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Posts published by “McEwen Bruce”

Double & Triple Jeopardy

You can’t be tried twice for the same crime in this fine, fair country of ours, the envy of the world for its just legal system. Unless. Unless you're Matthew Graves. Although Graves had been…

‘Go Ahead And Taze Me, Punk’

Nelson Vose began his life of crime early on, and by the time he was 31, in February of 1998, and living in Willits, he was a seasoned offender, a felon, denied the right to…

Warrant On Trial

Defense lawyers from all over the county crowded Judge Anne Moorman’s courtroom last Wednesday to hear how she would rule on this very point. An energetic free market Laytonville man named Samuel Baker stood accused of presiding over a large-scale pot op.

A Merry Courthouse Christmas

The jailhouse gossipmongers and rumor brokers are working over time, and the more credulous inmates are full of high hopes. One very popular rumor making the rounds at the Tweeker’s Holiday Inn on Low Gap…

Courthouse Review, 2013

When I returned from a sabbatical to the north last January, I was astounded to find that the local media was completely ignoring the murder trial of Glen Hughes.

Christmas In Prison

It’s no longer news that the career outlaw Walter ‘Kris’ Miller will be spending the rest of his days in prison for the attempted murder of a peace officer. But some of the details of…

Kiss This, Dick Tracy

Walter K. ‘Kris’ Miller took the witness stand to try and convince his jury not to send him to prison for the rest of his life. He’s a two-striker looking at a 100-mile an hour fastball of a third strike.

Shots Fired

It was an exciting night that crisp February 25th of this year, so exciting that Walter K. Miller's performance is playing again in Mendocino County Superior Court. Miller, 43, of Ukiah, is accused of leaning…

Defense Of Necessity

In the predawn hours of Monday September 16th of this environmentally catastrophic year, Peggy Backup, 64, of Willits, a former plant pathology researcher at UC Davis, and Lucy Neely, 27, an organic gardener from Ukiah,…

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