Mendocino County Today: Friday 3/8/24

Cool & Clear | Variety Show | Septic Success | Loaner Sheep | County Notes | Ballot Counters | Love Adam | Old Office | Paint Job | Garden Starts | Beach Stroll | Ed Notes | Plungo | Name Change | Science Fair | Pastel | Volunteer Training | Unity Club | Remember Them? | Climate Resilient | Neil Benefit | Toxic GP | Planning Cancelled | Yesterday's Catch | Give More | Cafe Terrace | Murder | SOTU | Shrinkflation | Gaza/Israel Aid | Free Speech | Funny Stickers | Reason v Emotions | Tadich Grill | Wrongly Convicted | Furry Lewis | Alcatraz Escape | Dust of Snow

FROST ADVISORY remains in effect until 9 this morning.

ANOTHER COOL AND CLEAR DAY will become increasingly cloudy as a progressive low approaches the region. A series of shortwaves within the low will bring waves of wind, rain, and mountain snow through Monday morning. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Friday morning I have a brisk 38F under clear skies. A quick shot of rain tomorrow morning then a bunch of rain Monday & Tuesday before skies clear out on Wednesday. A longer dry spell to follow ? I sure hope so.

DREAMS DO COME TRUE!

Dear Anderson Valley Community,

It is hard to believe it was just a mere 18 months ago, where we had two failed septic systems and no resources to pay for it other than our limited bond money, which we needed for so many other important projects for kids. At the time, I asked for your action and your outreach and you came through. A community member called me in the midst of my outrage and asked me in my editorials “Why was I so angry?” and I said, “I’m so angry, because no kid should go to school with septic fluid on the ground or have to use a Port-a-Potty to go to the bathroom.”

I want to share some amazing good news.  Through the efforts of Congressman Huffman and his staff members, President Biden signed a bill through the House Appropriations Committee that authorized $500,000 in federal funds to pay for our septic replacement cost at the elementary school. What that does is it protects our bond money, so that we can continue to do the renovations and infrastructure improvements for both sites.

Folks, this is unheard of. I have in my school career heard of schools that received appropriations from State funding, but I have never experienced a congressional bill for federal funds for building infrastructure. I am deeply grateful. No kid should go to school that doesn’t have a working toilet. Thank you for your outreach and your time to raise awareness about the needs of Anderson Valley, and a huge thank you to Congressman Huffman and his staff, for their advocacy that kids, no matter their zip code, deserve a decent and safe school environment.

Thank you to all our parents and community that supported this effort. Dreams really do come true.

Sincerely yours,

Louise Simson
Superintendent
707-684-1017

TROY KREIENHOP: I have some Barbados sheep to loan out. If you have a fenced safe place for them. They are eating machines. Better than goats because they are not escape artists. I have 10, but would like to loan out at least 5, with an option to buy possibly. I don’t have enough fenced area for them right now and they eat everything completely down.

COUNTY NOTES

by Mark Scaramella

MINOR ELECTION UPDATE, posted at 12:22am Wednesday Morning (after a few more votes had been added to the 8:17pm initial count which we originally summarized on Wednesday):

7418 votes counted

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MIKE JAMISON:

The SOS page re returned ballots has updated info covering March 6 now.

16,725 ballots have been accepted by now (16,845 actually received) with 7418 of that already counted.

So, so far 9,307 remain to be counted, countywide.

Maybe a couple thou per district.

* * *

THERE SHE GOES AGAIN:

MAUREEN MULHEREN: “Is Mendocino County alone with low voter turn out? How do early Presidential primaries affect voting? So often for those that don’t research events, statistics, etc Mendocino County seem out of the ordinary, the reality is if you take a look at the data across the State you can see that voter turnout out was incredibly low. We should all be concerned about low turnout and lack of engagement in the democratic process, most importantly when it comes to local elections and misinformation but certainly how it affects us as a society and impacts future generations.”

MS NOTES: Ms. Mulheren again refers to unspecified “misinformation” perhaps having something to do with local elections which she conspicuously avoids mentioning, conveniently not specifying where, whom or what. Apparently, according to Mulheren, the only credible sources of information are those she approves of. Therefore, she herself is a source of misinformation.

* * *

FROM A FEBRUARY SUPERVISORS RESOLUTION “honoring” Civil Grand Juries: “Whereas, the grand jury’s fact finding efforts result in reports that contain specific recommendations aimed at identifying problems and offering ways to improve government operations and enhance responsiveness…”

THAT’S TRUE and very nice. Damned with faint praise. We couldn’t help but notice that the Board’s resolution falls very short of saying they appreciate those “specific recommendations.” Despite the multiple whereases that surround this particular statement of the obvious (which we won’t bore you with here), there are no whereases in the resolution about implementation of the Grand Jury recommendations. Not one. In fact, current and past Boards of Supervisors have not only been resistant but frequently outright hostile to the GJ’s recommendations. We can’t recall a single major Grand Jury recommendation concerning county operations that has been accepted and implemented. 

Supervisors David Colfax and Kendall Smith were downright outraged in the mid-2000s that the GJ pointed out their bogus travel claims. Four Times. Supervisor McCowen and his board crew howled like injuried children when the Grand Jury had the audacity to point out that having a former senior manager for Ortner on the proposal review team that picked Ortner for the adult mental health services contract was “an appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Just last fall the Grand Jury pointed out major flaws in the Human Resources Department and Family and Children’s Services and, while the Board grudgingly agreed with the Grand Jury in some respects, nothing has been done, including the GJ recommendations that the Board said they agreed with.

If the Board’s praise for the Grand Jury was accompanied by action and follow-up, we’d be more inclined to believe their empty, pro forma resolutions.

COUNTY COUNTING COUP, LOW GAP ROAD, UKIAH

WHY I LOVE ADAM GASKA

by Betsy Cawn

Lake County's anti-GMO objectors lost their argument with Lake County ag operators, despite enormous local efforts to educate the public, even with help from the original Sonoma County movement leaders (from the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center). The bitter divide between “environmentalists” and “farmers” still affects the local civic “culture,” where “traditional” or “conventional” agriculture practitioners are fighting for the preservation of established standards being challenged by the “commercial cannabis” “industry” favored greatly by our Board of Supervisors.

Profound impacts on finite and fragile groundwater resources, broadly unchallenged by qualified subject matter experts in the local Department of Water Resources during Initial Study reviews, threaten rural landowners whose non-traditional (ecologically sound) alternative agriculture practices -- i.e., biodynamic or “regenerative” small farming methods created by Rudolph Steiner, later adapted to California soils and climate niches by Alan Chadwick at UC Santa Cruz, and successfully taught in our region by John Jeavons up in Willits were narrowly dismissed. A sadly unsuccessful enterprise located on the beautiful North Shore of Clearlake, Jim Fetzer's Ceago Vinegarden, is up for sale and has been closed to commercial patrons for several years.

Many thanks to Els Cooperider, Adam Gaska, and all of the staunchly courageous activists who prevailed over UC Davis-sponsored “big ag” in Mendocino County!

MAZIE MALONE: I walked past the old Vets House/office on Observatory Avenue which is still the Air Quality office on Wednesday with my dog, which I do often. Air Quality remains in place. All the signs and vehicles remain. Interesting to note that I have never once seen an Air Quality vehicle in the driveway at their new location. Their cars are always parked in the public health lot right next door.

PLANT STARTS FOR SUMMER GARDENS - by Philo Flora (Misha Vega)

After years of starting all my own plants for my large homestead garden due to the lack of robust and inspiring local offerings, I am starting over 2000 plants this year. I will be offering varieties that I have personally grown with success, both in my home garden and in larger gardens that I have worked at in the valley. I will have vigorous and healthy plants beginning in early April, planted in mostly reused and returnable (if you wish) pots. Get in touch to place an early order, or to get on my email availability list. Pricing on plants will generally be: 4” pots $4 each, jumbo 6 packs $6-7 each. 

Plant types available (open pollinated and hybrid - seeds sourced from Johnnys, Uprising Seeds, Fedco, Territorial, and Open Circle Seeds): 

Peppers: Serano, Jalapeno, Poblano, Jimmy Nardello, Bell, Lunch box, Stocky Red Roaster, Ajvarski, Padron. Eggplant: Millionaire, Orient Express, Aswad, Diamond. Cucumber: Lemon, Armenian, Slicing, Japanese. Tomato: Early Girl, Green Zebra, Black Krim, Brandywine, Goldie, Sun Gold, Cherokee Purple, Costoluto Fiorentino, plus three types of canning tomato. Yellow and green summer squash, winter squash, melons and watermelons, celariac, celery, parsely, chevil, kale, green onions, basil - Italian, Thai, Cinnamon. Flowers: Cosmos, coreopsis, zinnia, sunflowers, strawflower, and more. 

For questions or to order, please contact Misha at: misha.vega@gmail.com

ED NOTES

JUST IN: THE BOONVILLE PERSPECTIVE ON BIDEN'S SPEECH

Biden sets a low rhetorical bar, not quite as low as Trump, but certainly not leadership quality. Biden was pretty good, though, by Biden standards. Not a lot of gaffes, his slurred words didn't often detract from his meaning. If you didn't know who he was though, he came off as a half-cracked angry old uncle lecturing a family picnic. He mispronounced jogger Laken Riley's name when he mentioned the famous murder victim killed by a Venezuelan criminal, calling her “Lincoln” as he held up a pin with her name given to him by, of all people, Marjorie Taylor Green, who bellowed out a few catcalls inaudible to me except for “Say her name.” To hear Biden tell it, crime was down, jobs were up, he's knocking back drug prices, and things were in overall good shape, a view shared by very few Americans. He thundered out his proposal to tax the rich at 25 percent as if it were sufficient to pay for lots of stuff Americans can only dream of and, of course, no mention at all of single payer other than a reference to the successes of Obama Care. And that's the problem with him and Democrats generally, too little too late. America was at its most prosperous when the rich were taxed at 90 percent, and the tide was indeed lifting all boats. Biden rightly blamed “my predecessor” for ineffective border controls, weaseled on Israel's genocidal assault on Gazans and called it a night amid rapturous Democrat cheers. He looked and sounded more vigorous than his other recent appearances, which his handlers keep to a minimum out of fear he might go off script. 

