The lawyers tend to congregate in the entryway at Department B, just out of the sight of Judge Cindee Mayfield’s bench, so they can ask hurried questions of one-another pertaining to their cases, which are being called at a pretty brisk pace. The lawyers can’t always keep abreast, due to the nature of their clients (remember, it’s a criminal court, and defendants often as not have to come in chains to be on time – and even then the casual courthouse visitor would be amazed to see how much delay they can cause).
Several cases are usually in hand at any given time, some on hold for a bit of paperwork to be filled out, others for a flat tire in a borrowed car en-route from Covelo, or a conflict of interest when you just found out your client is your mother-in-law’s ex, or you have to wait for the deputy prosecutor assigned your case to finish a trial in another department which, I believe, was the cause of the delay when Judge Mayfield called “the matter of Clorissa Bernice Dennison,” 21, four-year resident of the streets of Ukiah.
“Michael Shambrook for Ms. Dennison, your honor, who is present and coming forward (c’mon, Clorissa, step forward)… Your honor, this matter comes on for judgment and sentencing, and we’re prepared to go forward, but the prosecutor, Ms. Norman is before the court in another department, so if we could pass this briefly…?”
Mr. Shambrook shepherded his shy-looking client into the entryway, cooing encouragement, and assiduously searching his pockets for a bit of money because Clorissa had been on the streets the night before, sleeping rough, like she had been doing since she was 16, and “Shammy,” as his clients call him, wanted to buy her a cup of coffee or chocolate at Schat’s Bakery before the case went forward, and his client, a repeat offender, was sentenced to a cold cell at the jail.
Shambrook didn’t have any money on him, so he bummed some off another loitering lawyer, “Hey, Bill, lend me a fiver, will ‘ya?”
“Sure, but all I got’s a $20.”
“Thanks, Bill. Listen, Clorissa, here’s some money. Go down to Schat’s and get some coffee or something. It’s going to be about half an hour. Be back here at 10:15, okay?”
Clorissa had never reappeared that day. The twenty was too much temptation.
Last Thursday, she was back in court, this time in chains.
It appears Ms. Dennison has a friend on the streets – what’s called a road dog, in the vernacular – a guy who took her under his wing, so to speak, taught her the proverbial ropes – how to dumpster-dive, which are the most fruitful dumpsters to dive in, when does the trash tide come in? (when is the dumpster full?), when does it go out? (when do the trash trucks come?) … Where do we eat? … Where do we sleep?
“Wull, ya don’t have to worry much about eating and sleeping when you’re on meth all the time, do ya?”
Clorissa was a repeat offender of the 11550 type, which means she’d been found to be under the influence of a controlled substance, meth or heroin, and because she hadn’t returned to court last time, it meant she was going to go to jail for six months.
Defense attorney Shambrook pleaded eloquently for a day-for-day stint in a rehab program instead, and then a three-year term of probation afterwards, but the prosecutor, Deputy DA Elizabeth Norman, wanted a clean break from the road-dog, a certain Mr. Hoff, a bad influence, Ms. Norman asserted.
A delicate point Mr. Shambrook brought up with an air of regret was that he didn’t know, or couldn’t remember, what it was like to be 21 and in love. “Sorry, your honor, but to tell her she can’t have any contact, as Ms. Norman is suggesting, with the person she feels is the most, well, your honor, we would only be asking that since she’s going to be going away for a long time into rehab at Friendship House in San Francisco, thanks to Mr. Martin Martinez, here — thank you for coming today, Mr. Martinez — that by the time she gets out things may well have changed in Mr. Hoff’s living arrangements…”
Shambrook was reading it all off a yellow legal pad, notes he’d prepared earlier. His sheepishly demure client stood humbly behind him, and he didn’t like to say that Hoff wasn’t likely to wait around for half a year for Clorissa, because of course such a cynical comment would only bruise his lovestruck client’s tender feeling.
