CDCR STAR SPECIAL EDITION

California sex offender sweep nets hundreds of arrests
By Nick Monacelli, News10 -- The largest statewide sex offender sweep of its kind, wrapped up Thursday evening.

Operation Safe Playground was a joint operation with 140 different local, state and federal agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigations and U.S. Marshals.

The purpose of the sweep was simple: make contact with as many sex offenders as possible to make sure they're not violating the terms of their parole.

In Northern California, three teams from Sacramento, Redding and Modesto spent at least eight hours every day beginning on Monday, Nov. 15 until Thursday, Nov. 18.

Each team had at least 20 agents.

"We would love to put even more resources into finding guys that are up to no good," said agent Greg Shuman.

Shuman is a part of the California Parole Apprehension Team, a division of the State Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). He led the Sacramento team which had enough agents to split up and cover more ground.

Monday's first stop was in the Arden-Arcade area of Sacramento. Shuman and other agents were forced into a screaming match with a parolee's wife. Using expletives, she refused to allow agents to search their home, even though search and seizure is the foundation of parole.

After a 10-minute dispute the wife finally calmed down and agreed to the search.

"It could come to the point where we make him move because we're not going to deal with this everytime we come out here," Shuman said walking out the front door. "Normally we see the parolees are cooperative and the girlfriends or wives are not. They believe it's an invasion of their privacy, even though it's not."

The fourth stop on Monday's schedule proved to be the worst. Ernesto Ortega, 61, had failed to charge his GPS monitor and was to be arrested for the parole violation.

But when agents searched his downtown hotel room his violations quickly added up.

Ortega had been convicted of child molestation. In his room agents found a princess pillow, Barbie toys, play money and child's underwear.

"I can't imagine what he would be doing, especially a man of his age, with a Cinderella wagon and Monopoly money. It's scary,"Shuman said.

While still holding the underwear with a disgusted look on his face, Shuman added, "He has a history of abusing children, these things can be used as gifts or items to lure children and that's against his conditions of parole."

The majority of the compliance checks were less eventful, although in Sacramento, more than half of the parolees were arrested; most of them for possession of pornography.

"I don't really freak out [when I see them coming] because there's nothing for me to freak out about, I'm not doing anything, I'm not up to no good or anything like that," said Jason Kliewer, 31, who is on parole for burglary, assault and battery with the intent to commit a sexual act.

Kliewer was one of the few who had no violations.

"But sometimes it's a little nerve-racking. You see them all dressed up in their gear and stuff and you think, 'Did I do anything,' and stuff goes through your head."

Other parolees had an automatic arrest because of they either failed to charge their GPS monitor or going places not allowed.

Officials said the excuses all sound the same.

"It never went dead, I always charge it," said an offender arrested in Hotel Marshall. "I was in my room the whole day and I charged it."

GPS data sent to agents showed the unit was powered off for six hours.

The most common excuse, agents said, comes after a parolee is caught with pornography. Shuman said they either say it's not theirs or didn't know it was there. Either way, parole conditions prohibit having direct access to the content.

"They know they're not supposed to do it. Why they continue to do it we have no idea," said Shuman.

Andre Summer, a 31-year-old parolee was arrested when agents found prostitution ads on the computer in his apartment.

His wife told agents she makes the ads for clients.

"I take responsibility for that, I should have been more responsible," said Summers.

The Sacramento team made 36 arrests in the four-day sweep while Modesto area agents arrested 19 and those in Redding arrested four.

Statewide arrest results will be released Friday morning.

Adult parole changes spurs sweep

After names like John Gardner and Phillip Garrido dominated national headlines, the CDCR underwent enormous scrutiny. Much of that scrutiny resulted in policy and training changes. Operation Safe Playground demonstrates one such change.

"Both the Phillip Garrido and the Gardner case has given the department an opportunity to revisit its policies and its approach," said Robert Ambroselli, the director of adult parole operation. "There's also a number of boards and task forces that have made recommendations and what you're seeing is the department moving forward on most of those recommendations. We've specialized our work with these apprehension teams and intelligence units. In some cases these recommendations have come out saying you need to specialize that work."

One example of that specialization was highly evident during the sweep as computer agents scanned computers and cell phones, instantly allowing parole agents to arrest offenders with pornographic material.

