Court Watch

It has been a year since a Yolo County Jury Convicted Ajay Dev of multiple counts of rape of his adopted daughter.  He would in August be sentenced to 378 years in prison.  The family continues to maintain his innocence, and  to bring up  evidence that the multiple incidents of rape did not occur.  Many people continue to offer general support to the family.

In a letter to family, friends, and well wishers, Ajay Dev said, “This June 25, 2010 marks one year since the worst miscarriage of justice that has occurred against me and my family. It has been tremendously difficult as the wounds of betrayal, injustice and the loss of my freedom are still very fresh.”

Last week a nutrition specialist at UC Davis received a settlement from the university after she claimed she was subjected to retaliation for blowing the whistle on fraud perpetrated by a subordinate.

Amy Block Joy filed her complaint in September 2007 and a subsequent investigation by the university verified many of her allegations.  These included activities of another employee over a 6 year period.  The employee pled guilty in 2008 to theft in 2008, admitting to spending federal funds on hundreds of items.  Remarkably, the employee was only sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay government restitution of $128,681.80.

The Vanguard has learned that Former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, his wife Elaine and his grandson were in a serious car accident near Charlottesville, VA on Sunday.

Mr. Reynoso sustained a number of broken bones, ribs and a collapsed lung and will be healing for some time.

On Wednesday the Vanguard ran the story, “Media Bias in Local Court Coverage” which described how the District Attorney’s Office effectively gets to write their own stories.  To illustrate the point, we ran the DA’s Press Release side-by-side with the Woodland Daily Democrat’s article covering the same story.

The article went on to point out several inaccuracies or omissions that the Daily Democrat reprinted without fact-checking.  From our standpoint this is a problem as the public receives a very slanted view of what actually transpired and there is no effective media check against the DA’s PR campaign.

One of the main complaints about the charging of cases by the District Attorney’s Office in Yolo County is that the DA overuses the gang enhancement charge.  There are times when we believe non-gang members or questionably gang members are given extended sentences or charges by the DA’s office.  But there is another interesting set of cases, where the individuals are actually gang members, they commit a crime, but the crime should not be enhanced with a gang enhancement.

In March of 2009, the victim was walking to the store when he ran across a friend along with Angel Sanchez.  The victim did not know Mr. Sanchez prior to this date but was introduced by their mutual friend.  Together they walked back to Mr. Sanchez’s apartment and decided to start drinking alcohol.  In total there were individuals inside the apartment drinking.

While many in the nation including members of our community and adjacent jurisdictions have protested and boycotted Arizona’s immigration law that gives law enforcement the legal ability to racially profile in an effort to identify potential undocumented workers and residents, a lawsuit in the neighboring county of Sonoma is moving forward alleging much of the same activity.

Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco allowed a lawsuit to move forward that charges the unlawful collaboration between the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department and the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to unlawfully target, arrest, and detain Latinos in Sonoma County.

As a non-traditional media entity the Vanguard and sites like it, is often criticized for presenting a biased perspective and slanting its news coverage.  The Vanguard believes its role is to cover news stories in greater detail, and present alternative and opposing perspectives from the mainstream newspaper.

However, we also take issue with the notion that news covered by traditional media outlets, such as newspapers necessarily represent fair, unbiased, and accurate assessments of what has actually happened.  While we believe that individual reporters endeavor for journalistic standards of fairness and balance, the decisions made by editors introduce bias in terms of what gets covered and what does not get covered.  But just as important, newspapers given their lack of staffing and resources will often rely on third-party press releases and news accounts from government agencies to be printed, almost verbatim.

On June 4, 2010, Yolo County Superior Court Judge Tim Fall sentenced 22 year old Anthony Vasquez to 38 years and 8 months to life in state prison after a Yolo County jury convicted him of robbery and attempting to dissuade a witness. 

According to a release from the DA, the jury found Vasquez guilty of robbery with intentional use and discharge of a firearm causing great bodily injury, assault with a firearm causing great bodily injury and attempting to dissuade a witness. The jury also found that the crimes were committed for the benefit of a criminal street gang.

In the fall of 2008, Judge David Rosenberg and Judge Janet Gaard wrote an op-ed that appeared in both the Woodland Daily Democrat and the Davis Enterprise.  In it, they were arguing against Proposition 5, which was the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act, which was supposed to reduce the costs by pushing nonviolent drug offenders away from prison.

In that op-ed that focused mainly on the particulars of the proposition, they argued, “We believe in drug courts and the real possibility that drug courts can help people escape addictions and turn their lives around.”

We have not given coverage to the Attorney General race that is coming down to its final days for the Democratic Primary, where six democrats are vying for the nomination.  One of them is San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris.  Ms. Harris found herself in a controversy on Wednesday when San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi accused her of refusing to “turn over to defense lawyers the names of police officers with arrest records or misconduct histories whose trial testimony has helped to convict defendants,” according to a Thursday story in the San Fracisco Chronicle.

Kamala Harris is arguing that her office must first review the names and only after going to court for permission would her office alert defense attorneys to the officers’ problems.

