C. David Eyster is the Mendocino County District Attorney. The C. stands for Caesar, at least in the opinion of a certain element of local law enforcement, a close-knit group stitched together for the practical purpose of watching each other’s backs. They are a veritable family. "Element” doesn’t mean there's no dissension in the khaki, olive drab, camo and navy-blue ranks, the uniforms of the people who keep the cutthroats from lifting our scalps at night.
The law enforcement family, until now, has had an Us-versus-Them attitude toward the pot growers. Lately, they tolerate medical marijuana but only on the strictest terms, since they see it as a phony-baloney front to deal dope with flagrant impunity.
In most cases this perception of the medical marijuana industry is absolutely true. Any hypochondriac or game-legged faker can get a Prop 215 card for the slightest bellyache, and with their “doctor’s recommendation” proceed to get rich growing and selling weed while honest folks have to work for a living, a source of considerable resentment among both law enforcement and regular working stiffs, not to mention the millions of parents who pray that their kids won't be derailed by too much smoke.
So when Eyster won election and immediately implemented his progressive marijuana policy, a policy that gives growers the option of settling their cases for misdemeanors and fines rather than risk the court process and felony convictions, lots of cops didn't like it but reconciled themselves to an approach that made the County some money rather than cost the County lots of money.
Not only did Eyster's progressive pot policies annoy a lot of cops, he irritated pot growers, too.
Mendocino pot pharmers tend to be every bit as retro as the cops — they still call cops “pigs” and they sanctimoniously see themselves pitted against a Police State no matter how progressive the State legislature, the County supervisors, and even the various City councils that have tried to lighten the cannabis laws. But Pot People are never happy, and they don't know beans about police states.
It was inevitable, then, that sooner or later a case would come up that seemed to symbolize all the pent-up anger and confusion about weed.
Kyle Edward Stornetta, of the influential Stornetta family of Point Arena, was busted a year ago with more than 800 marijuana plants. Eyster handled it pretty much he now handles all pot cases — Let's Make A Deal.
Stornetta, 32, would plea to the charges, pay hefty fines of about $43,000, go on probation with the understanding that if he resumes pharming, indoors or out, on the Stornetta holding straddling the Garcia River, he better do it inside the law, whatever the law on marijuana happens to be that week.
Except for a very few, very stubborn cases, the Stornetta disposition has been how the DA has handled every pot bust since he took office [notwithstanding the obvious exceptions of his own former clients who had to be prosecuted by the state's attorney general's office.]
So, the Eyster strategy was rolling along, with Mendocino County, Land of Intoxicants, actually making money off its largest industry, marijuana, rather than going into the red processing pot people through the legal system.
Then came the Stornetta case and Judge Clayton Brennan at the Ten Mile Court in Fort Bragg.
The Judge wanted to know what was involved.
Well, your honor, there were the 800 plants, but there were also 17 steelhead trout taken from the battered Garcia River and an unlawful number of wild ducks, which as migratory waterfowl, are federally protected. Not to mention an “arsenal” of weapons. Enormous effort has gone into restoring fish runs on the Garcia but poachers have diligently continued to plunder the river during spawning season. Taking pregnant fish out of the Garcia, to many people, is a lot worse than an indoor pot grow.
And law enforcement considers big game hunting rifles, small caliber plinkers, and even fancy Italian fowling pieces “weapons.” Any of these could be used as a lethal weapon, sure, but so could a kitchen knife or a ball-peen hammer. Handguns, riot guns and assault rifles are weapons: designed specifically as man killers, like the Roman sword, for no other purpose; and, as such, they are the logical and the preferred “weapons” for protecting a marijuana grow. But law enforcement doesn’t make this nice distinction, and many people feel that a lot of expensive skeet guns and antique collectables never make it to the evidence locker.
So, here we were, with a lot of people watching the Stornetta case from a lot of different angles.
The deal Eyster wanted to make was that all this Stornetta stuff would be reduced to a misdemeanor, a couple of years of casual probation, the $43 thou in fines, and a co-defendant of a girl friend would walk, pretty as you please.
But Judge Brennan, widely assumed to be a stoner, wouldn’t buy it, and this surprised and delighted a lot of cops.
“It looks like your judge has finally grown a set of balls,” Sergeant Bruce Smith was overheard remarking to the Ten Mile court bailiff Kent Rogers.
It got wilder.
Brennan reportedly threatened to call the State Attorney General on Eyster.
And wilder.
Both DA Eyster and the defense lawyer, Keith Faulder, Stornetta's attorney, were yelling at Brennan like he was some kind of stray dog somehow wrapped in judicial robes, a judge who didn’t know a hondo from a piggin’ string when it came to matters of law.
If the judge wasn't signing off on the deal, Faulder wasn't getting his hefty retainer and Eyster and the County weren't getting the $43,000 in fines.
When Judge Brennan wouldn’t back down, Eyster tried to reject him with that trusty old 170.6 pre-emptory challenge. The DA wanted a new judge.
It was a piece of courtroom drama which — curse me — I missed. So I have to extrapolate, as the lawyers say, on the circumstantial hearsay evidence, which was lots and lots. Everyone was talking about it.
