Court was very unsatisfying, but Justice Sotomayor at least added some explanation as to why she joined the denial of cert: she writes that–
it is not clear that petitioner has been denied all access to the courts. In fact, a number of alternative avenues may remain open to him. He may, for example, seek appointment of counsel for his federal habeas proceedings. See 18 U. S. C. §3599(a)(2). And he may argue that he should not be required to exhaust any claims that he might otherwise bring in state habeas proceedings, as “circumstances exist that render [the state corrective] process ineffective to protect” his rights. 28 U. S. C. §2254(b)(1)(B)(ii). Moreover, petitioner might seek to bring a 42 U. S. C. §1983 suit contending that the State’s failure to provide him with the counsel to which he is entitled violates the Due Process Clause. Our denial of certiorari reflects in no way on the merits of these possible arguments.
My question is, of course, how is Redd supposed to know about all these options if he doesn’t have counsel to inform him that they exist?
As a coda to this: Some of you may remember that, two weeks before the vote on Prop 34, the Chronicle ran a story about how death penalty inmates themselves opposed the proposition, because it would deny them the free counsel they get. And several opponents of the proposition got behind that; arguably, that was the political capital that helped defeat the proposition. But the truth is that death penalty inmates don’t really get specialized counsel, and many of their petitions lag behind and go unheard for years for that very reason. If the death penalty were to be abolished tomorrow, and all these folks were to do life without parole with the general population, they could be represented by basically any attorney, which would increase the availability and quality of representation, and we would all save money and time.
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Many thanks to Simon Grivet for drawing my attention to this case.
BREAKING NEWS: Appeal in Jones v. Chappell
I have disappointing news to share: the Attorney General has decided to appeal in Jones v. Chappell.
I am not surprised, but I am very disappointed, just as all of you must be. Whoever has taken part in reaching this decision is not supporting the law or defendants’ rights; they are supporting wasteful, unconscionable expenditures of $130 million annually on a lengthy incarceration in a dilapidated facility, complete with decades of state-funded post-conviction litigation. This is a very sad day for any reasonable, conscious Californian.
The next frontier will be in the Ninth Circuit, where odds that we will prevail are not very good, but not non-existent. Please follow up on our coverage of this issue,and do not be discouraged: we will fight on, in litigation and through legislative and political means, and we will see nationwide abolition in our time.
Jones v. Chappell and the Road to Abolition
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| Today’s Daily Journal story about our petition. Please click to enlarge. |
On July 16, US District Court Judge Cormac Carney issued a decision in Jones v. Chappell (2014), vacating Ernest Dewayne Jones’ death sentence. But this was far from a decision in a particular case: Judge Carney declared the death penalty in California unconstitutional, citing the lengthy delays in its administration.
As the decision notes, since the reinstatement of the death penalty in California in 1978, only 13 people have been executed. Meanwhile, 95 inmates have died of natural causes or suicide, 39 were granted relief from their sentence, and the remaining 748 are languishing on Death Row, some of them for decades. More than 40% of the condemned population has been on death row for more than 19 years, and nearly all of them are still engaged in expensive, lengthy litigation—direct and collateral review proceedings—funded by the state. The arbitrariness in the administration of executions, according to Judge Carney, echoes the historical concerns in Furman v. Georgia (1972), and undermines any deterrence arguments, to the extent that these are still credible.
But while Judge Carney believes that these delays have made the promise of capital punishment an empty one to California citizens, to jurors, to victims and their loved ones, he does not believe that these defects can be remedied simply by streamlining the death penalty and executing inmates faster. He convincingly argues that much of the delay in litigation is the state’s fault, but points out that all efforts to reform post-conviction remedies have failed, and that cutting them would increase the grave risk of mistakes and wrongful executions. While the order pertains only to Mr. Jones, generalizing Judge Carney’s conclusions to all those affected by a system that “serves no penological service” is unavoidable.
