He wrote that the law would require the court to conduct “quasi-appellate review” of a person’s conviction or force the prosecution to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, “in this case, a quarter of a century after the crime was committed and the final judgment entered.”
Furthermore, in a case like Palmer’s involving a plea bargain, there is no trial record for prosecutors to go on, Covello wrote. As such, they can’t prove whether Palmer actually participated in the killing, was the mastermind, supplied the murder weapon or had intent to injure or kill.
“These facts (or lack thereof) illustrate that (the petition process does) not merely touch ‘incidentally’ on the powers of the court,” Covello wrote. “When a legislature mandates a court to set aside a lawful plea bargain, vacate a 27-year-old judgment, re-adjudicate that controversy under an entirely different legal standard, and then further mandates an unconstitutional process for that re-adjudication, they have arrogated unto themselves the core functions of the court, and materially impaired the proper functioning of the judicial branch of government.”
He added: “If this is not a legislative encroachment upon the authority of the judicial branch in violation of the separation of powers clause of the California Constitution, this court can think of no legislative action that would constitute such an encroachment.”
Kraut said Wednesday that Palmer and his family are very disappointed at the denial of Palmer’s petition but they respect the judge’s ruling.
Kraut added that he intended to file Palmer’s appeal Wednesday afternoon.
Hearings for remaining murder petition cases will continue to be heard throughout the coming months.
Date of this piece was JULY 03, 2019 Hope this is of interest, have a good day, Julia
A case list provided by the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office showed that, as of Wednesday, 18 people had petitioned for re-sentencing in the county, including two men who have already been separately paroled.
In April and May, Superior Court Judges Jacquelyn Duffy and Craig van Rooyen — who, like Covello, are former prosecutors with the local DA’s Office — heard arguments in six cases and were the first to weigh in, finding the law constitutional. In the case of 50-year-old Gerardo Estrada, sentenced to 25 years to life for a 1986 burglary and assault that resulted in the death of an 84-year-old man, van Rooyen called the matter a “complicated issue,” but found that the new law does not prohibit anything authorized by ballot initiatives passed by voters, and that past initiatives did not “freeze” state law related to murder with those initiatives. In addition to those six cases, two petitions were denied because the judge found the men were the actual killers, and Judge Dodie Harman is expected to make a ruling in three other cases July 10.
One of the 18 petitions was received Tuesday, Dobroth said, but the status of the remaining cases were not immediately available Wednesday.
‘LEGISLATIVE ENCROACHMENT’
But Covello had a different take in his ruling in John Palmer’s case. John Louise Palmer was 17 years old when he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1992 for the fatal stabbing of his grandmother, 67-year-old Roxana O’Grady, during a burglary at O’Grady’s Cayucos farmhouse on Toro Creek Road. Palmer and a co-defendant testified that they were burglarizing the house when a third member of their group, 38-year-old transient Frank Krafick, stabbed O’Grady and injured 67-year-old James Negranti, 76, who survived but later died from unrelated health problems.
Palmer, now 44, was sentenced to 15 years to life and was serving time at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione before being transferred to California Men’s Colony to be near local proceedings.
Matthew Kraut, Palmer’s defense attorney who until May 2018 had worked as a prosecutor with the DA’s Office for 20 years, argued in court documents that there was an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that Palmer did not kill his grandmother nor have any reason to believe Krafik would become violent.
Taking on the District Attorney’s argument, Kraut wrote that SB 1437 in no way changes punishments enacted by propositions 7 and 115.
“Simply put, the punishment for murder conviction remains unchanged by the passage of Senate Bill 1437,” Kraut wrote.
But Covello wrote in his ruling that the law does violate the will of the voters in propositions 7 and 115 and the state’s separation of powers by allowing the legislature to interfere with the judiciary.
(Former Sen. Anderson is a San Diego County Republican)
https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/crime/article232155267.html Law that could free accomplices of murder ruled unconstitutional by SLO judge
A San Luis Obispo judge has ruled that a new law that could free hundreds of people convicted of murders they didn’t personally commit flies in the face of past voter initiatives and is unconstitutional.
