-The Mercury News, January 7, 2009 by Sean Maher and Josh Richman
http://www.mercurynews.com/localnews/ci_11394377

“Normally, what you get in a police deadly force interaction is a ‘he said, she said’ in which there’s at least an accusation like, ‘There was a flash of metal as he reached toward his pocket,'” Zimring said. “But this guy was already down on the ground…. He’s not in a position to be threatening anybody.” Use of deadly force is considered “in terms of a threat to the physical safety of the officer or somebody else and there’s none there in this case,” he added. “So it’s accident versus intention, but justification is off the table.”

-Oakland Tribune, January 8, 2009 by Kelly Rayburn
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_11411613

“What on earth are the Oakland police doing staying out?” he asked. BART police “don’t have exclusive jurisdiction over (homicides) in the city of Oakland, even if it’s in a BART station,” he said.

-Oakland Tribune, January 15, 2009 by Josh Richman
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_11465336

“At the beginning of this year, I thought that the district attorney’s office in Alameda County was one of the better departments in the United States, and nothing that’s happened since New Year’s Eve has changed my view,” he said, adding that if anything moved too slowly in this case, it was the Oakland Police Department’s involvement. “The missing moving parts were in police investigation. There was nothing slow and nothing dysfunctional, at least in the public accounts, with what went on in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.”

San Francisco Chronicle, January 2, 2009 by Demian Bulwa
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/02/MNEN1515TC.DTL&type=printable

“What you’re seeing here is an outgrowth of chronic problems,” Zimring said. “We never solved the problems—chronic unemployment, gun availability, community disorganization. It is much more likely that what we’re seeing here is a slightly more concentrated edition of the chronic problems we’ve been having for decades in these cities, rather than something new,” Zimring said.

Concord Monitor, Dec. 21, 2008 by Margot Sanger-Katz
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081221/FRONTPAGE/812210305&template=single

“There are an awful lot of layers, and all of this is going to be brand new to New Hampshire, and all of it is going to be in an environment that is enormously ambivalent about capital punishment,” Zimring said.

The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 11, 2008 by Dionne Searcey
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122895801049696725.html#printMode

“When we made so-called murder policy, nobody had an eight-year-old in mind,” says Franklin Zimring, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

The Times-Pucayune, Dec. 8, 2008 by Bruce Alpert
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/library-160/122871733217370.xml&coll=1

“I wouldn’t expect any real softening from the government because there is so much history to the case and so many personal investments in a prosecution,” Zimring said.

Hollister Free Lance, Nov. 21, 2008 by Colin McConville
http://www.freelancenews.com/news/251099-expert-child-murder-cases-not-unthinkably-rare

The recent killing of 19-month-old Donna May Busch is “not part of an ordinary culture of violence,” said Frank Zimring…. The bottom line, though, Zimring said, is that kids can be subjected to their parents’ instabilities. “Children are hostages to the mental and emotional stability of the parents,” Zimring said.

Los Angeles Times, Oct. 25, 2008 by Franklin E. Zimring
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zimring25-2008oct25,0,3916250.story

“There is and must be a constitutional duty imposed on states to provide the inmates they lock up with decent medical care. Imprisonment forces the inmate into a total dependency on the state, and once the state chooses to impose this dependence—as California has on more individuals than any other state—it cannot abuse its absolute power.”

San Jose Mercury News, Oct. 18, 2008 by Sean Webby
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10755739?source%253Dmost_viewed.20F88DA3D7D369F5BB70F372987EAE1F.html

Franklin Zimring, law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, notes police have wide discretion in whether to narrowly use the law, such as when they spot people passed out in the roadway; or to freely use it when they see people whose conduct—harassing passers-by by shouting and cursing, for example—is inviting trouble. Though in recent years the trend is to use the law less strictly, Zimring said, neither approach is inherently right or wrong.

Sacramento Bee, Oct. 6, by Andy Furillo
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1290837.html

“The skies are getting crowded,” UC Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring said of the air traffic over the criminal justice system. “It’s become a two-sided process, with the left using it as well as the right.”