Crime & Punishment

“If I knew the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, your honor, why then I would be God! —Dick Gregory 

The week started out with two jury trials on Monday, but by early Tuesday both cases were out the window. The first one was a DUI wherein the defendant, Joshua Pollard, had reached across from the passenger seat and grabbed the wheel while his girlfriend was driving, causing a crash into another vehicle. The prime witness, the girlfriend, had had a change of heart. It would have been Pollard’s fourth DUI, and considering the injuries which resulted, Pollard was looking at prison time. The prosecuting attorney, Joshua Rosenfeld, a well-intentioned greenhorn, had failed to foresee that a love stuck lass will stand by her man, even if he is a drunken bum who grabs the steering wheel and piles into oncoming traffic. So the jury was released, along with the prisoner.

I asked DA David Eyster, “So, I take it you had young Rosenblunder thoroughly keelhauled for dereliction of duty?”

“It was just a learning experience he had to go through,” the DA explained. “It will never happen again.”

The other case was the long-awaited trial of Charles Merritt Osborne, the fellow who ripped off a group of Southern Humboldt and Northern Mendocino growers for 58 pounds of prime smokin’ dope in June of 2011. The buy was at a site down along the Eel River just outside of Percy, which is as close to Humboldt as you can get in Mendocino County and still be in Mendo.

In this case the defendant simply didn’t show up. At first it was thought he was just running late, but by 10 o’clock, the judge lost patience, forfeited Mr. Osborne’s bail, and issued a warrant.

“No cite-out; no release; no bail.”

I had spoken with Mr. Osborne the week before when he drove up from LA for his pre-trial conference. He told me with a chilly smile that he thought my sense of humor maleficent in his particular case, and that I had it all wrong about his past criminal convictions. In short, I was accused of exaggerating his criminal record for sensational effect. I promised him I'd revisit my sources and give a more modest account of his illegal activities in my coverage of his up-coming trial. He laughed.

Osborne's case was one I had been looking forward to for a long time, seeing as how it involved a high-speed chase through some of my favorite North County countryside at speeds topping 115mph, a great mass of counterfeit money, a veritable fortune in spoils, and the initiation of some rookie cops.

But while waiting for the no-show Mr. Osborne on Monday, Judge John Behnke observed aloud that Osborne held “a world record for prior convictions … at least, he has more priors than any case that I, personally, have ever presided over before.”

Judge Behnke has been a judge seven years in a county where a great many repeat offenders come before him. This statement seemed to vindicate my earlier assertions that Osborne was a career criminal. As this story progresses, the reader will encounter other aspersions on this fine publication, and a theme on the nature of TRUTH will no doubt develop. But for now, allow me to note that Judge Behnke himself instructed one defense lawyer, Dan Haehl of the Public Defenders Office, that what Haehl called “exaggerated lies” by the prosecution were in fact advocacy and, as such, no different than the minimizing whoppers told by Haehl himself on behalf of his own client.

That client had followed a motorist off the freeway and into a gas station where he pulled the man from his vehicle and would have choked him to death if a group of citizens had not come out of the store to intercede. This was all caught on video, but the excitable Mr. Haehl who often jeers at the AVA as “a yellow rag full of filthy lies,” felt that the prosecutor, Deputy DA Matt Hubley, was “not being truthful.” Having been at the aforementioned jury trial across the hall, I came in late on this one and didn’t get the defendant’s name, but hope to follow up on it in coming weeks as it nears resolution or trial

At any rate, the two jury trials, as they so often do, went away on Tuesday and it looked like a slow news week until I learned of the high speed chase with shots fired at the vehicle in hot pursuit on the Boonville Road the night before. The first suspect, Christopher Skaggs, was arraigned on Thursday before Judge Richard Henderson. Skaggs was due in court on the coming Monday for trial in another case which resulted in a CHP officer getting injured, and he was also on probation for a couple of burglaries. Public Defender Linda Thompson, who knew Mr. Skaggs rather well from representing him in his previous encounters with law enforcement, was assigned the case. Her first move was to get Mr. Skaggs’s bail set, and Ms. Thompson argued for the regular schedule which was $750,000 which, in Skaggs' case, might as well be set at $750 billion.