Judge Brennan stood his ground, rightly pointing out that the motion to dump him should, by law, have been made before the case was put before him.
Eyster and Faulder were incredulous. They unloaded on the judge in so harsh and unseemly a manner Brennan should have locked them up for contempt.
In order to find out what was involved in the case, Judge Brennan also insisted on a preliminary hearing, drily leering to Eyster that, considering how cozy the DA was with the defendant’s family and friends, he didn’t expect the People to put on much of a case.
Judge Brennan was appointed to the Mendo bench, and we'll leave it at that, but let's say the way his appointment came about is a case study in inside Democratic Party politics, and very depressing. Anyway, in theory, Brennan sits at the will of the same constituency that elected Eyster and the Sheriff, the people of Mendocino County, at least the half that bothers to vote. And that Brennan was stationed in Fort Bragg because it was assumed he'd do the least damage out on the Coast where the media are, well, the media. Kind of. People were still angry that a tweeker got away with a broad daylight shooting of a tame buck in the middle of Brooktrails, and a well-connected Willits teacher named Clint Smith skated on charges of unlawful intercourse with a 14-year-old student of his, charges that would have sent anyone else to the state pen.)
“I didn’t get the date and time of the prelim,” our source said, “because it will just be a farce, anyway.”
The difficulty here was not with the defendants. The Stornetta clan is a big one and the gallery was full of supporters for Mr. Stornetta and his co-defendant, Ms. Frost of the Point Arena Volunteer Fire Department. Our source tells us that Eyster was in full campaign mode for the bloc of voters in the audience, “and you’d have thought he was the defense attorney the way he hobnobbed with them, referring to the defendant as ‘this poor man’ until it was laughable.”
So, the whole show was delayed.
DA spokesman Mike Geniella got off a chaste press release attributing the delay to "a procedural error."
And there it rests.
Last Friday, Judge Brennan was at the Ukiah Courthouse where, again, he crossed swords with Eyster. It was a routine marijuana cultivation case. Eyster's first move was the 170.6 motion to disqualify Judge Brennan. While we waited for Judge Behnke to be brought in on his day off to handle a routine arraignment, I asked Eyster what was all the noise in Fort Bragg all about.
“Ha! You should have been there. It turned into quite a row. We had it all worked out, me and Keith, but Brennan wouldn’t budge. Ask Keith, he’ll tell you.”
Mr. Faulder, I know from experience, does not discuss his client’s affairs with the press — or anyone else, for that matter. In any event Mr. Faulder wasn’t available for comment. He’s getting ready to climb a mountain somewhere — Mt. McKinley in Alaska or K2 in the Hindu Kush, I forget his itinerary.
Thomas Croak out of Ten Mile Court. Croak represented Ms. Frost, Stornetta's co-defendant. Croak said mum. The pending deal would turn Ms. Frost loose with not a blemish on her unsullied record.
And Deputy DA Tim Stoen, the suave old Stanford guy who still looks like the kid he was when he served as Rev. Jim Jones’s legal sorcerer, sat back with his hands folded piously in his lap, and deferred to Eyster, his boss.
Maybe everyone secretly preferred former DA Meredith Lintott’s “snitch on your neighbor-and-the DA-will ruin-your-competition” policy. This policy ran everyone through the system, and everyone inevitably came out with slam-dunk acquittals while the County was stuck with a big bill for prosecuting them. Eyster can be Caesar-like but his pot strategy is a big winner for the taxpayers.
In other news, a civil court jury rejected the wrongful death suit brought against the Ukiah Senior Center and the Senior Center’s bus driver Steven Bocchetti. Ms. Janice Castro died from injuries sustained when the Ukiah Senior Center’s bus hit her as she puttered along in the bike lane on her motorized wheelchair near Autumn Leaves Retirement Home on Gobbi Street in Ukiah, on November 15th 2010.
Eric Petersen for the plaintiffs, Ms. Castro’s adult children, contended that Mr. Bocchetti negligently caused the accident. Mr. Petersen said Ms. Castro had been "extremely independent." On the day of the accident, she decided to go to the convenience store in her motorized wheelchair. Petersen had photos of the bike lane, the sidewalk, and the telephone poles planted right in the middle of the sidewalk. He argued that the bus driver, Mr. Bocchetti, after pulling into Harold’s Square across the street from Autumn Leaves to turn around, failed to look both ways before pulling out and hitting Ms. Castro, who was coming along the bike lane due to the problems with the sidewalk.
“Mr. Bocchetti didn’t look to his right and the law is you have to look both ways,” he said.
Mr. Murray for the defense, however, successfully persuaded the jury that Bocchetti did look both ways, and since Ms. Castro was going the wrong direction in the bike lane, his view was blocked by the front grill of the bus, and that Ms. Castro kept coming on regardless, and ran into the bus just as it was pulling out.
The jury was unanimous in its verdict that Bocchetti was not negligent, even though in civil trials a majority is all that is required. The Senior Center was listed as a co-defendant with Mr. Bocchetti since they hired him; damages would have had to come from a source with more money than a bus driver is likely to have. But the suit never got to the damages stage, having ended when Bocchetti was found not to have been negligent.
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