Inglewood resident Brandon Spencer petitions 40 year sentence

By Francis Taylor, Executive Editor

In April 2014, Inglewood resident Brandon Spencer, 19, was sentenced 40 years to life in prison for a 2012 shooting that wounded four people on the campus of the University of Southern California at a Halloween party. Immediately after this tragic shooting and following his ultimate arrest and conviction, Spencer denied his involvement in the shooting and vowed to prove his innocence and secure his release from prison.

Long before Spencer’s conviction I knew his family and had met the young man on several occasions in his home, when he was in elementary school. Later, as an aspiring college student, Spencer told me about his plans to enter college in Arizona, while he was working as a security guard in Los Angeles. I was among a legion of others who were prepared to vouch for his character.

However, with an overzealous prosecutor, and the coerced testimony of a defendant in an unrelated case that pointed the finger at Spencer, and without any hard evidence, he was found guilty in only three hours, late on a Friday afternoon.

But with new sentencing laws and the reversal of testimony from the coerced witness against spencer, his Petition for Resentencing is pending, a new court date may be assigned, and he is hopeful that the result will be the dismissal of all charges.

As of January 1, 2019, SB 1437 ended the practice of sentencing a person for first-degree murder if they did not commit homicide or even have knowledge that the homicide occurred. According to the language of this new law, a person can only be guilty of “felony murder” if: the person is the actual killer, the person acted with the intent to kill, such as assisting the actual person who committed the murder or encouraging the actual person who committed the murder, the person was a major participant in the crime and acted with “reckless indifference to human

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