DDA Matt Hubley wanted a no-bail arrangement, but when Thompson said that wasn’t legal, Hubley said he would be asking for $1.5 million. He noted that Mr. Skaggs as the driver of the getaway car, Mr. Skaggs had swerved into the oncoming lane as he rounded curves and crested hills on the Boonville-Ukiah Road, to give his passenger Kristopher Miller a clearer shot “with a fully automatic firearm” at the pursuing police interceptor, driven by Deputy Darren Brewster, of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.

“This was attempted murder,” Hubley said. “Not to mention the risk to public safety.” (When I told my jailers in Eureka that I was a risk to public safety and should be held until the rain storm raging outside was over — or at least until after breakfast — they'd picked me up and bodily thrown me out the door into the teeth of the worst storm of the winter. So this gambit doesn’t work for everybody.) The deputy was not struck with the spray of bullets, but the Crown Vic was disabled by bullets puncturing the radiator.

Judge Henderson set Skaggs' bail at $1.25 million.

Skaggs' co-defendant, Walter Kristopher Millar, had apprehended at the Best Western motel in Ukiah the previous day. (Mr. Miller was arraigned the following day before Judge Eric Labowitz of Anderson Valley. Judge Labowitz had been in court all week, following his Sunday night jazz program on KZYX radio in Philo. He was filling-in for the regular judges who had gone on a skiing junket all the way from Copper Mountain to Sun Valley to Breckenridge — what recession? What unemployment problem? What was that you were saying about not being able to afford a lawyer? How can that be?)

Judge Labowitz assigned Bert Schlosser of the Alternate Public Defenders Office to represent Mr. Miller, since the Public Defender already had Skaggs, and a conflict of interest would arise otherwise. Mr. Schlosser felt confident that his new client would never be able to make the basic bail schedule of $900,000 — with the Special Allegation of using a gun, the schedule was higher than that of Mr. Skaggs — but DDA Damon Gardner, failing to get a no-bail hold, wanted an increase, and Labowitz agreed, setting bail at $1.6 million.

Both defendants will be back in court March 6th for further proceedings.

The business with Skaggs and Miller had delayed the judgment and sentencing of a couple of convicted murderers, Glenn Hughes and William Crocker. While we waited for the killers to be brought in, defense attorney Albert Kubanis approached the area reserved for the press and told the reporters assembled there — myself and Tiffany Revelle of the Ukiah Daily Journal — about the ski trip the judges had gone on, adding that he himself was a much better skier than either Judge LaCasse or Judge Behnke. Ms. Revelle and I admitted that neither of us had ever been able to afford the lifestyle that includes skiing, and Kubanis went on to tell us how much money he’d saved by buying a season pass. Paul Sequeira was drawn into the conversation and told how lamentable his own financial condition was, having married the poorest girl in Petrolia — if not all of Humboldt County.

“Money is the root of all evil,” he quoted stoically.

“It is the love of money that is the root of all evil,” Ms. Revelle corrected. “Why do people always get that wrong?”

Just then the District Attorney walked in.

And somebody hissed discreetly

“For the love of God, Tiffany, why don’t you marry Dave Eyster, so he doesn’t keep walking into open court with his collar twisted and his fly unzipped. He needs a sharp wife to monitor his public image and you need help with your teenage girls.”

Reasserting his control of the discussion, Mr. Kubanis informed us regarding the recent lengthy absence of Judge John Behnke, as well. Behnke, he said, had come down with a case of Hepatitis-A during a trip to Madagascar to visit his daughter who works with the Peace Corps.