Other parolees were arrested after agents found them using social networking sites to converse with children. One was arrested after he posted pictures of himself with minors. His parole conditions do not allow him to be in contact with children.

"These people are clandestine about their operations, they get on the Internet, they use all kinds of different names, they cloak themselves and so it requires a lot of hours and sometimes a lot of dead-end leads before you get that one piece of information that's necessary to be able to follow through," Ambroselli said.

The director also noted operations such as this are likely to continue, giving field agents the opportunity to better supervise their parolees.

"You have an opportunity to take the offender and isolate them while the rest of the team moves through the house doing the searches, and that's, a lot of times, when we tend to find those much more detailed occurrences," said Ambroselli.

Agents speak out against Jessica's Law

During the four-day sweep, one topic that became normal conversation was the recent ruling against Jessica's Law. A Los Angeles County judge ruled the law, approved by voters in 2006, unconstitutional. He believes the State cannot restrict where parolees can live.

Many of the agents couldn't speak to the legality of the law, but did admit more of their parolees cannot find places to live. One part of the law requires sex offenders to live no less than 2,000 feet from a school or playground.

"That's one reason I'm here," said Kliewer. "I have friends that I could stay with but because they're so close to [a school] it can be a pain sometimes looking for housing."

"At times it can be frustrating as far as the housing goes," said Shuman. But right now we're following the law to the T."

Intensity highlights Contra Costa's role in first-ever statewide sex offender sweep
By Robert Salonga, Contra Costa Times -- It was obvious something was different when they started checking the air ducts.

The search team also looked through the man's cell phone to check for pornographic images or videos, which would have violated his release conditions.

By the time the dozen or so officers left the man's Pittsburg motel room, drawers were left open, laundry bags had been searched and air duct screens were removed, leaving little doubt that the occupant was abiding by the strict tenets of his parole as a registered sex offender.

The police team's stop at a home near downtown was a little more dicey. GPS coordinates indicated that a registrant was inside his mother's house -- a violation because he wasn't registered at that address and because it was about 50 yards from a children's park -- but he wasn't there. During a neighborhood search, the parolee came strolling from around a corner, as if he had just been on a walk, but it was clear to officers and in his GPS trail that he aborted an attempt to flee.

On Tuesday morning, a dozen-member team of state parole agents and deputies from the Contra Costa Sheriff's Office, and police from Pittsburg, Clayton, Concord and Pleasant Hill, made three arrests for parole violations in its first four searches.

The team was one of several multiagency squads canvassing Contra Costa to ensure the county's registered sex offenders -- about 1,700 live within the boundaries -- were living where they said they were living, and, depending on their parole, steering clear of children and staying out of trouble.

Their efforts were part of the first statewide sex offender compliance sweep, dubbed "Operation Safe Playground," conducted this week under the leadership of the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Besides enforcing compliance, the teams were dispatched throughout California to hunt for at-large sex offenders.

"To the extent we can, we're going to uncover things," said Fredrick Bridgewater, regional supervisor for the California Parole Apprehension Teams, made up of the specially trained parole agents coordinating the weeklong operation.

Through Wednesday -- figures for Thursday were not available by press time -- teams had performed 1,840 parole, probation and registered sex offender searches and audits across the state, yielding more than 400 arrests and revealing 49 compliance violations. The arrests included a variety of offenses, such as possession of drugs, weapons, and child and adult pornography.

Local law enforcement agencies have conducted similar sweeps in the past, though more limited in scope and generally aimed at ensuring that sex offenders were living at the residences where they registered.

The diligence of such sweeps came under scrutiny after the surfacing of Jaycee Dugard, which in August 2009 shone an international spotlight on the failures of county, state and federal authorities to find Dugard, whom authorities said spent 18 years after she was kidnapped living in registered sex offender Phillip Garrido's backyard near Antioch.

Last week, a statewide task force set up in the wake of the Dugard case recommended repealing a voter-approved ban on registered sex offenders living within 2,000 feet of a school or park where children "regularly gather," saying the restriction has led to a dangerous 24-fold increase in homelessness among sex offenders. Parole agents say transient offenders are more difficult to track.

