The Horrid, and 100% Foreseeable, Aftermath of Judge Persky’s Recall

It is the nature of character assassination scandals, and a consequence of their frequency, that after a while they are forgotten by all except the people whose lives were destroyed by them. Such was the fate of Michelle Dauber’s cruel and idiotic crusade against Judge Aaron Persky in the aftermath of the Brock Turner scandal, which swept a lot of ill-informed progressive punitives with pitchforks and led to the destruction of his judicial career (and later, the destruction of his livelihood as a tennis coach.)

For all the shrill shrieking about “privilege”, pretty much every criminal justice academic I respect in the Bay Area warned at the time that recalling judges for lenient sentencing (especially, as in this case, following the probation recommendation) would make punishment harsher and much worse for everyone–especially for people who looked and lived nothing like Brock Turner. I was one of the first signatories and vividly remember shouting this from the rooftops, as well as seeing it as part of an appalling pattern of the left eating its own with no rhyme or reason.

As everyone worth their salt predicted, the recall did have an effect on criminal punishment in Santa Clara county: it made it harsher. As my colleagues Sanford Gordon and Sidak Yntiso found:

Using disposition data from six California counties and arrest records for a subset of defendants, we find a large, discontinuous increase in sentencing severity associated with the recall campaign’s announcement. Additional tests suggest that the observed shift may be attributed to changes in judicial preferences over sentencing and not strategic adjustment by prosecutors. We also demonstrate that the heterogeneous effects of the announcement did not mitigate preexisting racial disparities. Our findings are the first to document the incentive effects of recall and suggest that targeted political campaigns may have far-reaching, unintended consequences.

Sanford C. Gordon and Sidak Yntiso, Incentive Effects of Recall Elections: Evidence from Criminal Sentencing in California Courts, The Journal of Politics 84:4 (2022), 1947-1962

In other words: the fearless, plucky lefties who led this hysterical campaign can take pride in the fact that their relentless persecution of Persky empowered and enhanced carceral repression across the board, not necessarily making a dent in prevention/accountability for sex crimes, and harming precisely the people without “privilege” that they presumably sought to protect with this destructive campaign.

Why am I revisiting this? For two reasons. First, because I don’t want us to forget that these sorts of actions have consequences. I know that many on the left are already sickened by years of ugly, disastrous infighting. As Freddie DeBoer recently wrote:

I certainly would not say that the age of canceling is over. There will be public scandals to come; people will suffer major career and social consequences because of public anger. Sometimes they’ll deserve it. And maybe this is just a lull and the same old songs will get sung again and again.

But at this stage I find it hard to deny that the sense of palpable fear so many operated under, the feeling that the prosecutors held all the cards, appears to be in terminal decline. People just aren’t afraid in the same way anymore. The mob doesn’t have the momentum. The big bad wolf has lost his teeth. I suspect this is for a few key reasons – the fact that all of that endless raging did precisely nothing to make the world more just, for one. The growing understanding that the human species is flawed by nature and that no one can match those standards, for another. But mostly, I think it’s the dynamic I’ve been predicting for a long time: you can only bang the gong so many times. Everybody’s receptors all got blown out. Outrage is a finite resource. People can’t maintain permanent offense forever. Most of us can’t, anyway. You can only tense a muscle for so long.

Thing is, while we are tiring of the phenomenon, the people whose lives and reputations were laid to waste are going to have to live with the consequences of these witch hunts for a long time. Judge Persky, I think of you and am so sorry for the horror that you went through.

The second reason is that an excellent, short documentary about the poisonous effect of the recall campaign is out, and until September you can watch The Recall: Reframed for free:

How Machine Learning Improves Parole Research

Rabbi Levi son of Rabbi says…The Holy One said to Moshe “You will make a menorah of pure gold” (Shemot 25:31).

Moshe responded: how will we make it?

God responded: “It will be made of hammered work” (Shemot 25:31).

But Moshe struggled and went down and forgot how to make it.

He went up again and said: My Master, how do we make it? God said: “It will be made of hammered work” (Shemot 25:31).

But Moshe struggled and went down and forgot.

He went back up and said: My Master, I forgot it!

God showed Moshe, and Moshe still struggled. God said to him: “See and create” (Shemot 25:40), and took a menorah of fire and showed him how it was made.

But, it was still a struggle for Moshe!

The Holy One said to Moshe: Go to Betzalel, and he will make it.

Moshe told Betzalel, and he immediately made it. Moshe was amazed and said: How many times did the Holy One show me, and I still struggled to make it! But you, who never saw it, knew how to make it by yourself!

BaMidbar Rabah 15

One of the professional events I most look forward to each spring is the Virtual Workshop on Contemporary Parole–a fantastic two-day online gathering of a rigorous group of people producing exceptional work, which we’ve now held for the third year in a row. The papers are always superb and so is the camaraderie and commentary. I got to present a draft version of my new Sirhan Sirhan paper, as well as hear really terrific work on various aspects of parole: gang validation, racial proxies, young adulthood, and others. I can’t go into too much detail, because these are all works in progress and we’ll probably see polished versions of everything getting published soon enough. But one thing that stood out to me was the uptick in really interesting work utilizing machine learning.

I know next to nothing about machine learning and, like Moshe in the midrash above, I might be too old a dog to learn that particular trick. I mean, in the Sirhan paper, n=1. Thing is, the midrash really resonates with me because I, too, feel a lot like Moshe when I hear someone else talk about a fantastic skill they have and how they put it to good use. It looks like, despite God’s repeated tutorials, Moshe’s goldsmithing skills weren’t up to snuff. Thankfully, there were other Israelites with that particular skillset: Betzalel was a gifted goldsmith who made a spectacular menorah on the first try (this is why Israel’s fantastic art school is named after him.) While unable to emulate Betzalel’s feat, Moshe had acquired a basic understanding of the necessary artistry and workmanship, so he could appreciate why Betzalel’s finished product was of such high quality. In other words–I don’t employ machine learning in my own work, but I know enough about it to be amazed when I read a paper that uses it well.

To understand the promise of machine learning, let’s first talk about how we do parole research the old-skool way. A multivariate regression works much like the denouement in an Agatha Christie mystery novel. You know the drill: Poirot gathers all the usual suspects in a room and goes through a litany of their motivations, opportunities, debunked alibis, you name it. He eliminates them one by one until he can point to the culprits. The important point is that Poirot selects who goes into the parlor for that last scene: people get there by invitation, and Christie is careful to craft the scene so that it’s pretty much always a finite and manageable list of people. When I run a regression, I pretty much do the same: I think about the dependent variable–the phenomenon I’m trying to explain–and I try to come up with a list of the independent variables that might explain it. For example, if my determinate variable is a parole grant, I ask myself: Do people who are represented by a private attorney do better than people who are represented by a panel attorney? Do people whose hearings happen in the morning fare better than folks who are heard in the afternoon? If victims and/or prosecutors show up for the hearing, does that make a difference? Does the professional background of the commissioners matter? Do people in some prisons stand a better chance of being granted parole? You can tell that each of these assumptions has a certain logic behind it (you get what you pay for; people are more attentive and in a better mood when they are not tired or hungry; professional background goes into constructing people’s worldviews; some prisons have better rehabilitative offerings than others, which improves one’s case.) I put all of these “suspects” in a room (the regression equation,) run the numbers, and see which comes out significant.

One of the problems with this model is that regression models rarely offer a complete and exhaustive prediction of the phenomenon they try to predict. There is even a statistic, the r-square, that measures how much of the dependent variable is explained by the set of independent variables we coded for. But there could be many factors that play into a parole grant that cannot be adequately captured by the variables we identified. In other words, 21st century law enforcement doesn’t solve crime by putting twelve people in a parlor; if there is forensic evidence at the scene, it gets analyzed, plonked into giant databases, and could generate hits that are one-in-a-million, not one in twelve.