JAMESON JACKSON was 15 on February 24th of 2001 when he and Chris Coleman, also 15, walked into the little convenience store in Brooktrails (west of Willits) and shot Joan LeFeat to death as she begged for her life. Coleman functioned as Mrs. LeFeat's executioner, Jackson provided the gun, which he'd stolen from his father. 

TESTIMONY revealed that Jackson made no effort to stop Coleman from shooting Mrs. LeFeat. The killers fled with cigarettes and a few dollars from the till. 

THEY were soon caught. Jackson was prosecuted as a juvenile, Coleman, the shooter, as an adult. Jackson did 8 years in the California Youth Authority and has been off parole for some time now. Coleman's still in prison, I think. 

THE MURDER of Mrs. LaFeat still shocks and disgusts everyone who knew her, a long-time resident of Comptche before she moved inland to Willits. 

AT THE TIME of the atrocity I remember local reporters lurking outside Willits High School hoping to get luridly incriminating quotes from passing students, the kind of ghoulish behavior that helps diminish the reputation of legit journalists everywhere. 

CINDI MAYFIELD, juvenile court judge, opened the perps' arraignment to the public because, she said, the overwhelming public interest in the case compelled her to, although I don't recall much interest in the case beyond most people's sad recognition that another senseless death has occurred.

WHAT INTEREST there was in the LaFeat murder had been ginned up by the local newspapers. Cyber World had not yet eaten the print media.

THE SORDID, merciless details of the LeFeat homicide were very much like literally thousands of similarly pointless annual murders in America. The difference in this one is that it happened in Mendocino County. After you say that death occurred at the hands of a pair of deranged adolescents, what's left but the mechanics of adjudication and a short wait for the next senseless act of random violence?

LOCAL PAPERS claimed that recent legislation allowed the release of the names of persons under the age of 18 if they've committed crimes of a particularly heinous nature. The murder of Ms. LeFeat was heinous, certainly, but America has long been past the quaint notion that juvenile criminals should not be publicly named because they might go on to lead honest, productive lives as adults. Get their names and faces out there, and the ensuing bad publicity might pressure them and their families onto the paths of righteousness.

THE MURDER of Mrs. LaFeat, like most murders, was essentially a multiple homicide — Mrs. LeFeat, the two killers, Mrs. LeFeat's survivors, the families of the two boys.

CHRIS COLEMAN, the boy who pulled the trigger, and pulled it more than once as Mrs. LaFeat begged to live, showed no remorse. Jameson Jackson seemed genuinely pained, but after years in the Youth Authority, where recidivism runs better than 80 percent, and his subsequent return to Willits when he was ordered not to.... well, another one lost. . 

WHAT STRIKES ME about the accounts of these berserk teen rampages is the utter irrelevance of the post-event discussion. What makes “the kids” do it? Are they nuts, or what? We get the predictable parade of experts, invariably people who hold doctorate degrees in psychology, a diploma about as intellectually sound as advanced degrees in astrology or the I Ching. 

THERE is the usual speculation about derelict parents who are either physically or emotionally absent from their children's lives. And school-yard bullying. And failed schools. And dope. And antisocial song lyrics. And the sick visuals of movies. And the stupefyingly moronic images beamed in by television, the primary caregiver for most American children under the age of 12. 

AND NOW, with the internet, the young have access to much more depraved forms of unwholesomeness. And don't forget those diets of sugar and grease. And totalitarian architecture (cf your local school buildings). And single moms. And disappeared dads. And, and, and…

ALL TRUE. Added up, we have millions of children being raised in an objectively psychotic social-political nexus, but nobody really wants to address that one because the answer leads to the big question: Is it time to bring it all down? After all, Founding Father Jefferson said a revolution every generation or so was necessary to prevent crooks and stagnation getting too entrenched.

I REMEMBER talking with an Anderson Valley store owner who gave me a new perspective on the tragic death of Joan LeFeat. The local store owner pointed out that the persons who own and work in the little stores of far-flung Mendocino County are expected to be “law enforcement officers” in addition to their many other responsibilities in operating a small business. “We can be fined and put out of business for selling cigarettes to minors, or selling liquor to minors, or selling liquor to people who are already drunk, adding that being liable for these sorts of violations is on top of constant complaints and investigations by government agencies about food stamp irregularities caused by crooks trading in them, other crooks committing crimes via money orders, and even crooks trading in the welfare vouchers known as WIC certificates. It's up to the store owner to sort out the criminal from the non-criminal on all these transactions. “We can find ourselves in court as the defendant on a whole range of laws that require us to enforce them! It isn't fair to expect a market owner to function as a cop. It's twice as unfair to make us liable for the criminal behavior of another person.”

THE STORE OWNER went on to describe three instances of menacing customer behavior that might well have resulted in serious harm to this person if help hadn't arrived just in time. “Someone else is going to be killed like that poor lady in Willits was. People have no idea what we deal with in our stores every day.”

* * *

SQUIB of a story in a recent PD caught my eye. It said the Santa Rosa Police Department now provides maps “pinpointing” the town's “275 sex offenders.” 275? That figure translates as an average of one perv per block.

BUMPER STICKER spotted in Palm Beach: “Honk if you voted for Biden. It's the big button in the middle of your steering wheel.”

MIKAEL BLAISDELL of Name Change Fort Bragg: “No mention of the fort, established to enforce ethnic cleansing, systematic starvation, and forced labor of the indigenous people. What of that history?”

AS PSYCHOLOGICALLY COMFORTING to the emotionally needy Woke, it works just fine. As history it's totally wrong.

SOLDIERS were dispatched to the Mendocino Coast to protect Indians from the criminals preying on them and to maintain order generally, and Indians were not merely the pathetic victims portrayed by the Fort Bragg name changers. They fought back as best they could given that they didn't have horses and guns. When they did get guns? Hence the federal detachment of soldiers at Fort Seward, Southern Humboldt County, into the early twentieth century.

NAME CHANGE TEACH-IN

Change Our Name Fort Bragg Invites the public to a Teach-in on Thursday, March 14, at 6:30 p.m. at Harbor Lite Lodge, 120 N Harbor Dr., Fort Bragg.

Envisioned as a program to educate attendees about the issues involved in the name change and to hear neighbors’ ideas, the teach-in will last about one hour and will feature three speakers and a question and answer/discussion period.

Speakers will be: Kate Daugherty and Kate Donahue.

This program is free and open to all.

for further information: changeournamefortbragg@gmail.com

38th ANNUAL MENDOCINO COUNTY SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING FAIR & S.T.E.A.M EXPO

All families and science enthusiasts are invited to come together for a day of fun and learning at The 38th Annual Mendocino County Science and Engineering Fair & S.T.E.A.M Expo, Saturday, March 16th from 10 AM until 4 PM at Mendocino College. This event celebrates the accomplishments, curiosity, and creativity of 3rd through 12th-grade students from Mendocino County public, charter, and private schools.

Admission to the Science and Engineering Fair & S.T.E.A.M Expo is free. The S.T.E.A.M. Expo offers exciting hands-on activities, booths, and music performances from community partners, including California Native Plant Society - Sanhedrin Chapter, California State Parks, Climate Action Mendocino, GrassRoots Institute, Hopland Research and Extension Center, Instilling Goodness/Developing Virtue Schools, Latino Outdoors North Coast, Mendocino College, Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, North Coast Opportunities Head Start Child Development Program, Redwood Collegiate, Academy Robotics Team, Repurposing Plastics, River Oak Charter School, Shanael Valley Academy, Sonoma Clean Power, Tree of Life Charter School, and more!

For more information about the event, please visit the Mendocino County Office of Education’s event website: https://bit.ly/MendoScienceFair24.

AV VILLAGE VOLUNTEER TRAINING

Sunday, March 17th, 2 to 3:30 PM, Anderson Valley Senior Center

Been thinking about giving back to the elders of our community? Now’s your chance, join us for a short volunteer training and learn more about the Anderson Valley Village. The work of our volunteers is vital to our mission of supporting seniors as they age in place, they provide all manner of help, from basic chores, transportation, tech support and errands to check-in calls and visits to skilled services. It’s up to you how, and how often, to volunteer. And if you would like to be a volunteer driver, please bring your Driver's License and proof of insurance card. Please fill out the volunteer application before the training, they are available at the Senior Center, Health Center and/or our website.

Please RSVP with the coordinator.

Anica Williams
Anderson Valley Village Coordinator
Cell: 707-684-9829
Email: andersonvalleyvillage@gmail.com

UNITY CLUBS NEWS

by Miriam Martinez

Wildflowers everywhere. What's that one's name? To learn more about our wildflowers join us every Tuesday starting March 19th, from 2 to 4 in the Lending Library, for the Wildflower ID group. The classes run for five consecutive weeks with the 6th week (April 23rd) for collection of specimens. The Lending Library is located in the Home Arts Building, Boonville Fairgrounds. Hours are 1:00 to 4:00 on Tuesdays and 12:30 to 2:30 on Saturdays. There are new selections to check out and gently used books for sale: $1 for hard bound and 50¢ for paperbacks.

Our annual Wildflower Show will be held Saturday, April 27th and Sunday April 28th from 10 to 4. Silent Auction items will be different each day. Food and beverages will be served in the Tea Room and Student Art will be in display. The biggest feature is our fantastic collections of local wildflowers and plant sales of local shrubs and flowers, many important to our pollinators. 

You don't want to miss the AV Unity Club's Wildflower Show. For more information or to volunteer to help our Scholarship program, call Jean Condon.

REMEMBER THESE GUYS?

BUILDING A CLIMATE RESILIENT NAVARRO RIVER WATERSHED

by Price Sheppy

Mendocino County Resource Conservation District (MCRCD is spearheading this project in collaboration with other local organizations such as the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association, Anderson Valley Land Trust, and Dogwood Springs Forestry.

Rallying for a Climate Resilient Future

In the lush, pastoral, and forested landscapes of Anderson Valley our community faces a modern challenge that tests our collective resilience and adaptability in the face of climate change. As we confront the realities of droughts, wildfires, and topsoil erosion, the question looms: How will Anderson Valley not just survive but thrive under these conditions? This challenge, however daunting, presents us with an opportunity for innovation, unity, and proactive engagement. As the inhabitants of this valley, it falls upon us to not merely observe these transformations but to actively shape a future where our community, economy, and natural environments flourish alongside our evolving climate.

