Horrifying

Prosecutors are now requiring that defendants give up their right to appeal sentences if the laws change as a part of plea deals.

I guess that they want to ensure that the folks that they put in jail for nickel bags won't be released early if we as a society decide to change the drug laws.

This is just evil:

The San Diego County District Attorney has a new tactic aimed at locking in prison terms in plea-bargained cases, by requiring defendants to give up any rights they may have in the future to seek a lower sentence if the Legislature or the courts change the law under which they were sent to prison.

The move comes after years of criminal justice reform measures, passed both by voters through statewide propositions and by lawmakers in Sacramento, that have lessened potential sentences for some crimes, downgraded other crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and opened a way for people in prison to go to court and get lower sentences based on newly-adopted changes to the law.

Now, in some cases, prosecutors in San Diego will require defendants to agree that a sentence imposed as part of a plea bargain will remain forever. Under the terms of the waiver, defendants will be barred from pursuing any new benefits that may be available to them in the future.

………

But word of the waiver even in limited use raised protests from defense lawyers and criminal justice reform advocates. They said that prosecutors were making an end-run around the Legislature and voters, largely out of frustration at the wave of changes the state has made to the criminal justice system.

“The ground is shifting underneath them,” said Kate Chatfield, the co-founder and former policy director of the reform group Re:store Justice. “They don’t like it. And that’s shameful.”

Chatfield’s group was instrumental in the Legislature passing a bill this year that changed the felony-murder rule so that accomplices who did not do the actual killing would no longer face murder charges, as they had in the past. The law was retroactive — meaning hundreds of inmates serving prison sentences have now gone back to courts, seeking a lower sentence. That is just one of several measures — including Three Strikes reform, a measure that reduced felonies to misdemeanors and is also retroactive — that have remade the face of criminal courts in California.

This is fascist bullsh%$.

I hope that the ACLU gets involved, because prosecutorial butt-hurt is no excuse for this sort of crap.