Month: November 2013

This past week, students in the UC Davis School of Law Immigration Law Clinic, working under the supervision of Lecturer and Staff Attorney Raha Jorjani, were successful in preventing the deportation of a detained client.

Working on behalf of their client, they succeeded in filing a Motion to Terminate removal proceedings that cited recent U.S. Supreme Court opinions in arguing that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not met its burden of proof in establishing that the client’s criminal convictions were deportable under the Immigration and National Security Act.

We often hear that a conviction was thrown out based on a technicality.  In this case, the technicality is not just Miranda, but the actual right to an attorney.  This is not a technicality, this is a constitutional right.

Last week, the LA Times covered a federal appeals court’s unanimous overturning of a first degree murder conviction in which the man was sentenced to life without parole for killing his estranged wife and an off-duty Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy.

This year the Vanguard is honoring eight individuals in this community and around the region who have put forth exemplary work in the area of social justice and justice reform.  Two of these individuals are honored posthumously.

It was a great honor that Steve Berlin worked as a member of the Vanguard Court Watch Editorial Board in 2011 until health conditions forced his resignation.  It was nearly a year ago that Mr. Berlin passed away at the age of 66.  On Saturday, we will present his wife, Linda Berlin, and his son, Eddie Berlin, with the honor.

It has been just over one year since a Sacramento federal jury acquitted three sheriff’s deputies of the 2009 shooting of Luis Gutierrez, a 26-year-old farm worker who was walking on Gum Avenue in Woodland in the middle of the day, after completing his efforts to get his driver’s license reestablished.

On October 21, 2013, Dale Johnson, who was the commanding officer during that incident, was promoted from lieutenant to captain.

I will confess that I am a relative later comer to the notion of restorative justice.  It was not until late 2011 and early 2012 that I was exposed to the idea when a group of citizens – Robb Davis, David Breaux, and Reverend Kirstin Stoneking – came to the Davis Human Relations Commission with the idea of promoting a restorative justice process, some sort of victim-offender mediation between the university and the students who had been pepper sprayed.

Ultimately, the proposal was unsuccessful.  The university was unwilling to engage in any sort of process with an ongoing lawsuit, and by the time the lawsuit was settled it seemed too late.  In retrospect, the process would have proven valuable and there are still deep wounds in the community that have come out as John Pike was awarded a worker’s compensation settlement.

By Kaiti Curry

The courtroom was packed as friends and family of the victims and the defendant anxiously watched the next proceedings of People v. Marsh. The defendant, 16-year-old Daniel Marsh, faces two counts of first degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon and several case enhancements.

Case enhancement A involves a special circumstance for multiple murders. The second case enhancement involves a special circumstance for heinous and depraved murder.

Last summer, when Davis Police found a noose hanging from the goalpost of the Davis High School Stadium, many in the community looked to Dr. Jann Murray-Garcia, a pediatrician by training who has become, for the better part of the decade, one of the consciences of Davis.

“Though we don’t know the motivation of whomever put the noose there, we are responding as one voice against the centuries of pain and terror that this symbol represents and still produces today in so many of our neighbors,” Dr. Murray-Garcia would write in her biweekly column in the Davis Enterprise that she co-writes with Jonathan London.