Following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s moratorium on capital punishment via executive fiat in March, will California voters end the death penalty in 2020? New research from the National Institute on Money in Politics indicates that, absent a robust grassroots anti–death penalty effort, it could be a tough sell.

That’s owing to the power and influence—and infrastructure—of statewide unions such as the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, whose small-donor efforts in 2016 helped turn the public opinion tables on a capital punishment proposition twofer on that ballot that year.

Proposition 62 would have ended the death penalty outright; while pro-death penalty Proposition 66 sought to limit appeals in capital cases.

The institute’s research found that even as the state was trending away from support for the death penalty, that pro–death penalty, 62/66-specific committees outspent opponents’ committees by $13.5 million to $9.7 million in 2016.

That year, “corrections officers represented the overwhelming majority of small donors rallying behind the death penalty,” reports the institute’s online research portal, followthemoney.com, adding that “thirty-five public sector unions collectively gave $3.3 million to the pro-death-penalty effort. . . . Almost half ($1.6 million) of the union total came from contributions from CCPOA and the Peace Officers Research Association of California.”

Twenty-eight-thousand CCPOA members contributed $287 each to 62/66-specific committees. Small-donor anti-death penalty contributions were not nearly so robust, as the institute reports that “more than four-fifths of the anti-death-penalty total ($7.9 million) came from just 35 donors that gave $50,000 or more.”

Contributions from opponents were made by George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center ($1 million), Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective ($600,000), “and more than $450,000 from the Northern California Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.”

The report further noted that Stanford professor Nick McKeown gave $1.5 million, “a 91 percent share of the total from education donors,” while Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings contributed $1 million of $1.2 million that came from the TV and film industry. Lastly, it found that five people (including Tom Steyer) “accounted for more than 80 percent of $1.1 million from securities and investment donors.”

Small donor contributions from 1,700 opponents totaled $377,000, reports the institute as it recounted the run-up to the 2016 election. That year, opponents contributed an average of $4,750 to the committees; proponents of the death penalty contributed an average of $470.

On Sept. 21, 2016, the Sacramento Bee reported that polling to date indicated that a plurality of voters supported Prop 62, while only a third of voters supported Prop 66. It cited a joint study from the Field Poll and the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, that “found Proposition 62 ahead 48 to 37 percent, with 15 percent of likely voters undecided. Meanwhile, barely a third (35 percent) support Proposition 66, a competing initiative aimed at expediting the death-penalty process. With 42 percent undecided, it appears far less familiar to voters. Twenty-three percent are opposed.”

Then came a late-season, CCPOA-led advertising blitz that raised public awareness of the initiatives. “In the end, 53 percent of voters rejected Proposition 62 and 51 percent okayed Proposition 66,” notes the institute.

In making his announcement, Newsom highlighted that the death penalty discriminates against minorities and poor people as he called the practice “ineffective, irreversible and immoral.” He pledged to give a reprieve to the 737 inmates currently on death row in California, close the death chamber at San Quentin (it was dismantled soon after his announcement), and end a years-long controversy over the state’s execution protocols in the bargain.

Most of the 737 condemned in California are men held in one of three death row tiers at San Quentin. Women on death row are incarcerated at a facility in Chowchilla.

Marin Assemblyman Marc Levine has also introduced a proposed constitutional amendment on the 2020 ballot that would ban the death penalty. In response, proponents have ramped up the grassroots activism in light of the renewed push to end capital punishment in the state.

Families of crime victims and local district attorneys have embarked on a “Victims of Murder Justice Tour.” In April, NBC Los Angeles reported that the organization would take the tour to each of the 80 Assembly and 40 Senate districts in the state.

Can opponents match the grassroots activism? Death Penalty Focus, a California non-profit devoted to ending capital punishment in the state through public education and grassroots organizing, was unsurprisingly supportive of Newsom’s March move and says it might spur grassroots activism at the local level, should Levine’s measure wind up on the ballot in 2020.