Superior Court Judge Tim Covello made his ruling June 27 in two cases, including a 28-year-old murder case, and is the first local judge to agree with the District Attorney’s Office’s opposition to petitions for re-sentencing from more than a dozen people convicted of murder in San Luis Obispo County.
Despite Covello’s ruling, two other local judges have already deemed the new law constitutional in nearly half of 18 local cases. Those cases will continue forward on their merits later this month.
Though people across the state have already been released under the law, the District Attorney’s Office and several local attorneys involved in local cases say the local judicial split is representative of county courthouses across the state.
Though Assistant District Attorney Eric Dobroth said Wednesday the path forward isn’t immediately clear, the matter will most certainly end up before the California Supreme Court.
WHAT IS SB 1437? Former Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1437 last September, limiting prosecutors’ ability to use a so-called “felony murder rule” to charge accomplices to a homicide.
Prior California law said someone could be held criminally liable for first- or second-degree murder if a person died during a felony they committed, such as a burglary or a robbery, even if the defendant was not present for the actual death. Under SB 1437, a person can be convicted of murder only if he or she “was the actual killer” or “aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, solicited, requested or assisted the actual killer” or “was a major participant in the underlying felony and acted with reckless indifference to human life.”
While some chose not to oppose the new law, many District Attorneys offices across the state have been challenging the petitions in local courts on the grounds that the law is unconstitutional because it goes against the will of the voters from 1978’s Proposition 7, which increased penalties for murder, and 1990’s Proposition 115, which added crimes applicable to a murder charge.
Local prosecutors argued in past hearings that the petition process violates the state’s separation of powers — with the legislature encroaching upon the judiciary — and Marsy’s Law, which created a victims’ bill of rights to prevent unnecessary suffering on the part of victims and their families.
Are the actual killer. Aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, solicited, requested, or assisted the actual killer with the intent to kill. Were a major participant in the underlying crime and acted with reckless indifference to life. And so it’s been disappointing to see some of California’s district attorneys now working to block the law’s implementation. They remain intent on pursuing murder convictions for people not guilty of that crime, despite the fact that it’s not in the interest of public safety nor is it just.
Yet they have challenged SB 1437 in court arguing it’s unconstitutional on the grounds that it’s allegedly inconsistent with two ballot initiatives California voters passed decades ago.
Before introducing SB 1437, we spent over a year carefully reviewing past statutes, court decisions, and, yes, voter-approved ballot initiatives, to ensure that the provisions in SB 1437 did not overstep our role.
SB 1437 falls squarely within the Legislature’s broad authority to make policy.
Prosecutors have also challenged SB 1437 in the press with mischaracterizations. The president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County, for example, recently told The New York Times that under SB 1437, “We’re literally talking about letting murderers go free.”
That’s a false claim designed to stoke fear.
Thankfully, many prosecutors have properly applied the law, and courts around the state have upheld the reform as constitutional. As a result, many deserving people have been able to go home—some after serving decades in prison for murders they did not commit.
It’s not just those newly freed and their families who have recognized the justice served in these cases. In San Luis Obispo County, after a judge found SB 1437 constitutional, a reporter went to the parents of the victim.
They said that while they still endure the pain of their son’s death, it did not justify an unfair sentence: “It certainly wouldn’t bring closure to me to see him punished as if he were the murderer,” the parent of one murder victim was quoted as saying
SB 1437 is a just and overdue reform. We’re confident that California’s courts will uphold it.
Hi Donnie, thank you for your letter of 22 july. I am aware that it takes a long time to respond even if you write the same day, as you did apparently. Nice thing is that meanwhile I totally forget about it and then it is a nice surprise to find my name at the head of an entry :) Sorry to hear that it does not go without a fight, this Senate Bill 1437. Just looked it up and found some stuff again:
PUBLISHED: JULY 1, 2019 https://calmatters.org/commentary/felony-murder-reform/ Prosecutors should stop the scare tactics. Reforming felony murder rule improves our justice system by Nancy Skinner and Joel Anderson
In January, California ended a decades-old legal doctrine that put numerous people behind bars for murders they did not commit.
