By Crescenzo Vellucci
The Vanguard Sacramento Bureau Chief
SANTA ROSA, CA – More than 200 people—three of them were later arrested—attended a sentencing hearing rally here in Sonoma County Superior Court Thursday for a lawyer convicted last month of felony conspiracy in actions to rescue sick and injured animals in county factory farms.
Attorney Wayne Hsiung—who has been in jail the past month awaiting sentencing since the jury guilty verdict—is still in jail and expected to be released within a few weeks, serving about half his 90-day sentence, according to his lawyers Thursday.
But now he’ll have company, of sorts.
Deputies unexpectedly arrested three supporters Thursday at the Hsiung rally, charging them with felonies and misdemeanors surrounding the same rescues Hsiung was convicted of previously, and possibility other rescues.
While marching from the courthouse to the Sheriff’s Department to, said supporters, report “evidence of criminal animals cruelty in the county,” Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) investigators Zoe Rosenberg, Rocky Chan and Conrad de Jesus were grabbed by deputies and charged with felony conspiracy and misdemeanor trespass. Rosenberg is charged with seven felonies.
Supporters reported the three are jailed until a hearing Monday.
Hsiung, besides the jail sentence of 90 days—expected to be halved—also agreed, as a condition of release, to two years of probation. Judge Laura Passaglia also ordered Hsiung to have no contact in any form with the other named “co-conspirators” in the case, including co-accused in a March beagle rescue trial.
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Almira Tanner, a lead organizer with DxE, said at the courthouse, Hsiung “shouldn’t be in jail at all. He shouldn’t have been charged at
all. He shouldn’t have been tried at all. He shouldn’t have been convicted at all if the jury was able to hear the entire
story. The end result of this multi-$100,000 prosecution is 90 days in jail.”
Tanner decried the release conditions put on Hsiung, calling them “devastating,” including the probation requirement that Hsiung cannot have any interaction with friends, activists and even the ‘co-parent’ of his dog.
“And the reason that they did that is not because we’re going to go plan some crime together, not because we’re a danger to the safety of this community, but because they want to crush this movement. And they thought that by throwing Wayne in jail, immediately after he was convicted that they would crush the movement.
“But on the same day we released new rescues, new animals were rescued, people continued to investigate factory farms, and almost 200 people showed up at his sentencing hearing today, and so that did not work. And what they’re trying to do now is say, well now you can’t even talk to each other.”
Tanner added, “What Wayne did is not a crime, and what we’re going to continue to do is not a crime, until we hold the actual abusers accountable, the corporations that are torturing billions of animals.”
The legal conflagration in Sonoma County is centered around animal rescues, in 2018 and 2019 at two factory farms: Sunrise Farms, a major egg producer, and Reichardt, California’s largest duck farm Hsiung’s trial lasted about two months, and the jury took six days to come to a verdict, only after the judge ordered them to continue deliberating after the jury said it was hung,
Hsiung is a co-founder of Direct Action Everywhere, which uses the tactic defined as the legal “Right to Rescue” of sick and injured animals from commercial operations.
Earlier this year, Hsiung led the effort in the winning case of two activists acquitted of the open rescue theft in Merced, California. And, in 2022, Hsiung was acquitted of felony burglary and theft in a piglet rescue case in St. George, Utah.
The judge, said observers, appeared to ignore a bevy of character letters to the court by his family members, minister, law professor and even a poultry producer who said Hsiung investigated his turkey farm, rescued a sick turkey and the two adversaries became friends.
The farmer wrote to the judge, “I was grateful that he had exposed some rough conditions so we could fix them. In fact, I don’t think Wayne stole the turkey because there’s a difference between stealing and rescuing, and Wayne was just trying to save the turkey’s life.”
Lawyers for Hsiung said he is appealing the conviction in Sonoma “based on several rulings by Judge Passaglia that constitute prejudicial and reversible error.”
The University of Denver’s Animal Activist Legal Defense Project is working on the appeal, and attorney Chris Carraway said, “I often hear courts describe trials as a search for the truth. Mr. Hsiung’s trial was anything but.
“The press had limited access; trial participants were unconstitutionally gagged from the beginning; and the court bent over backwards to prevent the defense from detailing the chronic animal cruelty found which informed the intent behind the actions. At the end of the day, a jury still deliberated for six days – indicative of reasonable doubt itself – without the full picture of what they were truly weighing in on.”
According to supporters, “The mass open rescue at Sunrise Farms was prompted by investigations that occurred in 2016 through 2018, which found that despite Proposition 2 banning intensive confinement of animals on factory farms, Sunrise was confining tens of thousands of birds in towering 15-foot tall rows of tightly packed cages, inside of which many birds were sick, dying, and dead. Investigators also found violations of California’s animal cruelty statute, Penal Code 597, including injured birds who were unable to access food or water.”
Activists said, “At Reichardt Duck Farm, investigations by Mercy for Animals in 2014 and by DxE in 2019 revealed systemic violations of animal cruelty laws, including diseased ducks stuck on their backs, unable to get up, and consequently unable to reach food or water.”
The now detained Zoe Rosenberg, a defense witness and DxE investigator, testified in Hsiung’s trial, and claims she found “deceased ducks from the facility and sent them for necropsy tests that revealed a fatal disease was spreading in the facility, though she was prohibited by the court from telling the jury the name of the disease or describing it,” said DxE.
“Hsiung and other activists were also barred from testifying about the many times they reported criminal animal cruelty at Sunrise and Reichardt to Sonoma County authorities and how those reports were repeatedly ignored, which led them to believe direct intervention was necessary to help the animals,” added DxE.
Before she was snatched by deputies Thursday, Rosenberg told supporters, “We won’t stop rescuing abused animals when the authorities fail them. While Wayne was on trial, I continued to investigate Reichardt and documented dozens of ducks stuck on their backs unable to stand up. I rescued one duck in this condition who had bloody wounds all over his back and got him emergency medical care. His name is River and rescuing him wasn’t a crime; it was a necessity.”
DxE said among the crowd at the hearing Thursday, one of the jurors who voted to find Hsiung guilty attended, and wanted to see a more “lenient” sentence.
DxE also said “solidarity protests in support of Hsiung and the ‘Right to Rescue’ are taking place in Mexico City, Paris, London and more than a dozen other cities across the world.”
