Court Watch

Twenty six yeras later, on March 29^th, 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Connick v. Thompson that a district attorney’s office was not liable for its prosecutor’s failure to turn over evidence, which proved the innocence of a Louisiana man.

One of the biggest barriers to timely court coverage is the unavailability of court files to members of the public or journalists, while hearings are in progress. 

This has proved to be a big hindrance to timely reporting.  What it means is that if one of our Court Watchers in the Yolo County courts sees a case of interest, we have to wait three or four days for the file to be moved from the courtroom where the case was heard back to the clerk’s office where we can peruse the files.

Judge Janet Gaard finally showed up Friday to explain her ruling in the Arreola matter and instead she only added to the confusion, as neither the DA or public defender’s office are pleased with her ruling or the seeming inconsistencies along the way.

Judge Gaard is now ordering that the DA’s office turn over a cell phone whose data is sought by Deputy Public Defender Dean Johansson to the defense, but said that it can be viewed only at the DA’s office.  This angered Mr. Johansson, who believed that the previous order was to turn over the phone so that an expert could examine it in his lab.

The facts are staggering, as laid out in a recent brief in Yolo County’s death penalty case.  California has over 700 people on death row and yet, since the death penalty was reestablished in California in 1977, only 13 offenders have been executed.

Recently, the Marco Topete case has been delayed another four months at least, due to the illness of one of the defense attorneys and his subsequent replacement.  The typical death penalty case costs over a million to prosecute, and this one will be over three years old when it starts – if it does – in August.

Judge Stephen Mock granted Michael Artz probation on Friday. However, he imposed very strict probation requirements and imposed a 270-day county jail sentence for after Mr. Artz completes his college finals. 

It has been, as Judge Stephen Mock reminded the court yesterday afternoon, been eight and one half months since Michael Artz was convicted of the two lesser counts in his case stemming from oral copulation with a 16-year-old female student, a year behind him at Davis High, and from his ill-advised attempts to reconnect with her nine months later.

Davis City Councilmember Sue Greenwald finds herself in the middle of an unusual debate, in the sense that the Yolo County Courthouse on the surface does not directly involve her elected position with the City of Davis.

Nevertheless, in Thursday’s Davis Enterprise, the councilmember argued, “My concern is not merely with the $173 million cost of the replacement courthouse. It is with the entire $5 billion cost of the statewide courthouse construction bonds, which are currently under the radar screen.”

On Thursday, the ACLU of California sent an open letter  to Governor Jerry Brown, Senate President Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John Perez, asking that two key reforms targeting waste in prison spending are included in the May revised budget.

They claim that these two reforms alone would save the state hundreds of millions annually: making possession of a small amount of drugs for personal use a misdemeanor instead of a felony and making low-level non-violent property offenses – like vandalism or writing a bad check – a misdemeanor instead of a felony.

A man is arrested for the rape of his daughter over a nine-year period of time.  He is taken into an interrogation room at six p.m., he is told he can freely leave but then not allowed to exit, he may or may not know that he should contact an attorney, and somewhere around nine hours later he confessions to something short of raping his daughter, but nevertheless incriminating enough to be arrested and convicted.

The question before us is whether this was a legitimate confession and whether we should be doing more than we have already to prevent false confessions, which lead to long imprisonment for innocent individuals.

A Woodland man faced petty theft, with a series of prior convictions which enhanced the charge to a felony, for stealing a candy bar from JC Penneys in the Woodland Mall. 

The defendant, Ovan Taylor, apparently suffers from schizophrenia and has a long history of mental illness.  Following a preliminary hearing, Judge Paul Richardson reduced the charge to a misdemeanor in the interest of justice, over the protests of Deputy DA Jennifer Davis.

Like many so-called gang crimes, a central question is always whether a gang crime, and thus gang enhancement charges, are a “specific intent” charge as defense attorneys would argue, or whether they are more general, as prosecutors would argue. The former interpretation insists that gang enhancement charges require a specific intent to promote or benefit a criminal street gang, while the latter views such charges as simply applying to gang members committing crimes that may indirectly also benefit their criminal street gang.