Ms. Revelle had already warned me that Mr. Kubanis considered reporters to be highly susceptible to his charm, and that this always nicely dressed Republican dandy felt confident he could influence the press in such a way as would reflect favorably on his clients and himself. She also cautioned me to beware of his short temper. She said Kubanis had lost his poise completely during a recent murder trial and had started shouting at the judge. As the hours dragged on, Mr. Kubanis, having tantalized us with his gossip, produced copies of his statement to the court concerning his client, William “Buck” Crocker.

“Read this and you’ll see what really happened,” he said.

My jaw dropped and I was about to explode with gesticulations and guffaws, but the perceptive Ms. Revelle stayed me with a calming hand on my arm.

In his own inimitable way, Al Kubanis began patronizing Ms. Revelle, saying how unfortunate it was she worked at such “a pitiful excuse for a daily newspaper” (nothing to compare with FOX NEWS, to be sure) and he ended by insulting me.

Buck Crocker, AVA readers may remember, was the gunman in the Bushay Campground shootings a couple of summers ago. He shot both Brandon Haggett and Joe Litteral through the chest with a .45 caliber handgun. Haggett survived to tell how his friend Joe Literal took a bullet for him, and how Litteral did not survive. Kubanis, who only sporadically attended the trial of the co-defendants, assured us that only he knew the truth of what happened that day, and that the AVA and the Daily Journal had been duped by clever lawyers like Paul Sequeira into printing a pack of lies about the case. I was astounded when I realized he wasn’t joking.

We dutifully read Mr. Kubanis’ estimation of the events of that July day, wherein he minimized his client’s involvement and exaggerated the culpability of the others, placing most of the blame on the victims, Joe Literal and Brandon Haggett, whom he referred to as morons and drunks, and who, he concluded, got themselves shot out of their own stupidity, and therefore through no fault of the estimable Mr. Crocker. Kubanis suggested his client was the real victim.

When I handed the pages back to Kubanis saying his idea of the truth was obviously nothing more than advocacy for his client he became so enraged his physician would have been alarmed. Ms. Revelle had to bite the knuckle of her forefinger to keep from laughing as Kubanis spluttered that I was nothing but a filthy yellow journalist and that my paper wouldn’t know the truth if it hit me in the face — which Mr. Kubanis seemed about to do, just before he snatched up his papers and stormed out of the room. As he left I reminded him that he didn’t read the AVA — a point he has repeated often — so how could he know whether it contained bullshit and cow pies or strawberry shortcake and whipped cream… my words falling on deaf ears. It took the rampaging Republican about twenty minutes to compose himself enough return.

Mr. Kubanis is typical of the vast majority of people in Mendocino County who don’t read the AVA — they know what’s in it, though, through some sort of psychic intuition, I suppose. But I sympathize with them because reading not only requires some effort and basic decode skills, even when a writer tries to make it fun and easy — and most people are so weak-minded and mentally frail that reading a few paragraphs can be quite excruciating. I personally know many local liberals — some of diverse ethnic extraction — who have to lie down in a darkened room with a cold cloth over their eyes for several hours after reading only one article in the AVA. So it stands to reason that a white male conservatives like Kubanis would have to be hospitalized in the ICU for months on end after a single paragraph of, say, Off The Record, or perhaps one of Mark Scaramella’s even-tempered reports on the doings of the Board of Supervisors. And we will note that our critics  seldom write in to correct us, as blithely unwilling to defend their self-alleged principles as they are to libel our humble efforts.

Haehl and Kubanis are more alike in this respect than either care to admit — since they thoroughly despise one another. The tyranny of small differences between the Libertarian and the Republican — at the end of the day, we’ll get back to that.

Meanwhile, Judge Ann Moorman — who apparently got left out of the ski trip — finally came in to sentence poor old Buck Crocker: Her Honor gave him 25 to life, as per a plea agreement reached between Sequeira and Kubanis. And, no, she wasn’t swayed by Mr. Kubanis’s eloquent argument that Crocker get the mitigated term — he’ll go the long stretch, and that’s a shame, cause a guy so handy with a gun could prove useful in the coming economic crunch when a great many middle-class families find themselves in homeless camps like the one at Bushay that fateful summer day, and end up thinking they’d be better off dead from a gunshot wound than watching their children starve. But no. When the power grid fails, all those gunslingers will smother in the “climate-controlled” glass and steel dungeons that our jails and prisons have become.

