Mr. Ferris Perviance, III, sixty-ish, wearing a dark suit and brown fedora, sat on a bench on School Street. Perviance Three had the resigned air of a man enduring an unearned insult. He was still enduring the insult when I sat down beside him.
Two County trucks were parked nearby as workmen moved Perviance’s desk and other office furnishings next door into a seedy little cubicle no bigger than a cell at the county slammer.
All the public defenders were being put to this downward office space indignity because as a little household economy, the county is moving the public defender lawyers out of the stately Feibush building on the corner of Church and School Streets, with its charming portico, sunny exposure to the south and west, lots of space and glass, and into the adjacent dark, dank storerooms.
Having put these lawyers in their place, so to speak, and the defense of the indigent not being anywhere on anybody's priority list anyway, the County went back into the corner building and remodeled the restrooms, lavishing $50,000 on them, a solid indication that some connected County someone is going to move in.
Nothing was done to improve the two squalid little toilets at the public defender lawyers’ new digs. The workmen didn’t even bother to sweep the place out.
As the dejected Perviance sat watching his work site move from heaven to hell, one workman walked past with a filing cabinet on a handtruck. The dust and grime hadn’t been wiped off the cabinet, a courtesy any professional furniture movers — even college students working summer jobs — would have done. Not these guys. They seemed to sneer at the old lawyer as they went by, banging the faded and flaking paintwork with the handtruck. Perviance looked the other way and muttered something about maybe going back into private practice.
Perviance is used to getting short shrift from the County. In the past three years he has been handed the most hopeless of the constant flow of hopeless cases that arrive at the Public Defender’s office. Right now, he has the two most unsavory clients in the county, if not the country.
Kenneth Wilkinson, the young Willits man accused of dragging his grandfather to death behind a pick-up and heaving grandpap over the side of a Willits back road? Perviance has that one. The grandson is scheduled to go to trial November 5th. If he doesn't go away for the rest of his life — he's 22 — Perviance will have pulled a whole hutch full of rabbits out of his fedora.
And Perviance is also representing Simon Thornton, who was supposed to be sentenced to prison on Friday, but one of the jurors in the case, Juror Number Nine, had sent Judge Ann Moorman a letter concerning Thornton’s use of a bat in the murder of Joe Litteral at Lake Mendocino. The evidence showed that Thornton had wielded the bat with such homicidal zeal that it had shattered Litteral’s arm as Litteral blocked the blow that would have knocked his brains out of the park.
Judge Moorman didn’t read the letter in court, but apparently the juror felt the attempted murder charge against Thornton was somewhat more compelling than guilt by association.
“So we’re not going to go forward with this today, are we?”
“No, no, your honor,” the lawyers agreed. It would wait until Thornton’s lawyer had time to consider the impact the letter would have on the sentence, which is expected to be 25 to life for both Marvin Johnson and Thornton, both convicted last month in a lethal episode featuring one group of homeless mopes attacking another group of homeless mopes.
Noah Shinn, however, was sentenced by Judge David Nelson to 20 years in prison right on schedule. Shinn, Fagin-like, had encouraged his son Christopher and two other young guys, Tyrone Bell and Timothy Burger, to do a home invasion on Shinn's Laytonville neighbor, Ms. Jill Cahill. But Ms. Cahill came up firing, and she shot young Burger dead with her .357. Shinn Jr. was not hit by Ms. Cahill's fusillade, but Shinn Sr. was charged with the murder because the boys had driven over from Sacramento at Shinn Sr.'s behest for what they apparently viewed as an easy money home invasion.
Shinn Jr. and young buddy Tyrone Bell, will be going down to San Quentin for a diagnostic visit — to see if prison staff feels they would benefit from an extended prison term. Lawyers call the Quentin diagnostic an entrance exam, and prison as a kind of college where courses in advanced criminality are taught.