Enter machine learning. As we’re all now figuring out through our use of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence excels at digesting large amounts of text, identifying repetitive patterns, and throwing those patterns into a model. AI is intertextual in that it can assess the impact of any factor in the database on any other factor. As my colleague Kristen Bell and others explain in this paper, this allows the tool to mine parole transcripts for repeated words to get a sense of factors that would not be salient to us in a traditional regression. Moreover, the capacity of these tools is enormous, so one can feed the machine tens of thousands of cases and get a very powerful sense of what is going on. There are even tools like SuperLearner, which can apply multiple machine learning tools to a dataset, coming up with the best of several models. My colleagues Ryan Copus and Hannah Laqueur do exactly this.

Machine learning has many applications in criminal justice, as this excellent NIJ article explains. The critiques that are leveled on machine learning often revolve around its most common criminal justice use: predicting reoffending risk. As explained in this solid blog post, critics worry that any predictive analysis based on historical crime data will reflect (and thus reinforce) existing biases embedded in the criminal justice system, and perpetuate misconceptions and fears through the feedback loop of basic predictions on past decisionmaking. In other words, as my colleague Sandy Mayson argues, the problem is with the nature of prediction itself. You rely on a biased past, you get a biased future.

What researchers like Bell, Copus, Laqueur and others contribute is the potential of turning the use of the predictive tool on itself and using it not to predict the risk of those subjective to the system, but rather the factors that impact the decisions that the system itself makes. For example, if private attorneys do a better job than state-funded panel attorneys, wouldn’t we want to know this, and wouldn’t it be important to figure out exactly what it is about their performance that makes the difference in the outcome? Using AI can help identify, for example, terminology used by lawyers, thus giving us a sense of the “flavor” of representation that parole candidates receive.

When done well, this technique has fantastic potential to teach us about the hidden nooks and crannies of the parole hearing machine that we would not be able to flag on our own. You don’t have to be an AI whiz to understand and appreciate machine learning research; you just have to understand what it does and appreciate its strengths and weaknesses.

Sirhan Sirhan, Yigal Amir, and the Place of Retribution on Parole

A Sanhedrin that executes a transgressor once in seven years is characterized as a destructive tribunal.

Mishna Makkot 1-10

So too for those who are liable for capital punishment or lashes: their death or lashing does not atone for them until they repent [do teshuvah] and confess verbally [do vidui].

Mishne Torah LaRambam, Repentance 1:1

It’s hardly debatable that Richard Nixon’s presidency was a watershed moment in American criminal justice. Even the scholars who point to punitive tendencies among his predecessors will admit that Nixon’s presidential campaign highlighted crime—and particularly judicial permissiveness in the face of rising crime rates—as a key political issue, and that his presidency made good on the promises to become tougher on crime.

Having lived under this regime for 50 years, it’s hard to speculate what our system would look like if Nixon had not been elected. We did come very close: Nixon’s most promising challenger for the presidency was Democratic Senator Robert Kennedy, well-respected and admired, and a former Attorney General. But shortly after Kennedy announced his victory in the California Democratic Primary at an event at the Embassy Hotel, a young Palestinian refugee, Sirhan Sirhan, darted toward the Senator and fired several shots from his revolver. Kennedy was killed and four other people were injured by the gunfire.

Sirhan was sentenced to death, but experienced a stunning reversal of fortune. In 1972, the California Supreme Court found the death penalty unconstitutional, and the 107 people on death row at the time–including the Manson family members and Pinole murderer Dennis Stanworth–had their sentences commuted to life with parole. By the time California brought the death penalty back in 1978, alongside the option of life without parole, the “Class of ’72” people were already preparing for their upcoming parole hearings. One of them was Sirhan Sirhan.

Almost immediately after his arrest, and throughout his trial and incarceration, Sirhan was interviewed by many psychiatrists. They noted his traumatic childhood in Palestine, his harrowing journey to Jordan as a refugee, the horrendous violence he witnessed as a young child. They identified psychosis and paranoia. But by the mid-1970s, he seemed to settle down, to the point that the parole board–on par with how things were done in those days–sat down to set a parole date for him. They settled on 1984; 16 years was plenty for first-degree murder back in those days. If this seems oddly lenient to you, keep in mind that Sharon Tate’s family members thought it would be an uphill battle to keep the Manson girls behind bars in 1978.

Sirhan’s early hearings in the late 1970s were basically status conferences, which followed up on his rehabilitative journey in prison. But things took an interesting turn in 1982. On April 26, a Monday, the parole board convened for a week-long hearing in his case, whose purpose would be to determine whether to rescind his 1984 parole date.

The impetus for this unusual step was threefold. First, as Sirhan’s release date approached, the Board faced unexpected gale force winds of public disapproval. The Commissioners received of 3,961 letters; 8,127 signatures of petitions; and 50 city and county resolutions requesting the recission of Sirhan’s parole date. The November 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, on the heels of his historical peace agreement with Israel, reminded the public of yet another anti-Israel act of terrorism, spurring these letters on and drawing connections between the two acts.

Second, the Board explained, new evidence had come to light that called into question the prior portrayal of Sirhan as a docile, rehabilitated inmate. The information included a Playboy article called “inside Sirhan”, as well as numerous threatening letters Sirhan had sent from prison to various individuals, and documentation of his threatening personality in his central file. “Generally,” the Commissioners explained, “the information specified above alleges that Sirhan has made threats against various people, and that he has exhibited other behavior indicating that he is not suitable for parole.”

The third ground for the hearing, however, was legal: the board maintained that its 1975 predecessor, which set Sirhan’s 1984 date, erred in exercising its authority. The question for discussion would be: “[D]id the parole granting panels fail to exercise independent discretion in finding Sirhan suitable or in establishing a period of confinement? The panel’s failing to consider the nature of the offense and the victim in finding Sirhan suitable for or in establishing a period of confinement.” The Board answered this question in the affirmative: they claimed that the 1975 Board abused its discretion by “fail[ing] to appreciate and fully assess the magnitude of the crime for which Sirhan was convicted.”

Sirhan’s attorney, Luke McKissack, balked at these reasons for recission. All the details about Sirhan’s crime, its seriousness, and its magnitude, he said, were widely known at the time of his trial and had no place at his parole hearing. As to Sirhan’s presumably threatening behaviors, McKissack explained, they should be understood in the context of his traumatic upbringing and unusual confinement situation. McKissack recounted some of Sirhan’s traumatizing experiences in Palestine—killings, mutilations, and mass atrocities, which “Sirhan, at four years of age, obviously would be affected by seeing that kind of violence.” He also explained that Sirhan’s threats should not be taken seriously: his 14 years in protective custody “could be the equivalent of twenty or twenty-five years for somebody else. . . from the onset he knew that anybody might kill him” and his threats should be seen as what they were: the airing of frustrations made “ten years ago when Sirhan was depressed, psychologically disturbed and reflective of that situation and not as high-powered as the district attorney makes it out to be.” During those years, McKissack explained, Sirhan witnessed other people—some convicted of multiple murders—being paroled, and it was understandable that he was frustrated and felt that he was singled out: “It doesn’t seem to me that in order to qualify for being paroled, that a person has to think that everything that occurred to him in life is fair.” Sadat’s assassination, he said, had nothing to do with Sirhan, who was being scapegoated: “In 1982, in an election year, with international events out of control, everybody is frustrated. It’s: Find someone to jump on.”

