By Carlin Ross
SACRAMENTO – Although the judge in Sacramento County Superior Court Tuesday ruled a drug case can go to trial, some of the testimony suggested a search may have been illegal, and a detective’s testimony was muddled.
Defendant Ronald Anderson appeared before Judge Kevin McCormick for his preliminary hearing, charged with violating Health and Safety Code section 11137, the possession of methamphetamines with intent to sell. The charging document at hand was a felony complaint filed with two charges: a misdemeanor charge and a felony charge.
Anderson, alongside his Assistant Public Defender Quoc To, expected expertise on narcotics in the courtroom. Instead, they received Detective Brain Welshons’s testimony which“defied logic,” as later labeled by the judge.
The first witness to testify was five-year sworn police Officer Patrick Scott, who was dispatched on Aug. 24 at 4 p.m. to check out “a suspicious person pacing back and forth near the park” who “appeared to be looking for vehicles.”
When he arrived on the scene, he didn’t locate anyone who matched the descriptions, but was advised of a subject that matched the description of the man and lived across from the park to which he was 
dispatched.
When Officer Scott arrived at Anderson’s address without a warrant, he was met by Anderson’s mother, stepdaughter, and wife.
Comments from spectators viewing the courtroom live stream call the search “illegal” due to “reasonable suspicion,” rather than probable cause.
The officer first conducted a search of persons, finding Anderson’s wallet in his back pocket with “$479 in random denominations.” He then searched Anderson’s room in which he located a black XL 49ers sweatshirt with a black zipper bag in the front pocket.
The black bag possessed a functioning digital scale coated in white residue, four miscellaneous pills, and a white plastic bag with 4.4 grams of methamphetamine: “Way more than a usable amount,” according to officer Scott.
Officer Scott then conducted a search of messages on Anderson’s phone, locating texts between a subject about buying and selling “points” of methamphetamine. Deputy District Attorney Brandon Jack confirmed Anderson had other texts with recipients that indicated drug sales.
Elk Grove PD Officer Mohammad Karimi, who assisted Officer Scott in the investigation, was next in line to testify, but it only lasted a few moments.
The DDA asked one question about Karimi’s conversation with Anderson’s wife “about selling dope.” Karimi revealed that when he asked Anderson’s wife why Anderson partook in distributing narcotics, she said “she’s not sure why he does it, they fight all the time about it.”
With just these two testimonies, Judge McCormick later ruled there was “sufficient evidence for a hearing,” but the final testimony of Detective Brian Welshons proved problematic to the prosecution.
After the DDA posed a hypothetical, a description of the evidence against Anderson in case 20FE013570, and asked the expert’s opinion on whether the defendant had intent to sell, Welshons responded affirmatively—not just because of the solid evidence, but because he was “familiar with the defendant” from previous investigations.
Judge McCormick was quick to intervene and point out Welshons’s biases.
Welshons then had a give and take with defense counsel about how drug users and drug dealers differ in their buying habits.
That will all get sorted out in trial, as Judge McCormick found sufficient evidence for one, setting the trial date for March 21, 2021. He also set an additional court date on Jan. 11 to try to get the case resolved. “The jury resolves a lot of these cases, especially in Department 10,” McCormick encouraged.
Carlin Ross is a senior at Santa Clara University who double majors in English and philosophy. She’s originally from Bozeman, Montana.
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