The unavoidable question is, what next? The ball is currently in Governor Brown and Attorney General Harris’ court. They must decide whether the state will appeal the decision to the Ninth Circuit. A day after Judge Carney’s decision, I started a petition on Change.Org, asking Attorney General Harris not to appeal the decision, which, as I write these words, bears 2,078 signatures. The Governor and the Attorney General are not known to be fans of capital punishment, and I believe that a refusal on their part to stand behind the death penalty can communicate an important symbolic message that has the potential to place us on the much-awaited path to abolition. It would signal that our state government is fiscally responsible, and unwilling to continue wasting $100 million annually (according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office calculations) on the incarceration of a few people in a dilapidated facility, paying for expensive conditions and litigation, with or without an execution at the end. It would signal an acknowledgment that consistency and fairness are important tenets of our penal policy. It would signal that the botched execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood in Arizona—and the botched executions of many others, estimated as 3% of executions every year—indicate that there is no way to divorce the infliction of death from the infliction of suffering, even behind a sanitized, medicalized window-dressing. It would signal that, like Justice Blackmun in 1980s, we have tired from “tinkering with the machinery of death” and have finally acknowledged its profound dysfunction. And it would signal that these new considerations join the old abolitionist arguments, based on ethics, racial equality, and innocence concerns—in ushering in an era of abolition.
But beyond the symbolic message, there are the practical consequences associated with the State’s decision whether to appeal. Should the Attorney General appeal the decision, the Ninth Circuit might affirm it, in which case it will apply to the entire State of California, rendering the death penalty effectively abolished. However, the current Supreme Court makeup does not seem promising to the abolitionist cause, and an appeal of the Ninth Circuit decision will, in all likelihood, reverse Judge Carney’s decision. A possible appeal of such a decision to the Supreme Court will, likely, reverse the decision. The best scenario, therefore, for abolition would be a final, affirming decision on the Circuit level, without a subsequent appeal—but that scenario depends on a favorable Ninth Circuit panel and the Attorney General’s restraint in appealing that decision.
If, on the other hand, the Attorney General decides not to appeal the decision, we will find ourselves in an interesting situation. As many California residents recall, the Governor and Attorney General did not appeal Judge Vaughn Walker’s District Court decision, according to which Proposition 8, which amended the California constitution to forbid same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional. Supporters of the initiative, who appealed the decision in their stead, were found by the Supreme Court to lack standing, and Judge Walker was left as the final decision on Proposition 8’s constitutionality. Lest our short memory confound us, California’s death penalty is also the product of a voter initiative: Proposition 7, the Death Penalty Act, of 1978. Moreover, some of the original supporters of Proposition 7 have now joined the abolitionist cause, so even if they had standing, they would probably lack the motivation to fight the decision.
There is, however, an important legal difference: Judge Walker’s order was an injuctive relief against the state. Judge Carney’s decision merely vacates Mr. Jones’ death sentence. In the absence of an appeal to the Ninth Circuit, further legal and political steps would be required to move from a particular case to a de-facto abolition of the death penalty in California.
The easiest situation would be that of inmates under sentence of death who have a pending federal habeas claim in the Central District, who could argue their case should be heard by Judge Carney, as a “related case”. The decision would be up to Judge Carney’s discretion, though it seems clear from the tenor of his decision that he meant for it to have an impact beyond Jones’ case alone. Also, the decision raises the question whether other Central District judges can ignore it in similar cases if Judge Carney does not, for some reason, find that they are “related”.
Inmates outside the jurisdiction of the Central District would face more of an uphill battle. Judge Carney’s decision, while of persuasive value, is not binding in other district, nor could they benefit from an “issue preclusion” claim, as they were not original parties to the action. This is where the good will of the Attorney General’s office and the other District Courts would come into play; surely we wouldn’t want to see the death penalty effectively ended in one California district and have other inmates on death row. Another possible scenario would be that, in order to correct the grave injustice of having some inmates benefit from a general decision while others don’t, the Governor could commute the sentences of all death row inmates to life without parole, and with the support of the California Attorney General, we could enter another period of moratorium.
The possible legal outcomes of Jones, therefore, run the gamut from one inmate’s victory to a de-facto moratorium in California. The eventual impact of the decision depends on the sound discretion and good will of many actors in the legal and political arena in the state. Last, but not least, of these actors is the public. In 1978, 71% of California voters supported the death penalty amendments. After many years of delays, mistakes, discrimination, litigation over chemicals, and expenses, support for the death penalty plummeted to 53% in 2012. Whether the courts and administration will bravely turn the tables before the public tide is completely reversed remains to be seen, but a comparative perspective shows that the road toward abolition—toward progress—is a one-way street. Let’s get this done.