Yet six months after the new state law—Senate Bill 1437—took effect, some prosecutors are trying to overturn it, resorting to scare tactics and false distortions.
We are the legislators who wrote and supported this critical reform, and we need to set the record straight about it.
SB 1437 passed the Legislature last year with bipartisan support and was signed into law by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. It reformed California’s outdated and unfair felony murder rule, which had allowed people who did not kill to nonetheless be charged, convicted, and sentenced as murderers.
The old felony murder doctrine allowed prosecutors to charge all accomplices to a crime with first degree murder. It did not matter if there was no intention to kill, if the death was accidental, or if the accomplice had no knowledge that someone else would kill. Everyone was just as responsible, as if they had planned and committed the murder themselves.
The California Supreme Court, in a 1983 ruling, termed the state’s felony murder rule “barbaric.” And yet it remained on the books, and people were unfairly sentenced to long prison terms under this law.
We studied this issue for over a year before passing Senate Concurrent Resolution 48 in 2017. That measure recognized “the need for statutory changes to more equitably sentence offenders in accordance with their involvement in a crime.”
Then in the following legislative session we introduced SB 1437 to correct what we concluded was a grave and needless injustice.
As SB 1437 moved through the legislative process, we made significant improvements to ensure it was fair and that our reform did not let people who are responsible for a murder off the hook.
Based on input from district attorneys and other public safety advocates, we amended SB 1437 to ensure that a criminal was held accountable for murder if they:
Thanks so much for writing! I finished the transcription for your post. Those were very moving, profound lyrics and appreciated getting to transcribe them. God bless.
I am a post-editor 4 the WRITE OR DIE ZINE Facebook page. Our Facebook page was started by California Death Row inmate authors such as yourself, and thier BtB (between the bars.org) group blog "Papyrus Collective" is the only group blog on BtB.
YOU are one of only a few Death Row inmates on the BtB website, and we're looking for those of you who would like 2 join our group of Death Row post-editors here on Facebook. Anything about you or your blog, you can share on the Facebook page. we can send out invites and have your people to follow your post on Facebook as well. Each post is linked back to your Blog post on BtB. Our prisoner support group also provide some Digital Media resources as well.
If you are interested send a REPLY to this post. Include your photo, icon, or Avatar you want to include with your Facebook post, as well as any other images or artwork. We will create a Facebook photo album for those images and either make it public or keep it private to use in your Facebook posts.
.Get at me if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you.
Dear Robert, I am glad the sending of poems was a happy surprise. And I just found one by the same author the he made just for you:
WEATHER FORECAST - Poem by Toon Tellegen Tomorrow we will see unsettled and unusual weather. Instead of the sun rising at 05:24, a dog will rise, a fiery red dog that will climb up through the sky, wearing an iron chain round its neck, and it will growl at the clouds that will hastily make room for him. At 13:37 he will be at the zenith and bark, he'll bend forward and chase everyone inside with his furious scowl. ‘The dog is shining! The dog is shining!' everyone will whisper, but the dog won't shine, the dog will yank at his chain and bare his teeth. Late in the afternoon he will descend to the horizon and howl. Everyone will emerge again, sit down on their benches outside their houses and say: ‘O dog, why are you howling . . . ' People will want to pat him and console him or give him something to eat. But no one will be able to reach him and everyone will close their eyes and let the howling wash over them. At 21:51 the dog will go down and never return. The day after tomorrow the sun will shine again, that big, round, dazzling thing that everyone knows, the most ordinary thing in the whole cosmos, that had already existed for billions of years before there was any mention of a sky or a firmament, and that does nothing but rise, set and shine. It will be a pleasant day. But should you wonder, the day after tomorrow, why you're so sad, it will be because you miss the dog, the dog that will appear in the sky tomorrow.
