Legal News

Will Garrido Case Derail California?s Parole-Reform Bill?

By Ashby Jones

Talk about strange timing.

The California State Assembly had settled on Monday — today — to vote over a bill that would help cut the state’s big budget deficit by $1.2 billion by reducing the state prison population through an early parole program. The program could reduce the state prison population by 27,000. The state’s Senate already gave the bill a thumb’s up.

Then, on Friday, broke news of the bizarro case of Phillip Garrido (pictured). For those who aren’t up to speed on the Garrido story, run — don’t walk — to your nearest Internet cafe. In a sentence, Garrido, a parolee and registered sex offender, was accused on Friday of abducting an 11-year-old and holding her hostage for 18 years. Click here for Friday’s LAT story on the case.

According to a story out in Monday’s NYT, some corrections reform advocates in Sacramento and politicians are worried that the fallout from the Garrido case could have a big effect on the Assembly bill.

"This demonstrates the problems that we're going to have if we release thousands of prisoners into our local communities," State Senator Tom Harman, a Republican from Huntington Beach, told The Sacramento Bee.

According to the NYT story, many of Harman’s colleagues had expressed fears on the impact of the early-release program, but the Garrido case is amping up the anxiety.

"If we let someone out early, and that man commits a crime, the Assembly members are worried that that will come back to haunt them like the old famous Willie Horton ads," said a prominent state politician, who asked not to be identified because of concerns about undermining legislative negotiations.

But Scott Kernan, a deputy secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told the NYT that a man who had committed crimes like those that sent Garrido to prison initially would never have been released early from prison under the proposed law. In fact, the bill would have made it possible to supervise sex offenders like Garrido even more closely.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 31, 2009 (boomark / email).