In summary
The state budget makes clear that Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators favor the left in conflict over how criminal cases should be handled.
California’s new budget makes it clear that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature’s dominant Democrats are favoring a cadre of local district attorneys who favor leniency and rehabilitation for lawbreakers in their political duel with traditional, punishment-oriented prosecutors.
The battle is being fought on several fronts, most prominently in a looming clash between newly appointed Attorney General Rob Bonta, an outspoken advocate of what’s called the “criminal justice reform,” and Anne Marie Schubert, the high-profile district attorney of Sacramento.
CALmatters Commentary: California budget favors left side in crime culture war dailyrepublic.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailyrepublic.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
George Floyd’s murder sparked a renewed national conversation around police reform, but progress in the year since his death has been stop-and-go. Reform at the federal level has languished in the Senate, while progress has been mixed in the states with some progressive efforts succeeding and others succumbingtoobstinatelegislatures or excessive compromise.
Stalled or failed efforts at reform are nothing new to the criminal justice community. It took Congress more than 24 years to finally address the indefensible 100-to-1 sentencing ratio for crack versus powder cocaine; then the number was only changed to a still onerous 18-to-1 ratio. It took eight more years for Congress to make that change retroactive. And repeated, bipartisan efforts to actually reduce those mandatory minimum sentences have gone nowhere.
Senate passes four major bills cosponsored by SF DA Chesa Boudin sfbayview.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sfbayview.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
SACRAMENTO
A month after taking over as California attorney general, Rob Bonta has put the Department of Justice on a hard pivot, launching a series of initiatives to refocus the agency on problems inside the state after it spent four years fighting the Trump administration on national issues.
In the last few weeks, Bonta has announced the creation of a Racial Justice Bureau to combat hate crimes and biased policing, financial help to local law enforcement agencies struggling with a backlog of untested rape evidence kits and expanded the Bureau of Environmental Justice to better target polluters.
Bonta has also taken action to make the department more transparent, reversing a prior policy that had withheld some records on police officer misconduct, and he set aside a Justice Department proposal to withhold gun enforcement data from researchers. The new attorney general also says he is working on the creation of a new unit to investigate fatal police shootings of unarmed civili