Mendocino County Today: May 23, 2012

PIXIE REPORT. A.Z. writes from Miranda: “Hi, well I knew she would make it to Garberville someday,...she was in front of Shopsmart supermarket bumming money,with a big white dog,and a friend.Their truck is broke down on 101 just north of Garberville with a broken fan belt..She looks gruff,and could use a shave!! Poor girl.”

JUST IN FROM CARMEL ANGELO: "Mendocino County is pleased to announce that it has been awarded $140,772.33 from the Indian Gaming Special Distribution Fund, which was funded by contributions made by the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians. The Indian Gaming Special Distribution Fund was established for the receipt and deposit of gaming license fees received from tribes pursuant to the terms of tribal-state compacts. Local government agencies (county, cities, special districts) impacted by tribal casinos may make application, with tribal sponsorship from the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians, to the Mendocino County Indian Gaming Local Community Benefit Committee (CBC) for grant funding from Individual Tribal Casino Accounts. To distribute funding, a county must create an Indian Gaming Local Community Benefit Committee (CBC). Mendocino County’s CBC, consisting of Hopland Band of Pomo Indians Representatives Shawn Padi and Pamela Espinoza; Mendocino County Representatives Supervisors John McCowen and Dan Hamburg; Willits City Council members Ron Orenstein and Larry Stranske; and Point Arena City Council member Trevor Sanders met on May 17, 2012, to evaluate grant funding requests and forward a list of approved projects to the State Controller’s Office for payment. This years grant recipients include the Hopland Fire District, Hopland Public Utilities District, Little Lake and Long Valley Fire Districts, the Mendocino County District Attorney Victim Witness and the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. Mendocino County would like to express a sincere “Thank You!” to the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians.

UKIAH'S REDWOOD ACADEMY has been cited by Newsweek and the Daily Beast as among the nation’s top 1000 High Schools. The list is based on graduation rate, college matriculation, average SAT/ACT scores, and so on. Redwood Academy is a charter school established in 2000 with a current enrollment of 140 students from 7th through 12th grade. The class days are more than 7 hours long, and the school, popular among Ukiah's professional classes, enforces a dress code.

A LOGGER was killed early Monday morning at the Navarro end of the Masonite Road. No details of the accident have been released, but we have learned he was employed by Shuster Logging, he 50 years old, was of Mexican descent, and lived in Fort Bragg. The man, an experienced faller, was hit by a “widowmaker,” a falling limb.

THE ANDERSON VALLEY Artists’ Guild welcomes the public to the 10^th Annual AV Open Studio Tour this Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28, Saturday through Monday, from 11 a.m. to 5pm. A map that guides visitors from studio to studio is available at: http://www.andersonvalley-artguild.org/ Included are five pottery studios on the tour. Wax and Bing Pottery, a two-person studio, has been part of the valley for more than 30 years. Jan Wax throws on the potter’s wheel and husband, sculptor Chris Bing, produces original sculptures in porcelain inspired by nature. The grandeur of the redwood trees on their land provides a major source of this inspiration, and the couple welcomes visitors to the green, park-like surroundings of their studio. Other Anderson Valley potters on the tour include Alexis Moyer, creator of both functional and sculptural ceramics; Doug Johnson, who specializes in crystalline and wood-fired pottery; Alan Porter, who makes one of a kind, hand-pinched ceramics with hand-brushed glazes; and Peggy Dart, whose multiple talents embrace sculpture, pottery, and printmaking.

SLOW NEWS FLASH from Elk — the town above it all, as our correspondent the precious little village on the edge of the Pacific. "Elk now has a red light. The bridge over Greenwood Creek, over which Highway One runs north and south, was falling apart. The state wanted to build a new bridge right next to it on its east side. It would have taken about a year to complete, and north and south traffic would have flowed normally until the switch over and eventual demolition of the existing bridge. It was a sensible plan until the Elk downtown association of nice people, got wind of it led by old nicely normal Norman deVall and Charlie — nice as ice — Acker. The objection: the new bridge was planned to be constructed over the existing Elk water well down in Greenwood Creek; thus the well would have to be moved a few yards further east. They tossed in a few enviro-reasons too, but the well was the real issue. The complaints went in; the project was delayed, but finally after a year and a half delay the new bridge will be constructed and nice people of Elk will have won another triumph in the onward march of Western Civilization. The old bridge will be sliced down the middle and removed and a new half bridge will be constructed in its place while one way traffic ensures. Then the process will be reversed. One way traffic will use the new half bridge while the older and remaining half of the old bridge is torn down and reconstructed. Of course, the entire project will now take two years to complete at twice the money and the flow of traffic north and south on highway one will also be subject to one-way traffic for the next two years. Nice.”

