It is not often that two local columnists speak out and put their necks on the lines. But we have to hand it to Rich Rifkin and Marcos Breton, who take on the power and uncomfortable truths.
I will give Rich Rifkin some props this week for speaking out on an issue that will probably get him more flak than praise. He calls on local Democratic leaders to repudiate Assemblymember Mariko Yamada.
I suppose I should have learned by now to expect the kinds of responses a couple of our stories got this week.
Frankly, I can understand why people would react to the Jose Valenzuela story and the notion that “it was time for Mr. Valenzuela to take an offer of time served, the first such offer he got” – even if he is innocent.
Unlike Critics Are Arguing Pension Reform Compromise Hits Most Needed Reform PointsCritics on both sides of the public pension reform debate have and will continue to attack the compromise, but the Vanguard will not be one of them. After careful analysis, the Vanguard concludes that the compromise hits on the key elements needed for pension reform while preserving the defined benefits plan.
Despite strong criticism of PERS (Public Employees’ Retirement System) and the city of Davis’ pension formulas, the Vanguard has always supported continuation of the defined benefits plan – as a system that continues to provide public employees with a secure and predictable retirement.
UC Davis student Thomas Matzat, who is also one of 12 protesters facing bank blocking charges, and here facing five felony counts along with another 15 misdemeanors, opted to take a plea agreement on Wednesday to a single charge stemming from an alleged incident at Starbucks on Orchard Road in Davis.He is alleged to have spray painted the word parasite. By pleading no contest to that charge, the Assistant Supervising District Attorney Michael Cabral agreed to dismiss the remaining charges against Mr. Matzat.
About 60 interested seniors were in attendance at the Aug. 28, 2012 scheduled Senior Citizens of Davis (SCD) Board meeting, ready to weigh in on agenda items. They gathered in the previously arranged for MPR East at the Davis Senior Center, which seats well over a hundred people. On the agenda were the following items:
Critics on Both Sides Blast the Deal which Rolls Back 3% at 50 But Only For New Employees –Governor Brown and Democratic leaders on Tuesday outlined their compromise proposal for what they are calling “a sweeping pension reform agreement that saves billions of taxpayer dollars by capping benefits, increasing the retirement age, stopping abusive practices and requiring state employees to pay at least half of their pension costs.”
“These reforms make fundamental changes that rein in costs and help to ensure that our public retirement system is sustainable for the long term. These reforms require sacrifice from public employees and represent a significant step forward,” said Governor Brown.
Judge David Reed on Friday denied the defense request for a Pitchess motion, citing a lack of evidence linking the officers’ conduct in the November 18 pepper spray case to the current case. However, defense attorney Alexis Briggs told the judge that she has additional information that she believes will lead the court to see the matter in a different light and may re-raise the issue at that time.
The defense, prosecution, and various other parties sparred over some of the requests for discovery, and there will be motions to quash a subpoena at the next hearing date of September 21.
By George GascónCalifornia’s “three strikes” sentencing law enacted in 1994 had the best of intentions – to keep serious and violent repeat offenders off our streets. Eighteen years later, we’ve learned valuable lessons about policing and keeping crime down, but we’ve also witnessed the unintended consequences of that law.
Since the law’s enactment, more than 8,500 prisoners have been sentenced to life in prison for solely nonviolent crimes – as minor as shoplifting or simple drug possession.
On August 9 of this year, William Diemer passed away at the age of 88. Among many things, he is noted for is his book about Davis, “Davis from the Inside Out,” which is an interesting almanac of Davis’ key features.
Someone dropped by with a copy of the book, copyrighted in 2000. For some reason I fixated on the youthful photo of then-Davis City Manager John Meyer, who was at the end of his rather lengthy tenure as city manager.
The key witness described the scene that took place at the Woodland Arco AM/PM as one in which she could tell something was about to go down. She saw a number of youths running around and acting rambunctious. However, she was late into a day of driving her daughter to college and wanted to get her gas and move on.
After exiting the gas station, the witness suddenly saw five youths attacking a four-door Honda Accord and the inhabitants inside to the point where the vehicle was rocking.
With the Republican National Convention this week, I thought it would be interesting to report on this story I dug up in a blog from the Dallas Morning News, written by their editorial writer Rodger Jones. I keep hearing that this is only a problem with liberals, even though some of the most rabid critics about the misconduct of at least one prosecutor I know are conservative Republicans.
Jeff Leach is a state Representative-elect from Plano, Texas. Mr. Jones jokes his blog will guarantee Mr. Leach “a call from the Texas District and County Attorney’s Association.”
