By Lloyd Billingsley
Last month marked more than three years since Davis police brought high-school student Daniel Marsh, 16, to the station for questioning about the murders of Oliver “Chip” Northup, 87, and Claudia Maupin, 76, on April 14, 2013. The police questioned Marsh for more than four hours and the teen duly confessed to the brutal killings, which he said gave him the greatest feeling of his life.
The teen pleaded not guilty and his lawyer, deputy public defender Ron Johnson, attempted to have the confession tossed. When that failed, Marsh changed his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity. In September 2014 the Yolo County jury found Marsh guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. The jury also found that he had been sane when he committed the murders.
On December 12, 2014, Judge David Reed sentenced Daniel Marsh to 52 years to life in state prison. After stops at Chino and Ironwood state prisons, Daniel Marsh, 19, is now inmate AW0819 at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center near San Diego. He will be eligible for parole in his early forties.
During the trial, controversy raged over Marsh’s interrogation by Davis police and Chris Campion of the FBI. Few saw it in court, but the full record is now available in book form, along with information about the victims not available during the trial. Meanwhile, the aftermath of another local murder case has passed without notice.
On June 6, convicted murderer Colleen Harris of Placerville lost her appeal. On June 20 she lost her civil trial and a court awarded $4.5 million in damages and $1.6 million in punitive damages to the family of Bob Harris, the husband she murdered on January 6, 2013.
Colleen Harris killed her second husband, Jim Batten, in 1985 but gained acquittal. That meant that the trial transcript could be tossed after 10 years. As the recent trial confirmed, that caused difficulties for both defense and prosecution.
To establish what someone said in court 30 years ago, with lives in the balance, there is no substitute for the actual transcript. Those records belong to the people and should be preserved in the interest of justice. Legislators should also have all trial transcripts video and audio recorded in downloadable form. We have the technology.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Killer Confession: Double Murder Dialogue in Davis, California and Shotgun Weddings, about the Placerville case. His journalism collection, Bill of Writes, appeared earlier this year.
i actually appreciate billingsley’s viewpoint here. I wish he would flesh it out more. where i completely agree is his call for transparency. court transcripts are treated as proprietary property of the court reporter rather than public records. the vanguard has a mission here to open the court system, it would be made easier with expansion of the transcript availability.
This is spam – buy an ad.
When anybody becomes aware of a legislator personally listening to–or reading a transcript of–a 4-hour police interrogation, post it with supporting evidence and I’ll buy you dinner.