By Linhchi Nguyen
SACRAMENTO – Assistant Public Defender Laurance Smith pointed out missing key evidence in the prosecutor’s case here, which seeks to link the defendant in a stabbing incident against another inmate in Sacramento State Prison in Folsom.
In the end, the judge set the case for trial, but suggested the prosecution find more evidence.
This defendant is Juan Valle, who was charged for assault with a deadly weapon and means to create great bodily injury while being a state prisoner.
At Wednesday’s preliminary hearing at Sacramento County Superior Court, Deputy District Attorney Jeff Harry presented three officers from the Sacramento State Prison in Folsom to testify how they found out about Valle’s alleged attack on a fellow inmate.
However, despite the testimony, PD Smith argued that none of the officers directly witnessed the incident nor did they locate any weapon that could have been used during the assault.
Officer Martin Fong, who was a part of the Investigative Services Unit on Feb. 7, 2019, was reviewing the cameras in a control booth when he saw the captured video of the assault.
The incident occurred outside in the yard, where the victim was exercising near the basketball court. Valle was standing off to the side of the victim, about six feet away. There were also a few other inmates around them.
The victim was “bending down to do push-ups, and Valle basically charged towards him and made two to three stabbing motions towards his right upper torso,” said Fong, who said he saw the alleged victim running away.
After that, Valle started walking down from the basketball court, where he met with another inmate. According to Fong, Valle seemed to drop an item on the ground, picked it up, and tucked it in his 
right pocket.
Valle, he said, then appeared to retrieve an item from the other inmate and placed it in his right sock.
Fong followed Valle’s movement through the cameras as Valle walked to the bathroom.
“Once he got to the bathroom area he went over to the toilet that was next to the sink, removed the objects from his right pocket and right sock, and he appeared to put them in the toilet and hit the flush button multiple times,” said Fong, who radioed the other officers on the scene, and one of them in the social tower made an order for the inmates to get down.
Walking out of the bathroom, Valle was seen by Fong to have stopped in his tracks to lie on the ground “right outside of the bathroom, on the asphalt track.”
Valle was then approached by Officer Marcus Omar Sawaya, who searched Valle’s body but admitted to not finding any contraband.
Meanwhile, Officer Kong Yang, a questioning officer at the facility, saw the alleged assault victim running toward him while holding his right side. Yang noticed that there was blood soaking through the victim’s sweatshirt near his right abdominal area.
Yang observed two puncture wounds, one below the armpit and the other on the victim’s right arm. The victim seemed to be in distress, but he did not make any statements as to the cause of his injuries, said Yang.
Toward the end of the hearing, Harry presented his last piece of evidence which consisted of the medical records, confirming the victim’s injuries on his right side.
But Smith stated that he is not protesting that there was an injury. “I’m just questioning the evidence of who inflicted the injury,” he said.
He argued that none of the officers testified to seeing the actual incident occur, nor did he hear anybody say that they saw the defendant inflict the injury. The only witness who “observed” the assault did it through a recording, but Smith, who saw the recording himself, said, “The camera was not a close-up, so you couldn’t see the faces.”
The PD noted that not only was no contraband found on Valle when he was searched, Officer Fong admitted during cross-examination that he could not find any weapon in the bathroom nor inside the toilet.
“I looked inside the toilet, nothing was inside besides water,” said Fong. “I accessed the pipe chase that allows you access to the trap portion of the toilet and the drains. I actually took a towel and a string, put it inside the toilet… and pulled it all the way through to see if I could capture anything in the toilet, but nothing came out.”
The other officers admitted to not finding any weapons in the bathroom nor the yard.
Attorney Smith and Valle even rejected DDA Harry’s offer to settle the case—a two year sentence for Valle, as opposed to a much longer term if he is proven guilty.
Judge Donald J. Currier found that because the bar is very low at a preliminary hearing, the case should move forward and he scheduled a trial date. He did encourage the district attorney to obtain more evidence.
The attorneys agreed to meet March 26, 2021, at 9 a.m. for a trial readiness conference in Dept. 4. The jury trial is set for March 29.
Linhchi Nguyen is a fourth year at UC Davis, double majoring in Political Science and English. She currently lives in Sacramento, California.
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