Posted August 6, 2019
Restorative Justice Program for Crime Offenders in California With the new California state budget, the legislature allocated $5 million to fund an experimental “restorative justice” reform initiative. The criminal justice pilot program will be implemented in San Joaquin County over
Posted July 19, 2019
California Crime Rate Continues to Drop Crime rates for 2018 are in from the California Department of Justice. The report shows violent crime cases, property crime, and juvenile crime fell in almost all regions across California. This continues the general
Posted June 28, 2019
Proposition 63 Goes into Effect in California July 1, 2019 is upon us, and that is the date major portions of Proposition 63 that will affect every-day residents of California go into effect. Proposition 63, also known as Background Checks
Posted June 7, 2019
Facial Recognition Tech: Challenges for Criminal Defense & Civil Liberties The Board of Supervisors in San Francisco broke modern surveillance ground a couple of weeks ago by banning facial recognition technology from use by city departments, including law enforcement. The
Posted May 15, 2019
What is Honest Services Fraud? With the current news cycle covering the “college admissions scandal” a somewhat obscure term has been introduced into our collective water cooler chat in recent months: honest services fraud. Let’s take a look at what
Posted March 29, 2019
Supreme Court Restrains Property Seizure: Civil Forfeiture In a unanimous decision the justices of the United States Supreme Court have set some boundaries around the practice of “civil forfeiture” by state and local law enforcement. While the ruling provides some
Posted February 1, 2019
Deepfakes: Criminalizing Forged Videos New legislation criminalizing deepfakes has been introduced in the U.S. Senate. Video and audio recordings are widely relied on as “proof” that something happened or as a way to document the way something unfolded. Investigators, law
Posted January 18, 2019
DUI Ignition-Interlock Device Becomes Mandatory in 2019 What was a pilot program in only four California counties up until the calendar turned over to 2019 is now a statewide DUI program. Californians convicted of a DUI as of January 1
Posted December 27, 2018
Bump Stocks and Other Gun Laws for 2019 You Need to Know Bump stocks have essentially been illegal in California since 1990. Any person who possesses, manufactures, imports into California, offers a bump stock for sale or gives or lends
Posted November 29, 2018
More Visibility into Police Misconduct Records Coming in California According to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force database, police shot and killed 162 people in California in 2017, and 99 so far in 2018. Under existing California law, police records of