Bridgewater downplayed the effect of the Dugard case on the state's current efforts, saying the emergence of the California Parole Apprehension Teams in January, and the increased capacity for coordination as a result, had more to do with the breadth and intensity of this week's first-of-its-kind sweep.

"We have always conducted these operations in the past," said Bridgewater, who then alluded to the Dugard case. "We do want to make sure those things don't happen again."

But the influence of the Dugard revelation -- if only psychological -- has been hard to ignore. As recently as March 2009, a local compliance sweep consisted mostly of door-knocking and making sure registrants were living where they said, and state parole agents were rarely seen. About a year later, their presence at a similar sweep was significantly larger.

On Tuesday, the refined focus yielded immediate results: The Contra Costa team's first visit at an apartment building revealed that a parolee was blatantly violating his release terms by living with his girlfriend and young daughter despite his being prohibited from contact with children.

A visit to a suburban home in Pittsburg uncovered a transient parolee unlawfully living at the home of his girlfriend's father. He was located through a GPS unit that tracks him to within a few feet. At the home they found a knife -- he is barred from having weapons -- and images on his cell phone suggesting that he had contact with children recently.

Both men were arrested.

Sex offenders arrested in "Operation Safe Playgrounds"
KFMB -- News 8 cameras rode along with parole agents this week as a major crackdown on sex offenders is underway.

It's called Operation Safe Playgrounds, and it starts with a knock on the door at the homes of hundreds of sex offenders.

For example, 46-year-old Russel Tennison had no idea officers were coming to his Lakeside apartment.

Although the registered sex offender was not wanted by police, officers were allowed to search his home without a warrant because he is currently on probation.

Agents found what they were looking for inside and Tennison is headed back to jail.

400 sex offenders arrested in statewide sweep
By Melissa MacBride, KABC --  Sex offenders in violation of their parole were rounded up by law enforcement this week as part of a statewide sweep called "Operation Safe Playgrounds."

During a Friday news conference in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, authorities called the operation a success. Agents arrested 400 sex offenders this week alone for violating the terms of their parole.

State, federal and local law enforcement teamed up to crack down on convicted child molesters, rapists and other sex offenders considered the greatest risk to the public.

L.A. County has the most sex offenders of any other county in California.

The California Parole Apprehension Team (CPAT) fanned out across the state to arrest parolees who have cut off contact with their parole agents. Some of the sex offenders, who are now back in custody, had let the batteries run low on their GPS bracelets, making them harder to track.

CPAT also checked cell phones and computers of parolees and found some of them had violated the terms of their parole based on the content agents uncovered.

"We found individuals that had various amounts of pornography," said Erskine Richmond, a CPAT member. "One person, I believe, had child imaging and stuff like that. The rest had some type of pornography."

Some of the parolees had crossed state lines, and others failed to register as sex offenders - both are violations of their parole.

What Agents Found Inside Sex Offender's Homes
By Tony Shin, NBC -- Hundreds of convicted sex offenders have been arrested after a four day sweep across California including dozens in San Diego County, according to state parole agents.

Operation Safe Playgrounds began on Monday. State parole agents, along with local law enforcement, conducted compliance checks on registered sex offenders.

"The short message is, if you're a sex offender and you are not in compliance in any way, we are going to track you down and get you back in compliance,” said parole agent Sean Torphy of the California Parolee Apprehension Team.

NBCSandiego went along with a team of agents and sheriff's deputies as they made surprise visits to registered sex offenders in East County.

The first stop was at the La Mesa home of a 73-year-old convicted child molester. Agents handcuffed him, which is normal procedure, as they searched his apartment for violations including pornography.

When asked what his life has been like since his conviction for molesting a five-year-old girl, he simply replied, “It’s been hell."

Agents didn't find any violations and then went to the next target, a convicted child molester on probation at a sober living house in Spring Valley.

He wasn't home, but agents were able to search his room for violations. He didn't have any violations, but agents were suspicious about a montage of pictures of women that hung over the man's bed. There was also an unused condom taped to it.

The next stop took agents to a home in La Mesa where a sex offender lives with his wife and two teenage daughters. Agents found potential violations including pictures of his daughter’s young friends on computer equipment that he isn't suppose to have in his possession. Agents decided to wait to see what exactly what is on the computer hard drives before making an arrest.