Book Review: Mass Incarceration on Trial by Jonathan Simon
Hidden from sight and forgotten from mind, American prisons in the last forty years have been horrific Petri dishes for medical neglect, interpersonal cruelty, and unspeakable conditions. California, which incarcerates the largest number of inmates (albeit not the largest per-capita), has been particularly notable for its abysmal incarceration practices, so much that, when commenting about his first impression of supermax institutions, Judge Thelton Henderson said to criminologist Keramet Reiter, “what was surprising to me was the inhumanity of the thing.” Jonathan Simon’s new book offers the general public a sobering look into California prisons through the prism of federal court decisions, which encourages humanism and empathy and does not allow the reader to look away.
Indeed, Simon’s book itself can be seen as an important contributor to a “dignity cascade”. Written in an engaging, accessible style, and providing the personal stories of plaintiffs in prison condition cases, Simon humanizes the individuals involves and evokes empathy and care for their preventable, horrible plight, while still making the bigger point that the violations are a systematic problem rather than isolated occurrences. While the book does not clarify the extent to which Simon attributes intent, or design, to the correctional officials, it certainly drives home the point that cruelty is the rule, rather than the exception, and the need to change that through a deeper commitment to treating humans with dignity and respect regardless of their transgressions.
There are a few places, however, in which Simon and I part ways. One of them is in his historical account of the path to total incapacitation, which paints the rehabilitative period in California corrections in what I think are overly rosy hues—especially when he ties the medical approach to incarceration to the eugenics movement. I also think that Simon gives the court decisions, which are undoubtedly important, too much significance in the overall scheme of California corrections. I wish I could be persuaded that these few decisions, the most recent of which and the focal point of the book was decided 5:4, were powerful enough to create a veritable “dignity cascade”. The book cites extensively dignity-promoting language from Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Plata, but does not include the parts in Justice Scalia’s dissent in which he referred to the inmates as “specimens”—a shameful opinion that I find hard to ignore with four Supreme Court Justices behind it. Even federal judges who are hailed as champions of inmate rights don’t always make decisions that promote dignity; in the fall of 2013, Judge Henderson (of Madrid v. Gomez fame) cleared the path to force-feeding inmates in solitary confinement who were protesting against indefinite segregation. Moreover, attributing the change in California—namely, the Criminal Justice Realignment—solely to the decision in Plata ignores the lengthy political machinations behind the Criminal Justice Realignment, which were driven by budgetary concerns and by other pressures as well as by the court’s decision. This is particularly problematic given the state’s acrobatic wiggling out of responsibility and its inability, and unwillingness, to follow up on the decision, almost to the point of contempt of court. While the language of the opinions themselves is important and meaningful, I wish we were offered more political and legal backstage access to the litigation, as well as more credit to the grassroots activism of inmates themselves, included but not limited to the hunger strike.
While I am less optimistic than Simon about a veritable transformation of public opinion about the mass incarceration project through federal court decisions, I find his call for dignity and for acknowledgment of the vast human rights violations incredibly inspiring, and like him, and anyone invested in the promotion of human dignity, I hope to see the spirit of John Howard’s progressive prison reform, and of the 1960s Warren Court decisions, channeled into this new era of prison litigation. After reading Mass Incarceration on Trial, no one can remain in a state of denial or indifference to the plight of fellow human beings, and this book is an important contribution not only to their dignity, but also to our own.
Death Penalty Update
In the last few days, we’ve made a huge effort to circulate a petition to Governor Brown and Attorney General Harris, asking them not to appeal District Court Judge Carney’s decision that the death penalty in California is unconstitutional. We’ve just hit 500 signatures, and I’ve sent the petition to the Governor and the AG. Thank you for your support, signing, and sharing!
What happens next?
Our elected officials decide whether they want to pursue an appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
What if California appeals the decision?
Then, we’ll have to take our chances with the Ninth Circuit. The hope is that we’ll draw a favorable panel, who will affirm Judge Carney’s decision. It’s possible, albeit not very probable. Regardless of the result, a further appeal to the Supreme Court is unlikely to yield a good result for abolitionists.
The best of all worlds would be a decision from the Ninth Circuit affirming the death penalty’s unconstitutionality, and THEN a commitment from the Attorney General that she would not appeal the decision. If that is the case, the decision will apply to all of CA, and would basically mean that the death penalty has been abolished. But for that to happen we have to be lucky twice: the Ninth Circuit has to go our way and the AG has to decide not to appeal that decision. That’s quite a gamble.
What if our elected officials hear our plea and do not appeal the decision?
In that case, we’re left with a great, favorable decision, but by a District Court, which means it doesn’t create immediate effect in all of California. But we also gain an important political advantage: we have a great decision, that became final, AND the political gravitas of the AG’s support for the result. That, then, allows us to consider political pressure on the Governor’s office to commute current capital sentences, which do not conform to constitutional standards, as well as a valuable weapon against various proposals to “fix” the death penalty.
