Author: Debra Saunders

When horrific and ugly crimes make headlines, politicians like to seize the opportunity — to make their own headlines. So when Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced former Stanford student Brock Turner, now 21, to six months in jail — he served only three months — for sexually assaulting a woman who was too inebriated […]

You don’t see many Californians when you look at lists of federal inmates whose sentences President Obama has commuted. The reason is simple: The mandatory minimum sentencing system effectively has allowed federal prosecutors to choose defendants’ sentences by deciding how to charge them. U.S. attorneys in California have been less heavy-handed than prosecutors in other […]

On Tuesday, Aug. 30, President Obama commuted the sentences of 111 federal drug offenders. In his first term, Obama endured the sting of critics like me who called him one of the stingiest modern presidents when it comes to the presidential pardon power. In his second term, Obama is making up for lost time. With […]

Some people do not learn from their mistakes. Anthony Weiner is one. The husband of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin resigned from Congress in 2011 when he was caught sending shots of his tumescent privates to a number of women not his wife. His first instinct was to lie about the messages and claim someone […]

Opponents of California’s death penalty have been highly successful at thwarting executions since the state resumed executions in 1992 after a 20-year hiatus. Their latest ploy is Proposition 62, which would repeal the death penalty and resentence death row inmates to life without parole. Measure sponsors argue that capital punishment presents the risk of executing […]

Patricia Hearst is the first person in American history to receive a commutation from one president and a pardon from another, author Jeffrey Toobin writes in his book, “American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst.” Hearst had served 22 months of a seven year sentence in federal prison […]

As mayor of Oakland in the 2000s, Jerry Brown supported redevelopment. Then he returned to the governor’s office in 2011 and inherited a $25 billion budget shortfall. Feeling the squeeze, Brown saw an opportunity to make $1.7 billion by eliminating redevelopment agencies and shifted. He liked redevelopment as mayor, he explained to the League of […]

In 2009, the fact-checking organization PolitiFact, run by the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the 2008 election. But I don’t think PolitiFact is likely to emerge from 2016 with its credibility intact. A recent NBC News poll shows that a mere 11 percent of voters […]

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi told The San Francisco Chronicle’s Karen de Sa it was “positively medieval” for District Attorney George Gascon’s office to charge LaSonya Wells for kidnapping after she and two men stole Supervisor Scott Wiener’s iPhone 6 in December and accompanied him to an ATM so he could swap his phone […]

For the first time since 1988, both major parties’ nominees — Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump — say that they have never smoked or experimented with marijuana (without inhaling). President Obama has been open about having used marijuana and other drugs in his youth, yet his administration has taken insufficient steps to inject […]

The first of three presidential debates won’t happen until Sept. 26. Today, nearly six weeks beforehand, I safely can make these predictions. Hillary Clinton will show up for all three, as her campaign announced Monday. Donald Trump will show up, at least to most of them. Tuesday he told Time Magazine, “I will absolutely do […]

Monday’s front-page New York Times story “Scholarship or Business? Think Tanks Blur the Line” reports that while think tanks in general “are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests,” some think tank biggies chase money from corporate donors. “And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their […]

Having declared Donald Trump to be “unfit to serve as president,” President Obama urged Republican leaders to disavow the GOP nominee Tuesday. “The question they have to ask themselves is,” quoth the president, “If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still […]

Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor, and his running mate, Bill Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, bill themselves as the “credible alternative to ClinTrump.” The two former GOP governors, who won re-election in bluish states, have a bounce in their step on the campaign trail. “Give us one term, America, and […]

Hillary Clinton’s advantage going into the final evening of the Democratic National Convention was her nonstop determination. The former first lady and secretary of state never gave up on her bid to become the first female American president. Unlike Donald Trump, she didn’t just stumble into the nomination. She reached the spotlight through “steady leadership” […]

“If the word ‘Manson’ was not attached to Leslie, she would have been out 20 years ago,” attorney Richard Pfeiffer told me about his client, convicted Manson “family” killer Leslie Van Houten, who is serving a life sentence for her role in two 1969 murders. On Friday, Gov. Jerry Brown reversed a parole board recommendation […]

Democrats have every reason to rage against the Democratic National Committee: Newly leaked DNC memos confirm that Donald Trump was right when he said the party machine was “rigged” in Hillary Clinton’s favor. The latest CNN/ORC poll shows that 68 percent of voters think Clinton is not “honest and trustworthy.” As a Republican unhappy with […]

I keep waiting for the Donald Trump who shows me that he is more than a highly successful reality TV showman, that he is a man who can bring America together, and yes, make this country feel great again. I saw a glimpse of that man when he said in his acceptance speech at Cleveland’s […]

When Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos, a blogger for the conservative news website Breitbart.com who used the Twitter handle Nero, Yiannopoulos reacted with characteristic modesty. He told The New York Times the ban launched “the beginning of the end for Twitter.” Oddly, Yiannopouolos may be right. In February, the social media platform announced its “Trust and […]

Facts don’t matter. Police are guilty until proven innocent — or even if proven innocent. The Black Lives Matter crusade, born after Florida vigilante George Zimmerman shot unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in 2012, turned to police shootings of black men after the death of Michael Brown, 18, in 2014. It doesn’t matter that the U.S. […]