"We definitely want to have our ducks in a row before we take this to court,” agent Torphy said.

The final stop was a trailer in El Cajon where agents found a phone belonging to a sex offender who lives there. They say the man has been accessing teen porn sites on his phone, so they arrested him.

On Friday, state parole officials will hold a press conference to release the finally number of arrests for California.

Parole Agents Crack Down On Sex Offenders
KTVU -- Since Monday, 300 sex offenders in the Bay Area have been arrested for parole violations as part of a sweep largely in response to recent high profile cases involving convicted sex offenders.

The multi-agency task force has a goal to check on every paroled sex offender in the state. KTVU’s cameras recently got an exclusive look.

Operation Safe Playgrounds was developed following criticism that was leveled at state agencies when Jaycee Dugard surfaced following her 18-year-long kidnapping and abuse ordeal at the hands of convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido

Outcry grew after convicted sex offender John Gardner confessed to raping and killing two teenagers in San Diego County.

The department of corrections promised changes, especially targeting parolees at large who have committed another crime or who can't be found because they've cut off their GPS monitor or let the battery die.

“We saw that our parolee at large rate was higher than the national average, hovering around 18-19 percent,” said parole agent Kurt Heffemon. “The national average was quite a bit lower.”

Since January, parole apprehension teams have been charged with locating every parolee-at-large whom they consider a high risk to public safety.

“It got bumped up significantly,” said Heffemon. “This is our full time job.”

Officials said they've found many PALs, the term used for parolees at large.

“We have we've seen our PAL rates go down significantly,” said Heffemon. “We've gone from 15-16 percent in our region two and we are down to 10-11 percent now.”

The 140 police agencies statewide focus on sex offenders but sometimes nets other wanted parolees.

They said one man apprehended was a former gang member on the run since August.

Agents said it's about checking everything: shoes, homes even a cereal box, which in this case hid a laptop computer.

“There was pornography found on the computer,” said Heffemon.

When officers find something, even an item as simple as an internet-capable phone, the sex offenders are taken in.

“Other than that phone, I would be staying here and not going into custody,” said one PAL who was taken into custody. “I didn't realize that phone was going to get me into trouble. I didn't think that phone had internet access.”

“We need more people doing what I'm doing,” said Heffemon. “That would be optimal.”

Friday authorities are scheduled to hold a press conference where officials will undoubtedly call this operation a success. But Operation Safe Playgrounds is just part of a multi-year plan to improve supervision of parolees. And that plan remains largely dependent on the one thing officials can't guarantee: funding.

New California parole team targets sex offenders
By Don Thompson, Associated Press -- More than 285 sex offenders have been swept up throughout California this week by law enforcement teams created partly as a response to agents fumbling their attempts to monitor paroled molesters.

The teams are designed to apprehend parolees who have become fugitives or are otherwise violating terms of their release.

Five California Parole Apprehension Teams were created this year, while five more will start in January.

The teams organized a crackdown called "Operation Safe Playgrounds" to target sex offenders. Officials will announce the results of this week's crackdown on Friday.

Since the teams were created in January, they have arrested more than 800 people for violating the terms of their parole, including about 370 sex offenders.

Nearly 580 Sex Offenders Arrested; Six in Monterey Co.
By Azenith Smith, Central Coast News -- UPDATE: A specialized team of parole agents with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced Friday they arrested 579 parolees during a six-month multi-agency sting called Operation Safe Playground.

The statewide operation, which began in July and continues through January, was conducted by the department's California Parolee Apprehension Team (CPAT) along with other 140 law enforcement partners. Central Coast News rode along with state agents during the sweep.

It was planned in the beginning of the year, but law enforcement agents kept quiet, as they raided the homes of nearly 50 sex offenders in Monterey County this week.

"We will be looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything illegal," says State Patrol Agent Jerry Gonzalvo. "We will search their computers, phones, their smart phones to ensure they don't have anything they aren't supposed to have like pornography, child porn."

Almost a dozen agencies took part in "Operation Safe Playground," a major statewide sweep to make sure these high-risk predators aren't breaking the law.

In the Inns of California in Salinas, patrol agents rounded up 20 registered sex offenders to make sure they were in compliance with their probation checks. They found one person who wasn't.

