POT CLINICS & THE COLONIES & MIKE RAMOS

In today's news we have a picture of the twisted priorities in this County. First with the DA's office already being over budget, they are pushing the busting of medical marijuana clinics despite Californians having the right to use marijuana for appropriate (physician prescribed) medical reasons. This budgetary arrogance and lack of accountability should not be a surprise for a DA that has cost $140,000 in investigation costs due to his moral indiscretions with a woman on his staff (so far) . Secondly, in the article in the Sun on the 12th of April (on the purchase of the $6.4 million office building from a partnership the Colonies was a part of), the DA's office admits it was looking for more room (but was denied the proverbial room at the inn)--good thing for the County--we would have had a DA's office budget that overran a year earlier. The most incredible thing of all is that that WHEN the DA's office was denied the space it claimed it so desperately needed and the building was bought from the same principal that cost the County $102 million just a short time before, NO INVESTIGATION WAS DONE!! This DA by making the decisions and delaying the action on the Colonies has created a permissive environment of abuse and or waste. Such leadership we cannot afford!

The Death Penalty...Can we afford it??

To get an idea how big the death penalty business is, were the Governor to convert all 700 death sentences in California to permanent imprisonment, it would save the state $1 billion over the next five years and we would not have to build another $400,000 in new death row housing--maybe we could spend it on schools?? Hiring more DA support staff? How about budgeting better raises?? What says ya'll??

It’s not just the practice of the death penalty that is being undermined; it’s the theory as well. The American Law Institute — the brain trust of the legal community — withdrew its support for the death penalty, finding, among other things, that it “is plagued by racial disparities; is enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers are underpaid and some are incompetent; risks executing innocent people; and is undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.”

But California, oddly enough, has become a rogue state when it comes to death sentencing.

California accounted for 29 of those 106 death sentences in 2009, or 27 percent (more than double California’s share of the total U.S. population). The number is over 700 today. For all the forensic hormones that flow when talking about the death penalty, California has only executed 13 people since 1967. It takes more than 25 years for a case to move through all of the mandatory appeals. All executions have been on hold for four years as a result of legal challenges. We don’t have enough lawyers and judges to handle 700 death sentences. Half the people on death row don’t have an attorney, and the Supreme Court already spends almost one-third of its time on death penalty cases.

The system is simply overwhelmed, overburdened and overdue for change. California’s death penalty process is broken--should a District Attorney continue to pump more death penalty cases in?

Meanwhile, the state is spending hundreds of millions of precious dollars trying to prop the failed system up. Housing for just one person on death row costs $90,000 more per year than housing in the general prison population (itself a hefty $50,000 a year). That means we are now paying an extra $63 million a year for death row housing.

The Governor is right: we need to spend more money on education and less on prisons to bring back the safe, healthy and sustainable California we all dream of. One necessary step is to really look at the cases being approved for death penalty tracking.

Your thoughts??

Bob Conaway-Candidate for San Bernardino County District Attorney