![]() ![]() When there’s too much voter pushback, you lose.Sans Catches Papyrus & Frisk "Fighting" Comic Dub (Ft. Like baseball, politics basically is a simple game. That’s why legislators got the pushback.” “It’s unfathomable to me that in California we don’t call trafficking of children a serious felony,” says retired Alameda County Dist. But that’s often difficult to prove, the bill’s advocates contend. Jones-Sawyer also notes that sex traffickers of minors already can receive sentences of 15 years to life if there’s force, coercion or violence. “Forty senators didn’t think it needed more amendments,” she says. Grove told me she has amended the bill enough. But he says it still needs an amendment to assure that victims forced to help traffickers aren’t subject to the stiffer sentences. Jones-Sawyer voted for the measure the second time. In a meeting that lasted only an eyelash, the panel voted 6 to 0 to resurrect the bill and send it to the Appropriations Committee. The Public Safety Committee quickly backpedaled. At a Democratic caucus meeting, Rivas declared that the embarrassing situation needed to be fixed. And he phoned Rivas to urge that the speaker intervene. The governor called Grove to express his disappointment. “In the current Legislature,” he asserts, “victims’ issues don’t matter.” “This bill was an easy one.”īefore being elected sheriff, Cooper was a moderate Democratic assemblyman who tried to push several crime bills and, he says, couldn’t even get a committee hearing. “Some of these folks, their moral compass is off base,” Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper told me, referring to his former colleagues in the Legislature. “Voters get outraged when the pendulum swings too far the other way and politicians become too lenient. “Felony stupid,” says Democratic political consultant Steve Maviglio. The bill needed five “yes” votes to move on and received only two from the panel’s lone Republicans. But now what you see is a survivor.”ĭemocratic committee members were not swayed. Then I started being made to have sex with a grown man, then … with a lot of quote-unquote ‘uncles.’ Then I was trafficked to the highest bidder - drug dealers. Perkins, who is Black, testified that she was victimized beginning as a small child: “Being touched, groomed. Traffickers are getting out of jail early and reoffending, continuing the horrific cycle of abuse and depravity.” “But I am here to say I was molested and raped repeatedly by Black and white men and even some women. “I’ve heard the opposition about Black Californians being disproportionately harmed by three strikes,” Odessa Perkins of Bakersfield told the Assembly committee last week. They fly the flag of criminal justice reform, refusing to accept the notion that reform can be achieved while still acknowledging - for example - that career pimps should pay a higher price for their evil and not be free to prey on children. Opponents of stiffer sentencing tend to be inflexibly adhered to the principle that increased prison time is wrong because it can overcrowd the lockups - and do so disproportionately with people of color. Another for fentanyl dealers if the user is seriously injured by the drug. Recent examples: A measure increasing the penalty for raping a developmentally disabled minor. And that’s where the bill appeared to die until the chairman, Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), got a wake-up call from Newsom, Rivas and many angry voters.įor years, that committee has been a deathbed for sentence-stiffening bills. Next stop: The Assembly Public Safety Committee. Originally, she wanted to apply the stiffer sentences to all sex trafficking, regardless of the victims’ ages. Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield), compromised with Democrats and amended the bill to apply only to trafficking of kids under 18. That was made possible because the author, Sen. ![]() The measure was placed on what’s called the “consent calendar,” the soft landing place for bipartisan bills that are so noncontroversial dozens are routinely passed simultaneously en masse. In fact, both parties agreed not to even bother with a floor debate and roll-call vote. The bill was such a no-brainer that all 40 senators voted for it. The significance of labeling a felony “serious” is that it subjects the criminal to California’s “three strikes” law, which can substantially lengthen prison time for repeat offenders. SB 14 would officially designate it as “serious” when children are peddled. Sex trafficking now is considered a non-serious felony. ![]()
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