The three little girls that Joe Literal left behind all had written letters to the judge. These were not read in court, but Mr. Literal’s cousin Arnold Partridge took advantage of what the court calls one’s “right to elocute” — the right to stand up and have your say, on the record, in front of the killer and anyone else concerned.

Mr. Partridge mentioned his cousin Joe’s daughters and his own kids and how they all missed the man who, considering his ultimate sacrifice for a young friend, must have been one hell of a good guy, a man who, Partridge insisted, “could have walked into this room and made everybody laugh.” Partridge also pointed out that Joe Literal was the last of his line, since his daughters would eventually marry and take their husband’s names. He had nothing but contempt for  Kubanis’s comments as to Buck Crocker’s being “just another victim of this stupid tragedy.” He looked at Crocker and said, “You are a horrible, horrible person and I hope they throw you in prison and that you rot in there.”

Judge Moorman duly gave Crocker the 25-to-life and imposed nine more years for the attempted murder of Brandon Haggett to run concurrent. There was a fine of $7,000 for the victims restitution fund, and an $80 “security fee” to go toward the new courthouse, and a $60 conviction fee to help defray the next ski junket to Vail and Aspen for the judges.

Glenn Hughes was next, but there was some delay in the report from probation so it had to be postponed. Mr. Hughes objected, saying he wanted to get it over with, but Judge Moorman explained it wasn’t that simple. The probation officers had lives, too. Couldn’t he grasp that? How could they pad their monthly salaries without additional reports? Why must these killers think of no one but their own sweet selves?

Apparently, there had been a dearth of paper for the reports, but one of the guards pointed out to me that Hammermill had just delivered 12 cases of bond, and it was stacked in the main entryway of the courthouse. The county had supposedly switched to electronic systems to save paper, but old habits are hard to break.

Outside, a crowd of protesters was gathering on the courthouse lawn with banners and placards. My editor had alerted me that some of his gun guy friends — my editor swims in many seas — were planning a demonstration. I went along with my camera taking snapshots, looking for guns. But it was all peaceniks, 30 or 40 of them, all protesting the war. Finally, down at the north end, I found a lone gun guy, with some scribbled references to the First Amendment on placards in the back of a pickup.

“But I thought the Second Amendment was about the right to bear arms?”

“Wull, duh... But it’s freedom of expression to carry a gun, ain’t it?”

He wasn’t visibly armed, but I used to be editor at Guns Magazine and knew better than to argue with a gun guy. I hurried over to the Forest Club for happy hour thinking it was not so slow a news week, after all.

* * *

Dan Haehl of the public defender's office did what he could for Mr. Severn-Walsh, of Navarro, who was facing felony child endangerment, a result of taking his young son for a ride on a three-wheeler and flipping the thing while trying to do a doughnut. Mr. Haehl wanted the charges reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor.

“I’m arguing for a 17b. [reduction of a felony to a misdemeanor],” Haehl said. “Because the injury was minor. The little boy got a bump on the head, which is unfortunate, but little boys get bumps on the head all the time, and in this case he was released right away. It was something that, I think, on these kinds of machines can happen to anybody. But it was not like some high-speed crash.”

Of course most little boys don't get their bumps riding helmetless on a careless father's three-wheeler, do they counselor?

A photo showed an angry red bruise on the child’s head.

Dad had confessed to drinking all night the night before, then starting again when he rolled out of the hay around noon. He rode the three-wheeler all-terrain-vehicle to a friend’s house and enjoyed a great huge turkey dinner with all the sundry and complementary side dishes as his host made the statement to law enforcement that “He didn’t drink anything [meaning alcoholic beverages] at my house; not that I’m aware of.”

