Court Watch

Opening statements begin today in the case of Oscar Barrientos, accused of burglarizing a West Sacramento home.  Mr. Barrientos had originally faced trial back in late March and early April, but the trial was cut abruptly short when Detective Tate from the West Sacramento Police Department had to rush to Florida for a family emergency.

One good thing about the Supreme Court’s ruling two weeks ago that California had to reduce its prison population is that, for once, we are getting a relatively honest debate on crime and incarceration.  Part of that is due to the relatively low crime rates, so the population is not automatically convulsing into knee-jerk reactions.

Dan Walters in his column this morning writes, “While liberal critics of the state’s criminal justice system hailed it as a long overdue wake-up call for reform, conservatives raised the specter of felonious hordes being released to prey upon the public.”

The Contra Costa Times has a very interesting story on a California Supreme Court case that will decide whether Contra Costa prosecutors (and by extension all DA’s) should be required to run criminal background checks on police officers so defense attorneys can prepare to challenge their credibility before they are called as witnesses in court.

The article, “Should DA run rap sheets on police witnesses?” is probably mistitled, as we are not talking about police witnesses here, but rather arresting and investigating officers.

Judge Timothy Fall sentence Pedro Ramirez to 13 years in prison for the beating of a Sikh Taxi Driver back in November 2010.  This followed an extended attempt to withdraw from his plea, based on ineffectual counsel.

At the hearing, Aman Kaur spoke on behalf of the family.  She proclaimed it was not a happy day but the family was satisfied that laws were followed and grateful to the efforts of law enforcement for the quick apprehension and resolution of this case.

The war on drugs has been a war on communities of color. The racial disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.

Yolo County Superior Court Judge Janet Gaard sentenced former UC Davis employee Jennifer Beeman to five years felony probation and 180 days County jail for embezzlement and falsifying of government records from the UC Davis Campus Violence Prevention Program.

Judge Gaard also ordered Beeman to pay $9,153.50 in restitution.

It started out as a late night call on the night of December 22-23, 2010, from nine-year-old Justin Parvin to his mother Yolanda “Star” Parvin, that his father was drunk and he wanted to be picked up and taken away from his father’s trailer.

Ms. Parvin would confront her drunken ex-husband, a confrontation ensued, Ms. Parvin called the police and a few days later she was stunned to be arrested on felony assault charges.

The afternoon panel in San Francisco’s Justice Summit was on the death penalty.  The panel began with a haunting clip from an Interview with an Executioner, which follows Don Cabana. He is a former warden at Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi  who would become an anti-death penalty activist, following his carrying out the execution of Edward Earl Johnson, whom he came to believe was innocent.

Don Cabana, in the documentary, said that it is not uncommon for death row inmates to maintain their innocence. However, he said by the time they get into the execution chamber and you know the execution is going to take place, “usually something happens and they may not come right out and say I did it.” Instead they would say things like “Warden, would you tell the victim’s family I’m sorry,” he continued, “something that says ‘I did this.’ “

On Sunday, former Attorney General and current Congressman Dan Lungren responded to a Sacramento Bee editorial.

Wrote Mr. Lungren, “Rather than confront facts, The Bee deals in fantasy. While admitting that the court’s decision could reduce the prison population  by 33,000 inmates, The Bee attempts to minimize the impact – all will be well: Just raise taxes again, build more prisons (“unlikely”), or ‘sensibly’ stop sending as many convicts to prison.”

It is appropriate that today we also run an article about a proposed 32% fee hike for UC students.  It is appropriate because every dollar we spend to incarcerate someone is a dollar we cannot spend on educating the future investment.

In a lot of ways, money spent on prisons – especially in their current form with the length of sentences and recidivism rate – is a sunken cost.  Every dollar we spend on education is an investment.

In 2010, a Yolo County jury convicted Steven Hector Martinez of Woodland, age 35, of one count of battery with serious bodily injury.  The incident had occurred on Picnic Day in April 2009 in a fight outside of Bistro 33.

Supposedly the defendant, a complete stranger to the victim, “sucker-punched” him in the face with his fist.  After an initial trial saw a 6-6 hung jury, the second trial saw Mr. Martinez convicted and sentenced to 31 years to life.