Ms. Norman was being what Mr. Shambrook, in his British accent, would term “awfully governessy” about his client’s romance with Mr. Hoff, telling the judge, “No, she’ll only fall right back into her old ways [dumpster-diving, panhandling, meth abuse]. To Shambrook’s class conscious British mind, Ms. Norman must have sounded like the chatelaine of an English manor disapproving of a love match between a kitchen scullion and an heiress, as “inappropriate.”
But it seems that a charming young Native American maiden like Clorissa, panhandling for her road dog at WalMart or Safeway – well, without putting too Dickensian a point on it, any old hand off the streets would estimate Clorissa’s earning power way up in the triple digits, upwards of something like $100 per hour in the right location! Nothing short of a three-legged dog could compete with her in the soft-touch department.
Then we learned, to no one’s surprise, that road dog Mr. Hoff had a drug problem, too, “problem” being the euphemism for a compulsion overwhelming all other human desire. When Clorissa had absconded with the charitable $20 it is unlikely she paused at Schat’s for coffee, but instead ran straight to her road dog’s kennel and…. 4 A U4EA, dude – get it? — the most common size meth bags are sold on the streets for $20 (no sales tax).
You can imagine how proud old man Hoff must have been of his young acolyte. Yeah, sure, maybe he wouldn’t swim the wide Missouri, like the guy in the song “Shenandoah” – let alone the Mighty Mississippi – for his Indian maiden. But it was clear to Clorissa, to judge by her impassioned entreaties to her lawyer, that she must have felt certain that her beloved road dog, Hoff, would at least wade the Russian River for her, even though he would have to brave the river ogre in the form of Supervisor John McCowen and maybe what we had here was a love stronger even than an eight-ball.
Judge Mayfield turned to Probation Officer Tim King for his input on the question of whether to check box No, 13 in the Terms of Probation, which would mean that Clorissa have no contact with Mr. Hoff.
Mr. King shrugged eloquently, and the discussion changed to whether Mr. Hoff should also be in treatment for his addiction, until in the end this reporter couldn’t be certain whether box No. 13 was checked or not, but the jail time was converted to day-for-day in rehab and Mr. Martinez would drive Ms. Dennison to Friendship House in San Francisco.
Then there was the case of Mr. Guevara – no, not Ché – rather, Joshua Espinoza Guevara, who was so totally tweaked that he tried to get into a police cruiser driven by Officer Corning of the Ukiah Police Department.
“He tried to open the patrol vehicle door and when I asked him why, he said it looked suspicious.”
Deputy DA Tom Geddes: “What exactly did he do?”
Corning: “He at first put his hands on either side of his face, like this, to see inside through the glass, then he reached down and pulled the handle to open the door.”
Geddes: “What did you do?”
Corning: “I arrested him for tampering [with a police car], and asked if he had any contraband. He advised me he didn’t. I advised him if he did, and gave it to me before going to the jail it would only be a misdemeanor, but if he took it inside the jail and it was found there, it would be a felony.”
At the jail the corrections deputies searched Guevara and found a smidgen of meth, 0.1 grams.
The question for defense, public defender Daniel Moss: “Was that a usable amount – enough to get high on?”
Corning: “I don’t think there’s a set amount, but my patrol sergeant said it was.”
Judge Mayfield called for a recess. When I later spoke with Mr. Geddes he informed me that the meth was reduced to a mere misdemeanor and the tampering charge dropped.
These were the entertainments that took center stage as we waited for Noah Myles Luranhatt, the main attraction, set to begin at 10:00 o’clock.
Mr. Luranhatt was in custody, at the jail, but as mentioned above, the defendants can cause delays, even when they’re in custody, and it was nearly noon before Luranhatt was finally brought in by the corrections deputies – and what a disappointment when his lawyer from the public defender’s office, Heidi Larson, stood up and said, “we’re declaring a doubt [as to the guy’s sanity], your honor.”
In other news, the new Public Defender Jeffrey Aaron finally appeared in court on Monday, October 1st – the day after CEO Angelo gave him a pre-work raise, and since all the upper echelon members of the County bureaucracy have been getting raises, the reasoning must be, well, why not — it’s all going south anyway, get it while you can and screw the peons who had to take pay cuts back in ’09!
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