Last month, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis came out in public support of the new bill authored by State Sen. Marty Block (D- San Diego), SB 456, which would distinctly make it a misdemeanor crime for someone to threaten to fire a firearm on private and public school campuses. The bill…
Police agencies across the country have begun outfitting officers with the cameras as an attempt to regain the public’s trust back, and the SDPD is no exemption. However this is not enough. Last month, on April 30th SDPD was involved in yet another fatal shooting of an unarmed man, Fridoon…
The Senate Committee on Public Safety recently held a hearing at the end of April on Sen. Ben Hueso (D- San Diego) and the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office’s proposed bill. Senate Bill 603, which is currently making its rounds through the California legislative process in Sacramento, would require…
It has been a busy year for criminal law development. With the seemingly unending current events surrounding police and citizen relations, the topic of when it is legal to run from police has resurfaced. It is already established by now that Freddie Gray was not doing anything wrong when he…
Recently, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to adopt changes in the guidelines that judges use in sentencing white collar crimes – to be effective this coming November. The decision came in part as a reaction to the overpopulation crisis in the prison population, and increasing costs of incarceration. The current…
On April 12, 2015, a man by the name of Freddie Gray was chased down and arrested for “possession of a switchblade” by Baltimore PD. Eyewitnesses report Gray screaming and asking for medical attention. By April 19, a week later, Gray had slipped into a coma and died while in…
As Baltimore becomes the latest casualty of events transpiring from police brutality, another Justice Department investigation is underway for the multitude of constitutional rights Freddie Gray may have suffered at the hands of police. Most people don’t think of criminal law as being fundamentally intertwined with our basic constitutional rights,…
The State of Washington was the first state in the nation to pass the ‘no-nonsense’ 3 strikes policy to address repeat, criminal offenders in 1993. California enacted its 3 strikes law shortly after Washington in 1994. These “habitual offender laws” are statutes adopted by individual state legislatures to impose harsher…
The Supreme Court once again re-visited the topic of traffic stops (the Court held this past December that evidence obtained from a search at a traffic stop based on a mistake of law was okay). Its most recent ruling issued on April 21 held that that police may not detain…
On Tuesday, April 21, the U.S. Marshals Service announced they would be reviewing a video that shows a deputy U.S. Marshall in South Gate, California charging at a woman who was filming them at a crime scene, grabbing her phone, smashing it onto the curb, and then subsequently kicking her…