“As it stands right now, it’s a bit premature to speculate about an initiative in 2020,” says David Crawford, senior advocacy director at DPF, “although the moratorium does raise questions about the movement’s endgame and whether the moment is right. My organization has many priorities at the moment, including public education, lifting up the voices of impacted communities like victims’ families and the wrongfully convicted, fostering new alliances with other criminal justice reform movements, and advocacy efforts at the local level. We rely on ‘small’ contributions from a broad base of donors to carry out this type of work, along with some funding from foundations and what nonprofits refer to as ‘major gifts.’ As a nonprofit advocacy organization, gifts of any amount really do make a difference for us.”

Meanwhile, it looks as like the most recent polling is favoring capital punishment opponents, by large margins, notes DPF. Even as district attorneys and victims’ families have accused Newsom of thwarting the 2016 will of the voters, recent polling suggests that Californians favor life-without-parole over execution in first-degree murder cases, by a two-to-one ratio. A Public Policy Institute of California poll conducted two weeks after Newsom’s announcement found that 62 percent of voters “chose life in prison over the death penalty,” reported DPF. “The survey found that only 31 percent of adults—38 percent of whom are likely voters—favored the death penalty.”

It remains to be seen whether the polling holds, or whether it will matter. “If a future campaign were to take place,” says Crawford, “it would need to build on the successful aspects of the last campaign’s fundraising strategy, while finding additional ways to raise money. Public figures play a big role in spreading the word about the issues at the heart of a campaign, and perhaps the governor’s bold stance might facilitate additional ‘small-donor’ contributions.”

A CNN investigation last week reported that the prison-healthcare giant Wellpath was the defendant in six federal lawsuits in recent years, most involving pregnant inmates.

The local upshot? Following a 2018 mega-merger, the for-profit Wellpath is now the heath-care provider at the Sonoma County Main Adult Detention Center.

The Massachusetts-based company is, in turn, controlled by private-equity firm H.I.G. Capital. CNN reported that Wellpath became the nation’s largest jail and prison healthcare provider in November 2018 when H.I.G. Capital merged Correct Care Solutions (which it bought last July) with the Correctional Medical Group Companies (CMGC). One of CMGC’s subsidiaries, the California Forensic Medical Group, is the contracted health-care provider at the MADF.

The county signed its latest contract with CFMG in 2017, which paid about $4.6 million a year for the first two years of the contract. The contract runs through 2022, and it appears that Wellfleet is indeed on the scene:

Job sites such as Indeed.com have been reporting for months that Wellpath is hiring for positions at the jail that include mental health professionals, social workers, psychiatric nurses and other positions.

A report in Bloomberg last year reported that the H.I.G. buyout of Correct Care Services was designed to “help the company gain a bigger footprint into the largely untapped behavioral health segment, which include providing mental illness and addictions services.”

With the for-profit mega-merger, CNN reported that Wellpath was projected to bring in annual revenues of $1.5 billion from contracts with jails such as Sonoma County’s. The county is also in the midst of building a new Behavioral Health Unit for inmates struggling with mental illness.

The Wellpath lawsuits cited by CNN “allege that pregnant women have been subjected to inhumane and dangerous conditions and treatment that in some cases have allegedly led to miscarriages and infant deaths.” One of the incidents occurred in Alameda County in 2018, where CFMG had a contract to provide health-care services. The county canceled the contract when a homeless woman allegedly gave birth while in solitary confinement. —Tom Gogola

As an outbreak of measles courses through California, Sonoma County Health Officer Celeste Philip issued a warning and recommendation yesterday that parents immunize their school-age children against the highly contagious disease.

“I . . . write this letter to emphasize to parents and guardians the seriousness of this current measles outbreak and the potential impact to unvaccinated or under vaccinated children,” says Philip in a note distributed to schools and parents yesterday.

As of this week there have been 44 reported cases of measles in California and 750 nationwide, the highest number of cases, reports Philip, “since measles was nearly eliminated in 2000.”

In 2017, the state moved to rein in abuses over a “personal belief exemption” in the state vaccination law and Philip notes that since then, there’s been a 94 percent rate of compliance with state law that requires vaccination as a condition of attending public school. But there are strong pockets of anti-vaxxer resistance, including in Sonoma County, where the immunization rate in some schools is less than half, she says.

None of the measles cases this year originated in Sonoma County, “but we are vulnerable,” she writes, given that “in some (Sonoma) County schools less than half of students are up to date with the recommended vaccination schedule.”

