New Study Gives Snapshot of Realignment Results

The California Corrections and Rehabilitation Department offered a glimpse today of how

realignment is working. The program diverts low-level offenders to county jails in an effort to reduce state prison overcrowding.

A study done by the department compares inmates released pre- and post- realignment. It found post-realignment offenders were re-arrested at a lower rate than pre-realignment offenders. Both groups were convicted of new crimes at nearly the same rate. The department’s Jeffrey Callison stresses this is just a snapshot.     

“This is not intended to be a definitive statement on realignment. It’s just showing people what’s been happening with some people who were released from prison after serving their time,” says Callison.

The study found post-realignment offenders were far less likely to be returned to prison for a parole violation. But that’s because most are ineligible to go back to prison under the realignment policy.

Read More: Valley Public Radio

$50,000 Prisoner Prescription: Inmates Get Expensive Hepatitis C Treatment

CBS 13 — There’s a disease running rampant and the cost of treating it is astronomical.

Hepatitis C is one of the most common diseases and can carry a death sentence. The cost of fighting it runs into the tens-of-thousands of dollars.

But with tight budgets there’s debate on whether prison inmates be given the most expensive, top-of-the-line medications? It’s a question of responsible compassion. “I was living, at one point in my time, in my life, as a youth pretty recklessly,” Paul Sousa admits with quiet candor.

Life for Sousa was filled with drug use. He says it was destiny; he just did what he saw his mother, and the other relatives who raised him, do – they were hippies who loved to party.

And the party didn’t end when, in 1992, Sousa tested positive for Hepatitis C. continue reading...

Inmate slashes two Correctional Officers at California Men's Colony

Two California Men’s Colony correctional officers are in the hospital recovering from slash wounds to their heads and necks after being attacked by an inmate Tuesday morning, according to prison officials.

Inmate William Mikeworth, 39, used a toothbrush handle sharpened into a knife to slice one officer in the head and neck several times about 10 a.m. Tuesday in the prison’s medium-security yard, according to a news release issued by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

An alarm alerted other officers to the attack, and responding officers used physical force and batons to subdue Mike worth, according to the release. During the altercation, a second officer was injured, also cut on the head and neck.

CMC Lt. Bob Furster said assaults on officers are not uncommon, but added that Tuesday’s attack was deliberately intended to kill. “Based on evidence collected and staff observations, this is clear attempted murder as opposed to battery,” Furster said.

Both officers are expected to recover and are considered in good condition.

CMC is a medium/minimum-security prison housing 4,917 inmates off Highway 1 outside San Luis Obispo.

Mikeworth, from San Bernardino, is serving a nine-year term for assault with a deadly weapon and has been housed at California Men’s Colony since Feb. 18, 2013. He has been in state prison since Sept. 9, 2008.

The case is being investigated as attempted murder by investigators at California Men’s Colony and the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney's Office.

Mikeworth is being kept in segregation, away from other inmates and staff during the investigation. He has a history of assaulting prison staff, Furster said.

SLO Tribune 

Read more here: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2013/05/16/2511236/california-mens-colony-assault.html#storylink=cpy

Inmate death at Kern Valley State Prison under investigation as a homicide

DELANO, Calif. -  

Kern Valley State Prison investigators are working with the Kern County Coroner and District Attorney’s Office to investigate the death of an inmate, which has been classified as a homicide.

Prison staff discovered an inmate, whose name is being withheld pending next-of-kin notification, unresponsive in his cell at 9:30 a.m., on Thursday, May 16. He was pronounced dead at 10:20 a.m. The cell and all its contents have been secured and processed as a crime scene.

The dead inmate’s cellmate, Dennis John Bratton, has been identified as the suspect in the case. Bratton, 43, is serving a life sentence from San Diego County for attempted murder, multiple counts of assault with deadly weapons and firearms, and an in prison assault with a deadly weapon.  He was received by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on November 13, 1997, and has been housed at KVSP since May 23, 2012.

Corcoran inmate gets death penalty

A lifer at Corcoran State Prison has been sentenced to death for murdering his cell mate, a Kings County judge ruled this week.

Judge Peter L. Spinetta handed down the sentence for Robert Galvan at a hearing Wednesday, said Kings County prosecutor Thom Snyder. Galvan was immediately taken to death row at San Quentin State Prison.

In March, a jury found Galvan guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances of torture and lying in wait, and assault with a deadly weapon by a life prisoner causing death.

Snyder said Galvan murdered his cell mate, Robert Johnson, 28, of Clear Lake, in September 2010 by getting him drunk on inmate-made wine, then slitting his throat, strangling him with an electric cord, then smashing his head against the concrete bed several times. Johnson was 30 days away from release, Snyder said. They shared a cell in a high-security housing unit.