On March 23, 2024, 9:30am to 4:00pm, there will be a pivotal community meeting called “Building A Climate Resilient Navarro River Watershed”. This meeting will be held at the Anderson Valley Grange aimed at harnessing the collective power of local landowners, farmers, and stewards of the land. This gathering is not just a meeting; it's a call to action for all who cherish our valley and wish to contribute to building a climate-resilient watershed.

One of the main focuses of the upcoming meeting will be to share insights on climate-beneficial practices for forests, vineyards, orchards, rangeland, and streams. At this meeting we will hear presentations from local experts and community members who have already started implementing these practices. We will dive into management practices that not only enhance our land's productivity but also its resilience to climate change. Imagine a future where our forests are less susceptible to wildfire, our soils richer and more productive, and our water resources more sustainable. This vision can become a reality with the knowledge we will share and community action.

Another critical aspect of our gathering will be exploring watershed-level carbon accounting and funding opportunities. By understanding and implementing carbon accounting, our community can access new funding streams to support these vital environmental stewardship efforts. Mendocino County Resource Conservation District (MCRCD is spearheading this project in collaboration with other local organizations such as the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association, Anderson Valley Land Trust, and Dogwood Springs Forestry . This workshop is funded by the Environmental Defense Fund.

As we look towards the future, the role of community engagement has never been more crucial. The upcoming community meeting at the Anderson Valley Grange is a testament to our shared commitment to the land that sustains us. Whether you own acres of vineyards or a small backyard garden, your participation is a step towards a resilient, thriving ecosystem in the Navarro watershed.

We encourage all Anderson Valley members to join us. The event is FREE for all but a modest $15 fee will get you lunch. This event promises to be an enlightening, inspiring day full of actionable insights.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/building-climate-resiliency-in-the-navarro-spring-2024-community-meeting-registration-838143579007

Register today and be part of a movement that's not just about confronting climate change but actively shaping a sustainable future for our beloved valley. Together, we can turn the tide on climate change, one practice, one plot, and one community at a time.

TIM MCCLURE: Regarding Georgia-Pacific and their burning of industrial waste for corporate profit, another aspect was the copious tonnage of fly ash that they offered “Free” to the unsuspecting locals for use as garden soil amendment and fill dirt. To my knowledge there has never been any reports on the toxicity of this byproduct but working on a property up on Sherwood road a decade or so ago I would come home from work with my feet turned a nasty black right through my work boots and socks. Not long ago the nice elderly lady, Betty Steckmeyer, who lived there, passed away from cancer. I also remember hearing that the fly ash that was spread on a cow pasture on Bald Hill had to be removed because it made the cattle sick. Classic mill town corporate behavior, strip the resources and leave the toxics behind.

WHAT? AGAIN?

Cancelation of Planning Commission Meeting (3-21-24)

The cancelation notice for the March 21, 2024 Planning Commission meeting is now available on the department website at: https://www.mendocinocounty.org/government/planning-building-services/meeting-agendas/planning-commission

Please contact staff if there are any questions.

Thank you!

CATCH OF THE DAY: Thursday, March 7, 2024

ILEANA AMRULL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

DAVID BROWN, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

ADAM FULLER, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

RONALD HIGGINS, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, battery with serious injury, controlled substance.

PAUL JOHNSON, Redding/Ukiah. Controlled substance, county parole violation.

JARED KIDD, Ukiah. Burglary, petty theft with priors, probation violation, resisting. (Frequent flyer.)

JEFFREY MCGEHEE, Coos Bay, Oregon/Willits. Paraphernalia, possession of personal ID with intent to defraud.

OLITA NAREDO, Redwood Valley. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, disorderly conduct-alcohol.

LINA RUBIANO-TOCORA, Covelo. DUI.

RUDY SAUCEDA, Potter Valley. Domestic battery, criminal threats, damaging communications device.

NAKIA SIMS, Ukiah. Burglary, vehicle tampering, parole violation, resisting.

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, Ukiah. Controlled substance, disobeying court order, failure to appear, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

MAGA HELPS RUSSIA IN UKRAINE

Dear Editor,

In all likelihood once Russia has forced the surrender of Ukraine, due in part to MAGA Republicans' opposition in Congress, Vladimir Putin and his henchmen in the Russian military will invade another less powerful European country. If that nation happens to be a NATO member, and a signatory to Article 5, the US will be brought in to the war.

American military members will become involved and shall be sent to defend whichever nation Russia has invaded. This is why these Republicans must stop playing this dangerous game of Russian roulette and approve the president’s full military aid request for Ukraine immediately. Our NATO allies have already contributed $50 billion to Ukraine.

Frank H. Baumgardner, III 

Santa Rosa

BILL KIMBERLIN:

Vincent van Gogh’s “The Cafe Terrace”

I photographed the original building in Arles, France as it exists today and here placed it beside his famous painting.

Vincent van Gogh’s “The Cafe Terrace” stands as one of the painter’s most remarkable works. It is also, without question, one of the most famous produced in Van Gogh’s brief but prolific career.

This work is the first in a trilogy of paintings which feature starlit skies. “Starry Night Over the Rhone”, came within a month, followed by the popular, “Starry Night” painted the next year in Saint-Rémy.

In a letter to his sister van Gogh wrote:

“In point of fact I was interrupted these days by my toiling on a new picture representing the outside of a night cafe. On the terrace there are tiny figures of people drinking. An enormous yellow lantern sheds its light on the terrace, the house and the sidewalk even, causes a certain brightness on the pavement of the street, which takes a pinkish violet tone. The gable-topped fronts of the houses in a street stretching away under a blue sky spangled with stars are dark blue or violet and there is a green tree. Here you have a night picture without any black in it, done with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square acquires a pale sulphur and greenish citron-yellow colour. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. They used to draw and paint the picture in the daytime after the rough sketch. But I find satisfaction in painting things immediately.” (September 1888)

“There are people who want to fight to bring about peace—the most deluded souls of all. There will be no peace until murder is eliminated from the heart and mind. 

Murder is the apex of the broad pyramid whose base is the self. That which stands will have to fall. Everything which man has fought for will have to be relinquished before he can begin to live as man. 

Up till now he has been a sick beast and even his divinity stinks. He is master of many worlds and in his own he is a slave. What rules the world is the heart, not the brain, in every realm our conquests bring only death. 

We have turned our backs on the one realm wherein freedom lies.”

— Henry Miller

BIDEN TEMPERS MY HATE OF THE UNION

It's the worst interpretation of the dumbest provision of the Constitution, but I liked the speech.

by Benjamin Wittes

My fellow Americans:

I hate Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, which requires the President “from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union”—as though Congress can’t do its own research and figure out the union’s state on its own.

AI really hate Woodrow Wilson for interpreting this dumbest of provisions of Article II to make it even dumber—into a kind of pageant speech before a faux friendly audience of a joint session of Congress. 

I hate everything about the State of the Union.

I hate the pageantry of it.

I hate the fake show of chumminess among people who loathe one another.

I hate the interruptions with applause.

I hate the cameras panning for the people who aren’t applauding during the interruptions with applause.

I hate the laundry list of bills that aren’t going to pass.

I hate using awkward-looking people sitting with First Lady as props.

There is no American political tradition I dislike more than the State of the Union. 

And I blame the founders. And Wilson. And the media. 

And yet, for the first time in many years, I actually watched the speech this year. I watched it because this moment seems like a fateful one—for the world and for American democracy and for Biden’s presidency—and I was interested to see how the president approached the moment in this bullshit set-piece of a speech speech with House Speaker Mike Johnson sitting in back of him.

I was surprised at my reaction: I was delighted by it. 

I was really glad to see Biden opened tonight’s speech with Ukraine funding and to link that specifically to Jan. 6—that is, to emphasize the connection between the fight for democracy at home and the fight for democracy overseas. I appreciated with something approaching a malicious glee that the entire first half of the speech appeared written specifically to make Speaker Johnson squirm—and that it did, in fact, make him squirm as though sitting through it were a mortification of the flesh. I enjoyed the fact that Biden barely even pretended this wasn’t a campaign speech—and that he baited Republicans repeatedly with references to “my predecessor.” I loved watching Republicans unable to decline to take the bait and yell at the president, giving him opportunities to make them look silly. 

The state of the union is surely more precarious than Biden admits, but tonight’s State of the Union exceeded my expectations.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

President Potatohead tosses out another giveaway to buy some votes. Now he’s cancelling late fees and other credit card charges. Yea, the banks are gonna let that multi-billion profit stream go. I guess the responsible people who actually pay their bills on time will be taking up the slack. No problem. SloJoe goes on endlessly about “shrinkflation” like he just coined the term. That shit’s been going on forever. A 1 lb. can of coffee went to 13 oz. in the ’80’s I think. The 1/2 gallon of ice cream disappeared more than 20 years ago.

AMERICA ENTERS THE SAMIZDAT ERA

by Matt Taibbi

I began studying in Leningrad, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, beginning in the fall of 1989. I was 19 years old, more interested in girls than politics, and thought of life behind the Iron Curtain as more novelty than terror. There was little visible suffering or hardship. 

The once-mighty Soviet government was already a ghost ship and the closest thing to repression I saw was a farsovshik or black-market dealer shoved into a cop car near my school’s subway station.

Not until much later, after I’d heard years of stories from Russians who’d lived through harder times, did I start to understand the brutal system whose end I got to witness. Parents of friends talked about going on vacations and trying to guess who was the snitch on the “Intourist” bus (the ratio was one party snoop for every four or five travelers), or making sure to be out of earshot of the old lady sitting na lavochke (on the bench outside the apartment building) before sharing a dangerous opinion, or the stress of sharing a kommunalka, or communal apartment, with a politically orthodox family. The bloodiest period of Soviet totalitarianism ended in the fifties, but the habits remained long after, including the advanced system of alternative media that ultimately broke the state: samizdat.

Thursday night, along with Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, I’ll be accepting the inaugural Samizdat Prize, given by the RealClear Media Fund. Samizdat is a bit of a play on words, since like a lot of politically oppressive groups the Soviets had a mania for reducing beautiful language to state-acceptable ugly compound words (GosPlan, GULAG, etc.), so in place of GosIzdat (State-Publish, the official publisher) dissidents created Sam- or “Self” Izdat: “Self-Publish.”