Any measles outbreak in Sonoma County will be met with swift action in the schools, Philip warns. “If your child is unvaccinated or cannot provide laboratory confirmation of measles immunity and there is a case in their school, they will likely be excluded from attending school for 21 days after their last exposure to the contagious individual. This exclusion helps protect the susceptible students and limits further spread of disease.”

Online data indicates that Sonoma County is one of the least-compliant counties in the state when it comes to parents getting their children vaccinated. The state requires that children entering kindergarten be immunized against 10 communicable diseases, including for measles, mumps and rubella. Those three are covered under the so-called “MMR” vaccine, which Philip says “has a long-established history of being safe and effective.” That view is not generally shared by the anti-vaxx community.

Here’s how the immunization debate and changes in state law have played out in one Sonoma County school over the past few years: the Sebastopol Independent Charter elementary school had 45 students enrolled in 2017-18. That year, 35.5 percent of students were up to date in vaccinations; up from 26.67 percent the year previous. Fifty-eight percent of the exemptions in 2017-18 were for medical reasons, up from 25 percent the year before. Thirty-eight percent of students were exempted in 2016-17 because of personal beliefs against vaccination held by the parents.

Those numbers are at stark odds with recent polling around vaccinations. A Pew Research study from 2015 found widespread acceptance of vaccinations, as 68 percent of adults said childhood vaccinations should be required. Thirty percent said the choice ought to be the parents to make—and many of those respondents were young adults aged 18-29 who have no experience with, for example, the devastating effects of polio (which has largely been eradicated thanks to the Salk vaccine).

Philip’s warning comes as the California legislature is considering closing a new loophole in the state’s childhood immunization law that came about after it ended the personal belief exemption in 2017. That moved followed a measles outbreak that year, as reported by KRCR ABC7 and elsewhere.

In closing one loophole, the state opened another: Now California’s vaccination law permits medical exemptions for parents of children whose health might be impacted negatively by vaccinations. The exemptions are currently granted by the family’s health-care provider. Critics say the loophole has been abused by parents who oppose vaccinating their kids, whether it’s for medical or personal reasons.

A state senate bill this year would close the loophole in a bill sponsored by Richard Pan, who is both a senator and a pediatrician. He’s been making the media rounds this month promoting SB 276, which would put the final decision about medical exemptions in the hand of the California Department of Public Health—and create a state registry of all children who have been granted medical exemptions.

As that bill works its way through committee, Sonoma County’s health official Philip is urging that “unvaccinated or under-vaccinated children should be vaccinated as soon as possible through their healthcare provider so they will have protection, will not further spread illness and will not need to be absent from school.”

One of the most persistent critiques of vaccinations is that they cause or can contribute to autism. The autism-immunization debate continues apace, and one of its biggest proponents is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder of the organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

Kennedy has compared a purported vaccine-driven rise in autism rates to the Holocaust, and noted in an interview that ran on the CHD site that “life for these children is an endless agonizing progression of twilight and terror. The tormenting gut aches, excruciating sensory sensitivities, the serial head banging and screaming, the isolation and perpetual joylessness. The entire family is permanently devastated.”

State Sen. Pan, in turn, has been stressing his pro-vaxx viewpoint on behalf of public school children with severe health problems and/or auto-immune disorders—who can often only attend public school if everyone is also vaccinated, given the health risks they’d face if one of their peers came down with the measles.

Buoyed by California’s strong economy, Gov. Gavin Newsom sent state lawmakers a revised budget on Thursday that boosts his already-hefty January proposal to $213.6 billion. Ka-ching!

Public schools will reap most of the gains if the Democratic-controlled Legislature rolls with him. Newsom also upped his ante on the housing crisis with a proposed $1 billion more to combat homelessness.

Still, Californians can expect some fiscal debate: Some Democrats want to go further on Medi-Cal spending, and others are leery of Newsom’s tax ideas, such as the sales tax break he wants to give on tampons.

And Newsom acknowledged the lessons of past budget exuberance, sounding for all the world like a certain frugal predecessor. Here are five key takeaways:

Public schools will be #winning

Talk about an apple for the teacher: Under Newsom’s revised plan, California will send $81.1 billion to K-12 schools and community colleges for the new fiscal year that starts in July.

