wright, rod rep

<div>=</div><div>july 2014</div><div>
</div><div>Sentencing of state Sen. Roderick D. Wright has been delayed again, this time until Sept. 3, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said Monday.</div><div>
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</div><div>Wright was reelected by a large margin in 2012.</div><div>
</div><div>Wright has said he believed he was following state law requirements when he arranged to rent a room in a relative's apartment in a complex Wright owned in Inglewood. The Baldwin Hills home that prosecutors said was his true domicile was not in the district Wright wanted to represent.</div><div>
</div><div>In March, Wright, along with two other state senators facing criminal charges in separate cases, were suspended, with pay, from their lawmaker posts.</div><div>
</div><div>Wright's sentencing, scheduled before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy, has been postponed several times.</div><div>
</div><div>Prosecutors have not yet responded to the documents filed recently by Wright attorneys asking Kennedy to toss out the verdicts and grant him a new trial, the D.A.'s office said.</div><div>
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</div><div>Attorneys for Wright, who was to have been sentenced July 21 on eight felony counts of voter fraud and perjury, want to have the jury verdicts overturned and to get a new trial for the Democrat, who represents an Inglewood-based district.</div><div>
</div><div>Follow @jeanmerl for the latest in Southern California politics news.</div><div>
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</div><div>iccc</div><div>
</div><div>During one dinner I sat next to Rod Wright, a brilliantly funny and apparently savvy Democrat state senator from the environmentalist hotbed California. Rod, one of only two black people I saw out of a claimed 600 attendees, told me how he became suspicious of renewable energy, and then climate science more generally.</div><div>
</div><div>These suspicions were confirmed by the avalanche of literature he received from the Heartland Institute. His colleagues deserted him but he was steeled by the support of the free market think tank. “You have to sift information through your own filter”, he told me. “Their funding does not devalue their information. Everybody got money from somebody. Jesus said, ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone’.” He smiles, before adding. “I have looked at some of their work on insurance and I think they’re full of shit.” (I read later that Wright has been convicted of voter fraud).</div><div>
</div><div>They are full of shit. But they are having a real influence on American politics.</div><div>
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