What are the odds that there will be an appeal?
Hard to tell. As you may recall, last time the State did not defend its laws in federal court was in the context of Prop 8, and the initiators of the proposition were ruled by the Supreme Court not to have standing. What this means is that if the AG does not want to defend CA’s death penalty, no one else can do so in her stead.
There is, however, a difference: Prop 8 was a voter initiative, and so the AG could more easily disengage from it by not appealing. Even though the AG is, personally, an opponent of the death penalty, she may think that solid administrative principles require seeing this thing to its end. And maybe she, too, is hoping that if she appeals the decision, the Ninth Circuit will rise to the occasion and decide the case for abolition.
In other words, your guess is as good as mine.
What can we do now?
Keep talking about this with friends of all political persuasions. Talk about the botched execution in Arizona; talk about the immense toll that incarcerating these folks and tending to their litigation effort is taking on the CA budget (to the tune of $150 million annually.) Talk about how we can see abolition in our lifetime, if we run with this ruling and make the most of this opportunity to drag our penal system to the 21st century.
BREAKING NEWS!!! Federal judge declares California death penalty unconstitutional
Astounding news: half an hour ago, US district court judge Cormac J. Carney issued a decision in Jones vs. Chappell declaring the death penalty in California unconstitutional.
The full text of the decision can be found here.
Judge Carney’s decision rests primarily on administrative grounds, namely, on the delay and uncertainty on California’s death row. Judge Carney points out that, since the reinstatement of the death penalty in California in 1978, only 13 people have been executed. Meanwhile, scores of inmates have died of suicide or natural causes, and 748 inmates are still on death row, litigating their case in pursuit of post-conviction remedies. These delays, writes Judge Carney, short-change the meaning of the death penalty and break its promise to the victims’ families, the citizens and tax payers of California, and the inmates themselves, who spend years, and frequently decades, in a state of uncertainty. Under these circumstances, California’s death penalty is no more than life without parole, with or without an execution at the end.
A cynical perspective on the decision would be that all the state needs to do is to streamline the death penalty and execute death row inmates faster. Indeed, that is what the California District Attorney’s Association has advocated recently. However, Judge Carney spends a considerable amount of time discussing the existing appeals and habeas corpus proceedings, and finds them constitutionally adequate. He comes to the conclusion that the only solution to California’s death penalty’s unconstitutionality is to abolish capital punishment in California altogether.
The big question is what happens next. Presumably, the warden is represented by the California Attorney General. However, Kamala Harris is personally opposed to the death penalty, and never sought it while she was the San Francisco County District Attorney. If the state does not appeal this decision, it has huge consequences not only in California, but nation wide. California’s death row is the largest in the nation. State-wide abolition, judicial or legislative, creates a critical mass of abolitionist states and might mean the end of capital punishment in America. But even if the state appeals to the Ninth Circuit, the decision is a prime example of the anti-punitive thinking that has become the mark of recession-era politics. Note that the decision does not go into death row conditions, humane execution methods, or any other dignity-based argument. Even though money is not explicitly mentioned, this is classic humonetarionism. Judge Carney is not arguing that the death penalty is inhumane; he is arguing that it is badly managed. As I point out in Cheap on Crime, these types of arguments have become far more persuasive in policy making and frequently succeed where classic human rights reasoning failed. It is of enormous importance that this logic has permeated not only the policy making arena, but judicial reasoning as well.
More updates in the next few days.
The Supreme Court: No Cell-Phone Search Without Warrant
This morning, the Supreme Court ruled in Riley v. CA and U.S. v. Wurie, 9:0, that searching a cellular phone requires a warrant.
Chief Justice Robert’s Op. Ct. analyzed phone searches in the context of the Search Incident to Arrest exception to the warrant requirement, comparing a phone search to a search inside a pack of cigarettes in Robinson. Robinson, you’ll recall, extended the Chimel doctrine to all containers within the “grabbing area” of the suspect. But given the newness of the technology, which the framers (duh) could not anticipate, the court thankfully is unable to find “guidance from the founding era” and turns to reason and pragmatics.