The Board was undeterred. On April 27, 1982, the Commissioners interrogated their predecessor, James Hoover, a member of the committee that set Sirhan’s original parole date. The resulting exchange reads like a remarkable showdown between the rehabilitative, professional, low-key logics of 1970s parole decisions, and the much more emotional and political tenor these decisions would reflect in the 1980s. Hoover had no love for Sirhan, obviously, but he thought his job was to judge Sirhan impartially on the basis of his prison performance:

Brown: It was your impression from 75-20 that everyone had to have a parole date set?

Hoover: That was my impression, as long as there was no negative factors in file.

Brown: Initially you could find no reason to deny the setting of the parole date?

Hoover: I could find no reason. I might mention in my own mind that I wanted to find a reason. . .

You have got to remember that our median time for murder first was only about fifteen years. So that means we had an awful lot of low cases and an awful lot of high cases. . . our legislature in their great wisdom did not say, “Well, if you shot a Senator you ought to do so many years. And if you shot Jose Gonzales down in the barrio, you only do this many years”. . . At that period of time this was what was acceptable. It may not be acceptable today, but at that period of time that was the guidelines. And my feeling was, there was nothing to justify. . . I thought that was ample punishment picking that period of time, that time in space of society and what people expected.

Hoover didn’t want Sirhan to walk, but he did what he thought was his job:

W]hen I saw [the psychiatrist], I said, first thing out of my mouth, ‘Shit. This son-of-a-bitch ain’t going nowhere.’ That was just—it was the flash that came up. And then I think she said, ‘Well, show me why not.’ And that’s when I went to the file. I thought, certainly I’ll be able to have all these negative things in file. I mean, it was just set in my mind. I just walked into it and without review, just off the top of my head.

Hoover’s 1982 colleagues, needless to say, did not see eye to eye with him on this. They rescinded his date, citing not only his threatening behavior but also the 1975 Board’s mistake in discounting the magnitude of his crime. The New York Times story about the recission features clearly retributive rationales:

‘’The people of the world will breathe a sigh of relief tonight because Sirhan will remain in prison,’’ said District Attorney John Van de Kamp of Los Angeles, who had pushed for canceling the Sirhan parole date. ‘’The message must be sent out in clear and unmistakable terms that political assassination will not be tolerated in this society – and those who engage in it must pay the price.’’

‘’He deserves never to be set free,’’ said State Treasurer Jesse Unruh, who as the California manager of Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the 1968 Democratic Presidential nomination was present when the New York senator was shot. ‘’I’ve been battling that parole date since 1975.’’

As we all know, Sirhan, who is now 79 years old, remains behind bars. In 2021 he was recommended for parole, but Governor Newsom reversed; in 2023 he was again found unsuitable for parole. In his last few hearings–probably to heed the California Supreme Court’s admonishment in Lawrence–the Board stopped citing the magnitude of the crime and started giving us, instead, the usual parole word salad about insight and accountability and looking inward, the whole psychic excavation enchilada. But the archaeology of the hearings plainly shows what happened: as of 1982, the parole board started seeing itself responsible not just for assessing the parole candidate’s prison journey, but for curating and appeasing the public sentiment about his or her crime.

To be honest, I’m not sure retribution has no place in release decisions. While working on Sirhan’s parole hearings, I repeatedly thought of another political assassin: Yigal Amir, the third-year Israeli law student who assassinated Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin. In 2023, it is hard to not see Rabin’s assassination as the watershed moment that ushered Binyamin Netanyahu’s ascendance to state leadership and, as Israel faces a severe constitutional crisis that threatens to disproportionately affect Palestinians and other non-Jews, to balk at the possibility that Amir should ever be paroled. In the following video, an excerpt from an excellent satirical show called The Chamber Quintet, actor Rami Heuberger depicts Yigal Amir. He smiles at the camera and said, “in twenty years, I’ll receive clemency. You know that’s true. Deep inside, you know it.” The effect is chilling:

The prospect of parole, clemency, or a pardon for Amir is not farfetched at all under the auspices of Israel’s 37th Government. Would that really be so much more horrible than a parole for Sirhan? What about when Amir is 79 years old? I’m not sure. But I also feel that we need to talk honestly about the role, if any, that retribution should play in parole decisions, and about the extent to which we entrust Board members to properly calibrate the resulting punishment in the face of political and social considerations and public upheaval. In any case, I find it poignant that Sirhan became a victim of the era of punitiveness that he ushered with a bullet.

Rise of the Innocence Podcast

A short while ago, I chaired a panel to celebrate Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance’s new book Crimesploitation, which examines the lowbrow and middlebrow shows that shed glamorous and lurid light on crime: Cops, To Catch a Predator, etc. As I wrote in my review of the book, this read coincided with the week in which Adnan Syed, whose case was the subject of the first season of the podcast Serial, was set free by a Baltimore court after serving 23 years of incarceration. Here is a timeline of Syed’s case, which clearly indicates that the push to exonerate him came from the investigation in the podcast. Following in Serial’s footsteps was Undisclosed, a more pro-defense oriented podcast, which highlighted more discoveries.

In the book, Kaplan and LaChance examine a TV show that came out more or less when Serial emerged on the scene: Making a Murderer, which followed the murder case against Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. It’s hard to argue against anything that creates a push for justice, and the authors don’t do that, but they do voice a critique against these wrongful conviction media products: by singling out specific cases of injustice, Kaplan and LaChance argue, they “fail[] to achieve the goal of critiquing the substance and structure of the criminal justice system and the bigger picture of hegemonic power relations in the United States that supports it” (94). In other words, “the protection of factually innocent people from the devastation of incarceration. . . becomes the most pressing criminal justice policy imperative, leaving untouched the question of why such a devastating punishment is so easily and readily meted out.” 

Kaplan and LaChance’s critique is well taken. The concern is that the focus on innocence will gloss over the fact that guilty people, as well as the innocent ones, don’t deserve neglect, sadism, cruelty, incompetence, and other cruel and, sadly, not unusual aspects of incarceration. I saw some of this play out in the conversation about vaccines, when jail vaccine advocates referred to the presumption of innocence to make a bid for vaccines that everyone, guilty and innocent alike, should have received immediately simply by virtue of being human and in a congregate setting with little control over their surroundings (and said so here.) But wrongful convictions are their own genre of awfulness, and while we need to support everyone who is incarcerated, I don’t think that infighting between innocence projects and prison advocacy projects helps the overall goal of making the world a better place.

Moreover, I think I am more optimistic than Kaplan and LaChance about these shows. For every person who might watch them and think, “wow, this is a unique instance of miscarriage of justice” there must be several who walk away from it thinking “if this atrocity happened in a case that was highlighted by a podcast, imagine how many more people are languishing in prison for crimes they did not commit who haven’t been featured in podcasts yet.” I said as much in my commentary on the podcast and on the radio.

Happily, the high-profile success of the vanguard shows of this genre led to a whole slew of podcasts seeking justice for the wrongfully convicted. Just recently, the podcast Proof led to the exoneration of two men in Georgia. At the same time, a seemingly contradictory trend is visible: podcasts that reopen cold cases and present theories of the case can help revive interest in unsolved murders and sometimes put terrifyingly violent people behind bars, as well as highlight atrocious behavior that might or might not be criminally defined in an effort to get justice for the victims. I say “seemingly” because, in both cases, the underlying assumption seems to be: podcasters can grease and speed up the wheels of justice faster and better than, say, Innocence Project lawyers.