Although some Democrats and education advocates continue to complain about lackluster per-pupil spending, that investment would be the biggest ever, up nearly $400 million from Newsom’s January budget. The governor noted that school funding will account for 45 percent of the state’s general fund, much higher than the 40 percent minimum guaranteed under Proposition 98, the state’s education funding formula. Lawmakers may also question whether any money needs to be set aside in a special public school rainy day fund.

One notable change is a scale-down of an earlier $750 million proposal to expand access to full-day kindergarten by building more facilities. Instead, about $150 million would go toward teacher recruitment and training while the other $600 million will be prioritized for districts with high concentrations of poor students.

The tweak was influenced by a new UC Berkeley study that found wealthier communities were more likely to benefit under the governor’s full-day kindergarten proposal because that’s where most part-day kindergarten programs are located.

School districts would also get additional aid to pay for teachers’ pensions. In January, Newsom proposed to contribute $3 billion extra to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, a move that lowers districts’ contribution rates from 18.13 percent down to 17.1 percent, freeing up local money, the better to address threatened teacher strikes. The May budget revision adds $150 million to bring the contribution rate down to 16.7 percent for one year in 2019-20.

And Newsom’s not done weighing in on the state’s polarizing charter school debate, another labor flashpoint. After signing a fast-tracked charter school transparency law, the governor is proposing regulations to prohibit charter schools from turning down students based on their grades or special education status. The governor wants to prevent charter schools from asking for students’ transcripts or records before enrolling them and to create a new state system for charter families to report complaints.

Fewer excuses to dodge homelessness

NIMBYs beware: Expanding on his push to aid Californians in need and address the state’s mounting housing crisis, Newsom announced a $1 billion investment to combat homelessness.

His plan calls for $650 million to local governments for emergency aid, $120 million for counties to pilot assistance programs for people at risk for homelessness, $150 million to train mental health professionals, $40 million for colleges to assist students going hungry, $25 million for Supplemental Security Income advocacy and $20 million to assist people from getting evicted.

One step or two on universal health coverage?

Newsom is sticking to his guns on expanding Medi-Cal coverage to only young adults up to age 26 regardless of immigration status. That could set up some haggling with legislative Democrats who may push to expand coverage to all low-income residents regardless of their immigration status.

He says he’s open to ideas but wants to make sure the state moves toward universal health coverage in a financially responsible way. “My goal is universal health care for everyone,” he said. “That is the goal ultimately.”

The administration also affirmed its commitment to restore eyeglasses benefits for Medi-Cal patients, although health advocates say Newsom remains silent on other benefits that were cut during the last recession.

Although he tweaked subsidy eligibility and amounts, the governor is also sticking to an idea for a state individual mandate. The idea is to use penalties to help expand subsidies for middle-income earners to purchase health insurance through Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange.

He’s serious about working parents

Newsom’s options may be limited and he may be burnishing his ‘Governor Dad’ brand, but his agenda clearly is that of a guy who knows the price of Pampers. Earlier this week, he announced expanding the state’s paid family leave program by 2 weeks, threw support behind legislative proposals to eliminate sales tax on diapers and feminine products (even if there isn’t agreement yet for how long) and wants to boost the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit for families with children under 6 from $500 to $1,000.

For working mothers, the administration had already proposed in January increasing CalWORKS grants. For a family of three, the highest grant will go from $785 to $888 per month. While that’s an increase of $103, it still remains 50 percent of federal poverty level.

Channeling Jerry Brown

Rarely have two governors differed more in style than Newsom and his predecessor. Still, at times during his 90-minute budget update, Newsom sounded for all the world like Jerry Brown.

The new governor repeatedly cited the old one’s warnings about the need for healthy state reserves and fiscal prudence. Newsom’s budget staff projects the state could lose $70 billion over three years in a moderate recession.

“We have a record amount of rainy day reserves and a record amount of resiliency. We have well over $30 billion-plus to weather a major storm and I would argue we have much more than that,” Newsom said. “We are preparing for a very different climate and we’ve never been more prepared as a state.”

CALmatters reporter Ricardo Cano contributed to this report.

Following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s moratorium on capital punishment via executive fiat in March, will California voters end the death penalty in 2020? New research from the National Institute on Money in Politics indicates that, absent a robust grassroots anti-death penalty effort, it may be a tough sell.

