Court Watch

In late September into early October, a Yolo County jury hung, with seven jurors voting to acquit and five to convict Jesus Solis. Mr. Solis stood accused of shooting and killing an individual named Jesus Cortez Heredia last September outside Ortega’s West, a bar in West Sacramento.  Another individual standing beside Heredia at the time of the shooting was also hit by the flurry of bullets, following a fight in the parking lot at closing time.

Mr. Solis is now in Mexico, having been deported, but is free after facing, at one point, the death penalty in this case.  Former Deputy District Attorney James Walker had said in the original filing that this was a capital case, unless stated otherwise. Charges were refiled after the mistrial.

Two men accused in the beating of Sacramento cab driver Harbhajan Singh in the early morning hours of November 28, 2010 were arraigned on Tuesday afternoon, charged with hate crimes, according to a release from the Yolo County DA’s Office.

Pedro Ramirez, 41, and Johnny Morales, 33 have been charged with felony assault and hate crimes, according to the release.  In a statement released by Mr. Singh through his spokesperson Amar Shergill at the Shergill Law Firm in Sacramento, they say that the Felony Assault charge also includes a Great Bodily Injury enhancement, and there was an additional charge of criminal threats.

I have sat in Judge Fall’s courtroom as he handed down an implausible sentence of 378 years to Ajay Dev.  I have sat in Judge Fall’s courtroom as he berated a young public defender, demeaning her not only in front of her colleagues, but in front of a jury.

He makes attorneys nervous.  He acts in an arrogant and condescending fashion at times.  But privately I have had more than one attorney tell me no judge in Yolo County knows the law better than Judge Fall, and Judge Fall makes them a better attorney.

On Friday, former West Sacramento Police Officer James Reeder took the stand.  Mr. Reeder testified that he arrived a couple of minutes after the altercation began between Ernesto Galvan and Officers Schlie and Farrington.

He said it was pitch black and all he could see was the amber lights of the police “overheads.”  He then saw the skirmish and called out, asking if there were anyone else involved.  Officer Farrington said, “just him. ” That would be Fermin Galvan.  Mr. Reeder admitted under cross-examination that Fermin Galvan was 30 feet from the incident, not participating, not yelling to his brother, but nevertheless he considered him a threat.

The DA’s office is seeking to prison time now for a former Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) Executive Director who had pled no contest to one felony charge of grand theft from an employer. 

Last week, the Vanguard reported that the DA’s Office would be attempting to overturn a plea agreement reached with former CASA Executive Director Claudean Medlock.  Ms. Medlock had allegedly embezzled more than $46,000 from the non-profit agency and used the money to gamble at casinos.

Early on Sunday morning, November 28th, Sacramento cab driver Harbhajan Singh was attacked by two of his passengers in a neighborhood in West Sacramento.  According to eye witness reports, during the beating the two men repeatedly threatened to kill him, while calling Mr. Singh ‘Osama bin Laden’. 

This assault left Mr. Singh with multiple facial lacerations requiring stitches, bone chips in his nose, eye injuries and bruising along his rib cage.  Mr. Singh, a Sikh-American, believes that had he not gotten away, his attackers would have killed him.

Opening statements began on Wednesday in the third iteration of the trial of Ernesto and Fermin Galvan, charged with resisting arrest and battery stemming from a West Sacramento incident in 2005.  Both earlier trials – one in October 2007 and the other in February of 2010 – ended in hung juries.

Jury selection on this case began on Monday, but on Tuesday things got interesting as both sides, after reviewing the lengthy questionnaire, began the process voir dire.

Whether the death of Wayne King, a ranch hand at the Historic Nelson Ranch north of Woodland, was ultimately determined to have been at his own hands or at those of another, one thing is clear, this is one of the strangest, most interesting,  and most unique incidents one could envision.

Family and friends are not accepting the official word from the Sheriff’s Department that it was a suicide and that the case is closed.  Instead they have hired their own investigator, Frank Roman, a former Santa Clara Sheriff’s detective who invited CBS 13 and the Vanguard to the ranch to see the scene for ourselves.

In February the Vanguard, in one of the first cases under the fledgling Yolo Judicial Watch Project, reported that a Yolo County jury was unable to reach a verdict in the case of Ernesto and Fermin Galvan, brothers who were charged with resisting arrest and battery for an incident that occurred back in 2005.

Ernesto Galvan was beaten into a class-3 coma by officers during an incident that occurred on June 14, 2005 at 3:20 am in West Sacramento.  Photographs shown at trial show Ernesto Galvan lying face down in a pool of blood.

