Faced with whopping debt and a frightening budget forecast, what kind of law enforcement priorities do California lawmakers have on their minds? As it turns out, nothing new (unless you consider locking people up for a longer period of time a “new” strategy), but plenty that is just scary, scary, scary. And, as it turns out, the biggest financial backer of state lawmakers’ biggest “anti-crime” initiative is now facing a possibility of 340 years in prison.
How’s that for irony?
Proposition 6, would not only guarantee $965 million per year from the state for law enforcement and create a host of new criminal offenses and penalties (40 of ’em, according to the San Jose Mercury News), but also would expand the circumstances under which kids as young as 14 can be tried as adults, the daily reports. The language of the law comes to voters courtesy of the authors of the much derided Three Strikes Law, which throws offenders in the clink for life after a third offense — regardless of the nature of the offense or other related circumstances. The law has been pimped to voters as a tough-on-crime measure known as the “Safe Neighborhoods Act.”
But as it turns out, Act backers might want to find a new champion for their cause, because the chief financial supporter of the proposed initiative, which will appear on the November ballot, has gotten himself into a shit-load of trouble with the law. Broadcom co-founder and former CEO Henry Nicholas, who donated $1 million to the Prop 6 campaign, is now facing a 21-count federal indictment that accuses him of backdating stock options, supplying friends and prostitutes with methamphetamine, and — get this — of spiking colleagues’ drinks with Ecstasy, the Merc News reported last week. Indeed, the daily reports that during a flight on Nicholas’ private plane, he and his guests “exhaled so much marijuana smoke that the pilot was forced to don an oxygen mask.”
This article appears in September 26 • 2008.