The state presented essentially two rationales for warrantless searches of cellphones: harm to the officer and destruction of evidence. The opinion summarily dismisses the former: contrary to the cigarette pack in Robinson, there could be no argument of a physical weapon hidden in the phone (the police knew what they were looking for: data), and if there were any concerns of alerting someone to the presence of officers using the phone, those could be addressed via other exceptions to the warrant requirement, such as exigent circumstances, in specific cases. As to the second rationale, with the phone itself physically in the hands of the police, the main concerns regarding destruction would involve encrypting and remote wiping, none of which seems to the Court to be an empirically-supported practical concern (maybe it will be, from now on?). Also, the practicalities of securing the scene, bringing the suspect into custody, etc., mean that the police won’t turn its attention to the phone right away anyway, and therefore the warrant requirement is not onerous or time-consuming for the investigation as a whole.
The decision then explains its particular sensitivity to the issue of phones because of the heightened privacy interests involved. Cellphones differ from physical objects in their immense storage capacity, which means that one carries on one’s person intimate, sensitive data from various sources: locations, conversations, history of internet searches, purchases, dating and romantic life. These merit particular scrutiny on the part of the Court and limitations on police power.
The court also rejects other analogies made by the state: to cars, to pen registers, to pre-digital phones. The rationales for the rejection are all about preferring a bright-line rule and concerns abou spillover of information that was not available before the era of smartphones.
(Justice Alito, concurring in judgment, disagrees that danger to the officer and risk of evidence destructions were the rationales behind Chimel, points to some anomalies created by the decision, but does not see a workable alternative.)
Three notable things:
(1) The decision is refreshing in its willingness to engage with technology and fully comprehend its implications. It is not driven by technophobia (like, say, Kyllo), but by the experience of people who use phones daily.
(2) Not unrelated: Like Jones, this is one more decision that protects the lifestyles and technologies of the middle class. As opposed to, say, searches of homes with no curtilage, or stops and frisks in the street, both of which fall under the “poverty exception”, the privacy intrusions in Jones and Riley are both such that the Justices might be able to imagine themselves subjected to them.
(3) Note that in the era of smartphones, police officers have phones, too. And they can use them to call a courthouse and get a warrant. So, this decision might not stave off privacy intrusions for very long. The extent to which the cellphone warrant requirement is not merely a formality depends on the extent to which judges will exercise discretion in issuing warrants, which we know, empirically, to be fairly limited.
What do you think about the decision?
Solitary Confinement Lawsuit Attains Class Action Status
The struggle against long-term solitary confinement in California continues! Months ago, we reported about the certification hearing for Ashker v. Brown, a lawsuit against solitary confinement.
The most recent news are from June 2: U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken granted the lawsuit class action status. The L.A. Times reports:
“We pose a fundamental question: Is it constitutional to hold someone in solitary confinement for over a decade,” said Alexis Agathocleous, staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.
The class action motion was filed by 10 Pelican Bay inmates in solitary confinement, but California has since moved five of them to other quarters. Wilken’s order allows the remaining five prisoners to represent the larger class of some 500 Pelican Bay prisoners who have spent more than a decade in isolation, and some 1,100 put into solitary because of alleged gang associations.
Many of the inmates named in the suit also were organizers of a lengthy statewide prison hunger strike last summer.
Wilken refused to allow the state prison guard union to intervene in the lawsuit. The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. had argued that it had an interest in protecting the safety of its members by preventing prisoners from leaving solitary confinement.
We will keep following up on the lawsuit and reporting on its progress.
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cross-posted with some changes at Prawfs Blawg.
Judge Karlton Declares Prop 9 Unconstitutional
I am thrilled to report another important legal development: Judge Karlton of the Northern District has declared Prop 9, otherwise known as Marsy’s Law or the Victim Bill of Rights, unconstitutional. He has also struck down Prop 89, adopted in 1988.
This is very good news for the CCC blog, as we fiercely advocated against Prop 9 and were truly dismayed at its passage. We pointed out how pointless it was to advance the rights of victims by denying parole to offenders, showcased research proving that the proposition did nothing to actually increase victim rights, and followed up litigation against the law from its inception through oral arguments and the partial dismantlement of some provisions of the law.
We said it in 2009 and we’ll say it again: Propositions that purport to advance victim causes and avenge the cruelties done to them through committing more cruelties do not address the needs of all victims and certainly not of the victim population as a whole. The best thing we can do for victims is to make sure they cease being victims as quickly as possible by empowering them and putting in place social structures that offer chances for rehabilitation and transformation for perpetrators. Any wholesale effort to curtail the ability to offer people a window of hope at the end of a long sentence does no favors to victims, and is unnecessarily cruel and wasteful.