Ten years ago PBS did a feature that quoted a Russian radio personality calling Samizdat the “precursor to the Internet.” Sadly this is no longer accurate. Even a decade ago Internet platforms were mechanical wonders brimming with anarchic energy whose ability to transport ideas to millions virally and across borders made episodes like the Arab Spring possible. Governments rightly trembled before the destabilizing potential of tools like Twitter, whose founders as recently as 2012 defiantly insisted they would remain “neutral” on content control, seeing themselves as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”

As writers like former CIA analyst Martin Gurri began noticing long before the election of Donald Trump, the Internet gave ordinary people access to information in ways that before had never been allowed. The inevitable result was that populations all over the world began to see more clearly the warts of leaders and governments that had previously been covered up, thanks to tight control over the flow of information. It also made communication and organization of dissident movements much easier. We started to see this with Occupy and the Tea Party in the United States, and the aforementioned Arab Spring, but the election of Donald Trump was the Rubicon-crossing event for information overlords.

I had the privilege (misfortune?) of seeing how presidential campaign journalism worked before the Internet took over. Politicians needed the mainstream press to reach high office. Sitting among the traveling press on campaigns of people like John Kerry and Barack Obama, I heard how campaign reporters talked, how they thought of their jobs. They were fiercely protective of their gatekeeping role, which gave them enormous power. If reporters didn’t think a candidate was good enough for them — if he was too “kooky” like Ron Paul, too “elfin” like Dennis Kucinich, or too “lazy” as just a handful of influential reporters decided about Fred Thompson — the “Boys on the Bus” would snort and trade cutting remarks in riffing sessions before and after events.

Campaigns would be elevated or die in these moments. I thought it was crazy, and said so in print, which made me a pariah, and I never thought it would end.

Then Trump came along and destroyed the whole system with one stroke, getting elected in spite of the blunt disapproval of media. His single Twitter account allowed him to bypass the press and speak to people directly. When that worked, and similar episodes like Brexit caused panic abroad, governments decided to take the anarchic potential of the Internet and turn it on its head. What was something like the “Self-publish” culture of the Soviet Union suddenly became, as we saw in the Twitter Files, an instrument of surveillance and social control.

Jay, Miranda, and I all share a connection to the same story. When Miranda published her blockbuster New York Post expose of October 14, 2020, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” Internet platforms Twitter and Facebook experimented for the first time with disappearing a major political story in the middle of an election year. Not only did both platforms suppress the story, but as I later found in internal correspondence, Twitter used tools previously reserved for child pornography to prevent individuals from sharing the story in direct messages — the digital version of a Cheka agent intercepting that copy of a Solzhenitsyn or Voinovich story before one person could hand it to another.

Meanwhile, when Dr. Bhattacharya conducted an experiment on his own initiative proving that the WHO had massively overstated the infection mortality rate of Covid-19, and later organized against lockdown policies he and many others felt were both ineffective and dangerous, the result was digital suppression — not because he was incorrect, but because his message was politically undesirable. Along with Bari Weiss, one of the first things I saw when Elon Musk opened Twitter’s internal files was a page showing Jay had been placed on a “trends blacklist.” This was just before we discovered that the platforms were in regular contact about content with agents of the American versions of the KGB or NKVD in the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, State, and Defense, among others.

The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat.

Worse, while the Soviets had to rely on primitive surveillance technologies, like the mandatory registration of typewriters, the Internet offered breathtaking new surveillance capability, allowing authorities to detect thoughtcrime by algorithm and instantaneously disenfranchise those on the wrong side of the information paradigm, stripping them of the ability to raise money or conduct business or communicate at all.

Like Jay and Miranda I’m sure, I’m honored to be chosen for the Samizdat prize, but also a little horrified that such an award is now necessary. People with dissenting ideas will now have to find alternative ways to distribute. As was the case in the Soviet Union, official news will be unpopular in America because the public will know in advance that it is full of untruths and false narratives — but that won’t translate into instant popularity for true reporting or great satire or comedy, because the reach of these things can be artificially suppressed.

We’re going to need to find new ways of getting the truth to each other, and it’s not clear yet how those networks will work, if they will at all. It may come down to handing each other mimeographed papers in subway tunnels, as they did in Soviet times. We haven’t built that informational underground yet, but no matter what, the first steps will necessarily involve raising awareness that there’s a problem at all. That’s why prizes like this are important, and the agitation and resistance of people like Jay and Miranda and so many others right now are so crucial. We don’t want our speech freedoms to go gentle into that good night; we want them to go kicking and screaming, or better yet, not go at all.

The good news? As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power, but even passed hand to hand, truth and good art do. The more the Soviets tried to clamp down, the more power they gave to books and stories like Master and Margarita or A Circle of Friends. As depressing as things sometimes look now, those who would suppress speech have the real problem. Imagine the problem of stopping the truth in the digital age? There will always be people who’ll try, but history shows — they never succeed for long.

REASON VS EMOTIONS 

by Tom Fantulin & Vincent Poturica 

1≥ and developing them into realities. Our ability to formulate thoughts can accomplish astonishing benefits or cause incredible harm. Unfortunately, the interpretive portion of our brain is underdeveloped.

These talents can accomplish astonishing benefits or incredible harm. Unfortunately, only a tiny portion of our brain governs our conscience. Plato once said, “There is a difference between how we perceive things and how they are;” As Western culture emerged from the Dark Ages, two giant intellects, Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, finally codified the Scientific Method. “Aristotle was the first to realize the importance of empirical measurement, believing that knowledge could only be gained by building upon what is already known. (Stanford science website). He realized it was dangerous not to distinguish fact from fallacy. Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century intellectuals felt that the Dark Ages were a perfect example of superstition and irrational thinking that caused harm. We usually learn from experience, except if untrustworthy information diverts our attention from critical examination. How we behave depends on the hypothalamus, the smallest part of our brain. In my mind, the seat belt controversy was one of the many irrational American attacks on reason. 

The point is FACTS should initiate change. Denial causes needless harm. Some governments dictate their opinions. Our system of government does not mandate unless it must. And when it does, it states a reason for its actions. Unfortunately, we do not realize fairness and public safety are part of its obligation. 

For years, eloquent orators like Frederick Douglas and MLK expressed the harm of unfairness. The fact no one responded to a valid complaint is a problem. Reason is powerless if the populace avoids the responsibility of responding. 

Part of our problem is who we believe. What is a credible source? An expert, an eyewitness, or a researcher. The conflict on our nation's seat belt policy displayed how Americans receive facts that cause change. Columnist Jane Brody's article for the New York Times presented a convincing argument for seat belts. But a response by Daniel Goldbeck drew more public support. “Unless the Constitution has been replaced with actuary tables, the governing principles of this nation are still based on basic rights of individual freedom.” 

While freedom of speech applies to everyone, its primary purpose is to promote reasonable debate—actual evidence produced by controlled testing. Ignorance is not a defense (S v De Blom S A 513 1977). Failure of proof is one thing, but denial of credible evidence is even worse. 

We know a jury cannot convict a felon by opinion. Facts are the foundation for a panel's decisions. If Americans want to be good democratic citizens, they should start acting like jurists. Plato once said, “There is a difference between how we perceive things and how they are;” consequently, Western culture devised a of verifying reality. “Aristotle, regarded as the father of science, was the first to realize the importance of empirical measurement, believing that knowledge could only be gained by building upon what is already known.” Socrates was one of the many prominent thinkers who opined that we must distinguish fact from fallacy. 

We usually learn from experience, except if untrustworthy information diverts our attention from critical examination. How we behave depends on the hypothalamus, the smallest part of our brain. In my mind, the seat belt controversy was one of the recent irrational American attacks on reason. 

If Americans want to be good democratic citizens, they should start acting like them.

HE’S WRONGLY CONVICTED OF MURDER. SHE’S A CALIFORNIA HIPPIE MOM. CAN THEY PROVE HIS INNOCENCE?

by Harriet Ryan

LOS ANGELES -- When the COVID shutdown began, Jessica Jacobs Dirschel, a mother of four in Topanga Canyon, was one of the many millions of people who staved off boredom by binging on Netflix.

Five hours into a documentary series about wrongful convictions, Dirschel hit pause and Googled the phone number of an attorney on the show who worked on exoneration cases.

When the lawyer answered, Dirschel said, “I want to help.”

* * *

Jofama Coleman had served 14 years of a life sentence for murder when the pandemic lockdown came to the state prison in Corcoran, Calif. Almost every day behind bars, he had taken some step to try to prove his innocence, researching case law, drafting court filings and writing letter after letter asking innocence groups and appellate lawyers to review his case.

“The vast majority of people just don’t believe you,” he said. As the years went by, he said, “I gave up the idea that someone out there would actually do what was necessary to help.”

Yet, as he lay quarantined in his bunk, cut off from the law library, Coleman knew that without someone on the outside, he would never leave prison.

It was, he thought, “kind of an impossible situation.”

* * *

Ellen Eggers answered the phone in her Sacramento home in March 2020 and heard an unfamiliar, high-pitched voice, swollen with emotion, telling her what a great lawyer she was.

Then 68, Eggers had spent the years since her retirement from the state public defender’s office working on exoneration cases without charge at her dining room table.

“It’s the best thing that a lawyer can do with their bar license: to get an innocent guy out of prison,” she had said in the Netflix series “The Innocence Files,” clenching her fist while her eyes welled with tears.

Her passion seemed to leap up from Dirschel’s laptop screen. She thought, I want to know her.

When she got Eggers on the phone, Dirschel said she was willing to do anything — absolutely anything — to assist. Eggers heard the words, but after decades in the criminal justice system, she couldn’t quite make sense of them.

“I don’t have people [calling] like that. People who want to help,” she recalled.

Eggers assumed Dirschel had a husband or brother locked up.

No, Dirschel told her. She didn’t know anyone in prison.

Was she some sort of attorney, Eggers wondered.

“I’m a teacher,” Dirschel told her. “In Topanga.”

* * *

Coleman’s ex-wife was watching Netflix that spring too. Evelyn Medina knew Coleman was not guilty of the drive-by shooting in South Los Angeles in 2003 that had landed him in prison, because she had been with him in his green Toyota Camry that night.

The jury hadn’t believed her story, and their marriage fell apart with him in prison. But they had a daughter together and stayed in touch.

Medina had sent Eggers’ name to Coleman, but he sat on it awhile, doubting he could endure another disappointment. Eventually he wrote a letter.

Eggers was swamped with two big cases — both would end in exonerations — and did not have time to answer all the inmate mail she got. She scanned Coleman’s letter and set it aside.