Why is that? Consider what might be the first example of this genre: Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2, the documentaries about the murders of three children in West Memphis, Arkansas, and the convictions of Damien Echols, Jesse Miskelley and Jason Baldwin. The documentaries evoked enormous interest in the cases, and with the weight of celebrities and advocates, within a few years, everyone who knew something about these cases became convinced that the three were wrongly convicted. This newly fueled interest led to some movement in the case, ending in a new trial for Echols and, eventually, in an Alford plea for all defendants that set them free. Shortly after the plea, understanding the power of media, Echols and his wife Lorri Davis produced a documentary of their own in 2012, which featured better forensics and more novel analyses of the evidence.

What happened with the West Memphis Three case is instructive. The media can bring to the public voices form the scene. Unbound by technicalities and rules of evidence and of legal ethics, they can reinterview witnesses, examine forensic evidence with improved technologies, and have candid conversations with legal actors (some of whom might be retired at that point.) They can tell a story in emotionally artful ways that can persuade the public that an injustice has been done. I’m beginning to think that the Innocence Project might want to invest a considerable part of its budget in podcasting.

One argument against the use of podcasts in this way might be that they draw arbitrary, sporadic attention to certain cases at the expense of others. That is surely a problem. But isn’t sporadic, arbitrary attention that corrects injustice better than no attention at all?

The other challenge might be that the proliferation of these podcasts, with every fresh journalist or journalism aspirant hoping to be the one to stand on the courtroom stairs and celebrate, their impact will become marginally smaller, to the point that we will stop paying attention. I don’t think we’re at that inflection point yet. Moreover, the exoneration technologies (primarily the improvement and lower costs of DNA testing) are exposing more and more of these cases (there are also stark racial patterns) and I think we still need all the podcasts we can get.

Extradition, Extreme Punishment, and American Exceptionalism

While at the American Society of Criminology conference, I had the good luck to run into a colleague I really like and admire–Dirk Van Zyl Smit from the University of Nottingham. Dirk shared with me two recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), in cases that he worked on (the ECHR allows professors to submit written briefs as “intervenors”, akin to what we do with amicus briefs here in the US), which illuminate the strange contortions that European countries go through in an effort to determine just how much they are willing to passively cooperate with USian punitive barbarism.

A little bit of background: Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” In 1985, Protocol 6 to the Convention, which abolished the death penalty for all members, entered into effect. In accordance with the Protocol and with Article 3, all European Council members have abolished the death penalty (Belarus is not and has never been a member; Russia was recently expelled.) Moreover, the Council of Europe fights the death penalty within and outside its borders in numerous ways, including the well-documented refusal of its members to provide the U.S. with chemicals used in American execution protocols. One important aspect of this abolition-beyond-borders policy is a European Court of Human Rights case from decades ago, Soering v. United Kingdom (1989), which forbids extradition of people to the U.S. if they might face the death penalty there (virtually all European countries have extradition treaties with the US, as you can see in the above map.) Dirk tells me that the practice in these cases is to ask the U.S. to provide a guarantee that the death penalty will not be sought against the extradited person.

But what about life without parole, another form of USian extreme punishment? In Vinter and Others (2013) the ECHR found that “irreducible” life sentences were inhumane; this was applied in Trabelsi v. Belgium (2014) to the extradition setting. But later, in Harkins v. Home Secretary (2014), England’s High Court of Justice narrowly interpreted Trabelsi as applying only to life sentences that were grossly disproportionate or completely lacking in any mitigation mechanisms (such as commutation or parole.) Harkins and other cases (Wellington and Haffiz) treated Trabelsi as somewhat of an extreme aberration.

The Council of Europe’s hesitation to wage a war against LWOP makes more sense when you consider the LWOP situation in the European countries themselves, who also seem to interpret Trabelsi rather narrowly. Only Croatia, Bosnia and Herzgovina, and Portugal have abolished all forms of indefinite imprisonment. So did Spain, in 1928, but it brought the penalty back in 2015. By contrast, many countries have legally prescribed LWOP sentences: England and Wales, the Netherlands, Moldova, Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary, Malta, Cyprus, Albania, Ukraine, Serbia, and the Republic of Ireland. In some of these countries, evidentiary findings of dangerousness can prevent life prisoners to be released. In Austria and in Ukraine, the only way out of life imprisonment is presidential clemency or a finding that the person will not commit further crimes. As a consequence of Trabelsi, the Netherlands has recently allowed resentencing of life prisoners who have served at least 25 years. Even in LWOP-retentionist European countries, courts retain judicial discretion to decide whether a sentence of life should include parole or not.

One of the two recent cases before the ECHR involved Ismail Sanchez-Sanchez, who was arrested in the UK for his role in a conspiracy to ship more than 2600 kgs of Mexican marijuana to Atlanta, GA. At his extradition hearing, Sanchez-Sanchez argued that there was “a real risk that he would be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.” The British judge, following the logic of Harkins, tried to assess the likelihood that Sanchez-Sanchez would receive LWOP at his federal trial. For the drug conspiracy alone, Sanchez-Sanchez was unlikely to receive a life sentence on any count, and it was even less likely that he would be serving his sentences consecutively. The fact that one of his co-conspirators died of a fentanyl overdose made it more likely that they prosecution would request a life sentence; such a sentence, however, would not be “irreducible”, as Sanchez Sanchez could appeal, apply for executive clemency, and/or request compassionate release.

The ECHR looked at the case through the lens of both Trabelsi and the British cases, and also received some information from the U.S. federal government that addressed both the prevalence of LWOP in the federal system and the particulars of Sanchez-Sanchez’s case. As to the latter, the U.S. Attorney specified that the prosecution recommended a life sentence for each of Sanchez-Sanchez’s conspirators, but they pled guilty and so avoided that sentence. The ECHR highlights the distinction between acknowledging that LWOP is inhumane as an institution within member countries and applying it to extradition to the US:

Within the domestic context, the applicant’s legal position, having already been convicted and sentenced, is known. Moreover, the domestic system of review of the sentence is likewise known, both to the domestic authorities and the Court. In the extradition context, on the other hand, in a case such as the present where the applicant has not yet been convicted, a complex risk assessment is called for, a tentative prognosis that will inevitably be characterised by a very different level of uncertainty when compared to the domestic context. This calls – as a matter of principle, but also out of practical concerns – for caution in applying the principles flowing from Vinter and Others, which were intended to apply within the domestic context, to their fullest extent in the extradition context. . .  Therefore, while the principles set out in Vinter and Others must be applied in domestic cases, an adapted approach is called for in the extradition context.

The first step in this “adapted approach”, according to the ECHR, is an inquiry into the “real risk” that the particular person facing extradition will receive LWOP after extradition. If so, we move on to the second step – an inquiry whether “there exists in the requesting state a mechanism of sentence review which allows the competent authorities there to consider whether any changes in the life prisoner are so significant, and such progress towards rehabilitation has been made in the course of the sentence, as to mean that continued detention can no longer be justified on legitimate penological grounds.” Because of the uncertainty surrounding Sanchez-Sanchez’s odds of LWOP, as well as the sentences of his co-conspirators, the ECHR concludes that “the applicant cannot be said to have adduced evidence capable of showing that his extradition to the US would expose him to a real risk of treatment reaching the Article 3 threshold”, which renders the second step of the analysis unnecessary.

In the second case, Beverly Ann McCallum, suspected of involvement in the brutal murder of her husband in Michigan, was apprehended in Italy (the murder was a cold case from 2004, solved only in 2015.) During her years of absence from the U.S., her daughter and a friend were charged with first degree murder (the friend pled to second-degree murder; the daughter pled not guilty, was tried, and received LWOP.) The Italian court found that the extradition could go forward given the sentence mitigation options under Michigan law, and McCallum appealed. While awaiting the decision (under home arrest due to ill health), McCallum received a diplomatic note from the Eaton County district attorney, promising that if extradited she would only face second-degree murder charges (no conspiracy charges, only disinterment and mutilation of a dead body), taking LWOP off the table and resulting in a maximum sentence of life with parole. Under Michigan law, lifers are eligible for parole after 15 years, and may also petition the governor for clemency. The Italian authorities, animated by this communique, extradited McCallum to the United States.

