Under new criminal-justice reform bills that aim to make punishment better fit the crime, fewer teens and criminal accomplices will spend their adult lives in prison.
But the landmark legislation — part of a movement to shrink California’s incarcerated population and boost rehabilitation — also appears to have widened the chasm between reform advocates and law enforcement who fear that the bills signed by Gov. Jerry Brown over the weekend in his final legislative session will hamstring their efforts to keep dangerous criminals off the street.
SB 1391 bars 14- and 15-year-old offenders from being charged in adult court, which would prevent them from going to adult prison. A related bill, SB 439, would bar anyone under the age of 12 from being criminally prosecuted in the state except in murder and rape cases.
Homicide investigations and prosecutions also are likely to be handled differently with the passage of SB 1437, a bill authored by Berkeley-based state Sen. Nancy Skinner that restricts who can be charged under the state’s felony murder rule. Skinner’s bill modifies a peculiarity in the law that allowed prosecutors to charge suspects with murder on the premise that their actions led to a slaying, even if they did not participate in the actual killing.
“SB 1437 makes clear there is a distinction, reserving the harshest punishment to those who directly participate in the death,” Skinner said in a statement.
The chief public defenders in Santa Clara and Alameda counties, Molly O’Neal and Brendon Woods, agreed that the new law corrects a long-standing imbalance.
“The felony murder rule has historically unfairly treated less-culpable participants in homicide crimes the same as the major actors, so this change in the law will correct the disparate and unjust treatment under the law,” O’Neal said in a statement.
The bills become law Jan. 1.
In signing SB 1391, Brown explained his rationale for keeping more teens out of the adult court system.
“There is a fundamental principle at stake here,” Brown wrote in a statement. “Whether we want a society which at least attempts to reform the youngest offenders before consigning them to adult prisons where their likelihood of becoming a lifelong criminal is so much higher.”
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who urged Brown to veto SB 1391 after it passed through the Legislature, said its passage along with related bills threaten community safety by lessening the consequences for serious crimes.
“Criminal laws are powerful tools that we must use with great responsibility to protect the community and promote justice for everyone,” Rosen said in a statement Monday. “Today, unfortunately, we have two fewer tools. However, that will not deter us from doing everything we can to keep Santa Clara County safe.”
Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley and the other state district attorneys are preparing for potentially hundreds of people serving murder sentences having their convictions re-evaluated.
“As the new legislation applies retroactively, all District Attorney offices will have to carefully review any and all cases that may be affected by the new law,” O’Malley spokeswoman Teresa Drenick said in a statement.
David Ball, an associate law professor at Santa Clara University who specializes in criminal procedure, anticipates that the change to the felony murder rule will decrease prosecutors’ ability to plea-bargain and leverage peripheral co-conspirators against each other with the threat of a murder charge. But he also believes it will streamline how murder is charged and, by extension, the public’s confidence in the system.
“You often hear, when you diminish criminal penalties, that they don’t take a crime seriously,” Ball said. “The other way to look at it is if you make the getaway car driver a felony murderer, you equalize the crimes, and the less relatively serious the more serious offenses become.”
Anxieties over retroactive application also extend to SB 1391, given that its forerunner, Proposition 57, was deemed by a court earlier this year to apply to all active cases, which includes convictions under appeal. That would affect the case of Jae Williams, who was 15 when he and Randy Thompson ritualistically killed schoolmate Michael Russell in South San Jose in 2009.
Prosecutors say Williams, who is 24 and being held in San Quentin State Prison, could be free in two years if his case is transferred back to juvenile court, where incarceration typically ends around age 25. Cathy Russell, Michael’s aunt, and her family were apoplectic at the prospect of Williams’ early release.
“I woke up this morning and (felt) like it’s a nightmare … I’m just completely sickened,” Russell said, before directing her ire at Brown. “If anyone who gets out kills again, that blood is on his hands.”
In his statement about SB 1391, Brown said that there are existing mechanisms to keep dangerous offenders in custody even after they’ve timed out of juvenile incarceration, though prosecutors have voiced skepticism about that avenue.
Morgan Hill police Chief David Swing, who also is president of the California Police Chiefs Association, said the new law underestimates the threat posed by violent youth offenders.
“A one-size fits all approach does not work in this situation,” Swing said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we have seen heinous crimes committed by those under 16 that require greater accountability than the juvenile justice system is designed to provide.”
Frankie Guzman, director of the California Youth Justice Initiative based in Oakland, counts himself among juvenile offenders who reclaimed his life after six years of incarceration for a robbery he committed as a teen, eventually graduating from UC Berkeley and the UCLA School of Law. He stressed that the vast majority of youth offenders are trauma victims themselves from abusive or malnourished environments, and reiterated prevailing research showing teens’ developing brains make them less aware of consequences and more malleable to rehabilitation.
“I know there are victims out there who are hurting. But part of what they’re feeling is that they’ve only known one form of justice: meeting pain with pain,” he said. “Their pain is not lost on us. We’re forcing the government’s hand on taking on the real issues like the lack of community health.”
Staff writers Mark Gomez, Angela Ruggiero and Nate Gartrell contributed to this report.
