In 1988, Donald Schmidt was convicted of sodomizing and murdering a three-year-old girl. He was sixteen and was sentenced to a juvenile detention center.
Schmidt is now 38 years old, and is the oldest member of California’s juvenile system. Most juvenile convicts are moved to the state prison at the age of 25, but prosecuting attorneys turned to a little-used state law to keep him in the juvenile system by declaring him dangerous. Prosecutors used the same law in order to make Schmidt ineligible for parole.
However, last week the state considered sending Schmidt to a halfway house in Good Hope, California, in order to rehabilitate him during the last few years of his sentence. The facility was less than a mile from Good Hope Elementary School, reports SWRNN. Riverside County immediately began to protest the placement, noting the location of the halfway house, as well as the fact that Schmidt had no family in the county to help him recover, nor did his crime actually take place in their county and therefore they were not responsible for his rehabilitative needs.
The county ... Read more..
Archive for July, 2010
Divorce, in the public perception, is rarely a friendly undertaking. Even on this blog we often follow stories of contentious celebrity divorces and separations that don’t end well, with the theme usually being that couples are rarely on their best behavior when it comes time for a divorce.
An article from USA Today, however, makes the claim that divorce is getting friendlier for a lot of couples.
The article offers a couple of quick examples of what it sees as a potentially growing trend of divorces that are less contentious than perhaps they have been in the past. One dad, John Jarvis, of Phoenix, stays in his ex-wife’s guest room when he visits their 13-year-old daughter. Another divorcé, Bob Murphy of Chandler, Arizona, offered his ex-wife a key to his house.
One possible explanation for this trend in nicer divorces could be that those who watched a generation of nasty divorces wanted to change the pattern and avoid falling into the same traps. These people either saw their own parents divorce, or saw the negative impact that it had on their friends.
Hence ... Read more..
The first item that caught my eye this week was a little blog our student Priya Barnes is writing as she visits Germany, attending the Summer Session in Giessen, Germany, that Professor Fallone blogged about on Monday. So far, she’s only offered one entry, about her travels, but I intend to watch for more….
Mark Tushnet (who gave a terrific presentation at Marquette last week, co-sponsored by the student American Constitution Society organization and the local lawyer’s chapter of ACS) raises some interesting questions about Republican-sponsored legislation that would require congressional review of proposed “major regulations.” The idea is that agency rules would be transformed into agency proposals, to be okayed by Congress. For “non-major” proposals, Congressional silence would equal assent, while majority votes of both chambers would be required for adoption of new “major regulations.”
His first post questioned how this scheme could be reconciled with Chadha, but his second one noted that the statute would have the effect of repealing all agency authority to adopt major rules, converting it to authority to convert rules into proposals. He suggests there ... Read more..
Las Vegas is a city known for quick marriages, but Nevada’s governor, Gov. Jim Gibbons, recently finalized his divorce from wife Dawn when a family court judge in Reno, Nevada, signed the divorce decree.
According to the Associated Press, the first family of Nevada has officially split.
The Gibbons’s divorce marks the first time in the state’s history that a sitting governor has gotten a divorce. That’s not the only first, however. Gibbons was also the first incumbent governor to lose a party primary. Gibbons lost the Republican primary a month ago, to a former federal judge, and so he won’t be returning to the governor’s role.
The divorce between Jim Gibbons and ex-wife Dawn was not an extremely amicable one. They had reached a tentative divorce settlement in December, the AP article says, but even since then they raised disputes about details in the case.
The couple still had some things to work out, but Judge Frances Doherty was confident that the pair’s lawyers could settle those outstanding matters among themselves. Such items that were still in dispute include political memorabilia, some as ... Read more..
The editorial section of last Sunday’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel included two articles under the heading “Foster Care’s Failure to Launch.” Both pieces address the situation of teenagers in foster care and the difficulties they face when they “age out” of the system: in other words, they are forced to leave foster care at age 18, even though they are still young, vulnerable, and lacking functioning families.
One article, written by Kathy Markeland, describes current efforts in Wisconsin to try to address the problems of young people who “age out” of foster care without ever returning to their families or being legally adopted into a new family. Wisconsin has made “modest steps” to help kids – and they are in many ways still kids – who must leave foster care, including funding individual post-foster-care planning, extended health care and some college scholarships. Markeland argues persuasively that Wisconsin should follow Illinois’s lead, and give foster kids the option of remaining in foster care until age 21. She cites statistics showing that 50% more young adults are living with their parents now than in the ... Read more..