Galvan told investigators that he killed Johnson because his cell mate had "disrespected" him by calling him stupid, and that he was punishing Johnson for violating an unwritten rule not to complain to guards about disputes with cell mates, Snyder said.

After attacking his public defender in 2011 and breaking his nose, Galvan served as his own lawyer.

In July, while being taken back to Corcoran prison from court in Hanford, he slipped out of his handcuffs and stabbed a guard five times with an inmate-made weapon.

Galvan was in Corcoran serving four consecutive life terms. Two were for a 1999 kidnapping, robbery and ransom when an evening at the movies turned into a night of terror for a young couple who were carjacked outside a Fresno theater.

The couple, both in their 20s, had just left Edwards Cinemas on North Blackstone Avenue when they were accosted by a man with a knife.

The woman was forced into the back seat and her companion ordered to drive to an ATM, where he took money out and handed it to the kidnapper.

Instead of letting the couple go, he forced them them to drive to several other ATMs, but they were unable to withdraw more money. The male victim said his mother would give them money, so they drove to her apartment in Clovis.

While the son went inside, the robber held the woman hostage in the car.

The mother telephoned Clovis police while her boyfriend, driving his own car, agreed to lead the robber and hostages to an ATM in Clovis, where officers surrounded the bank and arrested Galvan.

The young couple, now married, testified during the penalty phase, Snyder said.

While in the Fresno County jail, Galvan attacked a correctional officer, for which he got his third life sentence. The fourth was for assaulting an inmate with a weapon at Salinas Valley State Prison.

"He's the absolute poster for the death penalty, " Snyder said in March.

Fresno Bee

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/05/17/3303640/corcoran-inmate-gets-death-penalty.html#storylink=cpy

New Haven hip hop group heads behind bars for day of peace

NEW HAVEN — Growing up, Adam Walker said he would never go to prison.

But soon he will find himself behind the prison bars he wanted to avoid, though for a positive purpose.

Walker, 42, a featured emcee of the rap group Coalition Hip Hop, will travel to San Quentin, Calif., to perform at the San Quentin State Prison’s Day of Peace celebration.

Coalition Hip Hop had been expected to perform Saturday, but due to a quarantine in the north block of the prison and with a new case of the norovirus, the performance has been rescheduled for June on a date to be determined.

“I was one to say I would never go to any prison, but now I find myself years later going to prison for a whole different reason,” Walker said. “A peace festival in a prison, I think it’s fascinating, and to be going there from New Haven to perform for different races of people and to help encourage positivity is something I’m proud of.”

Coalition Hip Hop is made up of Elm City natives and was created in 2009 in the interest of projecting a positive voice for the city. Other featured emcees of the group include Moureese Mitchell, 16; Darrel Grimes, 31; Tyra’ Pearson, 30; Jon Green, 27; Robert House, 25; and Derek Walker, 24, the group’s producer.

“We are excited about this opportunity to represent New Haven,” said Grimes, the founding member of the group, who goes by the name stage name Shiek Abdul.

“We are a sign of the struggle of what’s happening in the world and feel we represent the soundtrack of the streets,” he said.

The Day of Peace celebration was founded in 2006 by a group of inmates, many of whom are serving life sentences and decided to come together after a race-riot took place in the lower yard of the prison.

According to inmate committee organizers, the Day of Peace program stems from the senseless violence that plagues the prison system, their communities and society as a whole. Organizers also said they wanted to become voices of reason in times of crisis and help others find their voice through a commitment to peace. Continued...

Condemned Inmate Mario Lewis Gray Dies

SAN QUENTIN – Condemned inmate Mario Lewis Gray, 55, who was on California’s death row from Los Angeles County, was found unresponsive in his cell on Saturday morning at San Quentin State Prison.  Subsequently, he was pronounced dead at the prison on May 4, 2013, at 6:59 a.m.  The cause of death is unknown pending the results of an autopsy.  Gray was single-celled.

Gray was sentenced to death on March 14, 1990, by a Los Angeles County jury for the April 24, 1987, burglary, rape, and murder of 87 year old Ruby Reed. Gray had been on death row since March 21, 1990.

Since 1978 when California reinstated capital punishment, 59 condemned inmates have died from natural causes, 22 have committed suicide, 13 have been executed in California, one was executed in Missouri; and six have died from other causes. One is currently pending autopsy results. There are currently 735 offenders on California’s death row.
cdcr

Why Isn't Randy Kraft Dead?

"Do you know the area around where Mission Viejo is, and all that?” Max Gambrel asks over the phone. “That’s where Kraft was apprehended. California Highway Patrol made the stop there.”