Sometime later, Deandre Coleman called Eggers about his brother’s case. A year younger, Deandre considered Jofama his best friend. Watching him languish behind bars for something he didn’t do had become its own sort of prison.

“What he was going through, I was going through,” he said.

He begged Eggers to take his brother’s case. She was tough, having spent years representing death row inmates, but also empathetic, and his pleading touched her. Still, she didn’t have the bandwidth to take on another case.

What she did have, she realized, was one very willing volunteer.

* * *

Dirschel was, in many ways, a familiar California type. She grew up in Marin, went to college in Humboldt and, at 45, was raising her family in a hillside home with a backyard yurt in Topanga.

She was a vegetarian, of course, and skeptical of Western medicine. Single-use plastic kept her up at night, and she embraced the buy-nothing movement. She was such a hippie, she said quoting an internet meme, that she found eating at McDonald’s more embarrassing than eating her placenta.

She had eaten three of them and delivered two of her children unassisted, the last, a girl named Koriander, in a Canadian hotel room, because Donald Trump was about to be elected president.

After teaching high school math, she opened an “unschool” in her home in 2018 and named it DITCH School, which stood for “Dare to Innovate and Transcend Cultural Hegemony.” It reflected her belief that authority must be challenged.

“Kids learn what they want, when they want, how they want, and if they want,” she said. The approximately 50 students included Olympic athletes, entrepreneurs or actors with busy schedules; others had mental health challenges or were in recovery from addiction; others just hated traditional school.

By combing educational laws and policies for loopholes — “hacks,” she called them — she had developed a program that allowed students to enroll in community college while still in elementary and middle school and then transfer to universities as young teens. Her oldest son started UC Berkeley at 14.

When Eggers asked her to look into Coleman’s case, she was thrilled.

At Corcoran, Coleman had not expected to be passed off to a teacher with no legal experience, but he decided to be optimistic.

What choice did he really have?

* * *

The visitor line formed early and moved slowly at Men’s Central Jail in downtown L.A.

Deandre Coleman often waited there for hours with other relatives, including a baby.

Medina was four months pregnant when Jofama Coleman was arrested. In letters back and forth from jail, they discussed names. Jocelyne Anicia Coleman was born in 2004 as her father awaited trial. By the time a jury found him guilty in 2006, she was walking.

In the jail’s cramped visitor booths, Coleman’s family would hold Jocelyne up to the plexiglass to see her father and put the telephone to her small ear to hear his voice. The visits lasted about 15 minutes.

The sadness, Deandre Coleman recalled, “was overwhelming.”

Jofama Coleman was one of eight children raised by a single mother in a South L.A. neighborhood officially called Westmont but sometimes known as Death Alley. Awash in gangs and poverty, the area around Vermont Avenue north of Imperial Boulevard has historically been one of the deadliest places in Los Angeles County.

Coleman’s home life was difficult. One of his mother’s boyfriends beat her in front of her children and hit Coleman and his brother for small infractions, such as chewing food too loudly. Another boyfriend was an addict who sold Coleman’s stereo — which he had saved up wages from a fast food job to buy — to purchase drugs.

In high school, Coleman joined a tagging crew that functioned as a junior varsity gang, later testifying, “I felt I needed protection.”

The crew graffitied walls, threw parties and got in fistfights with rivals. Coleman sometimes carried guns that belonged to friends. He participated in a group attack on a man whose injuries required seven stitches, leading to an assault conviction in 2002.

As he left his teenage years, Coleman’s attention shifted. He got a job at United Rentals, rising from cleaning equipment on the yard to coordinating sales for the front office. He worked a lot and, in his downtime, hung out with Medina. At 20, he was looking forward to getting his own place and having a family.

The day of the drive-by murder was just another Saturday in this new adult life, he later said. He picked up food from Jack in the Box, tooled around in his Camry with Medina and rented some movies. He said, “I was in a good place.”

* * *

Coleman stepped off a prison bus at Corcoran in 2008 with a sentence of 25 years to life. Inmates had access to various self-help programs — educational, substance abuse, anti-gang, anger management — that might improve their chances of parole years or decades down the line.

Coleman rejected them all.

“I’m in here for a crime I didn’t commit, and I need to fight to prove it,” he recalled thinking.

He got a job in the law library and began learning from other inmates and legal textbooks. His clearest path seemed to be shoring up his alibi. For at least part of the night of the murder, he had been inside the Blockbuster Video on Western Avenue with Medina.

There was store surveillance video, but when a prosecutor tried to play it at Coleman’s trial, it appeared scrambled. Jurors were left to rely instead on testimony from a sheriff’s detective who had reviewed the recording at Blockbuster.

He told the jury that the cameras didn’t capture Coleman entering the store and showed him inside for less than five minutes, leaving with three movies at 9:38 p.m. That was about 40 minutes after the crime. Because the scene of the shooting was a five- to seven-minute car ride away, jurors heard, Coleman had plenty of time to carry it off, change vehicles, pick up Medina and drive to Blockbuster.

The rapid switch from drive-by to date night was by criminal design, the prosecutor told jurors. Coleman needed an alibi and probably didn’t realize the store had cameras. That he appeared to have raced through his purchases was telling, the prosecutor said. “You ask yourself, when was the last time you were able to go to Blockbuster and pick out three movies in five minutes.”

The low-budget gangster releases he chose, including one called “Love and a Bullet” showed “where his mind-set was at that point,” she said.

In the law library, Coleman found a reference to forensic video analysis. He located an expert in Orange County and got a cousin to foot the bill. The expert separated the surveillance feeds and sent a disc to Coleman in 2009.

When he pressed play on a DVD player borrowed from a prison classroom, the interior of the Blockbuster sprang to life. There had been four cameras, not one. The angles had been mashed together because the prosecutor had used a regular VHS player instead of a machine for screening multiple views.

Now Coleman could clearly see the customers from that night browsing the shelves, lining up at the register, coming and going. He watched himself from six years earlier, striding through the front door, Medina at his side.

The time stamp read 9:25 p.m.

Coleman cursed under his breath.

Twenty-five minutes after the shooting was not the automatic get-out-of-jail-free card he had hoped. Still, he thought, it might be grounds for a new trial.

He spent the next year drafting and redrafting a writ of habeas corpus, the last-ditch attempt of a prisoner who has exhausted his appeals to overturn his conviction. Coleman had only a GED diploma and had never been a standout student. But with his future at stake, he learned quickly. He plowed through complicated case law, learned to cite precedent and picked up the measured, confident writing style of an appellate lawyer.

“Petitioner contends that the twenty five (25) minutes window of opportunity could have been broken down tremendously, creating a serious degree of reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury,” he wrote in a filing that ran more than 300 pages.

Habeas work is notoriously hard. Even veteran post-conviction lawyers struggle to get their cases heard in court. But in 2011, a federal magistrate judge read the petition Coleman had written on a typewriter in his cell and granted him an evidentiary hearing.

“Many experienced attorneys could not achieve what you achieved,” one lawyer told him.

At the hearing, the magistrate listened to a video expert as well as additional testimony suggesting the route from the crime scene to Blockbuster was longer than previously accepted.

But in the end, the court denied Coleman’s petition. Even accepting his interpretation of the new evidence, the magistrate told him, he still could have gotten to the Blockbuster parking lot with three minutes to spare.

* * *

By the time Dirschel entered his life in 2021, Coleman had spent years trying to get his hands on a complete copy of the so-called murder book, the case file investigators build while working a homicide.

The L.A. County district attorney’s office had given the court-appointed lawyer who represented him at his trial some investigative files as part of the discovery process, but that lawyer no longer represented Coleman and had stopped responding to his calls and letters. (The lawyer was subsequently disbarred.)

He tried to get a court order for the district attorney to turn over the material, but a judge in L.A. refused. Coleman was certain the law was on his side, and he kept appealing all the way to the state Supreme Court. The justices sided with him.

Actually getting the documents required a hearing in L.A., and because Coleman did not have a lawyer, Dirschel went. She was supposed to just collect the records, but she had read up on his case. As the proceedings got underway, she started addressing the judge the way a lawyer would.

Coleman, she said, was actually entitled to two murder books: His and that of a second man, Abel Soto. A year after a jury convicted Coleman as the wheelman in the drive-by shooting, a different jury convicted Soto of being the shooter.

The judge might have been taken aback at a document “runner” arguing legal points in his courtroom, but it would not have surprised anyone who knew Dirschel. Though she didn’t look intimidating at 5 feet tall with a messy bob and a huge smile, she was a bulldozer who would push and push and push, in the sweetest of voices, to get her way.

Just give her both files, the judge finally told the district attorney.

Coleman, who knew something about persistence, was impressed.

“She finds ways to get answers,” he said.

* * *

Eggers, the exoneration attorney, was still swamped with her other cases. She told Dirschel that the best way to help Coleman was to take careful notes on the murder books, trial transcripts and other records and produce a very detailed memo that a lawyer might rely on at some later date.

Dirschel took a different tack.

“I read it the way I would read a novel,” she said. The police reports became her bedtime reading and the interrogation recordings like riveting podcasts.

The records laid out the murder of 16-year-old Jose “Chino” Robles on May 10, 2003. It was Mexican Mother’s Day, and his family was hosting a barbecue at their 101st Street home.

About 9 p.m., a white van with wood paneling turned onto the street. Someone inside fired a semiautomatic gun twice at Chino, who was on the sidewalk. Struck, he clung to a fence for support. A man then exited the van’s passenger side, trained a handgun on the teen and unloaded 15 rounds. The gunman got back in the van and the driver sped away.

Homicide detectives began working the case immediately but never found the gun or connected either Coleman or Soto to a van. The cases against both suspects rested on eyewitness testimony.

Chino’s younger brother, Jesse, then 15, had identified Coleman as the driver of the van. Subsequently others on the block at the time of the shooting also pointed the finger at Coleman.

The purported motive was payback for a confrontation earlier that day between Chino and Coleman’s 15-year-old brother, Jeremy. A group of neighborhood teens had hassled Jeremy as he walked to visit his girlfriend. He told Jofama that one of them, Chino, had struck him in the arm with a baseball bat.

Coleman was dubious — his brother’s arm looked fine — but he drove his Camry to the scene of the encounter. He later testified that when he spotted a group of teens, he shouted from the driver’s seat, “Which one of you was trying to fight my brother?” Getting no response, Coleman drove away. Just don’t walk down that block anymore, he said he told his brother.