Before the ECHR, McCallum argued that the diplomatic note contained insufficient assurances that the Eaton County DA would not revert to the serious charges (note: they did keep their promise despite the brutality of McCallum’s involvement in the murder – H.A.) The ECHR disagreed: Diplomatic notes, they wrote–

are a standard means for the requesting State to provide any assurances which the requested State considers necessary for its consent to extradition. … [T]he Court also recognised that, in international relations, Diplomatic Notes carry a presumption of good faith and that, in extradition cases, it was appropriate that that presumption be applied to a requesting State which has a long history of respect for democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and which has longstanding extradition arrangements with Contracting States. … [I]t seems to the Court that if, following her extradition, the original charges against the applicant were to be revived, that would not be compatible with the duty of good faith performance of treaty obligations.

The ECHR also proceeded to dismiss McCallum’s argument that her eventual release on parole depended on the unchecked discretion of the Governor of Michigan in granting clemency and was therefore “irreducible.” The Court again disagreed, highlighting the fact that the clemency power was procedural, rather than legislated, and had nothing to do with parole, which in Michigan is the sole purview of the parole board:

[T]he Court is not persuaded that the applicant’s understanding of the Michigan system is correct. It observes that. . . a prisoner’s release on parole is at the discretion of the parole board. While the Governor of Michigan indeed enjoys a broad power of executive clemency, he or she is not involved in the parole procedure. Nor do the relevant legal provisions empower the Governor to overrule the grant of parole to a prisoner. As indicated above, appeal against the grant of parole lies to the competent circuit court.

An applicant who alleges that their extradition would expose them to a risk of a sentence that would constitute inhuman or degrading punishment bears the burden of proving the reality of that risk. In light of all of the above-mentioned factors, the Court considers that the applicant has not discharged that burden. Contrary to her claim, it appears that there is no real risk of the applicant receiving an irreducible life sentence, i.e., life imprisonment without eligibility for parole, in the event of conviction of the charges now pending against her in Michigan.

I find two important takeaways here. The first is that the ECHR draws a real line between the death penalty–now widely outside of the acceptable margin of reasonable state behavior for Council of Europe members–and LWOP which, unless absolutely mandatory, remains within the realm of the reasonable. The second is that, among the members of the “extreme punishment trifecta”, life with parole–even with everything we know about the slim odds of obtaining parole–is not in the same league as LWOP, and assurances that the sentence will be the former fully satisfy the requirements of Article 3. What this teaches me is that American exceptionalism seems to have been relegated only to the world of the death penalty, and that Europe isn’t that far ahead of us in fully recognizing the possibility of LWOP as barbaric.

How to Talk to Our Kids About Prison

Today we took our five-year-old son to visit Alcatraz. We had been talking about prisons for a while, and I’ve been telling him some of what we have been doing on COVID-19 in prisons, and we had the opportunity to make a family trip of it with a young relative who is visiting.

In the days before our trip I thought to myself – what a good dilemma to have, whether and how to expose my kid to the realities of incarceration. Many, many children nationwide (almost 200,000 in California alone) have no choice but to know all about the prison or jail experience, because a parent, a sibling, or another loved one is behind bars. I still remember the haunting opening scene from Brett Story’s film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, in which we see mothers and young kids aboard a bus that drives all night to a remote prison. Megan Comfort’s book Doing Time Together tells the stories of the families, and Kay Levine and Volkan Topalli examine criminal trials attended by the defendants’ children as intergenerational punishment.

With my own fortunate son I’ve used two wonderful books, which do not sugarcoat the prison experience, but mediate it in age-appropriate ways. Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson’s Milo Imagines the World tells the story of a young boy and his older sister as they ride the New York City Subway on their way to visit their incarcerated mother. It’s a very moving and empathetic book, offering empathy and connection. We have also read Emma Bland Smith and John Ely’s The Gardener of Alcatraz, which recounts the true story of Elliot Michener, who was incarcerated on The Rock in the 1950s. We also plan to read Mariame Kaba’s Missing Daddy and watch the special Sesame Street episode about children of incarcerated parents.

While we walked around the prison, we talked about the realities of living there. We compared the size of the cells to the rooms in our house, and talked about what it would be like to live in a room with no toys and very little furniture. When we got to the visitation block, we talked about kids who get to see their parents only through a glass; and when we got to the glum exercise yard, we talked about how much we value time outside in the natural world. My son walked away from the experience feeling that prison was not a good place to be, and that it was important to be kind to everyone and offer them hope, even if they’ve done bad things in the past.

Trump Search Warrant Unsealed. Where’s the Affidavit?

Well, it’s happened: A search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence yielded numerous items, all of which are listed in the search warrant, which you can read here in all its glory.

If you still can’t make heads nor tails of this, it’s because all we have seen so far is the warrant, which lists the place to be searched and items to be sealed, and not the affidavit, in which law enforcement officers detail their probable cause for the judge. As explained here, for reasons involving the ongoing investigation, it is unlikely that we’ll actually see the affidavit before formal charges are brought, so speculation abounds. Nevertheless, there are some things we can learn from the warrant. Here’s the description of the items sought:

a. Any physical documents with classification markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes;

b. Information, including communications in any form, regarding the retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material;

c. Any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021; or

d. Any evidence of the knowing alteration, destruction, or concealment of any government and/or Presidential Records, or of any documents with classification markings.

Contrast this with the three crimes listed in the warrant and you get a fuller picture of the suspicions against Trump. Here’s an excerpt from this New York Times story, which describes these federal laws:

The first law, Section 793 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, is better known as the Espionage Act. It criminalizes the unauthorized retention or disclosure of information related to national defense that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Each offense can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

Despite its name, the Espionage Act is not limited to instances of spying for a foreign power and is written in a way that broadly covers mishandling of security-related secrets. The government has frequently used it to prosecute officials who have leaked information to the news media for the purpose of whistle-blowing or otherwise informing the public, for example.

Importantly, Congress enacted the Espionage Act in 1917, during World War I — decades before President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order that created the modern classification system, under which documents can be deemed confidential, secret or top secret. The president is the ultimate arbiter of whether any of those classifications applies — or should be lifted.

As a result, while these classifications — especially top secret ones — can be good indicators that a document probably meets the standard of being “national defense information” covered by the Espionage Act, charges under that law can be brought against someone who hoarded national security secrets even if they were not deemed classified.

The list of items that the warrant authorized the F.B.I. to seize captured this nuance. It said agents could take “documents with classification markings,” along with anything else in the boxes or containers where they found such files, but also any information “regarding the retrieval, storage or transmission of national defense information or classified material.”

The government has not said what specific documents investigators thought Mr. Trump had kept at Mar-a-Lago, nor what they found there. The inventory of items was vague, including multiple mentions of “miscellaneous top-secret documents,” for example.

But the invocation of “the retrieval, storage or transmission” of secret information in the warrant offered a potential clue to at least one category of the files the F.B.I. may have been looking for. One possible interpretation of that phrase is that it hinted at encrypted communications, hacking or surveillance abilities.

The other two laws invoked in the warrant do not have to do with national security.

The second, Section 1519, is an obstruction law that is part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a broad set of reforms enacted by Congress in 2002 after financial scandals at firms like Enron, Arthur Andersen and WorldCom.

Section 1519 sets a penalty of up to 20 years in prison per offense for the act of destroying or concealing documents or records “with the intent to impede, obstruct or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter” within the jurisdiction of federal departments or agencies.

