Yolo County

by Richard Van Zandt

When Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig’s hand-picked judicial candidate, Clinton aka ‘Clint’ Parish, sent out a toxic mailer to Yolo County residents a few weeks before the June primary, it took less than a day for Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto to withdraw his endorsement of Parish.  The mailer was a blatantly dishonest series of charges against Judge Dan Maguire, whom Parish was challenging.

In contrast to Sheriff Prieto, Mr. Reisig waited until the Bee issued an “anti-endorsement” before withdrawing his own.  Reisig was at the top of Parish’s endorsement list, and was one of Parish’s first and biggest financial supporters.

Saw a reference to an article by Karen Boudrie Greig, “Last Call From Death Row,” in the August issue of New Orleans Magazine.  In it she recounts the trial of Carlos DeLuna, who would be executed in 1989 for a crime that he did not commit.

Our keynote speaker from last week’s event was Maurice Possley, and his work with the Chicago Tribune was critical toward exposing that wrongful execution.

by Dick Price –

Sunday, on the final day of its three-day executive board meeting held in Anaheim, the California Democratic Party overwhelmingly endorsed Prop 34 — the November ballot initiative that would commute all the state’s death sentences to life imprisonment without possibility of parole (LWOP).

Saturday night, though, a lively five-person panel session organized by the party’s Progressive Caucus paired Prop 34 proponents with prisoner rights advocates to debate whether the Prop 34 remedy might be worse than the ailment.

The Vanguard has learned that Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig lifted huge portions of his op-ed last week from an op-ed entitled “Justice for crime victims demands death penalty,” written by Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully with Phyllis Loya, the mother of a Pittsburg police officer whose son was murdered.

While the piece written last week by Mr. Reisig is twice the length, at least six paragraphs are directly lifted and another six are slightly altered from the piece written by Jan Scully.

By Gary Wells, Professor of Psychology, Iowa State University

One of the more interesting debates that is emerging is over the issue of stop and frisk as a crime control policy.  The policy began in New York by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Depite the controversy and complaints from rights groups and minorities, the mayor continues to support it, arguing as he did in June, “that it had helped make New York the safest big city in the country, while acknowledging that the police needed to treat those whom they stopped with greater respect.”

You will have to forgive us for focusing a bit on the death penalty this week. After all, this evening five of the leading spokespeople on the issue will be coming to Woodland for a Vanguard event.

In any event, Yolo County DA Jeff Reisig gave us a month’s worth of material.  Mr. Reisig was making the argument that the system works, after all, as he writes, “Each of them received due process through the many checks and balances of the criminal justice system and were justly convicted and sentenced to death.”

By Tracie Olson

I am writing as the Public Defender of Yolo County.  Contrary to District Attorney Jeff Reisig’s recent opinion piece, there are numerous, overwhelming reasons to oppose the death penalty, and none involve dishonoring victims.

INNOCENT PEOPLE HAVE BEEN SENTENCED TO DEATH AND EXECUTED.

District Attorney Jeff Reisig laments the “endless delays in the criminal justice system, frivolous appeals, and a mountain of misinformation” caused by the “ACLU and its agents.”  However, he conveniently ignores the fact that the National Registry of Exonerations has recorded over 920 exonerations across the United States since 1989, more than 100 of which had been sentenced to death.

Franky Carrillo spent two decades in prison after he was convicted of a drive-by shooting in 1992 and sentenced in 1992 to one life term and 30 years to life in prison.  Critical to his conviction was the testimony of five eyewitnesses who said that they saw him pull the trigger.

Had we known then what we know now about the fallibility of eyewitness identification, particularly under poor lighting conditions, this travesty of justice may have been avoided.

Last week, the Davis Enterprise kindly ran a story about the Vanguard‘s Death Penalty Event on their front page.  That apparently was enough to prompt former Judge Jim Stevens to object.

He wrote in a letter to the editor, “Your recent article on the meeting of death penalty opponents was interesting but full of humbug. I respect the right of others to work for and express their opinion but reserve my right to tell them they are full of garbage.”

by Andrea Lyon

Monday, July 23 2012, Warren Hill is scheduled to be executed in Georgia. He was convicted of killing another inmate while serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This is despite the fact that Warren Hill is mentally retarded. Georgia was one of the first states to ban the execution of the mentally retarded; but there is a catch. The defendant bears the burden of proving he is mentally retarded beyond a reasonable doubt. This is the only state that requires the defense to bear this burden. Only the Board of Pardons and Parole can stop his execution now.

While a judge has found that Mr. Hill is mentally retarded, with an IQ of only 70, he didn’t find that fact beyond a reasonable doubt but rather by a preponderance of the evidence, which is the ordinary standard in civil matters, more likely than not. And it is on this technical basis that he will be executed. The Georgia Supreme Court voted four to three to reinstate Hill’s death sentence, and at the end of last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled seven to four to uphold that death sentence even though the majority seemed to think it “unwise.”

Pitchess Motion Revealing of Charges and Defense in Bank Blocking Case –

Defense for the 11 students and one professor charged with numerous misdemeanors for their alleged role in blocking the US Bank in UC Davis’ Memorial Union in January and February this year filed a Pitchess motion on Friday.

At a brief hearing they scheduled Judge David Reed to hear motions on August 24, 2012.

In two weeks, at the Vanguard’s Dinner and Awards Ceremony, the work of the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) will be honored with a Vanguard Award.  On hand to personally receive that award with be NCIP Executive Director Cookie Ridolfi and Legal Director Linda Starr.

The immediate benefit of the work NCIP and other branches of the Innocence Project across the nation is to exonerate those who have been wrongfully imprisoned like Franky Carrillo, who spent 20 years in custody before his 2011 release.  Mr. Carrillo will be one of the featured speakers at this year’s event and will present the Vanguard Award to the organization and individuals who helped to exonerate him.

Flawed Work by FBI Led to At Least One Wrongful Execution Paper Reports

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the Justice Department and FBI “have launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence”

They report this is the largest undertaking of post-conviction review ever done by the FBI.