Hey Donnie, This pink haired chic needs you to send me your address. I told ya what was supposed to get for that B.S. It is kinda sorta a better deal than I thought. I kept all your letters I just need to find them. I will explain more via snail mail.
RSS
Furthermore, in a case like Palmer’s involving a plea bargain, there is no trial record for prosecutors to go on, Covello wrote. As such, they can’t prove whether Palmer actually participated in the killing, was the mastermind, supplied the murder weapon or had intent to injure or kill.
“These facts (or lack thereof) illustrate that (the petition process does) not merely touch ‘incidentally’ on the powers of the court,” Covello wrote. “When a legislature mandates a court to set aside a lawful plea bargain, vacate a 27-year-old judgment, re-adjudicate that controversy under an entirely different legal standard, and then further mandates an unconstitutional process for that re-adjudication, they have arrogated unto themselves the core functions of the court, and materially impaired the proper functioning of the judicial branch of government.”
He added: “If this is not a legislative encroachment upon the authority of the judicial branch in violation of the separation of powers clause of the California Constitution, this court can think of no legislative action that would constitute such an encroachment.”
Kraut said Wednesday that Palmer and his family are very disappointed at the denial of Palmer’s petition but they respect the judge’s ruling.
Kraut added that he intended to file Palmer’s appeal Wednesday afternoon.
Hearings for remaining murder petition cases will continue to be heard throughout the coming months.
Date of this piece was JULY 03, 2019
Hope this is of interest, have a good day, Julia
In April and May, Superior Court Judges Jacquelyn Duffy and Craig van Rooyen — who, like Covello, are former prosecutors with the local DA’s Office — heard arguments in six cases and were the first to weigh in, finding the law constitutional.
In the case of 50-year-old Gerardo Estrada, sentenced to 25 years to life for a 1986 burglary and assault that resulted in the death of an 84-year-old man, van Rooyen called the matter a “complicated issue,” but found that the new law does not prohibit anything authorized by ballot initiatives passed by voters, and that past initiatives did not “freeze” state law related to murder with those initiatives.
In addition to those six cases, two petitions were denied because the judge found the men were the actual killers, and Judge Dodie Harman is expected to make a ruling in three other cases July 10.
One of the 18 petitions was received Tuesday, Dobroth said, but the status of the remaining cases were not immediately available Wednesday.
‘LEGISLATIVE ENCROACHMENT’
But Covello had a different take in his ruling in John Palmer’s case.
John Louise Palmer was 17 years old when he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1992 for the fatal stabbing of his grandmother, 67-year-old Roxana O’Grady, during a burglary at O’Grady’s Cayucos farmhouse on Toro Creek Road.
Palmer and a co-defendant testified that they were burglarizing the house when a third member of their group, 38-year-old transient Frank Krafick, stabbed O’Grady and injured 67-year-old James Negranti, 76, who survived but later died from unrelated health problems.
Palmer, now 44, was sentenced to 15 years to life and was serving time at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione before being transferred to California Men’s Colony to be near local proceedings.
Matthew Kraut, Palmer’s defense attorney who until May 2018 had worked as a prosecutor with the DA’s Office for 20 years, argued in court documents that there was an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that Palmer did not kill his grandmother nor have any reason to believe Krafik would become violent.
Taking on the District Attorney’s argument, Kraut wrote that SB 1437 in no way changes punishments enacted by propositions 7 and 115.
“Simply put, the punishment for murder conviction remains unchanged by the passage of Senate Bill 1437,” Kraut wrote.
But Covello wrote in his ruling that the law does violate the will of the voters in propositions 7 and 115 and the state’s separation of powers by allowing the legislature to interfere with the judiciary.
https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/crime/article232155267.html
Law that could free accomplices of murder ruled unconstitutional by SLO judge
A San Luis Obispo judge has ruled that a new law that could free hundreds of people convicted of murders they didn’t personally commit flies in the face of past voter initiatives and is unconstitutional.