"He's a child molester and upon searching his room, we found numerous pornography and DVDS which is the violation of his condition," says Gonzalvo.

So they took him to jail. He wasn't the only one.

At Sanborn Place, officers located a homemade billy club style weapon at one sex offender's home. Using GPS officers arrested the man a few miles away.

A sex offender in his 50's admits having a relationship with a 16 year old girl and said he understands these compliance checks, but doesn't like them.

"I don't feel to comfortable because we are in jail here," says June Acosta. "We didn't do nothing wrong here."

Agents say, they're necessary to put the community at ease.

"It's more safe for the kids, especially around here," says Linda Tejan who lives in Sanborn Place. "They should check in. I was surprised they even allowed them here."

And to make sure these offenders don't break the law again.

"A lot of them of course they are not going to like being searched," says Gonzalvo. "It's to insure public safety that we do especially the sex offenders we deal with."

Agents arrested six people in Monterey County and eight in Santa Cruz County for various reasons ranging from violating their parole, resisting arrest and porn and drug possession.

Hundreds of sex offenders nabbed in statewide sweep
By Kristina Davis, San Diego Union Tribune --  Nearly 350 registered sex offenders were arrested this week as part of a statewide sting to make sure offenders are complying with the law.

The effort, dubbed “Operation Safe Playground,” began in July and will continue through January.

In Southern California, which includes San Diego, Riverside, Imperial and San Bernardino counties, 205 offenders on parole or probation were arrested this week, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Numbers for San Diego County alone were not immediately available.

Parole officers teamed up with local agencies to do compliance checks on the sex offenders to make sure they were living at their registered addresses and weren’t violating the terms of their parole or probation.

Officers also monitored GPS, checked computers and social networks and conducted surveillance on parks.

“Operation Safe Playground is designed to deter crimes against children by taking dangerous sex offenders off the streets and by sending a clear message to all sex offenders that our agents are watching them carefully,” Robert Ambroselli, director of Adult Parole Operations, said in a statement.

Statewide arrests this week included nine for child pornography, 87 for pornography, 46 for possession of drugs, 36 for possession of weapons and 131 for possession of contraband, which can be anything from computers to children’s toys.

Since July, parole agents and their law enforcement partners have conducted 1,276 parole and probation searches statewide and arrested 579 sex offenders.

New California parole team targets sex offenders
Associated Press -- Michael Harden's problems were just beginning when agents rolled up to his cluttered trailer to arrest him for letting the battery in his GPS ankle bracelet run low, making it difficult to track the movements of the paroled child molester.

Then the agents found something even more disturbing: graphically sexual photographs on his cell phone. Seven months after he left prison, the 44-year-old Sacramento man was on his way back.

He was one of more than 397 paroled sex offenders swept up throughout California this week by recently formed law enforcement teams, which were created partly as a response to agents fumbling their attempt to monitor paroled sex offender Phillip Garrido.

Garrido is charged with kidnapping an 11-year-old girl, Jaycee Lee Dugard, and hiding her from parole agents for 18 years in a fenced-off area in the backyard of his Antioch home, where she bore two of his children.

The teams are designed to apprehend parolees who have become fugitives or are otherwise violating terms of their release.

"We're going to look over the fences. We don't want another Garrido," Greg Shuman, who supervises a Sacramento-based California Parole Apprehension Team, told agents heading out for one sweep. "It's no-tolerance. Anything, any violation, they're going to jail."

Five teams were created this year in different parts of California, while five more will start in January.

Money to fund them comes from savings created by a law that took effect this year. That law eliminated parole supervision for thousands of ex-convicts, some of whom served time for serious crimes.

It allows agents to focus on the parolees that state corrections officials consider the greatest risk to the public. Supervising fewer people lets agents concentrate their attention on sex offenders, gang members and violent criminals, said Robert Ambroselli, who heads the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's adult parole division.

The specially trained apprehension teams also have their own intelligence units armed with $300,000 worth of computer software. Their job is to scan the Internet and electronic databases for clues to the whereabouts of some of the more than 13,000 California ex-convicts who have broken off contact with their parole agents.

"We've specialized our work with these apprehension teams, intel units," Ambroselli said. "They are really new for us and extremely groundbreaking."