An Inspector General’s report, which came down last Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving, hit two area organizations, the Yolo County Probation Department and CALCASA (California Coalition Against Sexual Assault) for misappropriation and misuse of federal grant money.

According to a letter dated November 24 from Inspector General Laura Chick, money that first became available in the mid-1990s through the Violence Against Women Act, and was increased through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act  (ARRA) which awarded the California Emergency Management Agency (CalEMA) a total of $13.3 million, were misused.

For two years, ranch owners Ted Wilson and Brenda Cedarblade have complained about a bizarre series of events that includes harassment and even a shooting on their land.  They believe it has to do with their opposition to county land use policies that has made them a target.

At the same time, authorities found it somewhat easy to ignore these complaints.  But the shooting death of Wayne King, an employee on the Historic Nelson Ranch, will likely change all of that.

The Yolo County Coroner’s Office is calling the shooting death of a ranch hand in his 50’s, on the Historic Nelson Ranch north of Woodland, self-inflicted.

The body of  Wayne Henry King was found with a gunshot wound to the head.  Originally, they treated it as a homicide, however by late afternoon, Sheriff Ed Prieto called it suicide.

For those that missed it, there was a good article in the Sacramento Bee about the gang injunction trial on Sunday.  In it, reporter Hudson Sangree made a significant point about the trial.

He writes, “The question, however, of whether gang injunctions improve public safety remains largely unaddressed at trial, the evidence deemed unnecessary by the courts.”

In late October, the Vanguard reported that the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office announced that Claudean Medlock had pled no contest to one felony charge of grand theft from an employer. Medlock is the former Executive Director of the Yolo County Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).

She had embezzled more than $46,000 from the non-profit agency and used the money to gamble at casinos.

If you want to find injustice, follow the activities in your county courthouse.

I have been following the California Superior Courthouse in Yolo County for three months, and may I say, my eyes are wide open. The courthouse is found in Woodland and where I thought not much happened.

Timothy Acuna is one of the few named defendants able to take the stand in this trial and he gives us some insight that provides context to the black and white case of gang activity that the DA’s Office is attempting to portray.

Like many, Mr. Acuna has a long criminal record that goes back at least to 1997.  He was 21 at that time, raised in Broderick in what is now the safety zone.  He became involved with drugs and people who used drugs in the safety zone. He stated that he did meth and was addicted to it.

Earlier in the summer, the prosecution presented witnesses from what they considered to be one of two seminal cases showing that the Broderick Boys Gang represented an ongoing public nuisance to the residents of the safety zone.  One of these, the Memorial Park incident, appears to be far more complex than presented by the DA’s Office.

During testimony it became clear that while the victims, brothers James and Reese Hopkins, were indeed injured and injured badly in the fight that ensued at the park, they were also far from innocent bystanders caught up in the gang’s wrath.  Instead they went to the park looking for trouble, looking for a fight, and trouble they got.

Word to the wise, do not shoplift from Nugget, you will end up with serious prison time.  On Monday, Judge Timothy Fall sentenced Michael Caddick to seven years in prison for being the lookout in a shoplifting heist that saw him aid and abet the stealing of Chinese food from the Woodland Nugget Market.

This marks at least the third case where we know of a person stealing a very small amount from Nugget and landing  in prison for serious time.  Earlier, a man faced life for stealing a package of shredded cheese, only to see the Three Strikes provision waived, but he still ended up with a seven-year sentence.

The defense called their first expert witness on Friday, Professor James Hernandez of Sacramento State.  Professor Hernandez is a former law enforcement officer, having been assigned  back in 1993 as a gang expert by the Department of Justice, and having served as a police officer in Pittsburg, California.

Professor Hernandez argued that the Nortenos are not a criminal street gang because they lack central command.  They are not organized, but simply appropriate an identity they wish to use.  He testified that there was no criminal street gang in West Sacramento and there never was.

In 2006 California voters passed what would be the latest in a string of ill-considered laws to protect children from sexual predators. At that time it passed Jessica’s Law, one of the string of laws around the country named for Jessica Lunsford, a young Florida girl who was raped and murdered in 2005 by a man previously convicted of a sexual offense.

Among the stringent requirements was the mandatory registration of “sex offenders” for life, to allow officials to monitor and track individuals, who range from dangerous sexual predators to people who happened to be convicted of relatively minor offenses, as we have seen in this county.