SAFE California: The Campaign to Replace the Death Penalty

Ashley Morris

Jan. 22, 2012

Ashley Morris of the SAFE California Campaign will speak on the SAFE California Act, a California State Initiative that would replace California’s dysfunctional death penalty with life without the possibility of parole, saving $1 billion over the next five years. SAFE CA creates the SAFE California Fund which invests $100 million of the savings into the budgets of local law enforcement in order to solve more rape and murder cases. As long as we have the death penalty, we will always risk executing an innocent person. For example, experts now say that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent when he was executed for a fire that killed his three children, and in California this past March, Franky Carrillo, age 37, was freed from prison after 20 years of incarceration for a crime he did not commit. (See http://www.safecalifornia.org/)

 

Humanist Community Forum (2012-01-22): SAFE California – The Campaign to Replace the Death Penalty (Ashley Morris) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

 

The US Monetary System and the Present Financial State of our Economy

Martin Squibbs

Jan. 15, 2012

Martin Squibbs

Humanist Community member Martin Squibbs recaps (from his Nov. 13, 2011 Forum talk) his discussion of money as a measure of exchanged human value and an estimate of real wealth.  He will then seek to explain as simply as possible how the U.S. economy operates, based upon its fiat banking system, and review some of its 20th century history, in order to put its highly unbalanced state today in an historical perspective. Finally, he will consider the possible future paths it may follow to regain its balance, and some precautions we may ourselves consider in order to be prepared for such possibilities.

 

Police Oversight: A View from San Jose’s Independent Police Auditor

Judge LaDoris Cordell

Jan. 8, 2012

Retired Judge LaDoris Cordell will describe her unique work as the Independent Police Auditor for the City of San Jose. Judge Cordell, in addition to serving on the bench for 19 years (where she was the first African American woman to hold that position), also served for 8 years as Special Counselor to the President for Campus Relations at Stanford, has been an on-camera legal analyst for CBS-5 television and Court TV, and was elected to the Palo Alto City Council.

 

Humanist Community Forum (2012-01-08): Police Oversight: A View from San Jose’s Independent Police Auditor (LaDoris Cordell) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.