Judge Timothy Fall eventually accepted a misdemeanor plea by Anthony Brown for a DUI on a case that began on December 26, 2008 but for which the DA was attempting to upgrade to a felony even as Mr. Brown was serving time in the California Department of Corrections for another unrelated offense.

The case was filed almost two and a half years ago in January 2009.  Because the DA was taking so long to dispense with the matter, Mr. Brown filed the paperwork himself for the Penal Code 1381 demand for a trial.  It was completed by Mike Cabral of the DA’s office and the defendant was delivered back to Yolo County.

A few months ago a woman accused of drug dealing was acquitted of those charges, but still faced an immigration hold.  Her husband had tragically put out an assassination hit on her back in Mexico.  The sad part is, given the minor charges against her, the Sheriff’s office did not have to report the woman to immigration.

Some will argue that everyone who is here illegally ought to be deported, but considering the resources it takes to verify immigration status and transfer from custody to deportation proceedings, that is simply not practical.

A Yolo County jury last week acquitted Maria Olivares of possession of heroin for sale, possession of meth for sale, and offering to give away or transport less than 28 grams of marijuana.  The two primary charges contained enhancements due to their large quantities.

The incident began on November 4, 2009 when officers made an 11 pm traffic stop.  The car was pulled over for turning on the left turn blinker while stopped at a red light, when the law requires one to do so 100 feet or more before the intersection.

In a 5-4 Decision determined by swing voter Justice Anthony Kennedy, the US Supreme Court cited “serious constitutional violations” in California’s overcrowded prisons and ordered the state to ease overcrowding by releasing tens of thousands of prisoners, if no other solution can be arrived at.

“The violations have persisted for years,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “They remain uncorrected.”

One of the key complaints against gang injunctions is the notion that people can be deprived of “lawful commonplace activity” without the due process of law.

When Yolo County Judge Kathleen White allowed the permanent gang injunction to go forward in West Sacramento, one of the key provisions was that now people could be enjoined just by serving them and validating them as gang members.  As much as the West Sacramento Police Department had provisions in place to oversee such a process, and as much as they claimed they had no current plans to do so, the possibility that people could be deprived of liberty without the due process of law was in place.

In a move that surprised the judge and defense counsel, rather than turn over the phone to the defense, in the DA’s own office, Deputy District Attorney Sara Jacobsen dropped the charges in the Oscar Arreola case.

She indicated that they needed more analysis and thus more time to pursue the case.  So rather than put the matter on hold as Judge Gaard suggested, she dropped the charges.

An op-ed piece by the Innocence Project reminds us once again that the cost of a wrongful conviction is not merely that an innocent person is incarcerated for a crime not committed – a tremendous atrocity unto itself. But there is also the additional problem of the actual guilty party going free, free to possibly perpetrate a crime again.

The problem is pervasive as well.  They write of a 1993 murder of a woman by her sister’s boyfriend.  As they note, “Unfortunately, this tragedy might have been prevented — but for the wrongful conviction of an innocent man for a previous crime.”

SPECIAL TO THE VANGUARD

The office of District Attorney Steve Cooley has failed to disclose public documents on the costs of prosecuting capital cases, according to a lawsuit filed today by The American Civil Liberties Union of California (ACLU of California) on behalf of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHIRJ) at Harvard Law School. The lawsuit is for public records on expenses related to homicide cases, and discretionary spending generally, by the D.A. of California’s most populous – and murderous – county.

According to FBI statistics, there were about seven hundred murders and non-negligent homicides in Los Angeles County in 2009, accounting for approximately 35% of the homicides in California and nearly 5% of the homicides in the entire United States. The Los Angeles County D.A.’s office (LADA) handles the vast majority of prosecutions arising out of murders in Los Angeles County. But in response to a broad request for records showing how much the office spent on these cases, the D.A.’s office claimed that it had no such records.

Judge Paul Richardson lowered the bail of Ashot Manukyan to one hundred thousand dollars, following a hearing on Wednesday.  Mr. Manukyan, who owns the popular Cafe Mediterranee in Davis, faces three felony charges stemming from an arrest last week on a warrant.

The charges include penetration with a foreign object, assault with intent to commit penetration with a foreign object and false imprisonment in addition to a misdemeanor sexual battery charge.