Court Watch

The Vanguard covered the two-week trial of Angel Palacios, Carlos Hernandez and German Martinez, each of them 20 years old, each of them found guilty of possessing a Tec-9 type assault pistol in their car.  They were also found to be Norteño gang members from Woodland and to have been engaging in criminal street activity.

According to the DA’s version of events, witnesses testified at trial that on August 17, 2010, two groups of gang members were in the area of Harris Park near Midtown Elementary in Woodland. Just as school security arrived, a rival gang member challenged defendant Hernandez, who appeared to have an object in his hand.

I often hear it asserted that the US has the best system of justice in the world.  Often we arrive at this conclusion based either on our own prejudices and biases, but also in comparison to non-democratic nations around the world.

Having watched our system of justice in action for the last two and a half years, I have no such illusions.  I think the adversarial system does us far more disservice, in the interest of justice, than service.  The job of the prosecutors as representatives of the “people” ought to be dispensing justice rather than winning cases.

Last week, a Yolo County jury convicted 22-year-old Charles Quillin of first degree murder for the death of Mathew Smith on August 27, 2011.

According to a press release from the Yolo County District Attorney’s office, on August 26, 2011, Charles Quillin, Mathew Smith, Mr. Smith’s girlfriend, and two other friends went to Mr. Quillin’s trailer in West Sacramento to drink and hang out. Sometime after midnight, Mr. Quillin wanted one of the girls to leave his trailer after she vomited all over his living room.

As many as 100 students and faculty members turned out on Monday afternoon to show solidarity with 12 protesters facing as many as 21 misdemeanor charges, up to 11 years in prison, and restitution fines up to one million dollars for their activities relating to the blocking of a US bank building from January into early March.

On Friday, 12 of them will be arraigned in Yolo County Superior Court.  On Monday they rallied, asking the chancellor and the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office to drop the charges.  Students and others were signing the letters during the course of the event.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen today certified a fifth measure for the November 6, 2012, General Election ballot. The measure would repeal the death penalty, according to a news release from the California Secretary of State’s Office.

In order to qualify for the ballot, the death penalty repeal initiative needed 504,760 valid petition signatures, which is equal to five percent of the total votes cast for governor in the November 2010 gubernatorial election.

Tomas Matzat received good news and bad news on Friday.  The good news is that, in part thanks to the vigilance of his friends and fellow occupiers, he and his attorney met with those in charge of the College of Letters and Science, and it was determined that he would be able to be reinstated as a student so long as he follows some unspecified terms and conditions.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Matzat was scheduled to be arraigned in front of Commissioner Janene Beronio.  However, his attorney requested that the arraignment be delayed until May 11, where he will be arraigned by Judge Timothy Fall in Yolo County Superior County.

UC Davis student Tomas Matzat will be arraigned this afternoon on felony vandalism charges, the Vanguard finally confirmed late Thursday.  The arraignment had been something of a mystery, as Mr. Matzat apparently received the date upon his release from custody, but the hearing was not on the public calendar or in the court’s computer system.

Repeated emails to Assistant Chief Deputy DA Michael Cabral were unreturned, despite the request for public information.  The hearing was finally confirmed by the Yolo County Public Defender’s Office.

As we noted yesterday, it is difficult to imagine a more baffling ruling than the one the Supreme Court issued earlier this week in which the majority led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a 5-4 decision, somehow concluded “that the search procedures at the county jails struck a reasonable balance between inmate privacy and the needs of the institutions, and thus the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments do not require adoption of the framework and rules petitioner proposes.”

The ruling allows officials to strip-search individuals who are arrested for any offense, no matter how minor, even when there is no reasonable belief that the individual has weapons or drugs.

Court Greatly Expands Rights of Accused in Cases that Involve Plea Bargains –

It is difficult to figure the direction of the US Supreme Court, particularly in light of a controversial ruling this week that allows those arrested even for very minor crimes to be strip searched.  However, one area where the Supreme Court actually expanded the rights of the accused was during a recent ruling on the right to effective counsel during plea bargain negotiations.

Justice Anthony Kennedy has become the power in the middle, deciding which side the court swings on critical issues with an ideological divide.  More often he joins the more conservative wing.

A Yolo County jury has acquitted Randall Hill of failing to register as a sex offender.  According to Deputy District Attorney Chris Bulkeley, Randall Hill was residing in Woodland at his girlfriend’s residence.

He had been convicted of a felony for a sexual offense that requires him to register as a sex offender under Penal Code section 290.  However, he failed to register with the Woodland Police Department.

We have been critical of the university’s policies in responding to the bank blockers all along, and that now escalates with the decision by the Yolo County District Attorney to file charges against twelve of the protesters at the behest of UC Davis.

We spoke with Kristin Koster, one of the bank blockers who was not arrested.  She told us that, most likely, the purpose of this decision was to protect the university from a potential lawsuit from US Bank.

Public Defender Suggests Office Would Disqualify Judge Parish from Presiding Over Criminal Case Defended by Her Office

Deputy District Attorney Clinton Parish is running against sitting Yolo Superior Court Judge Daniel Maguire in a contested election that will be held this June.  Mr. Parish has focused much of his campaign on what he calls his strong record of criminal law experience, which, given AB 109 (California’s realignment law) and recent retirements on the bench, is in short supply.

In a recent debate presented by the Yolo County Bar Association, Mr. Parish argued, “There is a void there.”

Local Critics Believe Yolo County Could Do Better in Allocating Funding and Changing Current Incarceration Strategies –

Back in January, the Yolo County Board of Supervisors approved a plan that would apply for a 148-bed jail expansion as part of a plan to increase capacity in the face of AB 109.

Supervisor Don Saylor was the lone dissenter of this plan.  He argued that the current needs assessment ended its projection in 2007.  The 2007 needs assessment projected continued growth in the jail population.  But what we have learned with actual data since then is that the Average Daily Population (ADP) has not increased since 2008 but dropped from 428 to 384.

On March 2, 2012, Edward Lee Elmore was released from prison in South Carolina for a crime he had not committed.  But in order to do so, he had to agree to what is known as an Alford Plea – a plea arrangement in which he maintained his innocence but agreed the state could re-convict him of murder in a new trial.

However, after serving on death row for nearly 30 years, after being convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for the sexual assault and murder of an elderly woman in Greenwood, South Carolina, it was time to get out of prison even if it meant no exoneration.

On March 9, 2012, a Yolo County Jury of eight women and four men acquitted Christopher Spatola of a single misdemeanor count of a violation of Penal Code section 148, obstructing or delaying a peace officer in carrying out the legal performance of duties.

In the early morning hours of February 11, 2011, there was some sort of disturbance at KetMoRee in Davis, which serves as a restaurant until 10 pm and then a bar and club.

The case of four West Sacramento teenagers and one adult who allegedly attacked, robbed and assaulted a passerby in the late night hours back in January, 2011, turned when the defense’s expert, Dr. Geoffrey Loftus, testified about the impact of human memory on eyewitness identification.

Prior to the work of the Innocence Project, eyewitness accounts were considered critical pieces of evidence for convictions.  But we now know that eyewitness misidentification is among the leading causes of wrongful convictions across the nation.