Court Watch

West Sacramento and Other Local Jurisdictions Need to Revisit Vehicle Pursuit Policies –

Imagine, a 17-year-old juvenile steals a car and leads the police on a high speed chase in one end of town, and on the other end of town, a police car turns on its lights and heads off to join the chase.  But just as it does so, it strikes a man crossing the street and hits him so hard that it severs the man’s body at the torso.

This is what happened this week in West Sacramento.  The Yolo County DA’s office would charge the teen, who was arrested after crashing into a parked car, with vehicle theft, felony possession of stolen property, and misdemeanor allegations of evading a police officer, resisting arrest and driving without a license.

Deputy District Attorney Clinton Parish has apparently been on leave since his failed bid to win a judgeship seat from Dan Maguire this past June.  According to several sources, Mr. Parish has not returned to work since the June election.

The story of realignment figures to be a complex story.  From the start we believed that, without changes to both charging and sentencing policies, sustainable declines in prison population may be impossible to achieve.  The data that is now emerging may bear that out.

In a report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, written by Senior Research Fellow Mike Males in mid-August, the latest data analysis shows “that during the first 9 months of realignment there has been a 39% overall reduction in new prison admissions as of June 30, 2012, and a drop of 26,480 in the prison population as of August 8, 2012, compared to October 1, 2011.”

I had my first and only conversation with Chief Deputy DA Jonathan Raven in January of 2010.  We had just launched Yolo Judicial Watch and I was interested in having some sort of dialogue with the District Attorney’s office.  It was a strange and meandering conversation.

The upshot is this – the Vanguard covers public agencies all over Yolo County, but the only agency and agency head that will not speak with us are the Yolo County’s District Attorney’s office and DA Jeff Reisig.

UC Davis student Thomas Matzat, who is also one of 12 protesters facing bank blocking charges, and here facing five felony counts along with another 15 misdemeanors, opted to take a plea agreement on Wednesday to a single charge stemming from an alleged incident at Starbucks on Orchard Road in Davis.

He is alleged to have spray painted the word parasite.  By pleading no contest to that charge, the Assistant Supervising District Attorney Michael Cabral agreed to dismiss the remaining charges against Mr. Matzat.

By George Gascón

California’s “three strikes” sentencing law enacted in 1994 had the best of intentions – to keep serious and violent repeat offenders off our streets. Eighteen years later, we’ve learned valuable lessons about policing and keeping crime down, but we’ve also witnessed the unintended consequences of that law.

Since the law’s enactment, more than 8,500 prisoners have been sentenced to life in prison for solely nonviolent crimes – as minor as shoplifting or simple drug possession.

The key witness described the scene that took place at the Woodland Arco AM/PM as one in which she could tell something was about to go down.  She saw a number of youths running around and acting rambunctious.  However, she was late into a day of driving her daughter to college and wanted to get her gas and move on.

After exiting the gas station, the witness suddenly saw five youths attacking a four-door Honda Accord and the inhabitants inside to the point where the vehicle was rocking.

Two weeks ago Jose Valenzuela was released from custody, pleading to a single count of attempted murder and taking a strike, but getting time served.  His release comes more than 20 months after being acquitted of attempted murder of a man on May 18, 2008 and nearly being acquitted of the second man – one only person held out as the jury hung 11-1 for acquittal.

But that did not stop Mr. Valenzuela  from waiting in the Yolo County jail, serving more than four years in custody despite the fact that the majority of jurors believed him innocent of the crimes for which he was charged.  In addition to the attempted murder charge, he was acquitted of assault for the first victim and the jury hung 7-5 for acquittal of assault for the second victim.

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.