Superior Court Judge Tim Covello made his ruling June 27 in two cases, including a 28-year-old murder case, and is the first local judge to agree with the District Attorney’s Office’s opposition to petitions for re-sentencing from more than a dozen people convicted of murder in San Luis Obispo County.
Despite Covello’s ruling, two other local judges have already deemed the new law constitutional in nearly half of 18 local cases. Those cases will continue forward on their merits later this month.
Though people across the state have already been released under the law, the District Attorney’s Office and several local attorneys involved in local cases say the local judicial split is representative of county courthouses across the state.
Though Assistant District Attorney Eric Dobroth said Wednesday the path forward isn’t immediately clear, the matter will most certainly end up before the California Supreme Court.
WHAT IS SB 1437?
Former Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1437 last September, limiting prosecutors’ ability to use a so-called “felony murder rule” to charge accomplices to a homicide.
Prior California law said someone could be held criminally liable for first- or second-degree murder if a person died during a felony they committed, such as a burglary or a robbery, even if the defendant was not present for the actual death.
Under SB 1437, a person can be convicted of murder only if he or she “was the actual killer” or “aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, solicited, requested or assisted the actual killer” or “was a major participant in the underlying felony and acted with reckless indifference to human life.”
While some chose not to oppose the new law, many District Attorneys offices across the state have been challenging the petitions in local courts on the grounds that the law is unconstitutional because it goes against the will of the voters from 1978’s Proposition 7, which increased penalties for murder, and 1990’s Proposition 115, which added crimes applicable to a murder charge.
Local prosecutors argued in past hearings that the petition process violates the state’s separation of powers — with the legislature encroaching upon the judiciary — and Marsy’s Law, which created a victims’ bill of rights to prevent unnecessary suffering on the part of victims and their families.
Aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, solicited, requested, or assisted the actual killer with the intent to kill.
Were a major participant in the underlying crime and acted with reckless indifference to life.
And so it’s been disappointing to see some of California’s district attorneys now working to block the law’s implementation. They remain intent on pursuing murder convictions for people not guilty of that crime, despite the fact that it’s not in the interest of public safety nor is it just.
Yet they have challenged SB 1437 in court arguing it’s unconstitutional on the grounds that it’s allegedly inconsistent with two ballot initiatives California voters passed decades ago.
Before introducing SB 1437, we spent over a year carefully reviewing past statutes, court decisions, and, yes, voter-approved ballot initiatives, to ensure that the provisions in SB 1437 did not overstep our role.
SB 1437 falls squarely within the Legislature’s broad authority to make policy.
Prosecutors have also challenged SB 1437 in the press with mischaracterizations. The president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County, for example, recently told The New York Times that under SB 1437, “We’re literally talking about letting murderers go free.”
That’s a false claim designed to stoke fear.
Thankfully, many prosecutors have properly applied the law, and courts around the state have upheld the reform as constitutional. As a result, many deserving people have been able to go home—some after serving decades in prison for murders they did not commit.
It’s not just those newly freed and their families who have recognized the justice served in these cases. In San Luis Obispo County, after a judge found SB 1437 constitutional, a reporter went to the parents of the victim.
They said that while they still endure the pain of their son’s death, it did not justify an unfair sentence: “It certainly wouldn’t bring closure to me to see him punished as if he were the murderer,” the parent of one murder victim was quoted as saying
SB 1437 is a just and overdue reform. We’re confident that California’s courts will uphold it.
(Sen. Nancy Skinner is a Berkeley Democrat)
thank you for your letter of 22 july. I am aware that it takes a long time to respond even if you write the same day, as you did apparently. Nice thing is that meanwhile I totally forget about it and then it is a nice surprise to find my name at the head of an entry :)
Sorry to hear that it does not go without a fight, this Senate Bill 1437. Just looked it up and found some stuff again:
PUBLISHED: JULY 1, 2019
https://calmatters.org/commentary/felony-murder-reform/
Prosecutors should stop the scare tactics. Reforming felony murder rule improves our justice system
by Nancy Skinner and Joel Anderson
In January, California ended a decades-old legal doctrine that put numerous people behind bars for murders they did not commit.
