Judge rails on Prop. 47 during sentencing

In the nearly two years since California voters approved Proposition 47, there has been seemingly endless debate over whether it’s achieving its purported goals, and what it actually means for public safety.

The measure, passed in November 2014, reduced penalties for some nonviolent crimes, including simple drug possession and petty theft, from low-level felonies to misdemeanors. Since then, populations in the state’s historically overcrowded prisons and in county jails have dropped significantly — by 17,000 inmates and counting, according to a recent report.

Supporters say that frees up resources so law enforcement can focus on the most violent criminals. The most dangerous.

Yet many Proposition 47 foes maintain that it can, and possibly has, made the public less safe. Repeat offenders go on offending knowing there are few consequences, and police and prosecutors have fewer ways to force people into treatment.

As San Diego Superior Court Judge Frederic Link put it recently, reducing penalties for drug crimes is “like taking the teeth out of the tiger.”

Link’s comments came during a sentencing hearing for Ignacio Canela, 33, who had a long criminal history dating back 20 years with convictions for auto theft, assault, burglary and drug possession for sale. All of that, the judge said, indicated escalating criminal behavior that led to the 2013 shooting that nearly took a police officer’s life.

His words also capped a brief debate in the courtroom over whether Canela, who was convicted of transporting methamphetamine and other lower level felony crimes in addition to attempted murder, was entitled to some of the relief Proposition 47 provides.

It turns out he was.

Immediately after Proposition 47 became law in California, it allowed people who had one or more qualifying felony offense on their records to petition a court to reduce them to misdemeanors, so long as they didn’t also have a “prior disqualifying conviction,” such as murder, rape, child molestation or other violent crime.

Citing a recent appellate court opinion in Los Angeles, the prosecutor in Canela’s case argued that the methamphetamine charge and other lower-level felonies should remain felony convictions, given the guilty verdict in the shooting of San Diego police Officer Tim Bell.

Bell was shot four times during a confrontation inside a large drainage tunnel. He survived.

Deputy District Attorney Michael Runyon argued Canela’s conviction for attempted murder on a peace officer — a “super strike” on his record that made him eligible for life in prison — disqualified him from getting his other felonies reclassified as misdemeanors. In the Los Angeles case, a man wanted his 1999 felony conviction for cocaine possession dropped down to a misdemeanor but didn’t file his request until last August, several months after he was convicted of kidnapping to commit robbery.

A trial court said the kidnapping conviction, also a super strike, made him ineligible for reclassification even though it happened years after the 1999 offense. The appeals court agreed.

Despite the judge’s criticism of Proposition 47, he said at the June 22 sentencing hearing that he believed Canela’s other felony crimes were eligible for reclassification under the law. He explained that even though Canela committed the drug offense and other felonies in August 2013, he was convicted this year by the jury that also found him guilty of shooting Bell.

Therefore, the judge said, “everything that happened in August is now reducible” under Proposition 47, and he sentenced Canela to 54 years to life in prison, a term that accounted for the reduced penalties. But he clearly wasn’t happy about it.

“This defendant is the perfect reason why Prop. 47 does apply and shouldn’t be the law,” Link said.

It’s somewhat unusual for a judge to be so vocal on the bench about what the law “should” be, but this wasn’t a first for Link. At a January hearing for Tiffany Nowden, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for killing her wife, the judge said he was bothered by the “dumbing down” of laws in today’s society, particularly those related to drug abuse.

“What runs through all these cases were drugs, drugs, drugs,” Link said before sentencing Nowden to 20 years to life. “Drugs cause problems; drugs cause death and that’s what’s happened here.”