Court Watch

A turning point has perhaps been reached in terms of the handling of prosecutorial misconduct.  It was 2011 when the US Supreme Court overturned a multimillion dollar civil verdict for John Thompson, who spent years in prison as New Orleans prosecutors not only withheld evidence, but destroyed it.

As the New York Times noted at the time, the ruling protects prosecutors, giving them “nearly absolute immunity over civil suits.”

Hopefully you caught PBS’s Tuesday night broadcast of the Central Park Five – if not, I highly recommend it.  Ken Burns remains among the finest contemporary documentarians, presenting the story of five teenagers in late 1980s New York who were railroaded into providing false confessions and ultimately wrongfully convicted of committing one of the most horrific non-murders one can imagine.

Ken Burns did a masterful job of setting the scene, as author Eisa Nefertari Ulen, writing in the Washington Post on Tuesday, notes, “New York was just emerging from the near-bankruptcy of the 1970s and entering a period of lavish conspicuous consumption that was fueled by Wall Street in the 1980s. Black culture was just emerging from the empowerment of the Black Power Movement of the 1970s and entering a period of disenfranchisement that was fueled by the Crack Era of the 1980s.”

On Sunday, April 28, 2013 from 5:00 to 7:00 PM in Woodland at the Celebration Center Church (100 Woodland Ave), the Vanguard Court Watch Council of Yolo County (VCWCYC) is inviting the public to come forward to express their concerns about the judicial system, providing testimony and giving personal accounts of contemporary cases in the Yolo County Court system.

“The public has an opportunity to tell of their experiences in the Yolo County judicial system.  Experiences that normally are not covered in the newspaper,” said David Greenwald, Executive Director of Vanguard Court Watch.  “The Council will take public comment, testimony from invited speakers, and then deliberate in closed session to determine our course of action.”

On Monday the Yolo County District Attorney’s office unveiled an innovative new pilot project, modeled after a program that San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon implemented two years ago.

Jeff Reisig unveiled a program, in partnership with the Davis Police Department and the UC Davis Police Department, called the Neighborhood Court, a new adult criminal offender diversion program based on restorative justice.  This innovative program will be offered in the city of Davis and on the UC Davis campus, starting in May of 2013.

Back in the summer of 2010, lasting for six excruciating months – on again and off again – the gang injunction trial was an underwhelming experience.  Trotting out biased police officers who were stunningly allowed to testify, not just to what they witnessed, but also to what they were told, the District Attorney’s office managed to produce dozens of cases over the course of a decade in hopes of proving the existence of a nuisance represented by the Broderick Boys Criminal Street Gang, and thus laying the justification for a gang injunction.

In the end, we were left with the abiding belief that, while there may be areas where gang injunctions are necessary as a tool to reduce gang violence, the case was not made that West Sacramento was such an area.

In March of 2011, Judge Kathleen White, following a nearly six-month trial that went from July 12, 2010 to December 15, 2010 on alternate weeks, issued her ruling in favor of upholding the gang injunction in West Sacramento.  Three months later, she issued a final “Judgment Granting Injunction After Trial” against the Broderick Boys criminal street gang in West Sacramento.

The gang injunction issued by the court imposed a curfew and restricted other activities of gang members in a defined area within West Sacramento called the “Safety Zone.”

By Vanguard Court Watch Interns

Today in Judge Fall’s courtroom, Marlon Raye was brought from jail in a wheelchair for a probable cause hearing. He was arrested in West Sacramento on February 19 while riding a bicycle. He was charged with Resisting/Delaying Arrest and Possession of Methamphetamine.

Officer Wright, of the West Sacramento Police Department, testified that he observed the bicycle leaving the Pickwick Motel shortly after midnight. The officer was patrolling on foot. He called for assistance. No mention was made of why Officer Wright believed there was a reason to pursue Mr. Raye, nor why he was not in a patrol car. Foot patrol is not a common method used in West Sacramento.

Judge David Rosenberg has been working on this new courthouse for a decade now, and he deserves tremendous credit for the fortitude and skill to get it to the point where on Friday they actually broke ground on the new building.

“We truly love our historic courthouse … but it was built five generations ago for another time and another era,” he said, as quoted in other news accounts.  “We have outgrown that historic courthouse in every conceivable way.”

Earlier this week, we reported on a study from ProPublica that, in analyzing state and federal court rulings from 2001 to 2011, in particular “scrutinizing instances in which state or federal courts identified misconduct serious enough to throw out a conviction,” found that of 30 cases that met their very specific criteria, only one prosecutor would be disciplined in a meaningful way for misconduct.

Those findings mirrored earlier findings from the 2010 report from the Veritas Initiative, “Preventable Error,” funded by the Northern California Innocence Project, which documented more than 800 instances of prosecutorial misconduct, including 107 where the prosecutors were found to have committed misconduct more than once – two were cited for misconduct four times, two were cited five times and one prosecutor was cited for misconduct six times.

Last year when Clinton Parish was running for a Yolo County judgeship against Judge Dan Maguire, he made a critical mistake that, in the heat of the moment, is easy to make – he thought his political team had properly vetted an attack ad that they were recommending he launch against sitting Judge Maguire.

He was wrong, they had not, and the allegations turned out to be embarrassingly false.  The mistake cost him his dignity, his election, and ultimately his job.  He had to move his family from the place they had lived for over ten years.