San Diego California Criminal Defense Blog

California state senator Ted Gaines and El Dorado District Attorney Vern Pierson used the discovery that convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido had kidnapped then 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard and held her captive for 18 years as a launching point for a discussion about the need for the state to review the parole system with respect to sex offenders. Gaines and Pierson held a "community discussion" in August 2011 with a panel of experts to discuss what they considered major deficiencies in the way that California grants parole to sex offenders.

Gaines and Pierson wanted to challenge a 2008 California Supreme Court decision in Lawrence, wherein the court held that the prison system could not look to the crime for which a defendant was serving a sentence alone when making a decision about whether to grant parole. Instead, corrections officials are supposed to weigh the results of a psychiatric evaluation and a risk assessment test called a Static-99 in their decisions.

Gaines intends to propose legislation that would require that the California Parole Board factor in previous crimes when making parole determinations. He claims that it would prevent as many as 200 dangerous inmates from getting parole per year.

In the summer of 2011, authorities staged a massive crackdown on gang-related crime in San Diego County. In late July, over 250 law enforcement personnel from state, local and federal agencies conducted a weekend sweep that landed 49 criminal suspects in jail.

Smuggling, Other Cross-Border Crimes Targeted

The weekend raid - known as "Operation Tidal Wave" in law enforcement circles - was focused on disrupting the normal dealings of gangs and other criminal organizations that have been working with Mexican drug cartels in the United States. Curtailing drug trafficking was one specific goal of Operation Tidal Wave.

But, while groups involved in illegal activity were the target of Operation Tidal Wave, officers certainly did not overlook individual violations: just ten percent of the 49 suspects locked up following the sweep were documented gang members. A number of non-gang affiliated suspects faced charges for drug possession, drunken driving, parole and probation infractions and even traffic violations (almost 300 automobiles were stopped in the course of Operation Tidal Wave, resulting in 56 citations).

California Attorney General Kamala Harris is asking questions pertaining to Citigroup's marketing and selling of mortgage-backed securities. In targeting Citigroup, Harris is tackling corporate fraud involving the bundled mortgages sold as securities to the state and pension funds under false pretenses. Harris will look to the newly created Mortgage Fraud Strike Force to provide assistance in the investigation. To prosecute some of the crimes, Harris will utilize California's False Claims Act, which outlaws defrauding the state.

California is not the only state taking a staunch stand against mortgage fraud. In fact, since 2009 when President Obama signe d into law the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act and the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, all 50 states have been locked in negotiations with the banks and servicers to broadly settle allegations of misdoing when it comes to mortgage and foreclosure practices. Citigroup is one of five large banks involved in negotiations with all 50 state attorneys general investigating the banks' servicing and foreclosure practices.

For Americans that are stopped and arrested by the police, there are always questions revolving around if and when police can search vehicles. While there are broad rules pertaining to the Fourth Amendment and search and seizure, those broad rules combined with the specific facts of a situation will guide if and when the police are allowed to search a vehicle. This is how the United States Supreme Court can rule that a man was the victim of an illegal search and seizure, yet still uphold his conviction.

Stopped as part of a routine traffic stop, Willie Gene Davis was arrested for providing police a false identity, while the driver was arrested for suspected drunk driving. Both men were taken into custody, handcuffed and placed into the back of police cars. After the men were placed into custody, the police proceeded to search the car the two men were traveling in. During the search the police found a handgun in Davis' coat.

Davis, a felon, was convicted of a felon in possession of a firearm. A conviction he appealed on the grounds that the search was illegal.

Called "repugnant" by a California appeals court, sexually explicit images that were altered to include the face of a 13-year-old girl are not child pornography.

In 2009, a San Jose-area father was sentenced to thirteen-and-a-half years in prison for possession of child pornography after he pasted his daughter's face on sexual images. In its opinion, the appeals court stated that because the minor daughter did not actually engage in or simulate the depicted sexual conduct, the altered images did not violate possession of child pornography laws and were protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Because California treats almost all sex crimes as felonies, a conviction will usually carry a stiff prison sentence. Further, a person convicted of a sex offense may be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his or her life. Almost nearly as bad as the state imposed punishments is the stigma of being labeled a sex offender, which could have a major impact on a person's ability to find work or a place to live. And, sadly, the stigma may stick even if a person is falsely accused of a sex crime.

A long history of inequality in federal drug crimes sentencing guidelines has come to an end due to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's late June decision to bring prison terms for crack cocaine offenders in line with powder cocaine offenses. Commission members were unanimous in their vote to make retroactive the provisions of the Fair Sentencing Act, which Congress passed in 2010.

According to The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice advocacy group that promotes sentencing reform and alternatives to incarceration, federal sentencing policies from the late 1980s were the most severe ever implemented for low-level drug crimes. Possession of five grams of crack could result in a five-year sentence, the same penalty meted out for possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine.

According to a report from the LexisNexis Mortgage Asset Research Institute, confirmed reports of mortgage-fraud cases declined 41 percent across the nation in 2010. California had the third-highest number of cases, an increase from 2009 when it ranked 10th.

Since 2006, Florida has had the highest number of reported mortgage-fraud cases in the U.S. Denise James, director of real-estate solutions at LexisNexis and co-author of the institute's report, stated that California and Florida have high levels of mortgage fraud because they are coastal states with a lot of speculative buying and properties with underwater mortgages following the housing boom and bust.

In addition, California's ranking likely increased because it had a lot of short sales in 2010, and mortgage fraud is increasing in short-sale area of the market, the institute reported.

The institute also said reports of fraud have declined because mortgage-fraud schemes are becoming more sophisticated. James explained that, while reported fraud cases have decreased, actual fraud may have remained constant or increased because "mortgage fraud has become more complex and harder to verify using traditional methods."

A recent rape case involving a Santa Barbara woman who thought the rapist was her live-in boyfriend has shed light on a strange loophole in California law. The loophole allows the accused rapist in this case to avoid felony rape charges.

Walking through an unlocked front door and past the live-in boyfriend who was asleep on the couch, the accused found the woman asleep in her bed. Thinking the accused was her boyfriend, the woman became a willing participant in the act until she heard her boyfriend cough, in the other room. Realizing that the man in her bed was not who she thought it was, the woman screamed, causing the accused to seek escape through the front door.