To Dirschel, it was obvious she needed to speak with Jesse Robles. Coleman had heard years earlier that Robles had regrets about his testimony, but Coleman was unable to nail it down from prison.

Having fallen into a life of crime after his brother’s death, Robles was incarcerated in Blythe, near the Arizona border.

“We can get to him,” Dirschel told Eggers, whom she wanted to accompany her. The lawyer was skeptical. Why would the victim’s brother have anything helpful to say? Dirschel kept nagging.

“Think of it as a girls’ trip,” she said at one point. “It’ll be fun.”

Eggers relented, and they soon found themselves at Chuckawalla Valley State Prison sitting across from the man who had sealed Coleman’s fate. Now 34, he listened as they explained the purpose of their visit.

“I was waiting for someone to come speak to me again,” Robles recalled telling them. “What took you so long?”

What really happened, he later explained, was that another teen had speculated to him that Coleman was involved in the murder because of the earlier confrontation between Chino and his brother.

“I, like, ran with it and told everyone it was Jofama,” he said. Before long his father heard and brought the detectives to him, saying, “Tell them what you saw.”

Afraid to disappoint his already traumatized family, he said he had seen Coleman behind the wheel. In the following months, he watched as others in his circle adopted and enhanced his account.

“They started saying, ‘Yeah, it was Jofama and it was Abel Soto,’” he said. The truth was, it was dark, and he couldn’t see the driver or the shooter.

As the women across the table sat shocked, Robles picked up a pen and piece of paper and started writing a complete recantation of his testimony.

* * *

Coleman and Dirschel burned up the phone lines between Topanga and Corcoran discussing developments. Between calls, electronic sticky notes that began, “Ask Jofama,” accumulated on her computer desktop.

“Is Abel innocent too?” was one question.

Though Coleman and Soto belonged to tagging crews in the same neighborhood, they had never been close. Coleman was five years older, an almost generational divide to a 15-year-old, as Soto was at the time of the murder.

Detectives had interrogated Soto four times, including once when three detectives went at the teenager for an hour and a half. He never wavered on his innocence, even when they told him, falsely, that they’d found his DNA at the crime scene and that Coleman had ratted him out.

 “I’m not the type of person who would go out and shoot somebody,” he said. His older brother, Juan Ramon, had been murdered in 2000, and he insisted he would never cause that pain to some other family, telling a detective,” I can’t have another lady feeling the same thing that my mom felt.”

The first jury to hear the evidence hung. The second convicted him of murder. The sentence was 72 years and eight months to life in prison. He was 20.

Soto ended up at the prison in Susanville in the remote northeastern corner of the state. While Coleman toiled away in the Corcoran law library, Soto often was unable to leave his cell. Entire units were put on 23-hour-a-day lockdowns to punish the misconduct of one person. Soto recalled one lockdown that stretched 26 months.

“When things are quiet, you can get stuck in your head. Thinking about everything. If things were different, if this, that and the other,” he said. Eventually, he said, it can drive a person crazy.

The case against Soto had turned on a single witness: a 15-year-old friend of Chino’s who said he saw Soto as he got back in the van.

As Dirschel read the murder book, the identification seemed a lot shakier. The teenager was standing 216 feet away from the shooting — about two-thirds the length of a football field. Immediately afterward, he told one officer that the killer looked like a Latino man who belonged to the Mexican Kicking Ass gang. Later at the sheriff’s station, he reported that the shooter was a Black man who looked like “Willy” from the Dog Pound Gangsters.

Ten months later, the teen named Soto as the shooter. But when asked to pick him out of a photo lineup, he couldn’t. Two more years passed before the detectives circled back again, this time with a lineup that included a different photo of Soto. That’s him, the teen said, pointing to Soto. The following year, he confidently identified Soto from the witness box at trial.

It was a tortured path for sure, but in the end, the teen said he was certain, and the jury accepted his word. It might have been a dead end. But then in the spring of 2022, a former student of Dirschel’s signed up for a UC San Diego course titled “Memory and Amnesia.”

John Wixted, a psychology professor, lectured one day about a new analysis he had done of witness identifications. The research, which he and some colleagues had published in a scholarly journal a year earlier, showed that witnesses’ memories could be contaminated if they were shown a suspect’s picture more than one time.

Each face in a photo lineup created a tiny memory in the witness’ brain. If shown the same person in a later lineup, the picture might seem familiar even if the person had nothing to do with the crime.

“Test a witness’s memory for a given suspect only once,” Wixted summarized. “It’s really important to listen to what they say on that first test.”

Given the implications for Soto, the lecture “sort of seemed like fate,” said Sonny Ryder, Dirschel’s former student. Wixted agreed to review the evidence and concluded in a report that the teenager’s identification was worthless.

* * *

From the start, Dirschel wanted to reach out to the homicide detectives who worked the case. Coleman thought it pointless. Why would the men who put him behind bars want to help?

Eggers, with her decades of defense work, was more blunt: “They don’t like us. And it’s mutual.”

Dirschel was not deterred. She focused on lead detective Mark Lillienfeld, who had left the case before it concluded. Googling, she learned that Lillienfeld was still with the Sheriff’s Department.

Then-Sheriff Alex Villanueva had called Lillienfeld out of retirement after his 2018 election to work on a new task force the sheriff said would root out public corruption. Villanueva’s critics derided it as a thinly veiled way to target political enemies.

One story Dirschel read described an incident in which Lillienfeld dressed as a jail deputy to try to sneak contraband fast food to an inmate informant.

“He’s a little bit rogue,” she thought. “Maybe he’ll talk to me.”

Dirschel found Lillienfeld’s email address online and introduced herself as a teacher whose students were studying wrongful convictions. They would love to hear from a real homicide detective, she told him. Is there any way you would consider a presentation?

Lillienfeld bit. When he showed up at the address she provided in October 2022, he seemed confused.

Inside, a group of tweens and teens from DITCH School, who really were taking a criminal justice course, assembled on living room couches. Whatever his misgivings, Lillienfeld proceeded with a PowerPoint presentation.

At the conclusion, Dirschel told him, “I have a confession to make. I brought you here kind of under false pretenses.”

She explained that she was reinvestigating Chino’s murder and thought detectives had arrested the wrong men. Will you help? she asked.

Lillienfeld agreed. It is unclear why. He declined an interview request from The Times.

Lillienfeld had overseen Coleman’s arrest and interrogated Soto. Standing in Dirschel’s living room, he told her he had no reason to doubt their guilt.

She brushed off his skepticism and used him as an ad hoc police expert. In texts and phone calls, she peppered him with questions about the mechanics of investigations and kept him abreast of new developments. He started calling her “lambchop” and confiding in her about the politics of the Sheriff’s Department.

His boss, Villanueva, was up for reelection that fall and losing badly in the polls. Knowing his own days at the Sheriff’s Department might be numbered, Lillienfeld reached out to Dirschel, she recalled.

If you want to see the complete homicide file, he told her, now is the time.

They met at the sheriff’s Homicide Bureau in Monterey Park. Without speaking to any of the detectives, he ushered Dirschel into a conference room and returned with a box.

Much of the material inside was in the murder books, but there were internal memos between detectives that she had not seen. One was a 2004 email written to Lillienfeld by a junior detective dealing with the teenage witness who claimed Soto was the shooter.

“Problem,” he told his boss. The witness “knows the suspect, went to school with him … but could not make the six pack ID.”

Lillienfeld told Dirschel not to photograph the letter with her phone, as she had with other documents, but he permitted her to copy the words down in a notebook. And he noted how little the box of evidence weighed, Dirschel said, remarking, “There’s no way they got two convictions out of just this.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” she replied.

* * *

Lillienfeld had said something early on, Dirschel said, that stayed with her. The only way you can really clear these guys, he told her, is to prove who actually did it.

The murder books showed the detectives had other leads. There was a rumor about a person in the neighborhood who supposedly knew the identity of the shooter. Detectives had only a gang nickname to go on and were not able to find the potential witness despite much effort.

(The Times is not identifying the person out of safety concerns raised by the district attorney’s office.)

Dirschel was rereading investigators’ records one morning when she stumbled across notes from a brief interview with someone whose name bore a similarity to the gang moniker. Dirschel let out a shout. The police had talked to the person they were searching for. They just didn’t know it.

With a few Google searches, Dirschel located the person living outside Los Angeles. She wanted to call immediately, but Eggers was wary. Such an important witness should be approached in person, ideally by a trained investigator. They did not have money for travel or an investigator.

Ultimately, Coleman made the decision. Dirschel placed the call on Dec. 24, 2022, figuring, “If someone wants to do the right thing, even a little bit, Christmas Eve is the time to do it.”

When the person answered, she began, “Hi, my name is Jessica. This is going to sound really weird.”

Dirschel explained that she was looking for information about a murder that had occurred many years ago in L.A.

“The one on Mother’s Day?” the person asked.

Yes, Dirschel said. There are two people in prison who might be innocent.

The person said they weren’t alone and would have to call back the next day.

But there was no call on Christmas, and two texts Dirschel sent the day after that went answered. Finally on Dec. 27, the person phoned Dirschel and explained that they had needed time to pray for guidance.

“The story had been weighing on me for many years,” the person wrote later in a sworn declaration. At one point, they had even called the police but couldn’t reach the right person and gave up. Now, the person said, “I decided that God wanted me to come forward with the truth.”

The truth, the person told Dirschel, was that a gang member had confessed that he had shot and killed Chino. The person repeated the account on a call with Eggers and later in two recorded interviews with Lillienfeld.

“Two innocent people should not have to be in prison,” the person said.

* * *

Coleman had taught himself not to get his hopes up, but in Corcoran last year — his 19th behind bars — it was becoming increasingly hard. Eggers, who had agreed to take his and Soto’s cases, had reached out to the district attorney’s office. A team that reexamined convictions was willing to meet.

In the living room where Dirschel had charmed Lillienfeld, she and Eggers rehearsed a clear, matter-of-fact presentation. Her husband and Egger’s sister stood in for prosecutors. When they finally met with a deputy district attorney and an investigator downtown, Eggers introduced Dirschel as “a teacher friend who has been helping me.”

The meeting seemed to go well, but the district attorney’s office wanted to conduct its own investigation, meaning more waiting. Coleman came up for a parole hearing in July. Victims’ families can make a statement, and Jesse Robles attended.