The warrant does not specify whether that obstruction effort is a reference to the government’s attempts to retrieve all the publicly owned documents that should be given to the National Archives and Records Administration, or something separate.

The third law that investigators cite in the warrant, Section 2071, criminalizes the theft or destruction of government documents. It makes it a crime, punishable in part by up to three years in prison per offense, for anyone with custody of any record or document from federal court or public office to willfully and unlawfully conceal, remove, mutilate, falsify or destroy it.

Given that the ongoing investigation is still shrouded in mystery, assuming that there isn’t some glaring horror, this is beginning to look like Al Capone’s prosecution for tax evasion.

My Chesa Recall Punditry: The View from Bayview-Hunter’s Point

Last night provided me a unique vantage point on the Boudin recall effort: I was an inspector at a polling station in Bayview-Hunter’s Point, which is a neighborhood with a long history of neglect and criminalization. It is also unique in its demographics: 33.7% African American in a city that is just under 6% African American as a whole. There were approximately 650 registered voters in our precinct. 18 voted by mail and 17 voted in person, for a grand total of 35 voters. That’s 5% of the electorate. Things were somewhat better, but not by much, elsewhere in the city. By stark contrast to the 2020 Presidential election, pre-election mail-in voting in this local election–the third in 2022!–was very low. Our Federal Election Deputy (FED), who came to visit us throughout the day, reported that the polls were quiet and dormant throughout the whole day, pretty much everywhere.

Why does this matter? Take a look at a map published in today’s Chron of the neighborhoods that voted against Boudin:

At first glance, the story appears to be that neighborhoods associated with Asian-American populations tended to support the recall more fervently. This is unsurprising, and only talked about in hushed tones even though I think it is a big part of the story. In the last few weeks I saw concerted, fervent activism in support of the recall from very similar crowds to the ones who drove the SFUSD recall from a few months ago: it’s not all about out-of-town Republican millionaires conning unsuspecting masses into false consciousness. These are pretty much the same parents who resented the performative woketalk from the Board about school renaming and lottery admissions to Lowell. I suspect that some residual energy poured over from the previous recall (which I think was 100% justified) to this one (which I think was not.) The superficial narrative might be that a permissive and forgiving attitude toward prosecuting some people (read: presumably, young African American men) incentivizes crime and victimization (read: toward, presumably, Asian American victims) in the same way that lowering standards and talking about reparations and abolitionism (read: a narrative that supports, presumably, a monolithic African American interest) harms the pursuit of hard work and excellence in education (read: the purview, presumably, of Asian American students and parents.)

This story, which suggests the fomenting of racial animus between these two groups, building on the racial conflict undertones of the previous recall, is not completely preposterous. Most of the people who came to vote in person yesterday at our precinct were African American, and from their conversations, I gathered they all came motivated to vote against the recall. But this assumes that we can understand and generalize trends from a pretty minuscule percentage of San Franciscans. It’s not that the people who live in my beautiful city don’t care about criminal justice administration. NextDoor and other social media outlets are full of people chewing each other’s heads off about whether this or that wave of smash-and-grab, retail theft, or other incident is Chesa’s fault. But how many people care enough about this to put work into reading a hefty booklet and considering their positions on a three-page ballot, in which Prop H was the very last voting issue on the back side of the third page, for the third time in a row in the same year?

Over the years, I’ve returned again and again to Vanessa Barker’s excellent book The Politics of Imprisonment. Barker conducts a three-way comparison of penal politics in three states: California, Washington, and New York, finding that California’s political culture more easily lends itself to punitive experiments because of its polarization and populism. I write about this culture in Yesterday’s Monsters, when I show how politicized and emotion-driven the issue of parole is. In this kind of political environment, where money and strong interests can push something into the ballot as well as foment a well-oiled promotion machine (complete with all the tricks and deceptions we’ve come to expect from the initiative process), it is not difficult to swing the pendulum back and forth, from big reforms to big cancellations, from experiments in jurisdictional shifts to draconian policies masquerading as victim’s rights policies, and everything in between.

Ultimately, I think that what we saw here was just an exercise in manipulating this big machine and effectuating huge change through a relatively small number of voters. Direct democracy can be, and is, too direct when it imposes this burden thrice a year on already exhausted, grieving, anguished, and ticked off people with an empathy deficit from three years of awfulness that followed four years of a different kind of awfulness. In sum, whether or not the small minority who bothered to show up at the polls has false or true consciousness matters much less, sadly, than the forces exploiting the initiative process far beyond the Bay Area.

Would it have made a difference if the entire Bayview-Hunter’s Point electorate showed up en masse and voted against this recall? Of course it would. But after everything we’ve all been through–the impoverished folks in the neglected parts of town disproportionately suffering–we just didn’t have it in us to make yesterday a proud, sparkling moment for people-powered government, and even though it’s not our fault, we will all have to live with the consequences. Increased incarceration and the return of cash bail will not deter violent crime (but people’s attention will wander, and those who supported the recall will stop paying attention). Crime might go up (despite the recall, the supporters will say, or because of the recall, the opponents will say) or it might go down (because of the recall, supporters will say, or despite it, opponents will say) and we will continue to delude ourselves that dumbing down complicated policy decisions, deceiving people with oversimplified campaigns, and seasoning everything with some piquant interracial conflict, is how democracy should work.

The truth is that crime rates are like the weather. They rise and fall for a variety of reasons, only a few of which we can measure, and most of which have nothing to do with who is in charge. They have very little to do with big punishment trends (though, in localized situations, they do depend on effective police work in solving crime, which is a damn difficult thing to do when the community doesn’t trust the police enough to help.) It takes a real sea change in policy to effectuate changes in criminality patterns. But our megalomanic assumption that we can control crime rates through tinkering with policies will persist, and we will keep tinkering, until no one has any energy left to vote.

I offered a few more thoughts on KCRW here.

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied on the Appellate Level: Eisenberg vs. the Third District Court of Appeal

Not being on Twitter, while glorious, has its drawbacks; I would not have found out about this story if not for my colleague Paul Belonick, who came upon it through this thread. The story, in essence, is this:

The Sixth Amendment guarantees anyone the right to a speedy trial. What’s unique about this right, as the Supreme Court explained in Barker v. Wingo, is that it is often (though by no means always) in the interest of the defendant to delay matters in court: witnesses could forget and disappear, evidence could be mislaid, etc. But if someone is in pretrial detention, the clock ticks while the person’s ability to plan their defense is hampered. At the same time, speedy trial saves time and makes courts more efficient, and in that respect, it is as much a “right” of the government and the public coffers as it is of the defendant. For this reason, when someone brings a speedy trial motion, the court tallies the delays that are the government’s fault versus those that lie at the door of the defendant. There are official limitations on the time that can pass before a case is brought to trial at both the federal and state levels.

But speedy trial problems can happen at the appellate level, too–especially true for defendants languishing in prison while their appeals are pending. In 2021, well-known appellate attorney Jon Eisenberg decided on an unusual course of action: he sued the Third District Court of Appeal for the delays, framing them as the Court’s failure to comply with ministerial duties. In his petition for a mandamus writ, Eisenberg wrote:

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Since 2018, the court has denied calendar preference for at least 278 criminal appeals, with cases languishing from 12 to 99 months after being fully briefed. In some cases, the defendants had already served part or all of a reversed prison term or sentence enhancement—an egregious failure of the appellate process. Systemic inordinate delay in adjudicating criminal appeals is unconstitutional—a denial of due process. Where a right of appeal is afforded, the adjudicatory process must be timely. Currently, the Court of Appeal for the Third Appellate District has yet to calendar at least 66 criminal appeals that have been fully briefed for 12 to 41 months. Expeditious action by this Court is essential to protect dozens of inmates who are threatened with irreparable injury—or the worsening of irreparable injury already suffered—from denial of their constitutional right to timely appellate review. This systemic denial of statutory and constitutional rights is a stain on the integrity of California’s appellate process. This Court should not condone it by inaction.

