Div. Seven of this district’s Court of Appeal has held that Penal Code §3051, which requires defendants convicted of crimes that were committed before the age of 26 to be granted “youth offender parole hearings” after 14 years of incarceration on determinate sentences, does not run afoul of the California Constitution as applied to certain sex offenders based on the fact that an earlier voter-approved measure calls for longer sentences for violent predators.

Geofencing allows the government to draw a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed. After that, the government seeks a warrant — not to search a home or office, but to require a tech company to search its data to identify any of its millions of users who were within the geofence line at the time of the crime. The question before the U.S. Supreme Court is whether geofencing is ingenious, Orwellian, or both. And, ultimately, is it constitutional?

Gov. Gavin Newsom has nominated the presiding judge of Imperial County Superior Court to be an associate justice in the San Diego-based state appellate court. Judge Eran Marie Bermudez has been on the bench in Imperial County since 2018. She is poised to become a member of the 4th District Court of Appeal, Division 1, if her nomination is approved.

The proposal by the Judicial Council of California comes in response to an unprecedented rise in detentions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at superior courts across California’s judicial system, the nation’s largest. Attorneys, judges and public safety advocates have criticized the practice.