“We all miss my brother,” he began. He went on to say he was “deeply ashamed” of having falsely accused someone. “I apologize to you, Mr. Coleman, for what I did.”

As he awaited a decision, Coleman allowed himself to start planning for a life outside prison. He had ended up taking college classes inside, and Dirschel helped him fill out transfer applications with the help of her students.

He was paroled in January, just in time to start the spring semester at UC Riverside as a junior. On campus, he concealed his ankle monitor under jeans and did not share with many classmates his reason for pursuing a pre-law major at age 41. To those close to him, he explained that he hoped to be an attorney focused on exonerations: “What better person to relate to people who are wrongfully incarcerated than me?”

On a gray January day in downtown L.A., Deputy Dist. Atty. Lara Bazán told a Superior Court judge that her office no longer had confidence in Soto’s conviction. The reasons, laid out in a joint letter from the district attorney’s office and Eggers, included much of the evidence turned up by Dirschel — Jesse Robles’ recantation, the UC San Diego professor’s report, the doubts expressed in the memo to Lilienfeld and the witness account of the gang member’s confession.

Bazán asked the judge to vacate Soto’s conviction and declare him factually innocent.

Soto, now 36, watched on a video link from Soledad State Prison. Judge William Ryan granted the request with little fanfare. There were no congratulations or official apology, just a warning that the paperwork would take a few days to go through. The proceeding to undo 17 years of wrongful incarceration took less than five minutes.

Soto gave credit to Coleman, a man he still did not know very well.

“The whole time he has been in there just educating himself and just sticking with it,” Soto said. “I’m out, thanks to him.”

* * *

It seems impossible to analyze Dirschel’s success without considering race and class. If she weren’t an educated, middle-aged white lady from west of the 405, how much of this would have happened?

Coleman accepts that it was a factor.

“Whether it’s right or fair, I do think that plays a role,” he said.

When asked about it, Dirschel initially bristled, saying, “I don’t think anybody is like, ‘Oh, she’s white and she lives in Topanga, maybe we should give her our ear.’”

Instead, she said, “people are afraid of me, because I won’t accept an answer that doesn’t make sense, and I will make people’s lives difficult if they keep trying to do that.”

Sort of like a certain type of entitled woman who demands to talk to the manager?

Dirschel laughed.

“I am definitely a Karen,” she said, before correcting herself. Karens, she said, deploy their privilege when they shouldn’t. “I think an innocent person spending 20 years in prison is a time where you should be pushing and holding people accountable.”

She was already working on several new cases.

* * *

At a Tuesday afternoon hearing, a Superior Court judge made a formal finding that Coleman was factually innocent of Chino Robles’ murder.

“You’ve been granted relief, Mr. Coleman. Good luck,” Judge Ryan told him.

In the courtroom’s front row, Coleman’s daughter, now a 19-year-old college student, and his ex-wife wiped away tears and then applauded heartily along with his brother Deandre, Eggers and Dirschel.

It was a moment, Coleman said, that proved, “The fight is worth it.”

(LA Times)

THE GREAT ESCAPE: THE TRUE STORY OF THREE ALCATRAZ INMATES

by Fred Foster

Though the prison has been closed for decades, Alcatraz has earned its place in infamy. In its heyday, “The Rock” was considered impenetrable. At least thirty six prisoners attempted to escape the island – all were captured, shot, or swallowed by the sea. All of that changed one fateful day in June 1962, when a group of three men plunged into the San Francisco Bay in hopes of finding freedom. For years, their fates were unknown – most speculated that the prisoners had drowned in the tumultuous waters. But, 51 years after the fact, the discovery of a mysterious letter forced the FBI to reevaluate their presumptions about the daring escape artists of Alcatraz.

A Shocking Message

Back in January 2013, the San Francisco Police Department received a shocking message. “My name is John Anglin,” the handwritten note began. “I escaped from Alcatraz in June 1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris. I'm 83 years old and I have cancer.” Dropped into the laps of authorities was a long overdue clue to one of the most notorious mysteries in US history.

Back in the 60’s officials deemed that the unaccounted for men had almost certainly drowned in the dark, icy bay during their escape attempt. But, with the letter in hand, a shadow of doubt was suddenly cast over the long-accepted story.

Casting Doubt

For years, the escapees were presumed dead simply because it seemed to be the most plausible outcome of the case that had stumped law enforcement for years. However, the letter recovered in 2013 told a very different story. Naturally, some skeptics cast doubt on the validity of the document.

Unsure what to believe, the police department kept the letter under wraps for years. After careful examination, it was finally determined that there was some cause to believe the contents of the note. So, in January 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reopened the cold case.

Keep Watching

An Impossible Escape

What makes this particular escape remarkable is the fact that Alcatraz was designed to make it virtually impossible to escape. Until its closure in 1963, only the most despicable criminals were sent to the maximum security prison.

Of course, that never stopped those incarcerated from trying to escape. So, how exactly did Anglin and co. succeed where so many others had failed?

A History of Failed Jailbreaks

Believe it or not, these crooks were not the first individuals with enough moxie to attempt escape. At least a few dozen incarcerated inmates had taken the same risks over the years. Twenty three individuals were quickly captured and brought back behind bars.

Others weren’t so lucky. At least six men were shot and killed by guards as they attempted to execute their plans. Those that made it to the water drowned or disappeared.

No Cold Showers

When someone thinks about the US's most notorious prison, 'warm showers' isn't what would probably come to mind, but apparently, they were the norm in Alcatraz. However, it's not for the reason you think.

Although the prison provided the inmate with hot showers (and was the only prison in the US to do so), there was a sinister logic behind it. The strategic thinking behind this so-called luxury was that if the prisoners would grow accustomed to nice, warm showers, they would not be able to withstand the freezing Bay waters if they ever tried to escape. Did it work? That's for history to judge.

The Men Behind the Plan

Four men were a part of the group meticulously plotting a path to freedom – John and Clarence Anglin, Frank Lee Morris, and Allen West. The four men had cells near each other and endless hours to perfect their master plan.

Over the course of the investigation, it was revealed that the Anglin brothers knew Morris, as they had been shackled together while serving prison time in Atlanta. Fed up with penitentiary life, these men had nothing to lose – making them the perfect candidates to try something so risky.

Frank Lee Morris

Frank Lee Morris was nothing short of a criminal mastermind. At the age of 11, he was orphaned and forced to look after himself as he was shuffled between foster homes. Just two years later, he was convicted of his first crime. Over the years, his cunning increased and he developed into a skilled criminal.

After pulling off a string of armed robberies, the authorities ultimately caught up with him. He ultimately served time in Georgia and Florida before winding up at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the South”.

A Master Escape Artist

Unfortunately for those supervising him, Morris was never one to follow rules. Against all odds, he managed to escape the high security conditions in Louisiana. From there, he remained on the lam for about a year. During that time, he fell right back into his previous life of crime.

When the police finally caught up to him, they sent him to the real-life Alcatraz, where he reconnected with the Anglins. Morris proved to be a natural ringleader, and had no trouble convincing his old pals that he had the credentials to pull off a second prison break.

The Anglin Brothers

Born in Georgia, the Anglin brothers moved around early in life to help their parents with seasonal farm work. Two of thirteen children, they maintained a close bond that spanned far beyond adolescence.

Each year, the family migrated up north for cherry picking season. There, they splashed around the frigid waters of Lake Michigan and eventually grew into strong, skilled swimmers. Years later, this would prove to be crucial in their plans to escape Alcatraz.

Partners in Crime

Naturally, John and Clarence were perfect partners in crime as they reached adulthood. Like Morris, the two were serial bank robbers. Targeting establishments after hours, they took precautions to avoid interacting with or injuring others.

Because of their stealth, the two were able to pull off robberies for several years. Eventually, in 1956, they were caught, incarcerated, and sent to Atlanta Penitentiary.

 A Friendship Forms

Morris wasn’t the only one with escape on his mind. Several times, the Anglin brothers attempted to escape Atlanta Penitentiary. This eventually landed them at Alcatraz, where they met up with Frank Lee Morris.

Collectively, the men knew a thing or two about what it took to fool guards and get out of jail. Pulling in fellow inmate Allen West, the group of four men started to ponder how it might be possible for a person to escape “The Rock” alive.

The Perfect Storm

In order to understand precisely how the men made their way off the island prison, there are a few factors to take into consideration. Firstly, the four men were among Alcatraz’s very few non-violent offenders. Because they didn’t have a record of harming others, they were able to function under the radar and attract less attention from prison guards.

Furthermore, Alcatraz functioned as a factory as well as a prison. Those that found themselves within the walls of the penitentiary were forced to work making furniture, clothing, and shoes. As the men produced various resources, they were able to slowly but surely collect supplies for their eventual escape.

Fooling the Authorities

So, why exactly did the inmates need to accrue a collection of supplies? Their highly complex plan to escape Alcatraz, the notoriously isolated jailhouse, involved leaving behind handmade, human-like dummies.

Unlike today, escape attempts would likely be met with gunfire on the part of the tough Alcatraz guards. Therefore, it was of the upmost importance that the prison personnel not expect anything suspicious for as long as possible.

Crafting a Decoy

Each member of the team had their own set of responsibilities to take care of prior to the night of the great escape. The task of creating dummy heads to fill the beds of the escapees fell on the shoulders of the Anglin brothers.

The dummy heads were made with the supplies that were readily available – primarily, soap wax and toilet paper. The brothers were able to add a human touch to their creations with leftover hair collected at the Alcatraz barber shop.

Chipping Away

The dummies were just one part of the plan. The team also fashioned tools like picks and wrenches using everyday items, such as cafeteria spoons. With them, they’d chip away at bits of the wall whenever they were afforded the chance to do so.

Between 5:30 PM and 9 PM, the men were afforded a few precious unsupervised hours to work. After removing the vents in each of their cells, they were able to chisel away at the existing opening. Before long, they were able to create holes large enough to crawl through.

A Fortress Deteriorating

The task of fashioning tunnels and holes in the foundation of the prison was made easier by the fact that Alcatraz itself was beginning to crumble. Years of exposure to saltwater destroyed the pipes, and constant leaks deteriorated the walls over time.

By the time the escape was being planned, the prison was in serious need of repairs in certain areas. The salt water had even eroded the foundation’s cement.

Blocking out the Noise

Believe it or not, guards didn’t notice the banging and chipping of the inmates at work. This was thanks to the prison reforms of the 1960’s, which allowed inmates an hour of music. During this time, the prison would be filled with noise.

