In June of 2009, Tracie Olson took over as public defender for Yolo County when Barry Melton retired. At the time of his retirement, Melton said, “Tracie is a fine lawyer, a talented administrator, a deeply compassionate human being, and a true public servant.”
“The dismissiveness of the government’s response was startling to me,” Ms. Olson said. “After that experience, I worked for the Public Defender’s Office in Minneapolis and realized that the government’s dismissiveness of human suffering was an everyday occurrence. I am a Public Defender because I think that many things that happen in our criminal justice system are wrong, and someone has to try to make it right,” she said.
In Yolo County, she said, “I think many wrongful convictions in Yolo County are the result of plea bargaining in a system that is wrongly premised on two fundamental assumptions: (1) that the DA’s Office will appropriately exercise discretion, and (2) that the Court has the wherewithal to provide a check on the DA’s decisions. The failure of the prosecution to exercise its discretion and the Court’s inability to influence the DA’s decisions have resulted in people pleading to crimes they did not commit.”
One example occurred during the high-profile case where two men allegedly attacked a West Sacramento cab driver, allegedly for hate motives, when one of the men screamed anti-Islamic epithets at the victim, a Sikh. Her client pled to an assault in exchange for probation.
“Even if I forget the fact that Mr. Ramirez’s plea required him to admit that the crime was motivated by hate (which I don’t think would have been proven at trial),” she said, “I can’t forget that Mr. Morales pled to a felony because the Court had allowed the
DDA to add a charge of attempted murder, even though the charge was not part of the original pleading and despite the scant evidence adduced at preliminary hearing to support that particular offense as it related to Mr. Morales. Mr. Morales felt he could not risk being sent to prison for years and years and miss seeing his children grow into adults, so he took a deal.”
Ms. Olson worked her way up from an entry level Deputy Public Defender in 1998. She began in the misdemeanor unit, representing indigent defendants charged with crimes, later represented children in delinquency proceedings, and then represented adults in felony proceedings. She has been the attorney of record for defendants in hundreds of cases, with charges that include capital murder. Tracie Olson works on the front line to prevent wrongful convictions.
Public Defender Tracie Olson will join Natasha Minsker of the ACLU, Linda Starr, the Legal Director of the Northern California Innocence Project, and Maurice Caldwell, an individual who served more than 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, on Thursday November 3 at the Woodland Community and Senior Center to discuss wrongful convictions.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
