West
Controversial bill that would have freed convicted felons serving life sentences stalls in legislature
A controversial California bill that would have freed some convicted felons serving life sentences has stalled in the legislature and will not be moving forward.
SB 94, authored by California Sen. Dave Cortese, would have given certain people serving life without parole the chance to petition to have their sentences reviewed if their crimes were committed before June 5, 1990.
Advocates for the measure said it was much needed to clear the state’s overcrowded prisons.
The Los Angeles Times editorial board, for instance, wrote in SB 94’s favor, arguing that “most eligible offenders are now in their 60s and 70s, well beyond the prime age for violent crime.”
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A view of the California state capitol building on National Urban League California Legislative Advocacy Day on March 13, 2024, in Sacramento, California. (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for National Urban League)
The board also argued that SB 94 did not aim to release prisoners unconditionally, but created “a multistep process that would let them make their cases for resentencing.” It also noted that “serial killers, cop killers and sex offenders would not be eligible.”
Anne Irvine, Founder and Executive Director of Smart Justice California, called SB 94 “sound policy that advances our shared goals of public safety and rehabilitation.”
Cortese introduced SB 94 last legislative session, but the measure stalled to allow time for more negotiations and amendments, such as narrowing the scope of eligible individuals and changing the number of petition attempts allowed from three to one per individual.
Cortese, who did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment by deadline, said in a statement that amendments were drafted that “included language requested by several law enforcement agencies, excluded torture as a ‘special circumstance,’ codified full protection of victims’ rights.”
FILE- A California prison. A controversial California bill that would have freed some convicted felons serving life sentences has stalled. (BOP)
SB 94 missed a deadline this week to include the new amendments, and Cortese admitted Thursday that the measure does not have the votes to pass.
“The California model of rehabilitation often works, but we must do better. We must continue the conversation and revisit racist, inconsistent and harmful sentencing that has disproportionately impacted Californians for over twenty years, and will continue to wreak havoc until fixed,” Cortese said.
Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, hailed SB 94’s failure to pass this legislative session as a victory.
Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, R-San Diego, called SB 94 “radical” and a “direct assault on the rights of California families who have suffered the unimaginable loss of a loved one at the hands of violent criminals.”
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“Together, we’ve ensured that when violent murderers brutally take a life, they lose their right to freedom—forever,” Jones said in a statement. “Their punishment is in the name: life without parole. While I’m relieved that this dangerous legislation is finally dead for the year, we’re ready to continue the fight if it comes back. Californians will not stand for letting heinous murderers roam our streets.”
Sen. Kelly Seyarto, R-Murrieta, said the outcome of SB 94 “would’ve been disastrous for public safety and victim’s rights.”
Sacramento, CA – March 20: California Assemblymember Bill Essayli along with fellow lawmakers honor women in California making an impact during Womens History Month on Monday, March 20, 2023, in Sacramento, CA. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“We know that when voters come together and demand to be heard, even the supermajority has to take it seriously and listen to the will of the people,” Seyarto said. “That is what we saw happen today, a victory of the people over dangerous proposed policies.”
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Republican Assemblyman Bill Essayli of Corona assailed SB 94 as a slap in the face to the victims’ families who must relive the horror of the crimes during parole hearings.
“It’s so mean spirited and it’s just so cruel to these families to open up these wounds. They need some peace and some finality. And that’s what’s so destructive about this,” Essayli said.
Essayli argued that SB 94 was “just the beginning” of Democratic lawmakers’ wider ambitions for prison reform.
“If they get this bill through next year, they’re going to say, ‘okay, well, the new point in time is now 1995, then 2000.’ It’s this incrementalism that they love to do here in the legislature,” Essayli said, adding: “It took them a few years to get where they wanted to go. But we all know what the destination is.”
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WASHINGTON (Gray DC) – For most kids, a birthday means cake, gifts and a reason to celebrate.
For more than a million children experiencing homelessness in America, it often means none of that.
Nonprofits across the country are throwing personalized parties for children in homeless shelters to make sure they feel special on their big day.
The Good Side’s National Correspondent Debra Alfarone takes us to a birthday party for Yalina.
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Mobile home residents in Bozeman, Montana, say they’re being forced to choose between paying rent and paying medical costs.Courtesy of Jered McCafferty
35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.
On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer.
Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord.
Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. By unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing.
For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said.
Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions.
“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”
For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move.
The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.
This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.
Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”
Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.”
Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.
Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.
Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.
“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”
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