Month: April 2011

Governor Jerry Brown, in a quick stroke of the pen, has undone one of the more perplexing moves that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made, which was to take 65 million out of the state’s general fund to construct a new wing with 1152 beds for San Quentin’s death row – at a time when the state was not executing new condemned prisoners and at a time when there are only 700 inmates on death row awaiting death sentences.

And it was worse than that, $64.7 million was to be merely a down payment.  The full cost of construction would have been about $360 million from the general fund. The Bee last summer reported, “Interest payments on 20-year bonds the state ordinarily would sell to finance the construction could add another $150 million or more to the final price tag.”

Nicholas Benson pled no contest to all remaining charges against him, stemming from the January 21, 2011, incident that captured regional headlines after he was arrested for making threats to harm himself and others,  and carrying an assault rifle with over 100 rounds of ammunition in his vehicle.

Following his preliminary hearing, Mr. Benson only faced a single felony charge for possession of an assault weapon.

Yet another delay in the trial of Marco Topete will push the start of the trial to more than three years after he allegedly shot and killed Yolo County Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Diaz.

The trial of Mr. Topete has been pushed back to August 1, 2011, and Judge Richardson will attempt to preserve as many of the jurors as possible who were death-qualified during a five week proces.

Claudean Medlock on Wednesday pled guilty to four felony counts, for embezzling over 40,000 from the Yolo County Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).  She was sentenced by Judge Timothy Fall to three years and eight months in prison.

Ms. Medlock faced up to 18 felony counts and 12 years in prison for her actions as the executive director of CASA.  She also faced 22 felony counts in Placer County for similar crimes, but those charges will be dropped in light of the plea agreement in Yolo.

Two weeks ago Davis Enterprise columnist Rich Rifkin challenged the new Yolo County courthouse project.  This week, Judge David Rosenberg has taken it upon himself to respond to Mr. Rifkin’s column.

In his over 1200-word response, the Judge wrote, “His column is so full of misstatements and misconceptions that I felt compelled to respond.”

There was not much additional information available now, a week after the delay in the nearly three-year-old Topete case, where Marco Topete is accused of shooting Yolo County Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Diaz as he fled pursuit.

Last week, the trial was delayed on the eve of the final round of jury selection, as co-defense counsel Thomas Purtell suffered a stroke.

A Yolo County jury on Monday convicted 26-year-old Hoang Nguyen of six felony counts, the most serious of which was the assault with attempt to rape during the commission of a burglary – a charge that carries with it a life term.

Mr. Nguyen became infatuated with the victim after he broke up with the victim’s older sister.  He would purchase a stun gun, then attempt to incapacitate her and to rape her.  However, when the stun gun failed to incapacitate her, he stunned her repeatedly before she eventually escaped and was able to call for help.

On Friday, we went to the court expecting to find out how many hundreds of years Bennie Moses would received after a Yolo County Jury convicted him of 62 counts for the molestation and rape of his daughter from the time she was 12 until she turned 21. 

Instead, we learned that a juror had possibly violated the very tenet of a fair and impartial trial.