Five to ten gets you a bachelor of arts degree in petty theft, small-time drug dealing and the basics of being a functioning all-round low-life. Anything approaching 15 years means a master’s degree in crime, and 20 to life gets you a PhD. For this reason, judges are reluctant to send very young offenders off to the State Pen; they’d rather see them go the Penn State, unlikely as that prospect is for anybody these days, much less criminals.
Gabriel Monday, 18, of Fort Bragg was such a case. He got caught up in the recent gang trouble on the Coast and was supposed to behave himself when he got out of jail. This meant no contact with his gang, the Fort Bragg South-Siders. The South-Siders, you may recall, is the gang the sweet-faced MariCruz Alvarez-Carrillo belonged to before she went off to prison a few weeks ago for taking a hatchet to anther young woman with a different gang affiliation, Fort Bragg’s self-styled “dominant female,” Alissa Colberg.
But Gabe Monday went directly to the Sanchez place when he got out of jail, an indication that he may still committed to mopery as a way of life. The Sanchez home is a kind of headquarters for the South-Siders, and the cops, making a routine search of the place, found young Gabe hiding under some clothes in a closet.
Judge Moorman didn’t see where she had any more leeway in Monday’s case. He'd violated the terms of his probation in a blatant, if not impudent, gesture when he went straight back to the people the court told him to stay away from.
“Your honor,” Alternate Public Defender Bert Schlosser said in defense of Monday, “he had nowhere else to go. The gang has been like a family to him. He found himself on the streets, no money, no way to eat, nowhere to sleep. Mr. Sanchez, although he is on parole and subject to these routine searches, has been like a father to Gabe Monday. Now, as for myself, and Ms. Littlefield, and Mr. Finch, and Ms. Cole-Wilson, all from my office, we all like Mr. Monday, and we all dread which one of us is going to be the one that sees him go down… Well, it happened on my watch and I just can’t sit still and watch this kid go down to San Quentin for something as laughable, really, as hiding in a closet.”
Deputy DA Ray Killion said there was nothing funny about the injuries suffered by the victim.
“What victim?” Schlosser demanded. “Your honor, the DA is talking about the underlying case, and that’s not what we’re here to argue today; that’s already been heard and resolved. We’re here today on this probation violation, a kid with no place to go hiding in a closet at the only house where he can get off the street and eat.”
“What about his family?” Moorman asked.
“My Mom was supposed to come and pick me up,” Monday said. “I waited three or four days and she still didn’t come. I didn’t know what else to do…”
Schlosser said, “Your honor, if I could have a few days to get in contact with his mother and make arrangements for him to go and live with her, couldn’t we possibly resolve it that way? Because we know what’s going to happen if he goes to The Crime University— there’s already a bunch of his gang leadership down there and they’ll have him matriculated into graduate school by the time we get him back — and that can’t be good for anybody.”
Schlosser was given another week to see if he can find Monday’s mother and make arrangements to get him out of Fort Bragg and away from the gang.
A certain Mr. Hoisington had already finished two prison terms and was going back for an advanced degree — he would get two four-year terms, which would run concurrently.
“Is this a transfer out of Lake County?” Judge Moorman asked.
(Lake County is widely regarded as a kind of rural clearinghouse for criminal activity, especially the methamphetamine industry. A large percentage of Lake's small-ish population has had repeat encounters with law enforcement. “Instead of building another new state prison,” a former Lake County public defender told us, “the state just oughta throw up a fence around Clearlake.”)
Deputy DA Matt Hubley confirmed that Mr. Hoisington was from Lake County.
The charge was 11550, tweaking on meth, but Mr. Hoisington was on probation with prison hanging over his head for sales of the popular go-fast powder when he got caught tweaking in Mendoland. And with the two prison priors, the two years he was facing would automatically double. Plus there was another charge in the mix, somewhere, but Judge Moorman tossed it.
She said, “As for the 12500 [driving without a license] lurking out there somewhere, I’m dismissing it. We’ve got the 11350 and the 11550 in another case and this four years will run concurrently.”