Yet six months after the new state law—Senate Bill 1437—took effect, some prosecutors are trying to overturn it, resorting to scare tactics and false distortions.
We are the legislators who wrote and supported this critical reform, and we need to set the record straight about it.
SB 1437 passed the Legislature last year with bipartisan support and was signed into law by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. It reformed California’s outdated and unfair felony murder rule, which had allowed people who did not kill to nonetheless be charged, convicted, and sentenced as murderers.
The old felony murder doctrine allowed prosecutors to charge all accomplices to a crime with first degree murder. It did not matter if there was no intention to kill, if the death was accidental, or if the accomplice had no knowledge that someone else would kill. Everyone was just as responsible, as if they had planned and committed the murder themselves.
The California Supreme Court, in a 1983 ruling, termed the state’s felony murder rule “barbaric.” And yet it remained on the books, and people were unfairly sentenced to long prison terms under this law.
We studied this issue for over a year before passing Senate Concurrent Resolution 48 in 2017. That measure recognized “the need for statutory changes to more equitably sentence offenders in accordance with their involvement in a crime.”
Then in the following legislative session we introduced SB 1437 to correct what we concluded was a grave and needless injustice.
As SB 1437 moved through the legislative process, we made significant improvements to ensure it was fair and that our reform did not let people who are responsible for a murder off the hook.
Based on input from district attorneys and other public safety advocates, we amended SB 1437 to ensure that a criminal was held accountable for murder if they:
YOU are one of only a few Death Row inmates on the BtB website, and we're looking for those of you who would like 2 join our group of Death Row post-editors here on Facebook. Anything about you or your blog, you can share on the Facebook page. we can send out invites and have your people to follow your post on Facebook as well. Each post is linked back to your Blog post on BtB. Our prisoner support group also provide some Digital Media resources as well.
If you are interested send a REPLY to this post. Include your photo, icon, or Avatar you want to include with your Facebook post, as well as any other images or artwork. We will create a Facebook photo album for those images and either make it public or keep it private to use in your Facebook posts.
.Get at me if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you.
www.Facebook.com/writeordiezine
I am glad the sending of poems was a happy surprise. And I just found one by the same author the he made just for you:
WEATHER FORECAST - Poem by Toon Tellegen
Tomorrow we will see unsettled and unusual weather.
Instead of the sun rising at 05:24, a dog will rise,
a fiery red dog that will climb up through the sky,
wearing an iron chain round its neck,
and it will growl at the clouds
that will hastily make room for him.
At 13:37 he will be at the zenith and bark,
he'll bend forward and chase everyone inside
with his furious scowl.
‘The dog is shining! The dog is shining!' everyone will whisper,
but the dog won't shine, the dog will yank at his chain
and bare his teeth.
Late in the afternoon he will descend to the horizon and howl.
Everyone will emerge again,
sit down on their benches outside their houses and say:
‘O dog, why are you howling . . . '
People will want to pat him and console him
or give him something to eat.
But no one will be able to reach him
and everyone will close their eyes and let the howling
wash over them.
At 21:51 the dog will go down and never return.
The day after tomorrow the sun will shine again,
that big, round, dazzling thing that everyone knows,
the most ordinary thing in the whole cosmos,
that had already existed for billions of years before there was any mention
of a sky or a firmament,
and that does nothing but rise, set and shine.
It will be a pleasant day.
But should you wonder, the day after tomorrow, why you're so sad,
it will be because you miss the dog,
the dog that will appear in the sky tomorrow.
Warm greetings,
Julia
This pink haired chic needs you to send me your address.
I told ya what was supposed to get for that B.S. It is kinda sorta a better deal than I thought. I kept all your letters I just need to find them. I will explain more via snail mail.
Have it good
~Pinky