By Crescenzo Vellucci
Vanguard Sacramento Bureau Chief
SACRAMENTO – An unhoused man – facing five felonies after a struggle with police that saw his dog shot and killed by an officer, and an officer get tased twice – took a plea deal here in Sacramento County Superior Court that will result in only about two years in state prison.
Assistant Public Defender Tatiana Cottam negotiated a plea that now has Alvin Williams pleading no contest to only one felony assault charge, and the preventing a peace officer from doing their duty, another felony.
Williams was accused of five serious felonies, including criminal threats, resisting and three counts of assault with a deadly weapon, including on two peace officers. The deal reached – sentencing is April 17 – will put Williams in jail for about two years. It won’t be considered a “violent strike,” said Cottam.
Earlier in the week, Williams’ trial appeared to be a certainty – before it started, it was already tainted with controversy when Judge Donald Currier agreed with Deputy District Attorney Kristin Hayes that a Black juror was too “slovenly” to sit on the jury of Williams, who is also Black.
The court and DDA agreed that the potential juror – the only Black male on the panel – didn’t dress well, was heavy, had headphones around his neck, and didn’t remove his hat until he was asked to do so.
“This is race neutral,” claimed Hayes, stating that it was the juror’s “physical appearance not race” that caused him to get the boot. “He’s overweight, wore headphones. And he didn’t remove his 
hat (in court),” Hayes argued.
However, defense attorney Cottam strongly suggested it may have been because of his race.
“She (the DDA) asked zero questions to see if he (the juror) took the case seriously,” said Cottam.
In the end, the judge agreed with Hayes, ruling, “He (the juror) takes no pride in the way he presents himself.”
Although the judge and prosecutor denied that the decision to remove the Black juror was racist, defense lawyers often say just the opposite.
Williams was accused of threatening another unhoused person Nov. 19, 2019 with a hatchet and rock, which he later threw at officers. They responded by trying to arrest him, and in the ensuing fight, according to the police reports, an officer was stunned twice by his own taser by accident, and Williams’ pit bull bit another officer. The dog was then shot and killed.
Potential jurors were warned by Hayes that they may not want to sit on the jury if they had a special connection to dogs, like a family companion.
The fact that Williams is homeless was yet another issue that drove the jury selection questioning.
A handful of jurors said they couldn’t be “unbiased” because of their views of the unhoused – and even Judge Currier chimed in, calling homelessness a “lifestyle,” although thousands of people have been driven to live in the streets in Sacramento because of rising rents, job loss and healthcare costs.
The issue of a lack of Black jurors on Sacramento County juries pervaded the proceedings.
Late last year, private defense attorney Claire White charged the county is racially discriminating against the African-American community in its jury pool decision, and, in a broad statistical analysis, said odds that Blacks are so under-represented in the jury pool are near-astronomical.
Because of White’s allegations, Judge Curtis Fiorini delayed the jury selection portion of a trial of Jaedon Evans, the client of White, and Preston Bouie, represented by Tom Clinkenbeard, for armed robbery at a Sacramento Denny’s restaurant in May of 2019. Both are Black, and in the end, their charges were dismissed.
Although she ultimately lost the challenge, White’s filed a motion to dismiss the entire jury county venire/pool, saying “the jury is not drawn from a representative cross-section of the relevant community in violation of the defendant’s federal and state constitutional rights.”
She said and “the jury selection procedure in Sacramento County has resulted in selection of jurors in a constitutionally impermissible manner; that the jury excludes jurors of a protected class in violation of the defendant’s federal and state constitutional rights.”
In a detailed analysis provided the court, White said “it’s a mathematical fact that there is a disparity between the relative (number) of Black jurors in the venire and the relative population of Black people in the county.”
White maintained in her pleading that “statisticians in analyzing the limited data available to Mr. Evans, namely the presence of only two Black jurors out of 60 jurors” indicated that “if the venire is a fair cross section of the community, in this case a community with 10.9% Black population (as noted in the 2010 Sacramento County census), drawing only 2 Black jurors in a group of 60, would only happen 0.000027% of the time.”
The Oakland-based attorney continued, saying that “the system used inevitably and definitively results in a disparity in the number of Black jurors relative to the Black population of the county,” and that the venire cannot be a fair cross section of the community. This disparity, or under representations of African-Americans citizens on the jury venires in Sacramento County is not fair or reasonable in relation to the numbers of such persons in the community.
“The resulting disproportionate number of African Americans on defendant’s jury not only violates defendant’s constitutional right to a representative cross-section of our community on this jury but it also injures the entire community and reflects poorly on the judicial process throughout the county,” White said.
When White posed the challenge concerning the county jury pool initially, veteran defense lawyers said they couldn’t recall such a request – let alone one that was granted. One attorney said “it’s about time” the jury selection process in Sacramento was examined.
Sacramento County admitted in response to a query by White that it does not keep any records regarding potential juror selection. The court later tossed out the jury challenge because, in fact, the statistics needed to back up White’s challenge just don’t exist because the studies have not been done, in large part because the Legislature has not approved a budget to do those studies.
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I know this is a serious article and a serious case, but it reads like a bad situation comedy for 80’s television.