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  1. #1
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Supreme Court: California must continue prisoner release

    Supreme Court: California must continue prisoner release

    Richard Wolf, USA TODAY 3:51 p.m. EDT August 2, 2013


    Inmates sit in crowded conditions at California State Prison in Los Angeles in a 2007 photo released by the state.(Photo: AP)

    WASHINGTON -- A divided Supreme Court ruled Friday that California must proceed with the release of nearly 10,000 prisoners from its overcrowded prison system.

    In a ruling by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's lone Californian, the justices refused to grant the state a reprieve based on progress on prison overcrowding.
    The high court had ruled in May 2011 that conditions in the state's prisons violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
    At that time, Justice Antonin Scalia penned a vicious dissent, warning of murders and rapes to come as a result of the court-ordered prisoner release. Scalia, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented from Friday's ruling as well.
    "California must now release upon the public nearly 10,000 inmates convicted of serious crimes," Alito wrote, "about 1,000 for every city larger than Santa Ana."
    The case dates back several years to a federal court panel's decision that required the state to shed some 30,000 prisoners. Even that reduction would have left 110,000 people in state prisons, still 37% above capacity.
    When the high court ruled in 2011, it gave the state two years to comply. Having made progress toward the goal, the state asked for a stay of the ruling -- and the court refused. Kennedy's ruling came without explanation.
    Scalia, however, penned a three-page dissent decrying both the court's original decision and its refusal to reverse it now. While the court held out hope for the state two years ago, he said, it refused to follow through on its offer of possible revisions.
    "It appears to have become a standard ploy, when this court vastly expands the Power of the Black Robe, to hint at limitations that make it seem not so bad," Scalia wrote. "Comes the moment of truth, the hinted-at limitation proves a sham."
    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/02/supreme-court-california-10000-prisoners-release/2613283/
    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


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  2. #2
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    Supreme Court orders California to free thousands from crowded prisons

    Rich Pedroncelli / AP file
    An inmate at Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center in Elk Grove, Calif., in May. California is under a court order to reduce prison crowding by tens of thousands.

    By M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer, NBC News

    The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to let California delay the release of thousands of inmates from state prisons to relieve crowding.

    In June, a lower court ordered California to release about 10,000 inmates — nearly 8 percent of all state prisoners — by the end of the year to improve to improve medical and mental health treatment. Gov. Jerry Brown last month asked the Supreme Court to delay the order, arguing that it would jeopardize public safety.

    Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, strongly dissented with the high court's 6-3 one-sentence order Friday, predicting a wave of murders and rapes in the streets of California. Justice Clarence Thomas also disagreed but didn't join Scalia's dissent.

    Brown also blasted the decision Friday, saying, "California must now release upon the public nearly 10,000 inmates convicted of serious crimes, about 1,000 for every city larger than Santa Ana."

    Rich Pedroncelli / AP file
    California Gov. Jerry Brown, pictured at a news conference in Sacramento in January, called the Supreme Court's order dangerous Friday.

    The legal issue was Brown's request for a stay of a ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for Northern California ordering the state to release about 9,600 inmates in the short term as part of larger proceedings requiring it to reduce its prison population by about 30,000.

    The state argued that it had made "meaningful progress" by transferring thousands of "low-risk" inmates to county and local jails. Scalia and Alito agreed with that argument.

    Mike Bien, a lawyer representing inmates in the case, told Capital Public Radio of Sacramento that the decision was significant because it appeared that Brown was gambling everything on his request for a stay.

    "They raised all their arguments," he said. "They filed hundreds of pages of documents. They used specially hired Supreme Court counsel at over a thousand dollars an hour to raise these arguments."

    Even though the ruling was issued without explanation, Scalia managed to find that it came "at the expense of intellectual bankruptcy," writing in a blistering dissent (.pdf) that it was "nothing more than a ceremonial washing of the hands — making it clear for all to see, that if the terrible things sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order do happen, they will be none of this Court's responsibility."

    The state had already taken steps to start moving some inmates out of state, releasing more low-risk inmates and expanding parole programs — actions it said it was taking under protest.

    http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013...d-prisons?lite


    The deportation had better begin!

  3. #3
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    CA. should send all 10,000 inmates to D.C.
    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


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