Court Watch

As we noted yesterday, it is difficult to imagine a more baffling ruling than the one the Supreme Court issued earlier this week in which the majority led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a 5-4 decision, somehow concluded “that the search procedures at the county jails struck a reasonable balance between inmate privacy and the needs of the institutions, and thus the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments do not require adoption of the framework and rules petitioner proposes.”

The ruling allows officials to strip-search individuals who are arrested for any offense, no matter how minor, even when there is no reasonable belief that the individual has weapons or drugs.

Court Greatly Expands Rights of Accused in Cases that Involve Plea Bargains –

It is difficult to figure the direction of the US Supreme Court, particularly in light of a controversial ruling this week that allows those arrested even for very minor crimes to be strip searched.  However, one area where the Supreme Court actually expanded the rights of the accused was during a recent ruling on the right to effective counsel during plea bargain negotiations.

Justice Anthony Kennedy has become the power in the middle, deciding which side the court swings on critical issues with an ideological divide.  More often he joins the more conservative wing.

A Yolo County jury has acquitted Randall Hill of failing to register as a sex offender.  According to Deputy District Attorney Chris Bulkeley, Randall Hill was residing in Woodland at his girlfriend’s residence.

He had been convicted of a felony for a sexual offense that requires him to register as a sex offender under Penal Code section 290.  However, he failed to register with the Woodland Police Department.

We have been critical of the university’s policies in responding to the bank blockers all along, and that now escalates with the decision by the Yolo County District Attorney to file charges against twelve of the protesters at the behest of UC Davis.

We spoke with Kristin Koster, one of the bank blockers who was not arrested.  She told us that, most likely, the purpose of this decision was to protect the university from a potential lawsuit from US Bank.

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…”