Court Watch

When Clinton Parish, a Deputy DA in the Yolo County District Attorney’s office, announced just over a year ago that he intended to challenge Judge Dan Maguire for his judicial position, he did so with the full backing of his boss, District Attorney Jeff Reisig.

However, when he mailed attack brochures to county residents that proved to have unverified accusations against the judge, many of Mr. Parish’s backers, including Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto and DA Reisig, quickly withdrew their support.

In the immediate aftermath of the loss of Proposition 34, the ballot measure that would have ended California’s death penalty and replaced it with life without parole, its ballot sponsors took solace in the relative closeness of the election.

“The mere fact that the state is evenly divided is nothing short of extraordinary. In 1978, 71% of the electorate supported the Briggs Death Penalty Initiative and now, after hearing the facts, voters are almost evenly split,” said Jeanne Woodford, the official proponent of the SAFE California Campaign and former Warden at San Quentin State Prison where she oversaw four executions.

Proposition 34 Still Polling Under 50% But Support Surges – Last week an LA Times poll showed that Proposition 34, which would convert the death penalty in the state of California to life without parole, had pulled within the statistical margin of victory – demonstrating huge gains in a week.

Now the Field Poll, widely regarded as the most accurate of state polls, shows the unthinkable – that Proposition 34 has a lead outside of the margin of error.

Same Poll Finds Three Strikes Reform Passing Overwhelmingly – Last week, the LA Times-USC Poll found that support by voters to repeal the death penalty has increased dramatically, which puts the measure in range, though not enough at this point to actually ensure its passage, as support still falls below the critical 50 percent threshold.

The gap is just three points – 42 percent in favor of its passage (which would end the death penalty) and 45 percent against, with a critical 12 percent undecided.

The first ever academic investigation into the scope and cost of wrongful convictions revealed on Wednesday that California leads the nation in wrongful convictions.

The project, California Wrongful Convictions Project, launched by the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Berkeley Law), and Hollway Advisory Services, a criminal justice research firm, announced that their research found that at least 200 wrongful convictions have been thrown out since 1989 in California, costing those convicted more than 1,300 years of freedom and taxpayers $129 million.

ANALYSIS – Throughout the trial that seemed to stretch on far longer than the 13 calendar days it encompassed, the hope was that, win or lose, this trial would provide closure to the grieving family of Luis Gutierrez who was gunned down by plain-clothed sheriff’s deputies on April 30, 2009.

The odds from the start seemed stacked against the plaintiffs. After all, they had only three witnesses who actually saw what happened that day and none of them saw everything.  How were they going to prove this case, even at the lower civil trial level of preponderance of the evidence?

ANALYSIS – As the Federal Civil Rights Suit trial wrapped up last week, the Sacramento Bee‘s Denny Walsh does an exceptional piece in which he argues “jurors must ask: What about the knife?“

As Mr. Walsh writes, “The jury’s verdict likely will swing on whether the plaintiffs’ lawyers have sown enough doubt in jurors’ minds that Gutierrez did not have the knife when the shooting occurred.”

Did Chief Probation Officer Rist Resign Due to This Scandal? – In response to a citizen’s complaint, the Yolo County Grand Jury investigated the Yolo County Probation Department.

One of the critical questions regarding the propriety of the shooting of Luis Gutierrez on April 30, 2009 by three Yolo County Sheriff’s Deputies is the propriety of the consensual stop and encounter.  One of the persistent questions we have had is whether Mr. Gutierrez – a non-native English speaker, reasonably knew that he was running from police officers.

To answer some of these questions, the plaintiffs brought in expert Stephen L. D’Arcy, currently a Criminal Justice Department faculty member at Sacramento State and a retired undersheriff of Placer County as recently as 2007.

Juan Meléndez-Colón Speaks of Faith and Redemption and the Corrupt Justice System He Fought Against for 17 Years – It was hard to imagine that on May 2, 1984 when Juan Melendez was first arrested, not only was he wrongly accused of murder and eventually sentenced to be executed by the state of Florida, but he could neither speak or read English, other than a few swear words.

It took him 17 years, 8 months, and one day to be, not only exonerated, but to find his voice.  Despite his heavy accent, Mr. Meléndez gave a powerful and spellbinding speech for an hour on Sunday afternoon, depicting how he survived and many others, through execution or suicide or neglect, did not.