The case against Alexander Villa has long been contested, with troubling questions about how his conviction was secured, including confessions that were later recanted and evidence that appears shaky or missing.
The high-ranking role comes with a $180,000 to $230,000 salary, the listing states, and "will serve as a trusted advisor to the mayor, first deputy mayor, and the administration's senior leadership on all matters related to the closing of Rikers."
At Dublin, she had been sexually harassed and verbally abused by an officer, physically assaulted by another, witnessed other officers sexually abusing women, and been subjected to retaliation. Before her arrest, Cristal had been a long-time permanent resident of the U.S. Her conviction for drugs invalidated her green card, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a final removal order based on her felony conviction.
The city currently gives over $8 million annually to the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project to work with people awaiting trial outside of jail. The nonprofit has for 50 years connected people suspected of crimes to housing, employment, and medical treatment - the same services the probation department is now proposing.
Slate writer Molly Olmstead noted that that campaign, entitled "Stand With Our Brave ICE Hero," was started by an avowed white supremacist who goes by Tom Hennessey. He has asked if Good was a "negrophile," used the #DeportThemAll and "TheyAllMustGo" in his crowdfunding campaign, and initially said that Good's slaying was "a direct result of anti-American traitors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (who is Jewish) fanning the flames of resistance" before he removed mention of Frey's Judaism.
A state office created in 2024 to scrutinize local investigations into jail deaths has yet to complete a single review of the more than 150 people who have died in custody in California's county jails over the past year-and-a-half. That's because it hasn't received the records needed to fully analyze the deaths, according to the Board of State and Community Corrections, a regulatory body appointed by the governor to oversee the state's jails and juvenile halls.
Hall's son Miles was shot and killed by police a block from their home in Walnut Creek on June 2, 2019. The 23-year-old was gripped by symptoms of psychosis, believing he was Jesus and running around the neighborhood with a gardening tool that he said was his staff of God. Hall called 911 to get him medical help as a necessary step toward a conservatorship.
Now, marking its most comprehensive technology initiative since that seminal report, the LSC has released a new report, The Next Frontier: Harnessing Technology to Close the Justice Gap, which represents the findings of an extensive two-year Technology Summit process that kicked off with LSC's 50th anniversary in 2024. Like its predecessor, this new report offers an ambitious roadmap for leveraging technology to narrow America's justice gap.
The U.S.'s political landscape - and our daily lives - are increasingly shaped by repression and violence, amplified by a media cycle designed to keep us fearful in the present, uncertain about the future, and depleted. Exhaustion is not a side effect of this system. It is one of its core tools. Last year, I wrote that Donald Trump's attacks were designed to exhaust us. Over the past year, I've watched communities build movements and adapt their organizing under this reality.
The next "Dying to Stay Here" podcast will feature a panel discussing what we call our criminal justice system. The panel reflected on a recent election in California, where voters were asked, in plain language, whether they wanted to remove slavery from our constitution, where it's still allowed "as punishment for a crime," and voted to keep it. As we celebrate another Black History Month, I reflect on the disproportionate number of Black people behind bars.
Yet while "Abolish ICE" serves as a unifying chant in the streets, Democrats are once again seeking to temper and co-opt people's demands into a narrow version of reform. The demands outlined by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer could not be more toothless: requiring ICE agents to unmask, wear body cameras, and to follow a code of conduct modeled on other law enforcement agencies.
More than 100 grants were canceled because the department said they either didn't follow nondiscrimination requirements or align with the Trump administration's anti-DEI agenda. The cancellations represented about 3 percent of all TRIO programs, which served more than over 43,600 students. Colleges that house these programs have also had to lay off staff members and cut services to the underrepresented students that TRIO is designed to serve.
The truth about this money: It is invested with some of the worst actors engineering the current takeover. That includes private equity firms, venture capitalists, and asset managers-the most powerful corporations in the world and the billionaires that run them. Many of these people are actively supporting the Trump administration; most are doing little to nothing to oppose it. And all oversee millions, if not billions, of dollars in worker and community capital.
The change in the administration's tactics in Minneapolis is not a retreat. Instead, they are regrouping and planning another mode of attack, with the hopes that their repression might be met with resistance that is easier to control and contain. People who garner their relevancy and power through the dehumanization and oppression of others will do whatever it takes to cling to their soulless sense of self.