“Obviously, alcohol had some influence,” Mr. Haehl admitted. “But it is not a felony-level offence, your honor. Also, the child loved to ride on the thing.”

It would be hard to find a child who didn’t love to ride on these things. They even make the things now in a size a toddler can operate. It is the next logical step up from the stroller, then it’s on to cars and trucks!

“I’ll agree,” Deputy DA Josh Rosenfeld said. But as far as doing a doughnut with the two-year-old child riding on the father’s lap, with no restraints or helmet — this is not a case of just accidentally hitting a rock while driving normally; it was a difficult trick, and that is where we get the risk of great bodily injury. In a case like this the prior felonies indicate a pattern of behavior that’s not consistent with reducing the count to a 17b.”

Judge John Behnke said, “I’ll only consider the felony priors at sentencing — I don’t know what they are — but this is not the time to argue a 17b.”

“If I may, your honor?”

DDA Rosenfeld offered to read the priors, but Mr. Haehl interrupted.

“Sure, go ahead, Mr. Haehl.”

Dan Haehl is the oldest hack in the public defender's stable. He’s a large man and winces as he moves like his feet hurt.

Haehl said, “The fact that my client has made some mistakes in his life should not make this incident into a felony. The idea that anybody else —anyone but a felon — would never find himself in such circumstances is absurd. And, again, the injury was a bump on a little boy’s head. It is unfortunate, but that it should result in Mr. Severn-Walsh getting another felony is… is, well, just crazy, your honor.”

Mr. Haehl is given to these kinds of outbursts, and seems to live in a perpetual state of suspended skepticism.

Judge Behnke said, “I’ve read the statute and on each instruction, the language used does not specify any difference on how serious the injury has to be. It says that because there was an injury — not the level of seriousness — which is an important question, but a preliminary hearing is not the place to go into that. It has only been a short time from the time of the injury to the present — it was just 12 days ago — but I do know the child was injured and the mother is still upset. The argument for the 17b can be made at the time of the sentencing, but there is sufficient evidence for count three, that the defendant was in violation of his probation. As for count one, child endangerment — a three-year-old on one of these vehicles with no restraint, with a person who has been drinking, should never have attempted a dramatic maneuver, but the vehicle does go over and, you say it’s just a bruise, or a bump, Mr. Haehl — and I sincerely hope that’s all it is — but a child on a father’s lap in a dramatic maneuver like this is sufficient to hold the defendant to answer.”

The date for arraignment was set for March 26th at 1:30pm.

Another child endangerment case out of the bucolic paradise of Anderson Valley came in for arraignment the next day.

Samantha DelValle and Raymond Mabery are the parents of a two-year-old who turned up at the Ukiah hospital with a blood alcohol content of .16 and methamphetamine in his system. Mom was assigned to the public defender, Linda Thompson. Dad went to the Alternate defender, Michael Anderson. Both lawyers asked for more time to study the case.

Ricardo Trujillio, a minor, charged with “theft from a person,” pled to a deal promising no prison at the outset, but a max of three years if he fails on his probation. It seems Mr. Trujillio fell in with bad company the day after Christmas and went out to take away what Santy Clothes had so recently given.

Eric M. Patino was driving when the two guys spotted a young woman walking down State Street with a new handbag. They stopped the car, got out and told the girl to hand over her purse. She refused. Patino grabbed the purse and when the victim, “Christy M.” fought back, the gallant Patino struck her with his pistol. Patino and Trujillio got nearly $20 in change and a cell phone and a gift card.

Back on the prowl, Patino and Trujillio soon spotted another victim, Jamie G. with a new pack and skateboard. These the thieves took from Jamie G. at gunpoint — using a replica handgun — and also took Jamie G's new cell phone.

Eric Patino got it worse than Trujillio — two five-year sentences and two strikes, for the two counts of second degree robbery.