Whenever possible, Morris had an accordion that he would play. The noise of the instrument perfectly masked the sound of his fellow gang members hard at work.

No Man’s Land

Eventually, the prisoners discovered that the utility corridor was essentially unguarded. If the men could get the holes in each of their cells wide enough, they’d be able to climb up three floors to access the roof of the building. The only obstacle they’d have to overcome would be to shimmy up a large shaft to make it outside of the building.

Initially, the men found that the majority of the shafts were cemented shut. But luck was on their side – they eventually found an access point that they were able to pry open using a hand-fashioned wrench.

Squeezing Through

By the spring of 1962, both Anglin brothers and Morris had fashioned holes big enough to make the escape. The passageways were a claustrophobics nightmare, hardly large enough for a human body to squeeze through. But that was all the men needed to pull off their plan.

But getting out of the walls was only half the battle. Over the months, the men had stolen and subsequently stitched together a makeshift raft and set of life preserves using raincoats from the factory. Without these supplies, the men would have surely drowned in the icy bay.

Waiting for a Sign

When all of the preparations were in place, all the men had to do was wait for Allen West to finish his escape route and signal that he was ready to go. Once men West was ready, the gang would be able to slip out at a moment’s notice thanks to months of preparation on their end.

On June 11th, 1962, West signaled the others to let him know that he would be able to make it out of his cell. But, despite their thorough planning, the men would soon discover that not everything would go exactly according to plan.

The Big Day

When lights went out on the day the gang received West’s signal, the plan was finally put into action. They weren’t entirely confident in whether or not they’d succeed – chances were high that they wouldn’t make it out of the ordeal alive. However, the promise of freedom was enticing enough that they were willing to take the risk.

Adrenaline pumping through their veins, they weren’t going to succumb to their own fears. Instead, they tucked their decoys snuggly in bed and moved out as quickly as they possibly could.

A Snag in the Plan

Unfortunately, they ran into a snag over the course of their escape. The Anglin brothers and Morris were able to get out of their cells with ease, but the same could not be said for Allen West. Although he had signaled the gang, he had evidently misjudged the size of the hole he had built.

Initially, Morris did what he could to help his accomplice out. However, the cement wouldn’t budge, and the group came to the decision that West would have to be left behind.

Leaving One Behind

The men had been working together on their escape for months, so the decision to leave West behind was not one that they took lightly. However, the group knew that they weren’t left with many options. If they had tried to widen West’s hole on the spot, they would have certainly garnered attention from the guards.

So, West allowed the others to go on without him, resigned to his fate as a captive. Ultimately, leaving im may have been what saved the lives of the others – after all, the weight of one less man ultimately made the escape raft lighter.

Journey to the Shore

After squeezing through their tunnels, the men entered the utility corridor and climbed up 30 feet of plumbing to make it onto the roof. They then had to cross the rooftop and climb down an additional 50 feet of piping to make it to the ground.

When they finally set foot on solid land, they were able to silently make their way past the unsuspecting guards. They made it all the way to the shore, where the gang had to stop to inflate their rain jacket raft.

Sounding the Alarm

At around 11:30 at night, the raft was ready to go and the gang set sail. They were never seen or heard from again, and the next morning the guards finally discovered that the men were missing. 

That morning, all of the residents of the island were woken up by the sound of blaring sirens, signaling that there had been a security breach. Most of the prisoners and personnel were initially confused – surely, no one could have found a way out of the fortress. But, as they soon discovered, that was exactly what had taken place.

Too Little, Too Late

Although Allen West was left behind, he hadn’t quite given up on his hopes for freedom. Continuing to work on his hole through the night, he was finally able to squeeze through and make it out of his cell. Straight away, he ran after his three co-conspirators.

Unfortunately for him, by the time he was atop the roof they were long gone. He was then faced with a difficult decision; he could either return to his cell and safety or brave the treacherous waters of the bay. Not wanting to risk almost certain death, he went back inside.

Working with Authorities

Allen West crawled back to his bunk and waited til morning, when the alarms inevitably went off. The entire prison was searched, and eventually the authorities deduced that West was the only individual with any knowledge of the escape plan.

He cooperated with his captors fully and told them about the plot they had hatched. However, we may never know whether West was being entirely honest. According to his testimony, the men were headed to Angel Island, where they planned to steal a car, some clothes, and be on their way to start new lives.

Holes in the Plot

There was a hole in West’s story – there weren’t any reports of robberies within the two week period following the escape. Either the men didn’t make it past the bay, or they landed somewhere else entirely.

There were other holes that cast doubt on West’s story. He claimed to be the mastermind behind the escape plot, despite not making it out of the prison. Nevertheless, his account was all Alctraz had to work with. The FBI was called in to investigate the whereabouts of the trio.

 An Ice Cold Escape

Some of the men’s personal belongings were found floating in the freezing waters of the bay in the days following the escape, but there were never any bodies recovered. Had the men fallen overboard, they almost certainly would have perished – the temperatures of the San Francisco Bay hover in the low 50’s, regardless of the season.

According to experts, an adult male would be able to survive for around 20 minutes in the water before their body functions would begin to fail. Furthermore, the men weren’t acclimated to the cold, as the prison itself was intentionally kept warm.

A Fruitless Investigation

Only one hint that the men may have perished ever emerged, about a month after the escape. A Norwegian freighter spotted the sighting of a body about 17 miles away from the Golden Gate Bridge, donned in clothes similar to a prisoner’s uniform. However, by the time authorities made it out to the area, the alleged body was long gone.

For years, the efforts of the FBI were fruitless. After 17 years of investigation, they closed the investigation for good, concluding that the men likely drowned during the course of their escape. However, clues eventually cropped up to the contrary.

Evidence Emerges

According to a 2015 documentary produced by the history channel, evidence emerged that at the very least, the Anglin brothers had survived the ordeal. For instance, the family received handwritten Christmas cards that matched their script (although the delivery date could not be confirmed).

Eventually, the Anglin family even produced a photograph of the two men, taken in Brazil in 1975. Forensic experts analyzed the snapshot carefully and concluded that, “more than likely”, the two were indeed John and Clarence.

Family Ties

A deathbed confession from one of Anglin’s many siblings further pointed to the possibility that John and Clarence may be making a new life for themselves elsewhere. Just before Robert Anglin passed away, he confessed that he had been in contact with the two between the years of 1963 and 1987.

Though the Anglin clan has allegedly heard from the brothers, they’ve been deterred from actively searching for John and Clarence. The escape from Alcatraz is still an open Interpol investigation, and if the brothers were found, they’d be severely punished.

The Past Revealed

When the letter written by John Anglin was received by the police department, it seemed to confirm some of the rumors that had been floating around over the years. “We all made it that night, but barely,” Anglin reminisces. He then goes on to explain that Frank and Clarence had passed away in 2008 and 2011, respectively. 

Anglin also explained where he had shacked up over the years. Though parts of the note were illegible, it was revealed that he had spent the majority of his time post-escape in North Dakota and Seattle, Washington.

An Unconventional Deal

One of the last lines of the note proved to be the most shocking, as Anglin confessed that he was most recently living in “Southern California”. If the letter is indeed authentic, Anglin may have been living within a few hours of the prison he tried so desperately to escape all of those years ago.

As it turns out, the letter writer was evidently suffering from very poor health. In need of serious help, Anglin wrote in hopes that he might be able to seek medical treatment if he agreed to go back to jail – an unconventional offer, to say the very least.

Proving Authenticity

The letter concluded with an attempt at a negotiation. If a television announcement was made promising that he would be imprisoned for no more than a year and would receive adequate medical attention, Anglin would reveal his exact location.

But, before law enforcement could begin negotiations, the validity of the letter had to be investigated. Firstly, a careful analysis had to be conducted to determine whether any additional information could be gleaned from the note.

Results from the Lab

A lab full of forensic analysts searched for possible traces of DNA or partial fingerprints that might have been left behind on the paper’s surface. Handwriting experts also were brought in the compare the letter against writing samples sourced from all three escapees.

Eventually, local news outlets claimed that the results they garnered were inconclusive. In other words, the authenticity of the letter could not be confirmed or denied.

The US Marshals Respond

In the past, US Marshals had claimed that it was certainly possible that the prisoners could have escaped Alcatraz alive. Nevertheless, after the letter was released to the public, a representative claimed that the Marshals did not believe in the legitimacy of the note.

Despite their doubts, the Marshals Service has claimed that they will continue to investigate leads until proof emerges that they are dead – or, at the very least, that they’ve reached 99 years of age. But, with that milestone quickly approaching, concrete proof is unlikely to emerge. After all, the FBI’s 17 year investigation ended when they were unable to gather any credible information that the trio was still alive.

Open Investigation

The letter nly reached the public eye when a local news station was provided with a copy from an unnamed source. When the story broke, the Marshals were forced to provide a statement on the matter.

As the only organization to keep the case open after so many years, the Marshals knew the case inside and out after decades of investigation. “There is absolutely no reason to believe that any of them would have changed their lifestyle and became completely law abiding citizens after this escape,” they stated

New Discoveries

With renewed interest in their case, a group of researchers got to calculating what sort of conditions the inmates would have met the night of their escape. According to their findings, the current would have been in their favor if they left around midnight and there’s a very high likelihood that they would have been able to survive the treacherous waters.

With that information in mind, it makes sense why the Marshal’s Service has maintained an active warrant for the men all through the years. Back in 2009, a deputy stated that the organization “doesn’t give up looking for people”.

An Alcatraz Employee Speaks

In March 2018, the last guard to leave Alcatraz shed a bit more light on the situation. In honor of the 55th anniversary of the prison’s closing, Jim Albright agreed to an interview in which he was asked whether he believed Anglin and company could have survived their escape.

“I believe they drowned, I really do,” Albright stated in the interview. In his opinion, the men couldn’t have possibly made it to safety. Instead, he believes that the alleged John Anglin letter came from an individual desperate to find cancer treatment by any means necessary.

Where are they Now?

To this day, there still isn’t conclusive evidence on the fates of Frank Lee Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Anglin. Furthermore, it’s unclear whether law enforcement was ever able to get in touch with the author of the 2013 letter.

However, if the men are indeed still out there, they would be quite elderly. John Anglin would be 86 years old, while Clarence would be 87. Frank Morris would be celebrating his 90th birthday.

(12up.com)