California Senate Bill 94 “will allow killers serving life sentences without parole to request a re-sentencing,” notes a conservative web site.
It passed the state senate with strong Democratic support, by a 22-to-12 vote, with Republicans voting against the bill. It has now passed the relevant House committees along party lines, with strong Democratic support, and now “heads for the floor for a full vote by the California assembly. It includes all serious crimes including murder. If the offense occurred before June 5, 1990 and they’ve served 25 years, they can ask for a reduced sentence.” The only exception is
for first degree murder of a police officer. In New York they keep releasing cop killers.
GOP Assemblyman Bill Essayli said that people sentenced for heinous crimes should serve their full prison term.
“Killing two individuals with aggravating circumstances isn’t enough to justify a LWOP sentence? Being an accomplice to a mass murderer isn’t?,” he asked. “Killing a peace officer is sufficiently heinous, but killing a firefighter or other public official isn’t? These exclusions are purely political.”
“LWOP sentences are promises to the victim’s families that they need never fear the person will be let out of prison,” Essayli added. “This will permit a large percentage of LWOP offenders to be re-sentenced to standard first-degree murder and eligible for parole immediately.”
Bills in New York’s Democratic-controlled legislature seek to expand parole even after paroled inmates committed more murders and rapes. Last year, a transgender murderer was arrested for killing again in New York at age 83 after two prior murder convictions. Thus, it’s wrong to claim that inmates swiftly age of out of crime, or that inmates can safely be released just because they have reached a particular age, as supporters of New York’s Elder Parole bill claim.
Advocates of decarceration falsely claim people age out of crime after ten or fifteen years, and thus should be released. The sponsor of California’s Senate Bill 94, Senator Dave Cortese (D), mistakenly claims that “research overwhelmingly shows that people age out of violent crime.” Similarly, the George Soros-funded Law Enforcement Action Partnership claimed to the Virginia legislature that if “people entered prison over a decade ago,” “their continued incarceration does very little, if anything, to maintain safety.” It made that claim in support of a bill, SB 378, that would have allowed inmates to seek release after 10 or 15 years regardless of what crime they had committed. Another supporter of the bill claimed that “people age out of crime by their late thirty’s [sic].”
Returning to crime after being released is typical for inmates, according to a 2022 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. It documented that problem in a 116-page report titled “Recidivism of Federal Violent Offenders Released in 2010.” Over an eight-year period, violent offenders returned to crime at a 63.8% rate. The median time to rearrest was 16 months for these violent offenders. So, most violent offenders released from prison committed more crimes. Even among those offenders over age 60, 25.1% of violent offenders were rearrested for committing new crimes.
There are many examples of killers murdering people yet again after being paroled. One example is Kenneth McDuff, the “broomstick killer.” At the age of 19, after being paroled, McDuff and an accomplice kidnapped three teenagers. He shot and killed two boys, then killed a girl after raping her and torturing her with burns and a broomstick. Later, after being paroled yet again, he murdered additional women — as many as 15 women in several different states.
Some murderers continue to kill even at an advanced age. At the age of 76, Albert Flick killed a woman, stabbing her at least 11 times while her twin sons watched. He had previously been imprisoned from 1979 to 2004 for killing his wife by stabbing her 14 times in front of her daughter.
By making penalties for the most horrific crimes more lenient, the California legislation will result in increased numbers of killings. Harsher penalties discourage crime. Crime in California fell significantly after California voters adopted Proposition 8, which mandated longer sentences for repeat offenders who kill, rape, and rob others. A study found those longer sentences deterred many crimes from being committed. Similarly, a 2008 Santa Clara University study found that longer sentences for three-time offenders led to “significantly faster rates of decline in robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.”
In addition to deterring crimes by people outside of prison, longer sentences also keep dangerous people locked up so they can’t harm law-abiding people. Killings have increased in Baltimore, where most killings are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but who are no longer in jail due to their past lenient sentence.
Shorter sentences also make inmates more likely to reoffend and commit more crimes. As Michael Rushford noted in the Washington Post, “an exhaustive, decade-long study released in June by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, tracking more than 32,000 federal offenders released from prison in 2010, found that offenders released after serving more than 10 years were 29 percent less likely to be arrested for a new crime than those who served shorter sentences. Offenders who served more than five years were 18 percent less likely to be arrested for new crimes compared to a matched group serving shorter sentences.” Similarly, juveniles reoffended more often in New York after juvenile punishments were reduced.
