Wednesday, August 17, 2016

For the record: SFPOA really wants some executions

It should be no surprise that Dolores Huerta is on the opposite side from the guys who nearly killed her.

This is almost a "dog bites man" tale, but as California lurches toward an election in which we'll be asked to vote to either expedite (Prop. 65) or end (Prop. 62) the death penalty, it seems worth highlighting this SF Weekly story from June 2016.

The San Francisco police union tossed $60,000 into the pot to kill more quickly way back on September 11, 2015.

Perhaps oddly, the POA cut the check before the POA membership officially voted to support the bill, which it did this spring, according to the POA Journal, the organization's newspaper.

For that matter, the POA donated to the campaign even before there was a campaign — the language of the bill wasn't submitted to the state until October, according to Ballotpedia. 

It's been a great frustration to the cop union that no one has been sentenced to death (as opposed to shot by the police) in the city since the early 1990s. Former D.A. and present state Attorney General and Senate candidate Kamala Harris refused to ask death for a cop killer in 2004. In her state job, Harris is trying to move several mentally ill inmates off death row.

In November, Californians once again will have the chance to replace death sentences with life without parole. It will be a crazy long ballot with 17 state initiatives. But it will be worth working all the way through it to YES on 62 (end executions) and NO on 65 (kill 'em quicker.)

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