A CALLER ASKED, "What do you think of Pinot Weekend?" I said I think of it like the advice in the Victorian-era's guide for brides: "I lie back and think of Anderson Valley as it was until it's over." Boonville was teeming with florid-faced boozers, augmented by the usual shoals of mildly disoriented seniors slurping ice cream cones as they shuffled around in Bermuda shorts, their spindly exposed limbs the gleaming white ivory of fresh corpse.

WINNEMEM WINTU Tribe to Hold War Dance May 24-27 to Convince U.S. Forest Service to Protect Coming of Age Ceremony from Disruptions and Heckling For Immediate Release: May 21, 2012 For more information: Caleen Sisk, Spiritual Leader and Tribal Chief: 530-710-4817 Michael Preston: 510-926-1513 Jeanne France: ‎530-472-1050 Winnemem Wintu Tribe needs 4-day closure of 400-yard section of McCloud River to Perform Girls’ Traditional Coming of Age Ceremony Redding, CA – The Winnemem Wintu Tribe will hold a four-day War Dance (H’up Chonas in Winnemem) May 24-27 at the McCloud River site where they hold their Coming of Age ceremonies. The War Dance signifies the tribe’s spiritual commitment to defend at all costs the ceremony from heckling, flashing and violating disruptions by recreational boaters that have occurred in previous years. “We have been backed into a corner with no other choice. We should be preparing for Marisa’s ceremony, setting down prayers, making regalia, getting the dance grounds ready, making sure it happens in a good way,” said Caleen Sisk, spiritual leader and chief. “But instead we have to fight simply to protect our young women from drunken harassment.” More than 400 volunteers from throughout the country, native and non-native, are expected to converge upon the sacred sites to help the tribe close the river and protect the War Dance from interference by boaters. The ceremony will begin Thursday with the light of the sacred fire and an opening dance. On Friday and Saturday, the Tribe and volunteers will blockade a 400-yard stretch of the river. These will be the best days for media to attend. “We hope the blockade will let the Forest Service know that boats don’t belong in ceremony and that we will do it ourselves if they won’t take the appropriate measures to protect our young women’s ceremonies,” said Sisk. The tribe has contacted the U.S. Forest Service to arrange a discussion with officials to let them know what to expect and to ensure that everyone will be safe and have their rights respected. The tribe will have lawyers, legal observers, videographers, and the media present at all times during the War Dance and other activities. The Tribe hopes the War Dance will convince the U.S. Forest Service to implement a mandatory river closure for 16-year-old Marisa Sisk’s Coming of Age ceremony, a traditional rite that is vital to the tribe’s social fabric. The ceremony lasts four days, and takes place at the McCloud Bridge campground, which is within the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The site was once a Winnemem village, Kaibai, and is home to numerous sacred sites vital to the ceremony. At the tribe’s ceremonies in 2006 and 2010, the Forest Service enforced only a voluntary river closure, which led to drunken recreational boaters heckling the young Winnemem women and other tribal members with shouts of “It’s our river too, dude!” or “Fat Indians.” One woman flashed her naked breasts at the Tribe, and another boater dumped cremated ashes into the river shortly before a ceremonial swim. For six years, the tribe has unsuccessfully worked with Shasta-Trinity Forest officials to secure a mandatory closure of the 400 yards river necessary for the ceremony. It is not a thoroughfare. Access for the general public dead-ends at the north end of the site, which is private property. On April 16, the Winnemem Wintu held a direct action event at the Vallejo office of Regional Forester Randy Moore, asking him to take action and close the river using his professional discretion. The tribe gave Moore a May 1 deadline to respond to their request, but he has never contacted the tribe. U.S. Forest Service officials say that laws that would allow for a mandatory river closure for American Indian ceremonies – the 2008 Farm Bill and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act – do not apply to the Winnemem because they are not federally recognized. The Winnemem were federally recognized up until the 1980s when they lost recognition due to Bureau of Indian Affairs clerical error. Today, they are state recognized. The California Native American Heritage Commission has asserted that the Winnemem Wintu should be federally recognized. The California State Assembly also passed Assembly Join Resolution 39, which urges Congress to restore the Winnemem’s federal recognition. The Winnemem Wintu are a traditional tribe of 125 who still practices their ceremonies and traditional healings within our ancestral territory from Mt. Shasta down the McCloud River watershed. When the Shasta Dam was constructed during World War II, it flooded their home and blocked the salmon runs. It also flooded all the other Puberty Rocks that could be used for Coming of Age ceremonies. For directions to the War Dance, a cultural guide for the ceremony and more info, visit http://www.saveourceremony.com/wardance. Learn more about the Winnemem Wintu at http://www.winnememwintu.us/ Learn more about the ceremony at http://www.saveourceremony.com. Download Video of motorboats speeding past ceremony and flashing the participants at: http://vimeo.com/39867112 Footage of April 16, 2012 protest at Forest Service Region 5 Headquarters in Vallejo: http://youtu.be/oglCy–o7oY

RESPONSE TO RUDY TAYLOR by Pebbles Trippet

To Rudy Taylor,

Your letter (“A Deal's A Deal,” AVA, 5/16/12) said some things I need to correct, lest someone think they might be true.