In this case, four individuals, Det Kalah, Dom Kalah, Anthony Kalah and Saengphet Onsri face a series of drug charges, that the DA argues is a conspiracy to the benefit of the Asian Gangster Crips, along with enhancements for possession of a gun.

The case, in which Mr. Arreola is charged by the District Attorney with rape after his former girlfriend accused him of raping her, had already been through a preliminary hearing and subsequent hearings by that time.  However, this hearing was to be unlike any of the others.

In January of 2010, the Vanguard created its Vanguard Court Watch.  The idea behind YJW was to monitor and report on what was occurring in the Yolo County courts.

During the last 17 months since we founded the court watch program, interns have monitored numerous hearings and court trials, we have reported on dozens of cases, and the program has been remarkably successful.  Last week, we had 8 interns cover every single of one of Yolo County’s felony courts.

The Sacramento Bee reported earlier this week that Governor Brown is allowing that “convicted killers leave prison on parole at a far higher rate than previous governors, only rarely using his power to block decisions of the parole board.”

According to the paper’s research, Governor Brown has allowed 106 of 130 convicted killers’ parole releases to stand, which is about 82 percent.  Compare that to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who let stand only 27 percent of parole decisions, and Governor Gray Davis who only allowed 9 of 374 (about 2.5%) paroled killers to be released from prison while he was governor.

Governor Jerry Brown, in a quick stroke of the pen, has undone one of the more perplexing moves that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made, which was to take 65 million out of the state’s general fund to construct a new wing with 1152 beds for San Quentin’s death row – at a time when the state was not executing new condemned prisoners and at a time when there are only 700 inmates on death row awaiting death sentences.

And it was worse than that, $64.7 million was to be merely a down payment.  The full cost of construction would have been about $360 million from the general fund. The Bee last summer reported, “Interest payments on 20-year bonds the state ordinarily would sell to finance the construction could add another $150 million or more to the final price tag.”

Nicholas Benson pled no contest to all remaining charges against him, stemming from the January 21, 2011, incident that captured regional headlines after he was arrested for making threats to harm himself and others,  and carrying an assault rifle with over 100 rounds of ammunition in his vehicle.

Following his preliminary hearing, Mr. Benson only faced a single felony charge for possession of an assault weapon.

Yet another delay in the trial of Marco Topete will push the start of the trial to more than three years after he allegedly shot and killed Yolo County Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Diaz.

The trial of Mr. Topete has been pushed back to August 1, 2011, and Judge Richardson will attempt to preserve as many of the jurors as possible who were death-qualified during a five week proces.

Claudean Medlock on Wednesday pled guilty to four felony counts, for embezzling over 40,000 from the Yolo County Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).  She was sentenced by Judge Timothy Fall to three years and eight months in prison.

Ms. Medlock faced up to 18 felony counts and 12 years in prison for her actions as the executive director of CASA.  She also faced 22 felony counts in Placer County for similar crimes, but those charges will be dropped in light of the plea agreement in Yolo.

Two weeks ago Davis Enterprise columnist Rich Rifkin challenged the new Yolo County courthouse project.  This week, Judge David Rosenberg has taken it upon himself to respond to Mr. Rifkin’s column.

In his over 1200-word response, the Judge wrote, “His column is so full of misstatements and misconceptions that I felt compelled to respond.”

There was not much additional information available now, a week after the delay in the nearly three-year-old Topete case, where Marco Topete is accused of shooting Yolo County Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Diaz as he fled pursuit.

Last week, the trial was delayed on the eve of the final round of jury selection, as co-defense counsel Thomas Purtell suffered a stroke.

A Yolo County jury on Monday convicted 26-year-old Hoang Nguyen of six felony counts, the most serious of which was the assault with attempt to rape during the commission of a burglary – a charge that carries with it a life term.

Mr. Nguyen became infatuated with the victim after he broke up with the victim’s older sister.  He would purchase a stun gun, then attempt to incapacitate her and to rape her.  However, when the stun gun failed to incapacitate her, he stunned her repeatedly before she eventually escaped and was able to call for help.