Court Watch

It has taken two years and untold amounts of money, but the lawsuit filed by former UC Davis Police Officer Calvin Chang is going forward with the key provisions intact.

In 2009, former UC Davis Police Officer Calvin Chang filed a lawsuit against the UC Regents and UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza, alleging complaints of racial and sexual orientation discrimination, housing discrimination, and retaliation.

Last week, we reported on the death of Evaristo Ramirez, an immigrant who had been arrested for a DUI and held in the Sacramento County Jail.  He became the victim of Richard Harden, who somehow ended up in the same jail cell as Mr. Ramirez despite evidence that his hammer attack on a Latina female was motivated by hatred towards immigrants.

According to court testimony, when the Home Deport store security subdued Mr. Harden by taking him to the ground, the perpetrator indicated that race was the motivation behind his attack on the Latina female whom he had attacked with a hammer.

We have noted in recent weeks the seemingly larger than usual number of cases that have been overturned from Yolo County.  During the course of our reporting of these cases the question has arisen – “out of how many.”

The “out of how many” standard is a difficult number to assess for reversals, just as it is for problematic cases, prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions.  After all, one person in prison unnecessarily is too many.

Last Friday, we sat in Judge Stephen Mock’s court as he began calendaring long cause trials – those trials that will last into a second court week – for this year.  We were stunned to find out that, as of the first week of February, Judge Mock’s calendar was completely backed up until September.

Yolo County officials have for several years now bragged about an improved efficiency that has allowed the number of cases to the be handled to more than double with 55 trials occurring in 2005 and 121 in 2008.  The number of trials remained high, with 121 again in 2009 and a slight drop to 112 in 2010.

It took seven years to come to trial, a month to try the case, but the jury was ready late Tuesday afternoon with their verdict after just over two days of deliberation.

As the verdicts were read, one by one, defendant by defendant, a wave of relief swept over the Niazi brothers and Qumar Ashraf for the first time in seven years.

The California Report today has published a follow-up to last week’s bombshell that was accompanied by NPR and Frontline coverage, which showed the questionable history of Dr. Thomas Gill, who worked with the Forensic Medical Group, a private company commissioned by the Yolo County’s coroner’s office to do autopsies.

According to the report, the Coroner’s Office will review the work in five homicide cases handled by the doctor.

Aaron Ray Wilson this week was ordered free by Judge Arvid Johnson, following a late December ruling by the Third District Court of Appeals which threw out his convictions for carrying a concealed dirk or dagger which constituted a third strike and had him in prison for 28 years to life.

Mr. Wilson appealed the verdict that would have sent him to prison for a minimum of 28 years “contending, among other things, that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress a knife (the alleged dirk or dagger) seized from his back pocket during a pat down search initiated after a police officer was dispatched to a public park to investigate “five subjects [possibly] smoking H and S [sic] in the men’s restroom.”

On Friday, the trial of four Yolo County residents charged with assault and accused of being, at the very least, sympathizers of the Taliban, wrapped up and went to the jury.  A Yolo County jury will have to sort through the four-week long trial and determine whether the three men accused of assault started the fight and were not provoked.

When the trial began, several weeks ago, there were four defendants, facing attempted murder charges among numerous counts of assault.  Now, the attempted murder charge long gone, the defendants down to three, and numerous charges dismissed due to lack of evidence, the picture is clearer but still murky.

Back in 2009, according to the Sacramento Bee’s report, Richard Harden “chased the woman down at the Home Depot on Folsom Boulevard  and bashed her three times with a hammer, sending her to the hospital with injuries to her back, neck and shoulder.”

According to court testimony, when the store security subdued him by taking him to the ground, the perpetrator indicated that race was the motivation behind his attack on the Latina female whom he had attacked with a hammer.

Judge Timothy Fall on Friday agreed to reduce the bail for UC Davis student Nicholas Benson, from one million dollars to 100,000 dollars, in order to enable the family to seek mental health support for Mr. Benson while his case is pending trial.

Mr. Benson, 25, was arrested on January 21 after his family called the police, fearing he was suicidal.  The incident, according to police sources, escalated from there and Mr. Benson was Tasered and finally taken into custody, but not before he allegedly made terrorists threats to police while carrying an assault rifle, shotgun and more than 300 rounds of ammunition in his truck.

I don’t use this space very often to praise the actions of public officials.  There are a number of reasons for that that we won’t get into, but part of it is the watchdog function that we perform necessarily leads us in directions critical of the actions of those in local government.

