Court Watch

Public Defender Suggests Office Would Disqualify Judge Parish from Presiding Over Criminal Case Defended by Her Office

Deputy District Attorney Clinton Parish is running against sitting Yolo Superior Court Judge Daniel Maguire in a contested election that will be held this June.  Mr. Parish has focused much of his campaign on what he calls his strong record of criminal law experience, which, given AB 109 (California’s realignment law) and recent retirements on the bench, is in short supply.

In a recent debate presented by the Yolo County Bar Association, Mr. Parish argued, “There is a void there.”

Local Critics Believe Yolo County Could Do Better in Allocating Funding and Changing Current Incarceration Strategies –

Back in January, the Yolo County Board of Supervisors approved a plan that would apply for a 148-bed jail expansion as part of a plan to increase capacity in the face of AB 109.

Supervisor Don Saylor was the lone dissenter of this plan.  He argued that the current needs assessment ended its projection in 2007.  The 2007 needs assessment projected continued growth in the jail population.  But what we have learned with actual data since then is that the Average Daily Population (ADP) has not increased since 2008 but dropped from 428 to 384.

On March 2, 2012, Edward Lee Elmore was released from prison in South Carolina for a crime he had not committed.  But in order to do so, he had to agree to what is known as an Alford Plea – a plea arrangement in which he maintained his innocence but agreed the state could re-convict him of murder in a new trial.

However, after serving on death row for nearly 30 years, after being convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for the sexual assault and murder of an elderly woman in Greenwood, South Carolina, it was time to get out of prison even if it meant no exoneration.

On March 9, 2012, a Yolo County Jury of eight women and four men acquitted Christopher Spatola of a single misdemeanor count of a violation of Penal Code section 148, obstructing or delaying a peace officer in carrying out the legal performance of duties.

In the early morning hours of February 11, 2011, there was some sort of disturbance at KetMoRee in Davis, which serves as a restaurant until 10 pm and then a bar and club.

The case of four West Sacramento teenagers and one adult who allegedly attacked, robbed and assaulted a passerby in the late night hours back in January, 2011, turned when the defense’s expert, Dr. Geoffrey Loftus, testified about the impact of human memory on eyewitness identification.

Prior to the work of the Innocence Project, eyewitness accounts were considered critical pieces of evidence for convictions.  But we now know that eyewitness misidentification is among the leading causes of wrongful convictions across the nation.

On Thursday, the Sentencing Project released a report that examined juveniles serving life without parole. According to California State Senator Leland Yee, over 300 youth offenders have been condemned to spend their entire lives and to die in California’s prisons for crimes committed when they were teenagers, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Wednesday

The United States is the only country in the world where people who were under age 18 at the time of their crime serve sentences of life without parole. Nationally, more than 2,500 youth offenders are serving these sentences.

Spokespersons for the SAFE Campaign, a coalition of groups and individuals opposing the current death penalty, announced the filing of 800,000 petition signatures Thursday morning at four simultaneous news conferences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Diego.

The final number of signatures goes far and above the 504,000 required to qualify the measure for the November 2012 ballot.  If passed, the measure would replace the death penalty with a punishment of life in prison with no chance of parole.

It is a trial that, in strange ways, still haunts me.  Bennie Moses sentenced to 830 years for the crime of the repeated rape of his daughter over a period of years.

There were enough reasons to believe he did it – there was DNA evidence of his daughter and his own semen found inside the fly of his shorts, there was her testimony, and then there was his own confession.

A Yolo County Jury found Steve Sargent not guilty of gross vehicular manslaughter for his role in a fatal accident that killed his passenger.  The jury would deadlock on a lesser included charge of vehicular manslaughter, 8-4 in favor of acquittal, and 7-5 also for acquittal on a charge of failure to stop.

Michael Morton was released from prison in October 2011 after spending nearly 25 years in prison for the murder of his wife.

A frequent criticism of the current state of California gang laws is that they permit prosecutors to enter in damaging and prejudicial evidence that generally would not be admissible, under California’s Evidence Code section 352.

That is the critical provision that allows the court, at its discretion, to “exclude evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the probability that its admission will… substantial danger of undue prejudice…”

On Tuesday, Judge Dan Maguire sent out a press release announcing that he had received the endorsement of California’s leading crime victims’ group, the Crime Victims Action Alliance (CVAA). Crime Victims Action Alliance was formed in 1992 originally as the Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau, named in honor of the mother of Sharon Tate, one of the pioneers of the crime victims’ movement.

“I’m honored to have the endorsement of the Crime Victims Action Alliance,” said Judge Maguire. “This organization keeps a watchful eye over the justice system to ensure that crime victims are respected and protected from additional harm. I am humbled that they trust me to continue on with the work I am doing.”

It is a brilliant and powerful montage, one in which a female voice sings in the background, “I am falling half an acre.”  The images depict a string of events in which people uncharacteristically go out of their way to do the right thing for their fellow human kind.

When KCRA 3 in Sacramento requested the dash cam video of the pursuit that ended up with Deputy Sheriff Tony Diaz being shot, and aired it on Thursday evening, it caught many off guard.

The video was a sensitive matter to the family.  When it was initially shown in court, relatives of Tony Diaz responded in loud emotional outbursts that required the court to recess and prompted the defense to ask for a mistrial.  While Judge Paul Richardson refused to declare a mistrial, he did admonish the family to control themselves.

When five defendants – four of them juveniles under the age of 16 were arrested in January of 2011 for assault and robbery, the Yolo County District Attorney’s office refused to drop the gang charges.  Because the gang charges remained in place, the DA’s office was able to continue their direct filing of the juveniles.

Direct filing is when the prosecutor is allowed to try a juvenile as an adult, and Proposition 21, passed in 2000, increased  the ability to do that.

Eventually, the case that could have settled on the base offenses went to trial and the case blew up in the face of prosecutors as the defense was able to question the field show-up technique of witness identification.  Moreover, the gang charges – thin to begin with – did not hold up.

by Andrew Love

Tani Cantil-Sakauye, after one year as the Chief Justice of the State of California, has concluded that the state’s capital punishment system is “not effective” and requires “structural changes” that the state cannot afford.  Her predecessor, Ron George, who was Chief Justice for 15 years, came to the same conclusion, describing California’s death penalty scheme is “dysfunctional.”

These are two conservative jurists, appointed by Republican Governors, who with their fellow justices on the California Supreme Court have voted to uphold death sentences at an unprecedented rate.  But they have become disillusioned when confronted with a costly, time-consuming, unreliable and unworkable system that serves no useful purpose while draining judicial resources and diverting needed funds from true public safety programs.