Parole agents also search social networking sites for sex offenders trolling the Internet in search of potential victims.

Since the teams were created in January, they have arrested more than 900 people for violating the terms of their parole, including about 480 sex offenders. They cleared another 600 cases in which parolees were found to have died or been deported.

An effort of the new parole teams that started in July, called "Operation Safe Playgrounds," brings together local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to target sex offenders. An Associated Press reporter and photographer were invited to accompany that operation for a daylong series of raids earlier this week.

When the crackdown began this year, 960 paroled sex offenders had lost contact with their parole agents and were considered fugitives. Agents have since brought 233 of them into custody.

Arrests Made In State's Largest Sex Offender Sweep
10News -- Law enforcement conducted the largest sex offender sweep in California's history, resulting in many arrests, including dozens in San Diego County.

Dozens of convicted San Diego sex offenders who were found to be in violation of their parole conditions are now headed back to prison as a result of the initiative.

The massive, week-long effort under the direction of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was all part of "Operation Safe Playgrounds," designed to deter crimes against children.

Authorities said the latest GPS technology can get within feet of sex offenders who are wearing special anklets around their legs. 10News' Preston Phillips accompanied agents as they tracked one man all over San Diego and finally found him at a downtown train station.

I can put a guy in a hotel with GPS. This is going to tell me what room he's in," said Marvin Cooper, state parole GPS coordinator.

It's state-of-the-art crime-fighting technology with pinpoint accuracy down to the inch.

Maritza Rodriguez, state parole administrator, said, "The truth is that this is a population honestly of monsters, and trying to community supervise monsters is a difficult task.”

However, it's a task that Rodriguez lives for -- so much so that she mobilized the largest sex offender takedown to ever hit the state, stretching from the California-Oregon border all the way to San Diego's border with Mexico.

Within the first hour of the 4-day, 150-agency operation, there were numerous arrests.

Parole agent Enrique Castillo said, "He'll be booked into county jail for a day, and then we'll transport him back to prison.”

One unidentified sex offender said, "I committed an offense and I'm paying for it.”

At the same time, another new crime-fighting tactic was being rolled out, as dozens of parolee sex offenders were lining up outside the San Diego parole office, thinking they were there for a presentation, when they were actually there to be searched.

Some had even brought pictures of naked children with them, agents said.

Parole agent Jason Bradshaw said, "These guys are bringing this stuff to the office … and they think they're safe, but they're not.”

Dozens of sex offenders also showed up with electronic devices, which went straight to the San Diego Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

David Oyos, of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, said, "We're checking the phones and we're going through messages, we're going through Internet history and pictures to see if there is anything that has to do with child exploitation.

If they are found to be in violation of their parole conditions, they're taken off the streets. The tracking device is cut off and the sex offender is sent back to prison.

"Every member of our task force are parents and every one of them cares about the kids and so we genuinely are out here to save kids," said Oyos.

During the course of the sweep, 79 convicted San Diego sex offenders were arrested for violating their parole conditions and sent back to Donovan State Prison.

The statewide number of arrests will be released Friday morning, and they are expected to be in the hundreds.

CDCR STAR - Correction Clips

NEWS STORIES:

Capital Punishment:

ACLU: Where did California get its execution drugs?
By Rina Palta, The Informant -- In the growing nationwide controversy over the source of state’s stocks of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic used in lethal injections, the ACLU of Northern California yesterday filed a Public Records Act lawsuit in San Francisco’s Superior Court. An initial hearing is scheduled for November 30.

Sex Offenders:

California sex offender sweep nets hundreds of arrests
By Nick Monacelli, News10 -- The largest statewide sex offender sweep of its kind, wrapped up Thursday evening. Operation Safe Playground was a joint operation with 140 different local, state and federal agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigations and U.S. Marshals. The purpose of the sweep was simple: make contact with as many sex offenders as possible to make sure they're not violating the terms of their parole.

California Warden Ignores DA, Releases Rapist Early
By Tori Richards, AOL News -- A man who raped two young girls at knifepoint and threatened to bury them in a graveyard was released from prison by a warden who ignored a prosecutor's plea for a few more hours to obtain a judicial stay. Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas has spent the past year trying to make sure Lawrence Brown, 55, did not get paroled for the 1983 attacks. Nevertheless, Brown was released Wednesday evening from a Los Angeles-area prison after serving only half of his 49-year sentence. The California Department of Corrections placed a hold on Brown, but Deputy Warden Richard Alvarado of Chino State Prison decided to release him anyway.

