Watch where you park + New California law could help former senator
By Bryan Anderson and Alexei Koseff
DMV CRACKS DOWN ON HANDICAP PARKING ABUSERS
It’s not all bad news at California’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The agency has spent the last year and a half cracking down on people who abused disabled person parking placards, following years of misuse.
DMV Spokeswoman Jessica Gonzalez said about one in every 10 people is misusing a disabled parking placard. The special spots can only be used by people assigned the disabled placard. Fines range from $250 to $1,000, she added.
“When you illegally use a placard, you disrupt the lives of those with disabilities and interfere with their mobility,” Gonzalez said.
During the 2017-2018 fiscal year ending in June, the DMV issued 2,485 citations. Since July 1, the DMV has verified 5,422 disabled person parking placards and found 640 of them being misused. Of the 640 abusers, 491 were caught last month — largely from five enforcement operations at the Los Angeles County Fair.
NEW LAW COULD HELP EX-STATE SENATOR
Alexei Koseff writes...
A new law that will make it easier for California legislators to live outside their districts could retroactively help the man whose legal woes prompted the measure.
Gov. Jerry Brown is considering a pardon request from former state Sen. Rod Wright. The Democrat from Los Angeles County was found guilty of felony perjury and voting fraud in 2014, for living at a different address than the one he used on his voter registration and candidacy papers.
Wright ultimately resigned over the conviction and served 71 minutes in jail. But he has maintained that he was wrongly prosecuted under an ambiguous legal standard for determining someone’s primary residence.
Wright is also seeking clemency for a 1972 felony conviction, at the age of 19, for “taking a vehicle without the owner’s consent.”
In a request from his legal affairs secretary filed last week, Brown asked the California Supreme Court for a recommendation on whether Wright should receive a pardon. It’s one of 55 such inquiries Brown has made this year to the court, which will “determine whether the applicant’s claim has sufficient support that an act of executive clemency, should the Governor choose to grant it, would not represent an abuse of that power.”
“Sen. Wright’s application presents a favorable case for a pardon,” Peter Krause wrote, in part because of Senate Bill 1250, which Brown signed last month. It establishes that the address listed on a candidate’s voter registration form will be accepted as their primary residency, as long as they lived there for an unspecified period of time, and bars prosecutors from using certain evidence to prove that a lawmaker lives somewhere else.
“As the Board of Parole Hearings found, ‘establishing a domicile in the manner Mr. Wright did during the period of 2007 to 2009 would be permissible under the bill,’” Krause added.
The board referred Wright’s pardon request to Brown last month. Among those supporting the clemency application was Sen. Steve Bradford, the Gardena Democrat who now holds Wright’s old seat and carried SB 1250.
TWEET OF THE DAY
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“Governor Brown has been responsible for tremendous gains for working people, particularly for men and women in the construction industry. It is unfortunate that so many laws passed to benefit workers, especially to protect women from sexual harassment and equal pay violations, have been undermined by forced arbitration.”
— Cesar Diaz, Political and Legislative Director, State Building and Construction Trades Council
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The original article can be found here.