I. CODE OF CIVIL PROCEDURE SECTION 44 GIVES CALENDAR PREFERENCE TO CRIMINAL APPEALS. Code of Civil Procedure section 44 prescribes two forms of priority in calendaring appeals—among civil appeals, and between civil and criminal appeals. First, the statute requires “preference in hearing in the courts of appeal” for probate, contested election and certain defamation cases. Second, prioritized civil appeals must be placed on the calendar “next after cases in which the people of the state are parties.” These provisions have the effect of mandating calendar preference for all criminal appeals. “Adult criminal appeals receive priority because they are cases ‘in which the people of the state are parties.’” Thus, once a criminal appeal is fully briefed, it must be placed on the next available oral argument calendar—which in most Courts of Appeal usually means three or four months later.

II. SYSTEMIC DELAY IN THE CRIMINAL APPELLATE PROCESS IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Although there is no federal constitutional right of appeal, “if a State has created appellate courts as ‘an integral part of the … system for finally adjudicating the guilt or innocence of a defendant,’ [citation], the procedures used in deciding appeals must comport with the demands of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the [U.S.] Constitution.” This means a state’s criminal appellate process must be timely. “[F]ederal courts have held that undue delay in processing an appeal may rise to the level of a violation of due process.”  “[A]n appeal that is inordinately delayed is … a ‘meaningless ritual.’”

The Tenth Circuit has enunciated a general rule that delay in adjudicating a noncapital criminal appeal for more than two years after filing of the notice of appeal—including more than 11 months from the completion of briefing to the filing of the opinion—“gives rise to a presumption that the state appellate process is ineffective.” This “rebuttable presumption of prejudice” is applied where “such delays are chronic and systemic and have resulted in the wholesale denial of the right to a reasonably timely appeal.” “Delays of such magnitude produce an unacceptable threat to the integrity of the appellate process.” The most obvious and egregious prejudice from inordinate delay in a criminal appeal occurs when the defendant has already served part or all of a reversed prison term or sentence enhancement—which has happened more than a few times in the Third District. In such instances, the right of appeal is wholly subverted. Prejudice can also occur when delay impairs the defendant’s right to a retrial or resentencing after reversal—for example, due to faded memories or lost evidence. And harm can occur even if a long-delayed appeal eventually proves to be unsuccessful—in the form of emotional damage from the “increased anxiety, mistrust, hopelessness, fear, and depression” that “results from the very thwarting of the hope that liberty will be restored through a right that the State has guaranteed—the appellate process.” The rule should be no different under article I, section 7 of the California Constitution. “[T]he proper and efficient administration of the penal laws of the state, due regard being had to established procedure, demands a speedy resolution of all appeals taken in criminal cases.”

III. THE THIRD DISTRICT IS SYSTEMICALLY DENYING STATUTORY CALENDAR PREFERENCE FOR MANY CRIMINAL APPEALS.

A. Hundreds of Criminal Appeals Have Been Denied

Calendar Preference, With Dozens Yet to be Calendared. Justice Raye was appointed to the Third District in 1991 and became its Administrative Presiding Justice in 2010. His predecessor as Administrative Presiding Justice retired in September 2010. That same month, the Third District commenced a decade-long practice of failing to accord calendar preference to many criminal appeals.1 From September 2010 to March 2012, Justice Raye authored four decisions in criminal appeals with lapses of 17 to 25 months from fully briefed to submission for decision. Thereafter, the number of substantially delayed. Third District criminal appeals steadily rose, 1 Previously, such delay was rare. Petitioner has found only two Third District criminal appeals that were prejudicially delayed during the two years preceding Justice Raye’s appointment as Administrative Presiding Justice. (People v. Petit [18 months from fully briefed to submission for decision; adding 112 days conduct credit after sentence completed]; People v. Garcia [14 months from fully briefed to submission for decision; striking 8-month sentence enhancement after sentence completed].) 19 with longer delays. In 2012–2013, Justice Raye authored 17 decisions in criminal appeals with lapses of 13 to 36 months from fully briefed to submission for decision. By 2018, in cases authored by Justice Raye and other Third District justices, the court was failing to accord calendar preference to dozens of criminal appeals annually, some with extraordinary delays. From 2018 to the present, at least 212 criminal appeals had lapses of 12 to 99 months from fully briefed to submission for decision. Each was calendared months or years after the calendaring of civil appeals that were fully briefed long after those criminal appeals were fully briefed.

Other Third District criminal appeals, however, have been accorded calendar preference. As of this writing, at least 66 fully briefed Third District criminal appeals have yet to be calendared, with lapses of 12 to 41 months from fully briefed to submission for decision. (Eisenberg 2 Petitioner determined the numbers of delayed criminal appeals recounted in this petition by manually reviewing online docket entries for some 20,000 Third District filings. Given the limitations of that methodology, the true numbers are likely higher. The Third District’s internal records can complete the picture. Meanwhile, the Third District continues to calendar civil appeals that have been fully briefed for as few as four to eight months. 

B. Calendar Preference Failures Have Prejudiced Many Defendants.

Each of the 278 delayed criminal appeals referenced in this petition exceeds the Harris threshold for the rebuttable presumption of prejudice from unconstitutional delay—more than two years from notice of appeal to filing of opinion, including more than 11 months after completion of briefing. In some of those cases, actual prejudice is demonstrated by the fact that the defendant had already served part or all of a reversed prison term or sentence enhancement by the time of adjudication. For example: This despite the fact that, according to the Third District’s clerk/executive officer, “‘tentative opinions have already been prepared’” in many of those cases.

The Third District has also failed to accord calendar preference to some probate appeals, as Code of Civil Procedure section 44 also requires. [docket entries for four probate appeals with 17 to 21 months from case fully briefed to submission for decision].)

• In People v. Kalac [16 months from fully briefed to submission for decision], the Third District struck a one-year sentence enhancement only after it had been served. The People had conceded the point from the outset.

• In People v. Speegle [53 months from fully briefed to dismissal of appeal], the Third District dismissed as moot the defendant’s appeal from an order denying his transfer out of Napa State Hospital for outpatient treatment—because he had completed his seven-year commitment pending the appeal. 

• In People v. Weathers [41 months from fully briefed to submission for decision], the Third District struck a partially served 10-year sentence enhancement. Again, the People had conceded the point. Weathers is especially noteworthy because, by contrast, in an almost simultaneously filed appeal presenting the same conceded issue, a different Third District panel ruled just 81 days after the concession, thus giving that defendant the benefit of the court’s decision.

• In People v. Wrobel [52 months from fully briefed to submission for decision], the Third District reversed a 44-month prison sentence and remanded for misdemeanor sentencing only after the defendant had completed the sentence.

• In People v. Johnson [24 months from fully briefed to submission for decision], the Third District struck an already served five-year sentence enhancement.

• In People v. Kent [78 months from fully briefed to submission for decision], the Third District struck an already served eight-month sentence enhancement.

The extraordinary delay in these cases, resulting in defendants having served part or all of a wrongly imposed sentence, is an egregious failure of the appellate process.