Sex offender returned to Chino prison after release
By Neil Nisperos, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin -- A convicted sex offender doing time at the California Institution for Men was back in prison less than an hour after his high-profile parole release on Wednesday. Lawrence Joseph Brown, 52, was released from CIM at around 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, but was arrested by police in Tustin within an hour for violating parole terms, authorities said. Brown was taken back into custody at the Chino men's prison.

Intensity highlights Contra Costa's role in first-ever statewide sex offender sweep
By Robert Salonga, Contra Costa Times -- It was obvious something was different when they started checking the air ducts. The search team also looked through the man's cell phone to check for pornographic images or videos, which would have violated his release conditions. By the time the dozen or so officers left the man's Pittsburg motel room, drawers were left open, laundry bags had been searched and air duct screens were removed, leaving little doubt that the occupant was abiding by the strict tenets of his parole as a registered sex offender. The police team's stop at a home near downtown was a little more dicey. GPS coordinates indicated that a registrant was inside his mother's house -- a violation because he wasn't registered at that address and because it was about 50 yards from a children's park -- but he wasn't there. During a neighborhood search, the parolee came strolling from around a corner, as if he had just been on a walk, but it was clear to officers and in his GPS trail that he aborted an attempt to flee.

Parole:

Parole agency claims suspect was supervised
By Brent Begin, San Francisco Examiner -- The owners of a residential hotel where an accused killer was living were not notified of his status, but a parole agent said all protocol was followed, including visits to the site. Gary Scott Holland 43, allegedly posed as a utility worker checking for a gas leak at the apartment building at 900 Chestnut St. on the evening of Oct. 29. Once inside the building, police say, he knocked on the door of Kate Horan, 46, was allowed in and murdered her.

Winnfred Wright, Convicted Calif. Child Abuser, Gets Tougher Parole Than Planned
By Caroline Black, CBS -- California parole officials have reversed their decision to release a Marin County man convicted of neglecting and abusing his 12 children from prison without supervision. Winnfred Wright , who was sentenced in March 2003 to 16 years and eight months after pleading guilty to six felony counts of child abuse, has served the minimum amount of time required for his sentence and is scheduled to be released from prison Monday, reports The San Francisco Chronicle.

Former Cult Leader to be Paroled
By Nancy Isles Nation, San Anselmo Fairfax Patch -- A former Marinwood man who was convicted on six counts of felony child abuse and sentenced to 16 years and eight months in state prison will be released on Monday. Winnfred Wright, who lived with three women with whom he fathered 12 children, will be supervised by parole agents from the stateDepartment of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Marin County District Attorney Edward Berberian said his office was notified of Wright's release in September, when corrections department officials said he would be freed on "non-revocable parole."

CDCR Related & Miscellaneous:

Dispatch from San Quentin: Why finding work for ex-felons is so important
By Rina Palta, The Informant -- Recently, I watched a news report decrying the fact that there are hundreds of formerly convicted felons working as in-home caregivers–they assist the disabled in managing daily life. The reporter stated that Governor Schwarzenegger wanted the legislature to pass a law that would protect disabled people from possible abuse at the hands of individuals with a criminal history. In essence, he wanted to make it impossible for formerly incarcerated individuals to work in the in-home health care field in California. I’m all for protecting people, especially those unable to protect themselves from abuse or neglect, but what about those formerly convicted individuals who have served their sentences: are they to be punished for the rest of their lives and for the crimes of others?

OPINION:

ACLU sues state over lethal injection drug
By Ryan Gabrielson, California Watch -- The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit this week seeking to force the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to release records detailing how the agency obtained a key lethal injection drug. Officials have refused to disclose the source of the state's 12 grams of sodium thiopental.

State 'appreciation' of Sikhs is a bit ironic
By Rajdeep Singh, Modesto Bee -- The California Legislature recently designated November as California Sikh American Awareness and Appreciation Month. Among other things, the resolution encourages Californians to "better understand, recognize, and appreciate the rich history and shared principles of Sikh Americans."