Month: November 2014

Officer Steve Gilkerson of Woodville, Ohio, a K-9
cop for a year and a half, shot a chocolate Labrador that
approached him during a traffic stop, wounding it. Gilkerson
claimed he shot the dog out of fear for his safety and the safety
of the people he pulled over. The dog, Moses, belonged to the local
business outside of which Gilkerson made the traffic stop. The
dog’s owner says Moses usually greets customers who pull up right
where the cop did. No one has shot at Moses before.

Police in Woodville say they’ve cleared Gilkerson of wrongdoing
via a “review panel,” but no witnesses to the shooting, including
the two adults in the stopped car, were interviewed yet, and an
investigation apparently remains open.

A two-year-old girl was in the car when the cop shot Moses.
Although the driver consented to a search after she was stopped,
Gilkerson changed his mind about the search after he shot the dog.
The Toledo Blade
spoke to Cook:

“He told us to leave,” she said, saying they stayed awhile
because she was too emotional to drive.

Her daughter also witnessed the event, and was talking about the
dog being shot, bleeding, and needing to see a doctor.

“She talked about it all day [Monday],” Ms. Cook said. “I just
don’t want her to be traumatized. She loves animals. She was white
and was breathing heavy, like she was scared and didn’t know what
to do.”

Police insist Gilkerson loved animals too, although according to
The Blade during a K9 presentation last year he told an
audience he’s been afraid of dogs he doesn’t know his entire
life.

h/t Grant Cummings

Last night voters in California approved
Proposition 47, an initiative that effectively changes the
status of a number of low-level, nonviolent drug and property
offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.

The initiative changes the possession of most drugs, including
cocaine and heroin, from a felony offense to a misdemeanor.
Possession of certain, less common Schedule I and II substances
(including LSD for some reason) will remain a felony offense.
Certain property offenses such as shoplifting, grand theft,
receiving stolen property, forgery, fraud, and writing a bad check
will all be considered misdemeanor offenses, as long as these
crimes involve $950 or less.

The initiative also allows offenders currently serving felony
sentences for these offenses, including some inmates sentenced
under the state’s draconian Three Strikes law, to petition a court
for resentencing. 

For offenders who have previously been convicted of one or more
certain serious or violent offenses, however, current convictions
of these crimes would remain felonies punishable by 16 months, two,
or three years in a county jail.

California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) estimates
California will save “several hundred million dollars annually,
primarily from freeing jail capacity” at the county level.

LAO also estimates the initiative could result in the release of
“several thousand inmates” from state prisons, which could
temporarily reduce the state prison population “for a few
years.” 

The initiative
stipulates that the 65 percent of the savings achieved be used
to support “mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, and
diversion programs for people in the criminal justice system, with
an emphasis on programs that reduce recidivism of people convicted
of less serious crimes,” 25 percent of the savings be used on a
program to reduce truancy and support students who are “at risk of
dropping out of school or are victims of crime,” and 10 percent be
used to support trauma recovery centers and to provide services to
victims of crime. 

Some may say this ballot initiative was necessary to overcome
the state government’s lack of political will to pursue any type of
meaningful sentencing reform to help reduce it’s unconstitutionally
overcrowded prisons. Indeed, Governor Brown
vetoed legislation just last year that would have given
prosecutors the choice of charging low-level drug possession as a
felony or a misdemeanor, depending on the case.

Yet an overwhelming number of voters—58
percent—cast their ballot for Proposition 47 yesterday, a
measure that’s arguably much more “radical” than the sentencing
reform bill vetoed by Brown last year.

The success of the measure can be attributed, in large part, to
the amount of outside support it received.

All in all, the measure received roughly
$10.8 million in financial support from groups and individuals
of all political and ideological backgrounds, including
conservative billionaire B. Wayne Hughes, Jr. and Netflix CEO Reed
Hastings. Opponents of the measure managed to raise only $500,000.
Notably, B. Wayne Hughes, Jr. and former drug warrior turned
reformer Newt Gingrich co-authored an op-ed published in the
Los Angeles Times touting the benefits of the measure’s
proposed reforms.