C. These Systemic Failures Were Presaged.

These systemic failures of calendar preference for Third District criminal appeals may lack bad intent, but they have effectively operated to implement a proposal the Legislature 23 rejected four decades ago—that in criminal cases there should be no absolute right of appeal at all, much less calendar preference. In 1979, this Court held that the Court of Appeal may not summarily affirm a criminal conviction without full briefing and the right to oral argument, as guaranteed by statute and the California Constitution. In 1981, Justice Raye, at the time Senior Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs, urged the Legislature to supersede Brigham, testifying in support of a bill the Attorney General’s office was sponsoring—Senate Bill No. 1197—which would have eliminated appeals as a matter of right in criminal cases and made criminal appellate review conditioned on the trial judge’s discretionary issuance of a “certificate of appeal.” The bill failed. Immediately before Justice Raye’s testimony, Court of Appeal Justice Winslow Christian testified in opposition to summary affirmance of criminal convictions and urged the Legislature not to alter the statutory calendar preference for criminal appeals, stating: “[T]hat’s a priority that I think is sound. It should not be changed.” Justice Raye then testified:

• “[W]e think there should be some limitation on the right to appeal in consideration of the fact that over 90 percent of criminal appeals result in affirmance and a substantial number of that 90 percent could be characterized as frivolous appeals.”

• Under proposed Senate Bill No. 1197, “[a]ppeal would be only by a certificate of appeal granted by a trial court… Another proposal that we’re considering is vesting discretion not with the trial court but with the court of appeal to decide whether an appeal, on its face, presents substantial issues that warrant consideration by a panel [of] the court of appeal … and the court of appeal would have discretion to refuse to entertain an appeal.”

• “We think this Committee should consider a procedure whereby our office on behalf of the people can move for [summary affirmance] of appeals filed with the court of appeal. We attempted to do this under existing law about three years ago and regrettably the Supreme Court ruled the procedure … improper as not being authorized and in fact being at odds with court rules and with statute … The case name is People v. Brigham.”

A month before this legislative hearing, Justice Raye wrote to members of the Senate opposing an ultimately successful bill to increase the number of Court of Appeal justices statewide. Justice Raye argued that “the more appropriate remedy is to curtail the filing of the frivolous appeal” and “[t]he Courts of Appeal must also become selective in the cases they hear.” During Justice Raye’s tenure as Administrative Presiding Justice, the Third District has only selectively complied with Code of Civil Procedure section 44, thus effectively undermining Brigham by withholding meaningful appellate review in many criminal appeals—sometimes with serious consequences.

IV. MANDATE LIES TO COMPEL STATUTORY COMPLIANCE.

This Court has original jurisdiction to adjudicate this petition. Under such jurisdiction, mandate lies to compel public entities and officers to perform ministerial duties. A ministerial duty may be created “either by statute or by constitutional compulsion.” “A ministerial act is an act that a public officer is required to perform in a prescribed manner in obedience to the mandate of legal authority and without regard to his own judgment or opinion concerning such act’s propriety or impropriety, when a 26 given state of facts exists.’” The statutory duty of appellate courts to accord calendar preference to every criminal appeal is plainly ministerial. The “act” they are “required to perform in a prescribed manner” is to put fully briefed criminal appeals on the next available calendar. The “given state of facts” (ibid.) is a criminal appeal having become fully briefed. Code of Civil Procedure section 44 affords no discretion “concerning such act’s propriety or impropriety.” The gravity of the Third District’s mismanagement of its criminal docket amply justifies exercise of this Court’s original jurisdiction to compel compliance with Code of Civil Procedure section 44. Expeditious restoration of statutorily mandated calendar preference for all Third District criminal appeals is essential to protect dozens of inmates currently facing irreparable injury—or the worsening of irreparable injury already suffered— from denial of their constitutional right to timely appellate review. 

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The California Supreme Court formally denied Eisenberg’s petition, but wrote: 

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We recommend that within 180 days of this order, the Judicial Council complete an investigation of alleged delays in the Third District Court of Appeal’s disposition of criminal appeals and, if appropriate, propose measures that the Judicial Council and the Court of Appeal should employ to address any problems that are identified.

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As a consequence of the investigation, three appellate judges resigned (see here, here, and here.)

June 2022 Election: Blog Endorsements

Back when hadaraviram.com was California Correctional Crisis, I used to offer election endorsements for your consideration, focusing on the criminal justice propositions. This election has offered a grim opportunity to contemplate the probable victory of two seasoned and experienced politicians, whose management of the COVID-19 crisis in prisons has reflected an astounding moral eclipse.

A while ago, I posted an endorsement against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recall. We were all experiencing collective distress over his reluctance to do anything useful to save lives behind bars from COVID. My reasoning was this: the rest of the ballot was a list of egomaniacal clowns with no political experience, many of whom could not even spell their statements. And, as I said there:

I’m not an idiot, and I do understand the concept of the lesser evil. If you are so warped in single-issue agitation that you can’t see the qualitative differences between Newsom–an experienced and capable politician–and the rest of the lot, you need better glasses.

I wrote that post in August. in November, we found out that Newsom, the champion of science-forward, vaccine-forward policies in schools and everywhere else, thinks that unvaccinated guards are a-ok, and goes as far as to support them in their (devastatingly) successful appeal against a vaccine mandate. It was one of the ugliest examples of justice delayed becoming justice denied, can easily be attributed to the fact that the prison guards contributed $1.75 million to his anti-recall campaign, and has disillusioned me. I’ve come a long way from cheering for the then-Mayor of San Francisco who spoke at my 2005 PhD ceremony, and I’m feeling so full of bitterness and bile over the unnecessary loss of life that, this time around, I offer no endorsement for the gubernatorial position. Vote for whoever you want; Newsom will likely win.

The other person to resent is Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is the darling of all the progressive voting guides. Bonta and his employees are the architects of the prison system’s defense against the COVID lawsuits, both regarding San Quentin and more generally in federal court. Their bad-faith in court appearances and representations, ugly games, and shocking lack of regard for human life has soured me on Bonta to the point that I make no endorsement, even though on paper he is the better candidate of the lot and will likely win. I explain my position in detail here. The short version is this: Bonta thinks that he works for us only when he legislates or creates policy, and that when his office litigates, he is the Tom Hagen of the prison guards. That’s an unacceptable perspective for a public servant.

I try not to be a one-issue voter, but having experienced the COVID-19 prison catastrophe up close it is very difficult to justify voting for Newsom and Bonta. Follow your conscience/calculus.

By contrast to these two, one public official shines as a person of profound understanding and conscientious behavior, and that is Phil Ting. I endorsed Phil’s assembly campaign in 2018 and am happy and proud to endorse him again; his conduct during the COVID-19 crisis was nothing short of exemplary. As Chair of the Assembly Budget Committee, Ting presided over a hearing in which, finally, Kathleen Allison was being asked hard questions about her policies and the way CDCR was handling itself. He has also been very sensitive to issues of parole and one of the only politicians with enough guts and public responsibility to realize that long-term aging prisoners are the best release prospects from both a medical and a public safety standpoint. Vote for him again.

There are two criminal justice issues on the ballot. One of them is the ridiculous Prop D, likely thrown into the ballot to add a prong to the Chesa Boudin recall effort by creating the (false!) impression that the D.A.’s office is not responsive to victims’ needs. There is a long tradition in CA of deceiving the voters to believe that there is a need for a victims’ bill of rights and services, when one has existed since 1982 (I explain all this in Chapter 3 of Yesterday’s Monsters.) Just like Marsy’s Law and other deceptive initiative tricks, this is money allocated to no good cause, creating duplicative services that already exist. The Chron is far too gentle on this. Don’t be swindled – vote NO on D.

Finally, speaking of swindling, you already know my position on the Boudin recall effort. There’s a well-oiled, well-funded machine here trying to roll back important reforms, and exploiting people’s exasperation at the misery and turmoil in town, which are NOT Boudin’s fault by a longshot. Don’t be deceived! Vote NO on H.