Court Watch

On Sunday, April 28, 2013 from 5:00 to 7:00 PM in Woodland at the Celebration Center Church (100 Woodland Ave), the Vanguard Court Watch Council of Yolo County (VCWCYC) is inviting the public to come forward to express their concerns about the judicial system, providing testimony and giving personal accounts of contemporary cases in the Yolo County Court system.

“The public has an opportunity to tell of their experiences in the Yolo County judicial system.  Experiences that normally are not covered in the newspaper,” said David Greenwald, Executive Director of Vanguard Court Watch.  “The Council will take public comment, testimony from invited speakers, and then deliberate in closed session to determine our course of action.”

On Monday the Yolo County District Attorney’s office unveiled an innovative new pilot project, modeled after a program that San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon implemented two years ago.

Jeff Reisig unveiled a program, in partnership with the Davis Police Department and the UC Davis Police Department, called the Neighborhood Court, a new adult criminal offender diversion program based on restorative justice.  This innovative program will be offered in the city of Davis and on the UC Davis campus, starting in May of 2013.

Back in the summer of 2010, lasting for six excruciating months – on again and off again – the gang injunction trial was an underwhelming experience.  Trotting out biased police officers who were stunningly allowed to testify, not just to what they witnessed, but also to what they were told, the District Attorney’s office managed to produce dozens of cases over the course of a decade in hopes of proving the existence of a nuisance represented by the Broderick Boys Criminal Street Gang, and thus laying the justification for a gang injunction.

In the end, we were left with the abiding belief that, while there may be areas where gang injunctions are necessary as a tool to reduce gang violence, the case was not made that West Sacramento was such an area.

In March of 2011, Judge Kathleen White, following a nearly six-month trial that went from July 12, 2010 to December 15, 2010 on alternate weeks, issued her ruling in favor of upholding the gang injunction in West Sacramento.  Three months later, she issued a final “Judgment Granting Injunction After Trial” against the Broderick Boys criminal street gang in West Sacramento.

The gang injunction issued by the court imposed a curfew and restricted other activities of gang members in a defined area within West Sacramento called the “Safety Zone.”

By Vanguard Court Watch Interns

Today in Judge Fall’s courtroom, Marlon Raye was brought from jail in a wheelchair for a probable cause hearing. He was arrested in West Sacramento on February 19 while riding a bicycle. He was charged with Resisting/Delaying Arrest and Possession of Methamphetamine.

Officer Wright, of the West Sacramento Police Department, testified that he observed the bicycle leaving the Pickwick Motel shortly after midnight. The officer was patrolling on foot. He called for assistance. No mention was made of why Officer Wright believed there was a reason to pursue Mr. Raye, nor why he was not in a patrol car. Foot patrol is not a common method used in West Sacramento.

Judge David Rosenberg has been working on this new courthouse for a decade now, and he deserves tremendous credit for the fortitude and skill to get it to the point where on Friday they actually broke ground on the new building.

“We truly love our historic courthouse … but it was built five generations ago for another time and another era,” he said, as quoted in other news accounts.  “We have outgrown that historic courthouse in every conceivable way.”

Earlier this week, we reported on a study from ProPublica that, in analyzing state and federal court rulings from 2001 to 2011, in particular “scrutinizing instances in which state or federal courts identified misconduct serious enough to throw out a conviction,” found that of 30 cases that met their very specific criteria, only one prosecutor would be disciplined in a meaningful way for misconduct.

Those findings mirrored earlier findings from the 2010 report from the Veritas Initiative, “Preventable Error,” funded by the Northern California Innocence Project, which documented more than 800 instances of prosecutorial misconduct, including 107 where the prosecutors were found to have committed misconduct more than once – two were cited for misconduct four times, two were cited five times and one prosecutor was cited for misconduct six times.

Last year when Clinton Parish was running for a Yolo County judgeship against Judge Dan Maguire, he made a critical mistake that, in the heat of the moment, is easy to make – he thought his political team had properly vetted an attack ad that they were recommending he launch against sitting Judge Maguire.

He was wrong, they had not, and the allegations turned out to be embarrassingly false.  The mistake cost him his dignity, his election, and ultimately his job.  He had to move his family from the place they had lived for over ten years.

I was not always sold on the innocence of Ajay Dev.  It was the summer of 2009 when I received an email from Mr. Dev’s sister-in-law about the case.  Mr. Dev had just been convicted, and he had not yet been sentenced to the stunning 378-year sentence.

Little did I realize that this would be a pivotal moment in my life, as I headed out to the Roseville home of the Devs and heard their story.  I didn’t know what to think, I had not seen the case, had not heard the evidence, and I was in a position of having to take their word for it.

In February, the State Bar of California filed disciplinary charges against a Yolo County attorney for allegedly failing to comply with ethical rules while seeking judicial office. Clinton Parish, 41, is accused  by the California Bar of making misrepresentations about himself and his opponent in the May 2012 election for Yolo County Superior Court.

According to the complaint, in May of 2012, Mr. Parish was seeking judicial office against incumbent Judge Dan Maguire when, through campaign advertising, he made a number of misrepresentations regarding his opponent.