After bragging — “I have been a long time advocate of legalization of cannabis” — you lapsed into wishful thinking: “People like you are the old time warriors who deserve the credit for taking the issue this far. But your time has come and gone. It will be people like me in suits and ties who take us the rest of the way.”

No, that is confused thinking. It's because of people like you, lawyers in suits and ties, that we are in this mess today. Lawyers hold the power to make good laws and to challenge bad laws but have done neither with any success over decades of prohibition. The war on marijuana is the most protracted war on US soil — federal prohibition began in 1937 — and lawyers have done virtually nothing to help us climb out of this hole.

That is because there is a conflict of interest in your profession. Marijuana laws keep lawyers employed, so it is not in your interest to overturn them. It has been left to people like me — defendants with no legal training other than what we learn in the trenches — to step up to the plate and try our hand, because our lives are being destroyed by these laws.

Chris Diaz, age 22, is a good example of countless youth who innocently use marijuana, locked up for their use of a beneficial plant that has never been known to kill a single person. Millions of marijuana felons are marginalized. Jobs, student loans, scholarships and the like are off limits. Youth and people of color are hit the hardest, using profiling, stop and frisk and other questionable methods to find small amounts of pot to lock them up. 85% of all marijuana cases are for simple possession. Who are they harming to justify all the harm done to them?

Secondly, the vicious lies and tricks run on marijuana people to keep us chasing our tails are part of the game plan which works remarkably well to keep the laws in tact. You, dear public pretender, are complicit in this game as chief protagonist in the Chris Diaz case.

A public defender's job is to defend the defendant; instead you have expedited his misery and confusion, shamelessly intimidated him in his most weakened state after being locked up in solitary confinement for three weeks prior to trial, without a single visit or phone call to help him understand his situation as he faced 5-99 years in a Texas prison for 1/2 once of medicine, the perfect situation to pluck a plea from the uninitiated.

Chris was unaware, when you finally went to visit him in his concrete box on the eve of trial, that you, in fact, had cancelled his trial behind his back and had no other purpose than to mislead and coerce a felony plea for 3-years prison by touting it as a “bargain” to be grateful for. According to Chris, you looked over his shoulder and told him what to write as he signed the Plea Agreement. You told him to write in three years and he'd get out soon, so that's what he did. When he wanted to write, “without prejudice” next to his signature, you told him not to do that because it would “piss off the judge.” So he went along, because he was too scared and confused to do anything else.

You abandoned, intimidated, misled and coerced your client into doing something he “would not ordinarily have done,” but for your misleadership. Even Judge Ellis lost his mind for a moment and congratulated you on the record at the plea hearing for a job well done (for plucking the misled plea from a person locked in solitary).

The judge later apologized to the press since it expressed his bias in the case; judges are supposed to be strictly neutral.

Chris at age 22, a first time marijuana offender with no criminal record and no experience with injustice, didn't understand what was going on.

He begged for an explanation of why he had lost his daily mail and access to a phone to speak to his family and legal counsel.

He didn't understand if his witnesses — his California cannabis doctor and his mother — were ready to testify at trial about his medical necessity. Half of his life had been spent in and out of hospitals with collapsed lungs and other breathing problems to treat life-threatening asthma attacks that had plagued him since birth. Cannabis is a powerful bronchial dilator and worked wonders to control and stave off his life-threatening asthma attacks.

The trial witnesses were never contacted. The trial was cancelled. The race to the bottom was on. You and the DA knew the insidious plan, but the defendant, his doctor and his mother were not informed and had no idea what was up your sleeve.

Your betrayal didn't stop there. It continues in your 5/16/12 letter to me, which states, “After the evidence presented to me by the DA that Chris was selling grams of hash for '40 a g', all of the good will in the community that I had built disappeared (even though you and I know that he was going to sell a little medicine for gas money.)”

What??????? You and I know what?

First of all, please do not speak for me. “You and I know” this is a lie, designed to cover your discredited ass. When you raised this preposterous idea to Chris' mother, she absolutely denied it, saying, “Chris has never and will never sell his medicine.”

You insisted that DA Murray said it was so, making it clear you were taking your cues from the DA to get a conviction in the case. This is evidence you were not defending your client, but rather collaborating with the prosecution to nail your client.

Chris' mother insisted on seeing the text messages that allegedly showed Chris intending to sell hash for '40 a g'. They were never produced because there are none.

You are still slandering Chris, post-conviction, trying to put another nail in the conviction coffin, because the kid won't die.

