Court Watch

by Bill Pursell

There is a relatively new phrase in our legal system that is still heard all too rarely, but it should be a prime fear of all defendants who enter to the mercy of the courts. The phrase is “charge stacking”. These simple words are creating catastrophic effects in our court rooms. It is this phrase, or this practice of stacking which has enabled a 20 year old first time offender to receive 1,941 months (162 years) in prison without the possibility of parole, reported by Reuters – Tue, Jul 3, 2012.

The idea of charge stacking is simple. The method entails finding as many possible criminal counts to “stack” against the defendant in order to strengthen the core case of the prosecution. This is possible because the main deterrent against stacking charges is the law of double jeopardy. In Blockburger v. United States, the Supreme Court said the government may separately try and punish the defendant for two crimes if each crime contains an element that the other does not. Therefore double jeopardy is so weak a deterrent that a person can be convicted of ten counts of perjury when they were perjuring about one thing on ten different days.

Critics Call For New Legislation Protecting Child’s Rights, and the Overhaul of the Family Court System

Last week, longtime Davis resident Fraser Schilling wrote a letter the Davis Enterprise depicting a scene where four Davis police officers “were…dragging a 14-year-old girl to the airport because Yolo County Superior Court Judge Kathy White and the DA’s Office had ordered her forced emigration to Washington, even though the decision was under appeal.”

At the time, he questioned the use of police resources and the show of force, writing, “The two-day drama did answer the question of how many Davis PD officers, judges and attorneys it takes to screw up a 14-year-old girl – at least a dozen.”

The Yolo County District Attorney’s office declined to file charges against UC Davis students Jerome Wren and Tatiana Bush, who were arrested for allegedly repeatedly resisting arrest after police responded to a call of a disturbance on May 23 at the Glacier Point Apartments in West Davis.

Ms. Bush, a recent UC Davis graduate who served as a member on Cruz Reynoso’s Task Force looking into the pepper spraying, believes that she and Mr. Wren are the victims of police brutality.

by Gil Garcetti

My office sought the death penalty in dozens of cases when I was the Los Angeles County district attorney for eight years, and chief deputy district attorney for four. The cases had horrific and compelling facts; I had no problem seeking death sentences. But though I never was squeamish, I now fully support Proposition 34 to replace the death penalty with life in prison with no possibility of parole. Here’s why.

California’s death penalty is broken beyond repair, hideously expensive, and inevitably carries the risk of executing an innocent person. The hundreds of millions of dollars we throw away on this broken system would be much better spent on solving and preventing crime and investing in our kids’ schools.

By Rachel Myers

Snatching a purse off the arm of an elderly woman is one of the nastier offenses I can think of – the kind of thing that might make you shake your head and say to yourself “I hope whoever did that gets what’s coming to him.” And then you think for a second about just what he ought to have coming to him: community service, maybe – or even a night in jail. Stealing from an old lady is pretty mean, after all, and you’d want whoever did it to learn a lesson.

I guess that’s what the state of Texas was thinking when it sentenced Willie James Sauls last week for that very crime. Except in this case, apparently the lesson Texas wants us all to learn is “we don’t believe in rehabilitation” – for the crime of stealing a purse, Sauls was sentenced to 45 years in prison. The prosecutors in the case justified the long sentence by pointing out that Sauls has prior convictions and that he “already had chances to address the issues with his behavior.” And with that, they decided this purse snatcher should be locked in prison until he’s 82.

Braving the triple-digit August heat of Woodland, 250 protesters  not only listened to an hour of speeches but marched down to the courthouse in a protest that marked the third year anniversary of Ajay Dev’s conviction on dozens of charges of raping his adoptive daughter.

“I’m here today because I know without a doubt, with 100 percent certainty that my brother, Ajay Dev, is innocent,” Sanjay Dev told the crowd on Wednesday evening at Woodland’s Freeman Park.

For years we have complained that the Daily Democrat has simply taken a press release from the DA’s office and re-printed it verbatim.  There is no fact-checking for accuracy.  They simply take the word of the DA’s office and print it as fact, usually under the deceptive byline of “Democrat Staff.”

On Wednesday, family and friends of Ajay Dev, who believe he has been wrongly convicted of the rape of his adopted daughter, will mark the third-year anniversary of his sentencing with a protest march and vigil.  They have done this for every year, and the event usually attracts a few hundred people.

by Richard Van Zandt

When Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig’s hand-picked judicial candidate, Clinton aka ‘Clint’ Parish, sent out a toxic mailer to Yolo County residents a few weeks before the June primary, it took less than a day for Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto to withdraw his endorsement of Parish.  The mailer was a blatantly dishonest series of charges against Judge Dan Maguire, whom Parish was challenging.

In contrast to Sheriff Prieto, Mr. Reisig waited until the Bee issued an “anti-endorsement” before withdrawing his own.  Reisig was at the top of Parish’s endorsement list, and was one of Parish’s first and biggest financial supporters.

Saw a reference to an article by Karen Boudrie Greig, “Last Call From Death Row,” in the August issue of New Orleans Magazine.  In it she recounts the trial of Carlos DeLuna, who would be executed in 1989 for a crime that he did not commit.

Our keynote speaker from last week’s event was Maurice Possley, and his work with the Chicago Tribune was critical toward exposing that wrongful execution.

by Dick Price –

Sunday, on the final day of its three-day executive board meeting held in Anaheim, the California Democratic Party overwhelmingly endorsed Prop 34 — the November ballot initiative that would commute all the state’s death sentences to life imprisonment without possibility of parole (LWOP).

Saturday night, though, a lively five-person panel session organized by the party’s Progressive Caucus paired Prop 34 proponents with prisoner rights advocates to debate whether the Prop 34 remedy might be worse than the ailment.

The Vanguard has learned that Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig lifted huge portions of his op-ed last week from an op-ed entitled “Justice for crime victims demands death penalty,” written by Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully with Phyllis Loya, the mother of a Pittsburg police officer whose son was murdered.

While the piece written last week by Mr. Reisig is twice the length, at least six paragraphs are directly lifted and another six are slightly altered from the piece written by Jan Scully.

By Gary Wells, Professor of Psychology, Iowa State University

One of the more interesting debates that is emerging is over the issue of stop and frisk as a crime control policy.  The policy began in New York by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Depite the controversy and complaints from rights groups and minorities, the mayor continues to support it, arguing as he did in June, “that it had helped make New York the safest big city in the country, while acknowledging that the police needed to treat those whom they stopped with greater respect.”