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
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