The vast majority of criminal defendants in Yolo County are represented through either the public defender’s office or by conflict counsel, also appointed by the court.  Our research suggests a vast disparity in the resources available to the public defense of the accused in Yolo County following trends for the state overall. 

Does that mean that defends are not being well-represented?  Tracie Olson, the County’s Public Defender, says no, but at the same time the resource gap between the District Attorney’s Office and public defense is perhaps too large to ignore.

Para cualquiera razón, decidí comentar en un artículo en el Woodland Journal que hizo una reclamación sobre la Coalición de la Justicia del Condado de Yolo. El artículo mismo no se interesa mucho, pero uno de los moderadores del sitio, Dino Gay, hizo algunas afirmaciones que llamó hechos.

“Navarro fue Sureño. Fue drogado. Tuvo un cuchillo. Sacó el cuchillo ante un agente de la policía. Otra vez, todos hechos.”

For some reason I decided to weigh in on a post on the Woodland Journal that made a claim about the Yolo County Justice Coalition.  The post itself was not really that interesting, but one of the moderators over there, Dino Gay, then made assertions about the Gutierrez case that he called facts.

“Navarro was a Sureño. He was high. He had a knife. He pulled the knife on an officer. Again, all facts.”

A trial begins today for Loren Poirier, 42, accused in separate cases of vandalism.  Mr. Poirier has a history of serious mental illness, diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder, and there are serious questions both about his competency to stand trial as well as his state of mind at the time in which the crimes were committed.

Nevertheless, the Yolo County DA’s office, apparently overruling the judgment of Deputy District Attorney James Walker, who was assigned to this case, is pursuing this as a three strikes case and seeking to put Mr. Poirier in prison for life.

On Monday we learned that Raley’s has agreed to pay a settlement of $550,000 to resolve a case brought by the District Attorney’s offices in six counties including Yolo County, for illegal practices in handling workers’ compensation claims brought forward by injured workers.

The settlement was announced on Monday by the district attorneys from Yolo, Sacramento, Placer, San Joaquin, Amador, and Monterey counties.  Yolo County DA’s office will receive $100,000 as part of the settlement.

Mark Merin, local defense attorney, will ask “Should Freedom Have a Curfew?” as he reviews the current West Sacramento ‘gang injunction’ at the annual meeting the Yolo Chapter of the Northern California ACLU on May 27, 6:30-9pm at the Davis United Methodist Church fellowship hall, 1620 Anderson Road in Davis. The meeting is free. All county ACLU members are invited, and the public is welcome.

After a potluck meal and election of new Yolo board members for 2010-11, special guest Abdi Soltani, Executive Director of NorCalACLU will provide a brief update of current ACLU activities, followed by Merin’s presentation.

This time the tears flowed freely down the face of Santos Gutierrez and who could blame him.  It has to have been an horrific year since he’s lost his son, Luis Gutierrez Navarro, so far with only suspicions, thoughts of cover up and whitewash and few explanations aside from the usual cover-your-backside report from the DA’s office.

A year ago there were two hundred people that showed up to march in solidarity, this time if it was a quarter of that, they were lucky.  But this is a process that cannot be marked by numbers alone, it has to be marked by passion, compassion, and a bit of fortitude.

On April 15, the Vanguard ran a story that UC Davis is using anti-SLAPP legislation as a means to undermine civil rights protections for employees.  One of the cases we were tracking to illustrate the problem is the case of former UC Davis Police Officer Calvin Chang, who alleges he was the victim of discrimination based on both his race and sexual orientation.

The Vanguard has learned in that in a tentative ruling, the judge has awarded UC Davis 20,756.25 dollars for attorney fees and 407.39 dollars in costs for a total of 21,163.64 dollars.  We argued two weeks ago that this represented an abuse of anti-SLAPP legislation and the extension of SLAPP to include civil rights cases that it was never intended to cover.

People have come up to me quite frequently in the last few months asking why no one has challenged District Attorney Jeff Reisig.  That’s a complicated question that in part shows his strength in the office despite criticism from small segments of the population.  But in part, is the larger part of a much bigger puzzle.

According to the Yolo County Elections office the 2006 battle between Deputy District Attorney’s Jeff Reisig and Pat Lenzi was the first of its kind in Yolo County since 1990.  Dave Henderson was elected five times to office, was unopposed in 1994, 1998, and 2002, and drew opponents in his first two elections in 1986 and 1990.  In other words, only one of the last five DA elections has been contested.

In the last week we had a third Independent Civil Rights Commission meeting and also the announcement by the Sheriff’s Department that the officers had been cleared in an incident where the deputy had allegedly pointed a gun to the head of a nine-year-old girl.  While we may never know for sure, the case of Christal Ochoa probably came down to the word of the family against the word of the deputies. 

Meanwhile, we had more witnesses testify last weekend, depicting the Gutierrez shooting.  One of the witnesses apparently saw the badge of a Sheriff’s Deputy, but never saw a knife in Mr. Gutierrez’s hand.  The investigator believes there is another witness, who thus far has refused to come forward out of some sort of professed fear, that he believes actually saw the shooting.