Max is a truck driver in his mid-40s who lives in Commiskey, Ind., a small farming town not far from Crothersville, where he grew up. There’s not a whole lot going on there—if you need anything much more elaborate than fresh fruit and vegetables, he explains, you’ve got to go over to Seymour, the big town about 15 miles north. Max doesn’t mind. He prefers the gentle pace of life in the country. He’s never been to Southern California, and doesn’t much desire to visit.

But he’s spent a lot of time during the past three decades trying to picture a place in Orange County. Not Disneyland, or the beach, or the luxurious stores at South Coast Plaza. But the otherwise unremarkable stretch of Interstate 5 near Mission Viejo, where, about 1 a.m. on May 14, 1983, two CHP officers spotted a brown 1979 Toyota weaving from the right lane onto the shoulder, and decided to pull it over. At the wheel, the officers discovered a slight, mustachioed 38-year-old computer programmer from Long Beach named Randy Steven Kraft, who had alcohol on his breath. He failed a sobriety test, so they arrested and handcuffed him.

In Kraft’s passenger seat was a man with a dark jacket draped over his lap, who appeared to be asleep. Kraft said he was a hitchhiker he’d picked up. When one of the officers opened the door and pulled away the jacket in an effort to rouse him, he was startled to see that the man’s pants were pulled down, and that he had marks on his wrists, as if he had been tied. The passenger wasn’t breathing, nor did he have a pulse. One of the arresting officers, Sgt. Michael Howard, found it eerie how Kraft calmly asked, “How’s my friend?” when Kraft obviously knew his passenger was dead.

The victim was a 25-year-old Marine corporal, stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro. Apparently, as investigators later pieced together, he was trying to get to a friend’s party after a softball game, and had decided to hitchhike. The driver who’d picked him up apparently offered him a beer, which the hitcher didn’t know was laced with sedative pills like those the officers found on the floor of Kraft’s car.

The passenger was Terry Gambrel, the final victim of one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. Terry was Max Gambrel’s cousin.

Max has imagined that scene many times. Terry was the friendly, practically-a-big-brother relative who lived next door when Max was a boy. “I remember riding bikes with him and playing basketball and softball,” he says. “A lot of people gravitated to him. He was very likeable.”

Max was 15 when Terry died. His family sheltered him as best they could from the grisly details. It wasn’t until years later, when he started reading true-crime books, that he happened upon Dennis McDougal’s 1991 “Angel of Darkness,” and learned of the sickening things Kraft had done to the bodies of his other victims. He imagines what Kraft might have done to Terry with the buck knife officers found on the driver’s seat. “It’s fortunate he didn’t have a chance to mutilate my cousin,” Max says.

He still misses Terry. “We all miss him,” he says, even after all these years. And he still thinks about Kraft, who was convicted of 16 murders and linked to more than 65 others by investigators. For years, Max read books and articles about murder and watched “Criminal Minds” and other TV crime dramas, hoping to understand what would make someone kill so many people. Finally, he gave up. “I can’t fathom why he did it,” Max says. “There is no why.”

Instead, Max Gambrel wonders why, three decades after his cousin Terry’s murder, the man who was sentenced to death for killing him somehow is still alive.

Source: OrangeCoast       WikiPedia: Randy S. Kraft               Illustraion by Keith Negley

Walking death row at San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin State Prison has four massive cell blocks, each identified by their cardinal direction: north, south, east, and west. Of the four, only one houses inmates sentenced to death. None of the cell blocks have been visited by a reporter since 2007.

KALW’s Nancy Mullane asked Matthew Cate, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections, for press access to death row. Eventually, Cate agreed to allow Mullane to go inside all three of San Quentin’s death rows. Last week we visited the adjustment center, where new death row inmates begin their sentence and where the most violent are kept indefinitely.

Today, we go to East Block, which houses 537 men facing execution in the state.

Into the East Block

Before entering East Block, public information officer Sam Robinson and I first have to pass through a walled sally port. Inside the entrance to the cellblock, there’s a large rotunda with high arched windows.

Robinson leads me through two ancient-looking steel doors toward a set of black gates. An officer unlocks the gate to the left and we head for the tiers of cells. As we approach the cells, we pass a table piled up with opened and unopened letters that have been sent to the inmates. Mail sent to prisoners is read and reviewed before it is delivered. A sign on the wall in bright red letters warns prisoners that feeding the birds will result in a CDC 115, or disciplinary write up. There are no birdmen on death row.

Robinson tells me all condemned inmates at San Quentin are evaluated and classified in one of two categories.

“Here on death row, we classify them as grade A and grade B,” he says. “Grade A are individuals who are programming and follow our rules, for the most part. Grade B are the individuals who are the opposite of that, who are non-programmers or gang affiliates or whatever the case may be.”

