Court Watch

After more than two and a half years since the arrest of Marco Topete, accused of killing Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Diaz, the trial is about to go forward in the next couple of weeks.  This week marked the first of several hearings on motions in limine that will help to define the trial.

Recently Judge Paul Richardson threw out the gang charges against Mr. Topete, however, the DA is arguing that the Judge should reconsider the gang charges because the case that apparently was the judge’s sole authority for striking them is being heard by the Supreme Court.

As I told KCRA yesterday afternoon, the announcement  by the Department of Justice that they are not filing federal civil rights charges against the three Sheriff’s Deputies involved in the 2009 shooting of Luis Gutierrez changes nothing.

We do not know more today than we did last month about the shooting.  A day after the Sheriff’s Department released a press release on the matter, we learned little more than we knew at the onset.

On Monday, the Yolo County Sheriff’s Department announced that they had received a letter from that the United States Department of Justice stating that the U.S. Department of Justice has concluded their investigation into the fatal shooting of Luis Gutierrez-Navarro. 

In a letter dated February 4, 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice stated “After careful consideration, we concluded that the evidence does not establish a prosecutable violation of the federal criminal civil rights statutes. Accordingly, we have closed our investigation.”

In December, a Yolo County jury found Jose Valdivia guilty of two counts of drunk driving, plus they found him guilty of evading a peace officer and resisting arrest.  This was not the only set of charges that Mr. Valdivia faced. 

In a separate case, he also faced felony charges for transportation and possession of a controlled substance per Yolo County’s practice of double-charging possession of drugs as both possession and transportation.

It has taken two years and untold amounts of money, but the lawsuit filed by former UC Davis Police Officer Calvin Chang is going forward with the key provisions intact.

In 2009, former UC Davis Police Officer Calvin Chang filed a lawsuit against the UC Regents and UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza, alleging complaints of racial and sexual orientation discrimination, housing discrimination, and retaliation.

Last week, we reported on the death of Evaristo Ramirez, an immigrant who had been arrested for a DUI and held in the Sacramento County Jail.  He became the victim of Richard Harden, who somehow ended up in the same jail cell as Mr. Ramirez despite evidence that his hammer attack on a Latina female was motivated by hatred towards immigrants.

According to court testimony, when the Home Deport store security subdued Mr. Harden by taking him to the ground, the perpetrator indicated that race was the motivation behind his attack on the Latina female whom he had attacked with a hammer.

We have noted in recent weeks the seemingly larger than usual number of cases that have been overturned from Yolo County.  During the course of our reporting of these cases the question has arisen – “out of how many.”

The “out of how many” standard is a difficult number to assess for reversals, just as it is for problematic cases, prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions.  After all, one person in prison unnecessarily is too many.

Last Friday, we sat in Judge Stephen Mock’s court as he began calendaring long cause trials – those trials that will last into a second court week – for this year.  We were stunned to find out that, as of the first week of February, Judge Mock’s calendar was completely backed up until September.

Yolo County officials have for several years now bragged about an improved efficiency that has allowed the number of cases to the be handled to more than double with 55 trials occurring in 2005 and 121 in 2008.  The number of trials remained high, with 121 again in 2009 and a slight drop to 112 in 2010.

It took seven years to come to trial, a month to try the case, but the jury was ready late Tuesday afternoon with their verdict after just over two days of deliberation.

As the verdicts were read, one by one, defendant by defendant, a wave of relief swept over the Niazi brothers and Qumar Ashraf for the first time in seven years.

The California Report today has published a follow-up to last week’s bombshell that was accompanied by NPR and Frontline coverage, which showed the questionable history of Dr. Thomas Gill, who worked with the Forensic Medical Group, a private company commissioned by the Yolo County’s coroner’s office to do autopsies.

According to the report, the Coroner’s Office will review the work in five homicide cases handled by the doctor.

Aaron Ray Wilson this week was ordered free by Judge Arvid Johnson, following a late December ruling by the Third District Court of Appeals which threw out his convictions for carrying a concealed dirk or dagger which constituted a third strike and had him in prison for 28 years to life.

Mr. Wilson appealed the verdict that would have sent him to prison for a minimum of 28 years “contending, among other things, that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress a knife (the alleged dirk or dagger) seized from his back pocket during a pat down search initiated after a police officer was dispatched to a public park to investigate “five subjects [possibly] smoking H and S [sic] in the men’s restroom.”