The most recent development in the case is that Chris wrote another letter to Judge Ellis to reinstate his original motion to withdraw his plea as illegally coerced and misled, based on his PD's ineffective counsel.

After Chris' plea hearing on April 28, the Judge scheduled a May 10 hearing to consider Chris' motion to withdraw his coerced plea. But a few days before the scheduled hearing, Chris was shipped to prison from Brownwood jail without his legal papers going with him.

He then wrote the court to withdraw his withdrawal motion, because he was once again being deprived of his own case documents, his legal notes in preparation for the hearing, and all communication with family and legal counsel by phone.

The following is a 5/11/12 letter from prisoner Chris Diaz to his mother, summarizing his new letter and motions to Judge Ellis, explaining his previous change of heart:

“I withdrew my pro se motion only after being moved to TDCJ, further disrupting my communication with my family and legal counsel, as well as being scared I would again be left alone and defenseless with no one to help me in the courtroom, facing the same people who threatened, coerced and misled me before.

“I motion/move again to withdraw the plea agreement that was ill gotten and that I was illegally coerced into signing. The counter offer to DA Murray was not my counter offer. Rudy Taylor told me what to write word for word.

“Then he told me not to sign the agreement on March 29 2012 'without prejudice', like I sign every document and is my true signature, because he thought it would 'piss off the Judge' (you), which further scared me and was intimidating.

“Also I did not fully understand what it means to give up my right to appeal. Nor was I explained to what it meant to give up that right and I would not have given up that right if I had known.

“In my right mind, I would never have given up the right to challenge all the wrong doing done to me and my family by Brown County. I was misled and did not have full disclosure of the agreement and the consequences of signing the plea agreement.

“You all would be in dishonor to accept the plea agreement and the way it was produced. Are Murray and Taylor dishonorable? Are you Mr. Ellis?

“I motion/move to withdraw the plea agreement.

“I motion/move for a hearing on the coerced plea and ineffective assistance of counsel.

“I motion/move to represent myself at the hearing with the counsel of my choice present.

Thank you.

Without prejudice.— Christopher Diaz”

* * *

Chris Diaz is standing on principle, more power to him.

You, Rudy Taylor, were the key in this whole equation. The Texas laws are as extreme in their prohibition nature as the federal laws and you could have taken them on with a medical necessity defense, as well as a constitutional challenge in the trial court.

Instead you secretly cancelled the trial, informed neither the defendant, his family, nor his doctor, allowed Chris to be kept in solitary for weeks before trial without any communication from you, and at the last minute before trial, went to him and told him what to do if he wanted to get out soon.

As for the parole promises, they are like politicians' promises...empty. When they say you can parole out from this date, they should be saying you are eligible to parole out from this date, but that doesn't mean they'll allow you to.

Chris shouldn't have to do one day in jail for his medicine. Your smug satisfaction with the three year “deal” you coerced shows you are not challenging Texas' extreme marijuana laws; you are complicit.

You stated in your AVA letter to me, “It will be people like me in suits and ties who will take us the rest of the way.” If this is true, we are really in trouble. Chris Diaz with his innocent medical use of hash is not the world's problem; people like you are.

Pebbles Trippet, Elk

PS. CHRIS DIAZ WRITES BROWNWOOD TEXAS JUDGE TO REINSTATE PLEA WITHDRAWAL, 5/11/12

I am writing to you to request to withdraw my pro se motion. I now move/motion to withdraw the withdrawal motion and motion to reinstate the first illegal coerced plea hearing motion. I withdrew my pro se motion only after being moved to TDCJ, further disrupting my communication with my family and legal counsel, as well as being scared I would again be left alone and defenseless with no one to help me in the courtroom, facing the same people who threatened, coerced and misled me before.

I motion again to withdraw the plea agreement that was ill gotten and that I was illegally coerced into signing. The counter offer to DA Murray was not my counter offer. Rudy Taylor told me what to write word for word.

Then he told me not to sign the agreement on March 29 2012 “without prejudice,” like I sign every document and is my true signature because he thought it would “piss off the Judge” (you), which further scared me and was intimidating.

You all would be in dishonor to accept the plea agreement and the way it was produced. Are Murray and Taylor dishonorable? Are you Mr. Ellis?

Also I did not fully understand what tit means to give up my right to appeal. Nor was I explained to what it meant to give up that right and I would not have given up that right if I had known.

In my right mind, I would never have given up the right to challenge all the wrong doing done to me and my family by Brown County. I was misled and did not have full disclosure of the agreement and the consequences of signing the plea agreement.

I motion/move to withdraw the plea agreement. I motion/move for a hearing on the coerced plea and ineffective assistance of counsel. I motion/move to represent myself at the hearing with the counsel of my choice present.

Thank you. Without prejudice.

Christopher Diaz

PPS. Atty Paul Quinzi states on his website: “No one can be justly arrested for an unjust law.”