We have been critical in the past and will be in the future of Sheriff Ed Prieto, but the Sheriff deserves praise for his handling of the coroner’s office and the firing of forensic pathologist Thomas Gill who worked for the Forensic Medical Group (FMG), a private company the county contracts with for doing autopsies.

While the Judicial Watch covers mainly Yolo County, our goals extend more regionally, and certainly a matter of grave concern are the actions that occurred last weekend in Elk Grove.

What we know for sure is that last Sunday, an Elk Grove police officer shot a handcuffed man in the back seat of his police vehicle.  Initially, the Elk Grove Police Department had provided no explanation as to why the officer fired his rifle at the suspect, which ended up grazing the 32-year-old man in the face.

We spend a lot of time talking about the district attorneys on these pages, but just as important are the judges.  Most of the time, the judges are sitting back and making their legal rulings.  However, these rulings profoundly shape the cases and the evidence admitted.

Most of the time judges are restrained, but occasionally you see in them glimpses of their true spirit.  It was thus as the first of the closing statements were wrapping up in the never-ending Niazi trial that we got just such a glimpse into Judge Stephen Mock.

Yesterday the Vanguard learned of a California Watch/ Frontline investigation that discovered that a man who had performed potentially hundreds of autopsies for Yolo County had his qualifications to perform autopsies called into question by an investigative report.

The Vanguard spoke on Wednesday with Yolo County’s Chief Deputy Coroner Robert LaBrash, who downplayed any concerns that there were problems with Yolo County autopsies, arguing that any autopsy performed by Dr. Thomas Gill would have been overseen by his office and had his findings signed off upon.

A report issued on Monday from a project called California Watch, from the Center for Investigative Reporting calls into question some autopsies that may have been performed for Yolo County by forensic pathologist Dr. Thomas Gill, whose qualifications have been called into question by the project’s investigative report.

According to their report, Dr. Thomas Gill had “been forced out of a teaching position at an Oregon university, and then fired for inaccurate findings and alcohol abuse by the coroner in Indianapolis.”  Moreover, he had been “demoted for poor performance as a fellow for the Los Angeles County Coroner, [and] he resurfaced at a private autopsy company in Northern California.”

Friday marked the third time in two weeks that the Third District Court of Appeal (3rd DCA) has overturned the ruling of a Yolo County judge.  This time it was in a civil matter brought forward by Arthur Silen, a contract analyst, who sued the university after being passed over for a promotion that went to a much younger, much less educated and vastly less experienced candidate.

Yolo County Superior Court had granted the UC Regents’ summary judgment motion, finding that Mr. Silen had not established that the promotional decision was motivated by discriminatory animus.

A Yolo County jury has acquitted Heather Duffy of charges that she attempted to kidnap a toddler from outside his family’s home in Woodland last spring in an effort to replace two children who had been removed from her custody.

Ms. Duffy, who admitted she was high on meth, had been facing charges of kidnapping, child abduction and resisting arrest.

Can we imagine what might have happened had someone not pulled out their video camera that they had just purchased to film the beating of Rodney King back in 1991?  It’s not difficult to imagine, Mr. King’s claims of police brutality would have fallen on deaf ears and the officers involved never would have been held accountable, such as they were.

We have all wondered what would have happened had the incident involving the Galvan Brothers been filmed.  We can see the permanent life-altering damage on Ernesto Galvan’s face, but we do not know how it got there and probably never will.  In the coming months and years, a civil court will have to weigh out whether the police exceeded their authority and violated the rights of Mr. Galvan.  Had a video camera been present, we might have had the DA pursue the police rather than the victims in this case.

A key question that we must grapple with in society is when has someone paid their dues.  In a fairly balanced account of the proceedings, Lauren Keene, reporter for the Davis Enterprise, describes the interesting case of Bruce Young who has been in prison since a conviction for a crime he committed on August 9, 1982.

She calls it “one of Yolo County’s more horrific crimes” and describes the kidnapping of then 3-month-old Brandon Huff who was “dangled out of a van window as the suspects led police on a high-speed chase.”

For the second time in ten days, the Third District Court of Appeals threw out a conviction in Yolo County, this time due to juror misconduct as a juror performed a home experiment on a crucial piece of evidence.

A Yolo County jury convicted 17-year-old Kyle Vigil for his role in a drive-by shooting in Woodland.  Mr. Vigil was sentence to a 15 year to life sentence in prison, after being acquitted of the first shooting but convicted of aiding in the drive-by gunfire.