Hoisington looked on impassively as if someone else's fate was being discussed.
A Ms. Manet also came forward to answer to tweek charges. She got a break for the same offense that netted Hoisington four years in prison because she hadn't accumulated the priors Hoisington had.
There were so many things going on in the aforementioned Shinn matter — the woman who shot the kid, Ms. Cahill, had just broken off a relationship when she was home invaded, which is why she’d borrowed the .357 she'd shot the home invader with in the first place — and she mentioned to a source that she was still afraid for her life.
(The backroom deals seem to have increased since the AVA assigned me to the courthouse beat. In most superior courts a lack of interest in their functioning by what's left of the press makes the retreat into “chambers” and the rest of the secrecy unnecessary. They play Let's Make A Deal in plain view. But I might as well be wearing a leper's bell around my neck. At the mere sight of my debonair self, there's a rustling of robes, a sudden scurrying, papers disappear into brief cases, and throats are loudly cleared as in, “Not in front of the children.”)
When the judges meet socially they assure each other, probably with martyred sighs, “Never mind, my dears, what silly journalists put in their newspapers.”
“I never read newspapers,” Judge Moorman dutifully assured the wine mob last week when they appeared to intimidate her into ignoring their frost protection abuses of the Russian River. But Judge Moorman, a very attractive woman, seemed somehow different, and it only took a moment to notice what was amiss — she’d combed her hair! Usually, Her Honor looks like she’d just tumbled out of an industrial duvet drier, and had hurried directly into town to dispatch the usual suspects to their various state and county time out rooms.
The judge was looking good for the boutique booze brigade!
Anyway, it's hardly news that money goes a long way in an American courtroom.
Consider, for instance, not only the inland wine gang who think they're somehow entitled to unimpeded access to the finite waters of the Russian River, but Thomas Plowright, the enterprising young man who maintained a combined meth, marijuana and stolen construction equipment farm up Nash Mill Road near Philo.
Judge John Behnke all but promised Plowright that he would be remanded into custody on Friday. Behnke said much the same thing the last time Plowright was in court a couple months ago. But Plowright is a person with the resources to hire the judicially-connected former Mendo DA Duncan James and Plowright left the court still a free man. He has 44 months in prison already stipulated to, and he's supposed to pay $60,000 to Paul Brannon and $3,680 to Doug and Judge Nelson before July 27th or else he will then go to jail!
Most crooks, especially the ones represented by public defenders, get a ticket straight to San Quentin without all these ifs, ands and buts.
The prosecutor, a man from the State Attorney General's office, Huey Long — during his rural adventures Plowright also ran afoul of several state environmental agencies, hence the involvement of the State AG's office — is as reticent and as discreet as Mr. James, so it’s impossible to tell when, if ever, Plowright will see the inside of a cell.
After Plowright waltzed out the courtroom door, my friend Franz Wittenkeller of Fort Bragg, a man with no money, went down for five years and 60 days for what was plainly, to me anyway, self-defense.
Wittenkeller's defense was assigned to the self-deprecating Dan Haehl of the Public Defender’s office. Haehl advised his client to take what ever crumbs the DA threw them: “We’ll reduce the charges from attempted murder to assault with a deadly weapon; 60 months for the assault, and 60 days for a violation of probation. Wittenkeller, one of the County's all-time age-group record-holders — he's not quite forty — for drunk in public arrests was, of course, already on probation for drinking in public.
“I suggest you quit drinking,” Judge Behnke told him.
“It’s too late to matter, now.” Wittenkeller replied.
After they took him away I approached Haehl and said, “Hey, Dan, tell Franzie I’ll see about a subscription to the AVA. And let me know if he needs any thing — any little thing I might be able to do.”
Dan said, “Oh? And what about me? I got sentenced to a smaller cell than his — now that we’ve been kicked out of the Feibush Building — and for a much longer time! Franzie only got five years, I got life! What about getting me a subscription to the AVA? At least I’ll read the damn thing!"
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