Hardly, but I do believe that government has an obligation to society to protect them from violent criminals. Notice, I did not mention race in my previous post, nor will I in this one.
Lets talk a bit more about Smiley Martin.
Six months after he turned 18, Martin was caught in January 2013 with an assault rifle and two fully loaded 25-bullet magazines and was convicted of felony gun charges.
“The rifle had a pistol grip and the capacity to accept a detachable magazine in front of the pistol grip. Inmate Martin was also found to be in possession of two fully loaded twenty-five round magazines for the assault weapon. Inmate Martin admitted to transporting the assault weapon and large capacity magazines to potential buyers. Inmate Martin was sentenced to probation and county jail.”
10 Months later, he pushed aside a Walmart clerk to steal computers worth $2,800. He pled to the robbery and was sentenced to two years in state prison.
In 2016, he was arrested as a parolee at large. And less than six months after that was the assault that sent him back to prison.
He plead no contest to charges of corporal injury and assault likely to cause great bodily injury. In return for the government dropped the charges of kidnapping and intimidating a witness or victim.
For some reason I cannot fathom, of those charges only Kidnapping is considered a violent felony in California. This will be important later.
Prior to sentencing Martin sat in jail for 254 days. The judge awarded him time served credit for twice that. again, I don't get California.
So that would knock his remaining time to serve down to about 8.6 years for release sometime in 2026.
But it gets better! In California,
non-violent felons can earn "a variety of additional post-sentencing credits" which would have prior to 2016 reduced his time served by an additional 20%. But in 2016 California passed Proposition 57 which bumped those credits to 50%!
So that is how a clearly violent criminal only serves 4 years of a 10 year sentence.
The problem is that California failed it's duty to protect society from a violent criminal. Who though he has not been charged for it yet probably participated in a mass shooting resulting multiple murders.