For six years, the Vanguard has believed that Davis needs to both extend and codify its open government provisions. This November, the city of Dixon, which is also a general law city, will have an ordinance on the ballot that will put sweeping changes in their open government policies into effect.
On Friday, I presented this proposal to the Davis City Council. There have been some modifications since then. Many of the provisions have been taken and often modified from the proposals in the Dixon ballot initiative. In addition, there are some additions to that ballot initiative that the Vanguard is proposing.
Two weeks ago Jose Valenzuela was released from custody, pleading to a single count of attempted murder and taking a strike, but getting time served. His release comes more than 20 months after being acquitted of attempted murder of a man on May 18, 2008 and nearly being acquitted of the second man – one only person held out as the jury hung 11-1 for acquittal.
But that did not stop Mr. Valenzuela from waiting in the Yolo County jail, serving more than four years in custody despite the fact that the majority of jurors believed him innocent of the crimes for which he was charged. In addition to the attempted murder charge, he was acquitted of assault for the first victim and the jury hung 7-5 for acquittal of assault for the second victim.
The school board elections, at least based on initial discussion, will be one that figures to take on some of the more meaty issues and not just the budget which, as an ongoing concern, has dwarfed most other issues for some time.
To that end, Jann Murray-Garcia’s column today under the provocative title “Will GATE be Davis’ Watergate?” is worth reading in its entirety and not just in the chunky morsels I am about to feed you.
Over the past few years, I have stopped going to these council retreats held in July or August precisely because they have been a waste of time where the council has put forth vacuous and meaningless goals that they rarely adhere to and never implement.
This year however, it was different. I went there to present to the council a draft of our Open Government Ordinance while will be presented on these pages on Monday. I stayed there because there was a riveting discussion about council policies that were long overdue.
It seems that every week or so another wrongful conviction is overturned in the courts somewhere in this country. The most recent was David Wiggins, who was convicted in 1989 for a sexual assault of a 14-year-old in Fort Worth, Texas.
Mr. Wiggins was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, despite the fact that neither of the fingerprints at the scene matched his. The girl’s face was covered during much of this attack as the rapist put a towel over her face. However, she testified that she removed that towel during the attack and subsequently would pick Mr. Wiggins out of a photo lineup and then a live line up, saying that he looked familiar.
There are times when the issues facing our community mirror the issues facing our nation. I feel at times like I live in two worlds – the world that I sleep in, and the world that I live the rest of my day in.
I see things that most people in the community that I sleep in will never know and sometimes I can never adequately report. I write this message today, because I think we are in trouble as a community, a state, and a nation.
by Bill PursellThere is a relatively new phrase in our legal system that is still heard all too rarely, but it should be a prime fear of all defendants who enter to the mercy of the courts. The phrase is “charge stacking”. These simple words are creating catastrophic effects in our court rooms. It is this phrase, or this practice of stacking which has enabled a 20 year old first time offender to receive 1,941 months (162 years) in prison without the possibility of parole, reported by Reuters – Tue, Jul 3, 2012.
The idea of charge stacking is simple. The method entails finding as many possible criminal counts to “stack” against the defendant in order to strengthen the core case of the prosecution. This is possible because the main deterrent against stacking charges is the law of double jeopardy. In Blockburger v. United States, the Supreme Court said the government may separately try and punish the defendant for two crimes if each crime contains an element that the other does not. Therefore double jeopardy is so weak a deterrent that a person can be convicted of ten counts of perjury when they were perjuring about one thing on ten different days.
Critics Call For New Legislation Protecting Child’s Rights, and the Overhaul of the Family Court SystemLast week, longtime Davis resident Fraser Schilling wrote a letter the Davis Enterprise depicting a scene where four Davis police officers “were…dragging a 14-year-old girl to the airport because Yolo County Superior Court Judge Kathy White and the DA’s Office had ordered her forced emigration to Washington, even though the decision was under appeal.”
At the time, he questioned the use of police resources and the show of force, writing, “The two-day drama did answer the question of how many Davis PD officers, judges and attorneys it takes to screw up a 14-year-old girl – at least a dozen.”
After all of the troubling developments surrounding the 3-2 decision by the Davis City Council to grant a conditional use permit that would allow for the construction and move of Davis Diamond Gymnastics to a location on the Davis Auto-Center, the project died due to financing problems.
The original conditional use permit was approved on a contentious 3-2 vote in January, with the three council members facing reelection voting to support it and then Mayor Joe Krovoza and Mayor Pro Tem Rochelle Swanson dissenting.
