A friend of law enforcement in the California Legislature, Senator Ted Lieu, turned to Twitter to call attention to a California Senate policy long in need of change. We are glad he did.

Senator Lieu’s tweet was prompted by a case in which a rapist was set free on a technicality. The Assembly tried to fix the problem in 2011 but the legislation to do that died in the Senate Public Safety committee because of the ROCA policy.

“ROCA (Receivership/Overcrowding Crisis Aggravation) was started by Senator Gloria Romero in 2007,” Lieu said in a follow-up email to the LAPPL. “She essentially held up every single bill that might increase a felon’s prison time by even one day.

“Her reasoning was that this was necessary to alleviate prison overcrowding. One problem is that ROCA is a blanket approach that does not distinguish between a rapist and a drug user, or a murderer and a thief. Regardless of the heinousness of the crime, any new felony or increase in penalties will never even be allowed to come up for a vote.”

The issue came to light anew on January 2 when the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles cited a 19th century law in overturning the conviction of Julio Morales, who in 2009 had entered a darkened bedroom where a woman was sleeping and had sex with her. The 18-year-old woman said she initially mistook the defendant for her boyfriend, who had left earlier, but resisted when she realized it wasn’t him. Police said Morales admitted the woman probably wrongly assumed he was her boyfriend.

The 1872 law says that obtaining sex with another person by trickery is rape only if the victim is married and if the man pretends to be her husband. The court said it ruled reluctantly and appealed to the Legislature to change the law. Another court also put the Legislature on notice of the law’s anomaly 30 years ago, but legislators failed to act, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Changing this law should be a high priority of the new legislative session in Sacramento. The ROCA policy of the Senate that has gotten in the way of rationalizing California’s Penal Code must be set aside to allow it to happen.

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