Robinson says that all inmates on east block are grade A. As he talks, we make our way around the end of the block to see what looks like endless rows of cells. There are fifty-seven on each tier and the double sided block is five tiers high, making a total of more than 500 cells. Looking down the first tier, a half dozen wheelchairs are parked on the polished cement walkway, waiting.

“East Block structurally mirrors the majority of our housing units at San Quentin,” he explains, “They’re all five stories high and the dimensions of the cells are four and a half feet by ten feet, eight inches.”

That means each cell is 48 square feet and seven feet, seven inches tall – about the size of a walk-in closet.  From inside their individual cells, the inmates can look out through a row of black bars, a sheet of perforated metal, a railing and forty feet of open space to a wall of windows that fill the cavernous space with natural light and air.

“Here in East Block, these guys are confined to their cells for the most part of the day with the exception of the five hours a day they are allowed for recreation yard activities,” Robinson says.

“Five hundred people have recreation access five hours a day?” I ask.

RONALDO MEDRANO AYALA v. KEVIN CHAPPELL

On May 3, 2013, Ayala filed an appeal in the Ninth Circuit over the denial of his habeas petition in Federal District Court

RONALDO MEDRANO AYALA v. KEVIN CHAPPELL 
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/casdce/3:2001cv00741/40583/464/0.pdf?ts=1364550011

CTF’s latest graduation adds to long successful run

By Lt. Roland Ramon, Administrative Assistant/PIO

The Correctional Training Facility (CTF) in Soledad recently held a graduation for the inmates housed in Facility C.

Many family, friends, and staff attended this graduation in support of the students who have achieved various degrees and certificates.

CTF Warden (A) Marion E. Spearman

The student achievements for 2012 are as follows:

• 15 Vocational certifications from Office Services and Related Technologies (OSRT)

• 69 General Educational Development (GED); 33 of these graduates were present, 36 having paroled, transferred, or re-entered society.

CTF Associate Warden William Wilson

• 16 college graduates, including nine Associate of Arts (AA) and five Associate of Science degrees from Coastline Community College, two Bachelor of Arts degrees from California Coast University, one Bachelor of Arts degree from CSU Sacramento, and one Bachelor of Science degree from the University of London (some graduates earned multiple degrees).

The ceremony featured speeches from Warden (A) Marion E. Spearman, Associate Warden William Wilson, Principal Gerald Atchley and students from each program.   A reception and visiting followed the ceremony.

The Graduation was guided by Warden (A) Spearman and was successful due to his leadership and ability to bring the community together, said Vice Principal Kevin Kessler .

Currently, there are 163 students enrolled in Coastline and Lassen Community Colleges, 30 students attending Palo Verde Community College who have previously earned AA degrees working on Alcohol and Other Drug Studies Certifications.

There are nine students working on Bachelor of Arts or Master’s Degrees from Adams State University, California State University Dominguez Hills, Colorado State University, Pueblo, California Coast University, Global University, and Vision International College and University.

Since 2010 there have been 72 college graduates.

CTF is now a Reentry Hub and will continue to provide inmate students with educational and vocational skills to prepare them for life outside of prison.

Death penalty changes rejected

Prosecutor-backed legislation to shorten death penalty appeals in California, and bring back the gas chamber, has been rejected by a state Senate committee.

The bill, sponsored by the California District Attorneys Association, was defeated by the Public Safety Committee on Tuesday on a party-line 5-2 vote.

Backers of SB779, including its author, state Sen. Joel Anderson, R-Alpine (San Diego County), said the bill would speed up executions in California, which have been blocked by court orders since 2006. It was introduced following the narrow defeat in November of a ballot measure to repeal the state's death penalty law.

The bill would have limited most condemned prisoners to one round of appeals in the state court system and another in federal court. Other provisions would have eliminated public review of regulations on execution procedures, barred disclosure of the suppliers of drugs used in executions and authorized a new method of gas chamber executions.

California's last execution by cyanide gas was in 1993. A federal judge ruled a year later that the gas chamber at San Quentin caused excruciating pain and violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Lethal injections at the prison were halted in 2006 when another federal judge ruled that the executions, carried out by poorly trained staff in a dimly lit chamber, posed an undue risk of a prolonged and agonizing death. The court-imposed moratorium is likely to remain in place at least through 2013 as the state tries to validate new regulations and cope with a shortage of execution drugs.

Under SB779, a gas execution would have been carried out by filling the chamber with a nontoxic gas, such as nitrogen or helium, displacing the oxygen and suffocating the prisoner. The condemned inmate could choose between gas and lethal injection, but the bill specified that the execution would be conducted by gas if injections were not legally available.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, called the proposed execution method a "painless and more dignified alternative." Opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union, said the procedure had not been used anywhere in the world and there was no evidence it would be either humane or effective.
SFGate