That’s owing to the power and influence of statewide unions such as the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, whose small-donor efforts in 2016 helped turn the tables on a capital-punishment proposition twofer on that ballot that year.

Proposition 62 would have ended the death penalty outright; while pro-death penalty Proposition 66 sought to limit appeals in capital cases.

The institute’s research found that even as the state was trending away from support for the death penalty, that pro–death penalty, 62/66-specific committees outspent opponents’ committees by $13.5 million to $9.7 million in 2016

That year, “corrections officers represented the overwhelming majority of small donors rallying behind the death penalty,” reports the institute’s online research portal, followthemoney.com, adding that “thirty-five public sector unions collectively gave $3.3 million to the pro-death-penalty effort. . . . Almost almost half ($1.6 million) of the union total came from contributions from CCPOA and the Peace Officers Research Association of California.” Twenty-eight-thousand CCPOA members contributed $287 each to 62/66-specific committees.

Small-donor anti-death penalty contributions were not nearly so robust, as the institute reports that “more than four-fifths of the anti-death-penalty total ($7.9 million) came from just 35 donors that gave $50,000 or more.”

Contributions from opponents were made by George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center ($1 million), Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective ($600,000), “and more than $450,000 from the Northern California Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.”

The report further noted that Stanford professor Nick McKeown gave $1.5 million, “a 91 percent share of the total from education donors,” while Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings contributed $1 million of $1.2 million that came from the TV and film industry. Lastly, it found that five people (including Tom Steyer) “accounted for more than 80 percent of $1.1 million from securities and investment donors.”

Small-donor contributions from 1,700 opponents totaled $377,000, reports the institute as it recounted the run-up to the 2016 election. That year, opponents contributed an average of $4,750 to the committees; proponents of the death penalty contributed an average of $470.

On September 21 2016, the Sacramento Bee reported that polling to date indicated that a plurality of voters supported Prop 62, while only a third of voters supported Prop 66.

It cited a joint study from the Field Poll and the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, that “found Proposition 62 ahead 48 to 37 percent, with 15 percent of likely voters undecided. Meanwhile, barely a third (35 percent) support Proposition 66, a competing initiative aimed at expediting the death-penalty process. With 42 percent undecided, it appears far less familiar to voters. Twenty-three percent are opposed.”

Then came a CCPOA-led advertising blitz that raised public awareness of Proposition 66. “In the end, 53 percent of voters rejected Proposition 62 and 51 percent okayed Proposition 66,” notes the institute.

In making his announcement this spring, Newsom highlighted that the death penalty discriminates against minorities and poor people as he called the practice “ineffective, irreversible and immoral.” He pledged to give a reprieve to the 737 inmates currently on death row in California, close the death chamber at San Quentin (it was dismantled soon after his announcement), and end a years-long debate over the state’s execution protocols.

Most of the 737 condemned in California are men held in one of three death row tiers at San Quentin. Women on death row are incarcerated at a facility in Chowchilla. The last execution in California took place 13 years ago.

As Newsom was making his announcement, Marin Assemblyman Marc Levine introduced a proposed constitutional amendment on the 2020 ballot that would ban the death penalty.

Opponents to Newsom’s moratorium have already ramped up the grassroots activism in light of the renewed push to end capital punishment in the state.

Families of crime victims and local district attorneys have embarked on a “Victims of Murder Justice Tour” which today is in Riverside. In April NBC Los Angeles reported that the organization (founded by the Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer) would take the tour to each of the 80 Assembly and 40 Senate districts in the state.

Death Penalty Action, a California non-profit devoted to ending capital punishment in the state through public education and grassroots organizing, was unsurprisingly supportive of Newsom’s March move.

District attorneys and victims’ families have accused Newsom of thwarting the 2016 will of the voters, but recent polling suggests that Californians favor life-without-parole over execution in first-degree murder cases, by a two-to-one ratio.

A Public Policy Institute of California poll conducted two weeks after Newsom’s announcement found that 62 percent of voters “chose life in prison over the death penalty,” reported Death Penalty Action.”The survey found that only 31 percent of adults—38 percent of whom are likely voters—favored the death penalty.”