On Friday, the trial of four Yolo County residents charged with assault and accused of being, at the very least, sympathizers of the Taliban, wrapped up and went to the jury.  A Yolo County jury will have to sort through the four-week long trial and determine whether the three men accused of assault started the fight and were not provoked.

When the trial began, several weeks ago, there were four defendants, facing attempted murder charges among numerous counts of assault.  Now, the attempted murder charge long gone, the defendants down to three, and numerous charges dismissed due to lack of evidence, the picture is clearer but still murky.

Back in 2009, according to the Sacramento Bee’s report, Richard Harden “chased the woman down at the Home Depot on Folsom Boulevard  and bashed her three times with a hammer, sending her to the hospital with injuries to her back, neck and shoulder.”

According to court testimony, when the store security subdued him by taking him to the ground, the perpetrator indicated that race was the motivation behind his attack on the Latina female whom he had attacked with a hammer.

Judge Timothy Fall on Friday agreed to reduce the bail for UC Davis student Nicholas Benson, from one million dollars to 100,000 dollars, in order to enable the family to seek mental health support for Mr. Benson while his case is pending trial.

Mr. Benson, 25, was arrested on January 21 after his family called the police, fearing he was suicidal.  The incident, according to police sources, escalated from there and Mr. Benson was Tasered and finally taken into custody, but not before he allegedly made terrorists threats to police while carrying an assault rifle, shotgun and more than 300 rounds of ammunition in his truck.

I don’t use this space very often to praise the actions of public officials.  There are a number of reasons for that that we won’t get into, but part of it is the watchdog function that we perform necessarily leads us in directions critical of the actions of those in local government.

We have been critical in the past and will be in the future of Sheriff Ed Prieto, but the Sheriff deserves praise for his handling of the coroner’s office and the firing of forensic pathologist Thomas Gill who worked for the Forensic Medical Group (FMG), a private company the county contracts with for doing autopsies.

While the Judicial Watch covers mainly Yolo County, our goals extend more regionally, and certainly a matter of grave concern are the actions that occurred last weekend in Elk Grove.

What we know for sure is that last Sunday, an Elk Grove police officer shot a handcuffed man in the back seat of his police vehicle.  Initially, the Elk Grove Police Department had provided no explanation as to why the officer fired his rifle at the suspect, which ended up grazing the 32-year-old man in the face.

We spend a lot of time talking about the district attorneys on these pages, but just as important are the judges.  Most of the time, the judges are sitting back and making their legal rulings.  However, these rulings profoundly shape the cases and the evidence admitted.

Most of the time judges are restrained, but occasionally you see in them glimpses of their true spirit.  It was thus as the first of the closing statements were wrapping up in the never-ending Niazi trial that we got just such a glimpse into Judge Stephen Mock.

Yesterday the Vanguard learned of a California Watch/ Frontline investigation that discovered that a man who had performed potentially hundreds of autopsies for Yolo County had his qualifications to perform autopsies called into question by an investigative report.

The Vanguard spoke on Wednesday with Yolo County’s Chief Deputy Coroner Robert LaBrash, who downplayed any concerns that there were problems with Yolo County autopsies, arguing that any autopsy performed by Dr. Thomas Gill would have been overseen by his office and had his findings signed off upon.

A report issued on Monday from a project called California Watch, from the Center for Investigative Reporting calls into question some autopsies that may have been performed for Yolo County by forensic pathologist Dr. Thomas Gill, whose qualifications have been called into question by the project’s investigative report.

According to their report, Dr. Thomas Gill had “been forced out of a teaching position at an Oregon university, and then fired for inaccurate findings and alcohol abuse by the coroner in Indianapolis.”  Moreover, he had been “demoted for poor performance as a fellow for the Los Angeles County Coroner, [and] he resurfaced at a private autopsy company in Northern California.”

Friday marked the third time in two weeks that the Third District Court of Appeal (3rd DCA) has overturned the ruling of a Yolo County judge.  This time it was in a civil matter brought forward by Arthur Silen, a contract analyst, who sued the university after being passed over for a promotion that went to a much younger, much less educated and vastly less experienced candidate.

Yolo County Superior Court had granted the UC Regents’ summary judgment motion, finding that Mr. Silen had not established that the promotional decision was motivated by discriminatory animus.