Crime in California
In yesterday’s Pasadena Star-News,columnist Thomas Elias puts the lie to Jerry Keenan’s underhanded campaign to spring his son from prison with a “reformed” (diluted) three strikes initiative. It’s good to see that some of the print media are finally wising up to what the blogosphere has known for some time (in fairness, the Dog Trainer also reported that fact at the time). But the Star-News is a minor regional paper, and Elias is just one columnist. Judging by the most recent opinion survey, the good guys still have their work cut out for them.
As I previously blogged when the opinion survey came out, we need the big guns, all the way up to the Governor and the Attorney General, to educate the public about this trojan horse of an initiative. It may also help to blunt criticism the Governator has received of late from crime victims’ families who think he’s soft on crime because he actually follows the parole law rather than casually ignoring it, as his predecessor did.
UPDATE: Patterico notes in a comment that the article contains a factual error. Jerry Keenan’s son is not a three striker, but a one-striker who also serves an increased sentence as a result of the three strikes law. This does not diminish Mr. Elias’s point, however. If anything, it strengthens it further; the specific clause that would make the junior Keenan’s strike a non-strike was added to the initiative by Jerry Keenan’s lawyer for that very purpose. I think a new Google Bomb is in order, to be dropped on the backers of the Trojan Horse Initiative.
June 19th, 2004 at 4:33 pm
Careful of one thing in the article, however: the suggestion that the son had previous strikes. I e-mailed the columnist about this and he says it’s not accurate. He sent a correction to his client newspapers and the Pasadena paper apparently ignored it.
June 19th, 2004 at 6:20 pm
Schwarzenegger is to be roundly condemned for springing murderers to predate again upon the general public. A lot of lives will be broken beyond repair or snuffed out completely by the cutthroats that he has released and will release. His deluded mantra “They can be reformed,” shows incredible, unpardonable ignorance, and will get a lot of innocent Californians killed. Thanks a lot, Heir Governor.
Why the hell do we need to scrap the Three Strikes Law anyway? We already have the Pardonator in Sacramento letting record numbers of homicidal terminators back out in society to kill, and kill again.
Where’s Angry Clam when we need him? Arnold’s pissing me off; I need someone to share my rage with.
June 19th, 2004 at 9:57 pm
“Pardonator,” eh? Very clever. It would be cleverer still if Arnold had actually pardoned anybody, which AFAIK he hasn’t.
As to parole, can you name a single instance in which Gov. Schwarzenegger has paroled anyone against the recommendation of the Parole Board? Lest anyone get the impression that the board hands these recommendations out like candy, I refer you to the last paragraph of the linked story:
I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which is worse: a governor who releases up to 150 inmates a year under close scrutiny by the Parole Board first and their parole officers later, or a ballot initiative that would immediately turn 26,202 career criminals loose with no supervision whatsoever.