Proposition 47 also drew the support of a number
of A-list celebrities such as Jay Z, Olivia Wilde, Brad Pitt,
Cameron Diaz, John Legend, and others who were featured on the
website, artistsfor47.com.
For a criminal justice reform initiative, this type of support is
truly unprecedented.  

It’s hard to believe that this measure passed in the same state
in which voters once enacted the
nation’s most draconian Three Strikes law just 20 years ago,
which required offenders convicted of any third felony
offense, including minor drug possession offenses, to be sentenced
to life in prison.

The success of this measure indicates that sentencing reform is
starting to become palatable to more than just libertarians, but
the general public. Criminal justice reform is certainly an issue
both
Democrats and
Republicans agree is going to play a central role in the 2016
presidential election. Let’s hope that what happened in California
last night may be replicated elsewhere, either by legislators or
voters themselves.

As noted on
Reason 24/7, Christmas came early for the House Oversight and
Government Reform panel. On the eve of the midterm elections, the
Justice Department (DOJ) finally sent Congress
over 64,000 pages of documents related to the “Fast and
Furious” gunrunning scandal. How about that timing?

While the DOJ had originally
released some 7,600 pages, congressional investigators have
unsuccessfully been seeking access to all the documents for years.
In 2012, President Barack Obama
invoked his executive privilege to keep these documents
classified. The House of Representatives then held U.S. Attorney
General Eric Holder
in contempt for refusing to hand them over.

But despite the Obama administration’s
best efforts, this August a judge rejected Obama’s claims and

ordered the DOJ to release the documents.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa
(R-Calif.)
said that he would continue to seek more documents related to
the scandal:

Since these pages still do not represent the entire universe of
the documents the House of Representatives is seeking related to
the Justice Department’s cover-up of the botched gun-walking
scandal that contributed to the death of a Border Patrol agent, our
court case will continue.

Issa also expressed concern that the DOJ had been too liberal in
redacting some of the documents. Nonetheless, he called the release
a “victory for the legislative branch.”

The scandal broke back in 2010, when two guns sold to Mexican
drug traffickers under the Fast and Furious program were found at
the scene of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s death. The
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) had been
“gunwalking” during operations in Arizona from 2006 to 2011,
allowing guns be sold to known drug traffickers in a foolhardy bid
to trace the weapons to high-ranking cartel members.

The ATF ultimately lost track of thousands of guns, hundreds of
which
later turned up at crime scenes, including bloody
massacres. Mexican officials
claim that hundreds of people have died at the hands of
weapons knowingly sold to drug cartel members. Holder himself
stated in 2011 that the effects of Fast and Furious could
linger for quite some time. After all, guns put in the hands of
violent Mexican drug traffickers don’t just disappear
overnight.

Obama
claimed that neither he nor Holder approved the operation.
Holder also stated that he hadn’t heard of it until a few weeks
before the scandal, but memos leaked in 2011
contradict this claim. A DOJ Inspector
General report released in 2012 exonerated Holder from blame,
however—pinning the colossal screwup on rogue agents.
Yeah, right.

Some of the documents declassified on Monday
offer tepid evidence that perhaps Holder didn’t know the full
details of Fast and Furious after all. In response to the leaked
memos discussing the operation, he reportedly stated, “I didn’t
read them. I rarely do.”

But even if Holder doesn’t suffer from acute mendacity, his
appeals to ignorance aren’t doing him any favors. If anything, they
just prove that he is
as oblivious as he is incompetent.

This scandal, four years in the making, could get a lot more
interesting with the document dump. Just don’t expect Holder, who
has already announced he’s stepping down, to be around to face any
consequences. Or the ATF to stop drafting
gun control regulations without a hint of irony.

See a Reason reader on Holder’s track record as U.S. Attorney
General
here.