Court Watch

Stop me if you have heard this one before – a high profile case in which the defendant is facing dozens of felony charges and a potential life sentence, but, following a plea agreement, likely will not serve any time in prison.

The case of 37-year-old Troy Hensley, a former JV football coach at Dixon High, is one of those.  Mr. Hensley was arrested in June and held to answer in August on charges that he carried out a lengthy sexual relationship with a then 17-year-old student for four months while she was underage.

California leads the nation in wrongful convictions, according to a 2012 study, but it trails many states, particularly New Jersey, in safeguards and best practices aimed at reducing critical areas where wrongful convictions are likely to occur.  Assemblymember Tom Ammiano has been attempting to change that with his support of the Innocence Project Bill.

The law would authorize “law enforcement agencies to adopt regulations for conducting in person and photo line-ups; allows expert testimony at trial regarding the reliability of eyewitness identification; and requires the court to provide a jury instruction advising that it may consider whether or not law enforcement followed specified procedures when determining the reliability of eyewitness identification.”

Each year, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi and his office host the Justice Summit in San Francisco, bringing together a combination of local leaders and national figures whose work in the legal community and for social justice gets highlighted through speeches and panel presentations.

This year marked the 50-year Anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, which guarantees the poor and disenfranchised the right to a vigorous public defense.  On March 18, 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that all defendants have the constitutional right to a free attorney if they cannot afford their own. Fifty years later, 80 percent of criminal defendants are served by public defenders.

This past week, students in the UC Davis School of Law Immigration Law Clinic, working under the supervision of Lecturer and Staff Attorney Raha Jorjani, were successful in preventing the deportation of a detained client.

Working on behalf of their client, they succeeded in filing a Motion to Terminate removal proceedings that cited recent U.S. Supreme Court opinions in arguing that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not met its burden of proof in establishing that the client’s criminal convictions were deportable under the Immigration and National Security Act.

We often hear that a conviction was thrown out based on a technicality.  In this case, the technicality is not just Miranda, but the actual right to an attorney.  This is not a technicality, this is a constitutional right.

Last week, the LA Times covered a federal appeals court’s unanimous overturning of a first degree murder conviction in which the man was sentenced to life without parole for killing his estranged wife and an off-duty Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy.

This year the Vanguard is honoring eight individuals in this community and around the region who have put forth exemplary work in the area of social justice and justice reform.  Two of these individuals are honored posthumously.

It was a great honor that Steve Berlin worked as a member of the Vanguard Court Watch Editorial Board in 2011 until health conditions forced his resignation.  It was nearly a year ago that Mr. Berlin passed away at the age of 66.  On Saturday, we will present his wife, Linda Berlin, and his son, Eddie Berlin, with the honor.

It has been just over one year since a Sacramento federal jury acquitted three sheriff’s deputies of the 2009 shooting of Luis Gutierrez, a 26-year-old farm worker who was walking on Gum Avenue in Woodland in the middle of the day, after completing his efforts to get his driver’s license reestablished.

On October 21, 2013, Dale Johnson, who was the commanding officer during that incident, was promoted from lieutenant to captain.

I will confess that I am a relative later comer to the notion of restorative justice.  It was not until late 2011 and early 2012 that I was exposed to the idea when a group of citizens – Robb Davis, David Breaux, and Reverend Kirstin Stoneking – came to the Davis Human Relations Commission with the idea of promoting a restorative justice process, some sort of victim-offender mediation between the university and the students who had been pepper sprayed.

Ultimately, the proposal was unsuccessful.  The university was unwilling to engage in any sort of process with an ongoing lawsuit, and by the time the lawsuit was settled it seemed too late.  In retrospect, the process would have proven valuable and there are still deep wounds in the community that have come out as John Pike was awarded a worker’s compensation settlement.

Last summer, when Davis Police found a noose hanging from the goalpost of the Davis High School Stadium, many in the community looked to Dr. Jann Murray-Garcia, a pediatrician by training who has become, for the better part of the decade, one of the consciences of Davis.

“Though we don’t know the motivation of whomever put the noose there, we are responding as one voice against the centuries of pain and terror that this symbol represents and still produces today in so many of our neighbors,” Dr. Murray-Garcia would write in her biweekly column in the Davis Enterprise that she co-writes with Jonathan London.

When Sandy Holman created the Culture Co-op in 1991, it was an organization whose mission it was “to promote understanding and respect for diversity and equity, cultural competency, literacy and a quality education for all.”

“After working in working in various jobs, I noticed that there was a lot of challenges to being effective in serving whatever the target population was,” Sandy Holman told the Vanguard.  She said this was due to the fact that there “was inequity in those institutions, there was a fear in those institutions, and there was a general disrespect for differences that almost followed a color-skin line.”

A month ago Clayton Garzon copped to a plea in the case that arose out of his actions back in March when he severely beat Mikey Partida while yelling anti-gay epithets.  Mr. Garzon pled to battery causing serious bodily injury, and the hate crime enhancement.  He received what many believed to be a light sentence of five years local time, meaning he would be released in 2.5 years assuming good behavior – with no further supervision.

At the time, not only were we worried about the lack of equal justice in that sentencing, but also the lack of mandatory services that Mr. Garzon would be required to receive.

By Dan Williams

Thursday brought the closing arguments in a gun case that puts the justification of a gun-carrying law in Yolo County to the test.

If you’re not familiar with the case, here’s a rundown of what happened.