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Your Last Rear-View Mirror | Page A4
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Don't Drink and Drive: 5 Myths That Could Put Your Life In Danger | Page C2
Weather: 58o/46o | Volume IV | Issue XLVI
Thursday, December 29 - January 04, 2023
A SOBOBA
Soboba celebrates Christmas in many ways
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HEALTH | Page D1
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D HEALTH
C VALLEY BEAT
Choose your New Year's Eve Celebration in RivCo 2022
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Could mono virus or fat cells be playing roles? See more on page D1
Supreme Court asked to bar punishment for acquitted conduct KEVIN FREKING | AP NEWS
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jury convicted Dayonta McClinton of robbing a CVS pharmacy but acquitted him of murder. A judge gave McClinton an extra 13 years in prison for the killing anyway. In courtrooms across America, defendants get additional prison time for crimes that juries found they didn’t commit. The Supreme Court is being asked, again, to put an end to the practice. It’s possible that the newest member of the court and a former federal public defender, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, could hold a pivotal vote. McClinton’s case and three others just like it are scheduled to be discussed when the justices next meet in private on Jan. 6. Sentencing a defendant for what’s called “acquitted con-
duct” has gone on for years, based on a Supreme Court decision from the late 1990s. And the justices have turned down numerous appeals asking them to declare that the Constitution forbids it. The closest the court came to taking up the issue was in 2014, when Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg provided three of the four votes necessary to hear an appeal. “This has gone on long enough,” Scalia wrote in dissent from the court’s decision to reject an appeal from defendants who received longer prison terms for conspiring to distribute cocaine after jurors acquitted them of conspiracy charges. Scalia and Ginsburg have since died, and Thomas remains on the court. But two other justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, have voiced concerns while
Light illuminates part of the Supreme Court building at dusk on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 16, 2022. In courtrooms across America, defendants get additional prison time for crimes that juries found they didn’t commit. The Supreme Court is being asked, again, to put an end to the practice.| Courtesy Photos by Patrick Semansky
serving as appeals court judges. “Allowing judges to rely on acquitted or uncharged conduct to impose higher sentences than they otherwise would impose seems a dubious infringement of the rights to due process and to a jury trial,” Kavanaugh wrote in 2015.
Jackson, who also previously served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, could provide a fourth vote to take up the issue, said Douglas Berman, an expert on sentencing at the Ohio State University law school. “She is someone who we’d have good reason to believe would be
troubled by the continued use of acquitted conduct,” said Berman, who filed a brief calling on the court to take up McClinton’s case. Jackson replaced Justice Stephen Breyer, who generally fa-
See SUPREME COURT on page C4
Here’s what you need to know about California’s new pay transparency law GRACE GEDYE | CALMATTERS
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n less than two weeks, job seekers in California will finally know how much a job pays when they apply for it — if companies don’t figure out a way around a new law. Starting on Jan. 1, employers with at least 15 workers will have to include pay ranges in job postings. Employees will also be able to ask for the pay range for their own position, and larger companies will have to provide more detailed pay data to California’s Civil Rights Department than previously required. California isn’t the first state to force businesses to put their cards on the table. Colorado took that step in 2019, and a similar requirement went into effect in New York City in November. Washington state has its own version that will also kick in
on Jan. 1, and a similar statewide bill in New York was just signed by the governor. The goal of the California law is to reduce gender and racial pay gaps. But New York City’s measure had a bumpy start, with some employers posting unhelpfully wide ranges the first day the law was in place. When Colorado rolled out its law at the beginning of 2021, some companies posted remote jobs that they said could be done from anywhere in the U.S. — except Colorado — dodging the requirement. That wasn’t widespread; about 1% of remote job listings included a Colorado carveout, according to reporting in The Atlantic. But since California has nearly 7 times as many people as Colorado, according to U.S. Census data, excluding Californians in a remote job listing would come at a higher cost. “California’s just such a huge
PAY RANGE: In 2023, companies with at least 15 workers will need to add pay ranges to job postings. Larger companies will also have to report more data to the state. | Courtesy Illustration by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters; iStock
economic center,” said Lisa Wallace, co-founder of Assemble, a compensation management platform. “There just aren’t that
many industries that are not going to be touched by this.” What’s the pay range? Here’s what California job
seekers can expect to see more frequently come January: $44
See TRANSPARENCY LAW on page A4
EMWD Secures $17.5M Federal Grant for Purified Water Replenishment Program EMWD | CONTRIBUTED
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astern Municipal Water District (EMWD) has received an additional $17.5 million in funding from the United States Bureau of Reclamation to advance its Purified Water Replenishment (PWR) program. The new funding authorization, which is part of the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act, brings the total federal funding for the project to $27.5 million, making it the largest federal grant funding total EMWD has received for a single project. EMWD was previously awarded $10 million in funding for the program in August 2022 through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. For its PWR program, EMWD will construct an ad-
vance treatment facility adjacent to its existing San Jacinto Valley Regional Water Reclamation Facility. The new facility will further treat recycled water through microfiltration and reverse osmosis, resulting in purified water. That water will then be blended with tertiary recycled water and piped to EMWD’s Mountain Avenue West Groundwater Replenishment Facility, where it will percolate into the local groundwater basin. After at least five years of natural soil aquifer filtration underground and blending with groundwater, the water will be pumped out, cleaned one final time, then used as a safe and reliable drinking water source. The program will increase the quality and quantity of EMWD’s groundwater supplies. EMWD is in the design phase
The Mountain Avenue West Groundwater Replinishment Facility in San Jacinto will be used as part of EMWD's Purified Water Replenishment Program. | Courtesy Photo by EMWD
of the PWR program and has received a broad range of support from the program from key stakeholders and the public. In October 2022, EMWD hosted
a Purified Water Replenishment Open House, where the community was invited to learn
See EMWD on page A4