Chris Moritz
speaker
332 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Chris Moritz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks, Dr. True. Appreciate it.
Everything you say can and will be suggested.
Well, you know, there's a lot of reasons as to how we ended up in a one-party state, how we ended up in a state of decrepitude and, frankly, with elements of criminality that are so depraved and savage and dark that they are really unseen outside of the worst conflict zones in the world. And that is characterized by...
Let's say, for instance, the rise of child soldiers, juveniles committing a lot of crime, in fact, maybe driving the crime surge in the state and certainly in Los Angeles. Children. Children as young as 10 being recruited by gangs to commit armed robbery, hijackings, and even murder.
Well, so there's a legislative angle to this, and I think that's a really, really important part of- um the the history uh and um the pathway to destruction and that started um well that was influenced by a number of factors principally there was a there was an important supreme court case in 2011 called brown v plata
And in this decision, which was a 5-4 split, Kennedy was the deciding factor on the liberal side and wrote the opinion. It was determined that the California state prison system was in violation of the Eighth Amendment, which is a cruel, unusual punishment. And this was owing to the fact that prisons were operating at 200% capacity at that time.
And according to this ruling, California had to conform to a very arbitrary capacity ratio that was established by a federal bureaucracy of 137.5%. So if you were at 137.5%, you were no longer in violation of the Eighth Amendment. So as a result of this ruling, California did have to find ways to comply and took a number of steps to do so, a number of laws that I'll discuss.
But coinciding with this ruling and going back further is the emergence of the criminal justice reform movement. principally coming out of places like Stanford Law School and some particular individuals like a gentleman named Mike Romano, who
was able to influence the legislature and executive level officers in the state to embrace policies that were part of the criminal justice reform movement and principally dedicated to the idea of reducing the so-called crisis of mass incarceration.
So this meant that there was a force coming from the Supreme Court that was motivating this, and also ideological activist elements that pushed for these same reforms at the same time.
Well, so California had, up until, let's say, 2011- one of the most stringent criminal justice systems in the entire country. We, of course, like we're the force behind the three strikes law. And three strikes put a lot of bad people away for forever. But it had problems, too, to be honest. Like, there were problems and there were reforms applied to it to reduce, you know, potential injustices.
Right. And I support those, but... Nevertheless, three strikes and also the introduction of what are called enhancements. So special circumstance enhancements in which, let's say you use a gun in a crime. You use a gun that adds 10 years penalty. Additionally to your conviction, if you use a gun and you shoot someone, that's 20 years. If you use a gun and kill someone, it's life.
So that's an enhancement. If you're a gang member and engage in whatever crime, gang enhancements would apply and those would add to the sentencing. Right. These things were all eliminated and obliterated in big parts by directives that came from the so-called Soros DAs, the progressive DAs in 2020. But the dismantling started really following this Supreme Court case.
So the first law that was a big problem and put us on this path was called AB 109. It's called the Public Safety Realignment Act. And the idea was to reduce the number of prisoners in the state system you would transfer so-called nonviolent, non-sexual, low-risk offenders to county jails. There's a problem, though.
And the problem and the sort of poison pill within it was the issue of what classified nonviolent, non-sexual, low-risk offenders. Because under AB 109, the only...
offense that would be considered was the last offense for which you were convicted so in other words inmates with long and violent criminal histories who happen to be in jail in state prison because of a non-violent offense were eligible for this system and they were transferred out 27 000
It didn't even – even with that, we still didn't meet the capacity threshold of 137.5, but this was one of the steps to do so. Here's the other challenge. Did anyone think of building more prisons? Well, you know, we don't have the money. You can't build anything in California. California was bankrupt at that time. Yeah. Right? And actually, like, Jerry Brown, to his credit, like –
did a lot and, like, earnestly to try and, like, straighten the, you know, right the ship of California's fiscal situation. But these kinds of policies specific to jailing were... Totally ill-conceived. And so with AB 109, all of these prisoners go into county jails, but the county jails don't have the resources to house them. They don't have the funds to staff them.
And so the outcome is that many are just released into the communities. Right. Kamala Harris is elected attorney general in 2010, narrowly beating Steve Cooley, who is probably the last great district attorney of Los Angeles, a Republican. By the way, he's the only Republican she's ever run against other than Trump. And he lost to her by just a few thousand votes.
And just this is kind of an interesting coda is that there were also kind of odd circumstances around that election. Steve was ahead. And then, you know, kind of in 2020 fashion, there was a surge of her votes. But anyway, she's elected to California Attorney General in 2010.
Showing 41–60 of 332 · page 3 of 17
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