A former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy was charged today, Friday, with agreeing to accept $20,000 in bribes in exchange for smuggling contraband to an inmate inside the troubled Men’s Central Jail, the facility that has been ground zero for the inmate-abuse-by-deputies scandal.
The case against Gilbert Michel, 38, was announced by United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. and Thomas E. Perez, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.
Michel was of course the guy whose arrest for smuggling in a cell phone at the behest of the FBI’s confidential informant got Sheriff Baca all in a lather. (Baca has since backed off and stopped blaming the people who caught the lawbreaking, bribe-taking deputy—rather than the deputy himself.)
In a plea agreement also filed Friday, Michel agreed to plead guilty to the charge and to cooperate in an ongoing investigation.
Michel, who resigned from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in September 2011, was assigned to the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.
In the plea agreement, Michel admits that he agreed to accept $20,000 in cash in exchange for smuggling contraband into the jail for delivery to an inmate. The contraband included a cell phone, cigarettes and a note – which in jail parlance is called a “kite.”
The inmate, as it turned out, was a confidential informant for the Feds.
Moreover, according to the plea agreement, the dollars for contraband deal wasn’t a one shot. Michel. it seems agreed keep charging the phone for the inmate, holding the phone for safe keeping when he (Michel) went off shift, then returning the phone to the inmate/informant when the deputy came back on—each time for a hefty payment, which the informant/inmate made clear was from money obtained by illegal means.
The bribery charge carries a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison.
The case against Michel is part of an ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI, thus the plea deal in return for cooperation is considered significant by LASD watchers.
On Wednesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made the surprising decision to remove controversial Judge Manual Real from the federal RICO case that involves Alex Sanchez.
This news shocked nearly everyone who is closely tracking the Sanchez matter. Yanking a federal judge from a case is anything but business as usual.
As most longtime WitnessLA readers know, Alex Sanchez is the Salvadoran-born, former MS-13 gang member turned highly respected gang violence reduction activist who has been accused of a long list of Federal racketeering and conspiracy charges. According to the government’s case, the supposedly reformed Sanchez never reformed at all, but remained, in reality, a MS-13 shot caller who ordered at least one murder.
The judge assigned to his case, U.S. District Court Judge Manual Real, was appointed to the federal bench in 1966 by Lyndon Johnson.
At nearly 88 (his birthday is Jan. 27), Real is what we used to call a character. He has spent 45 years on the same bench and, in his court room, he projects an image that combines the demeanor of an irascible uncle who mutters loudly and tyrannically over his soup at Thanksgiving dinner, with that of a glowering bird of prey.
Yet, unlike your irascible uncle, Real wields enormous power over the lives of those who come before him. According to his critics, who are many and varied, he is a bully on the bench who often makes up his mind on a case before it goes to trial and then may visibly telegraphs his opinion to all in the courtroom. He once threatened to throw then California Attorney General Dan Lungren into jail for contempt and used to be known for telling lawyers “This isn’t Burger King. We don’t do it your way here.”
Real’s reversal rate is estimated to be 10 times the average for sitting federal judges.
He has had at least ten cases outright snatched away from him by appeals courts.
In 2006, there was serious talk of impeaching him.
Even in the Sanchez case, it took four separate hearings and the interference of the 9th Circuit, before Real would allow Sanchez’ attorney to fully present arguments for setting bail for Sanchez. (However, to Real’s credit, in January of 2010 Real called for a special closed door hearing, after which he did set Sanchez’s bail at $2 million, an amount that friends and supporters had already raised in the form of surities and property.)
Since Sanchez was originally arrested on the RICO charges in June 2009, this means, had thee been no bail he would have spent, as of this writing, 2 years and 7 months in jail, with no trial as yet in sight.
The change in judges will, of course, push Sanchez’ trial back still further.
Yet, with the alarming wild card presence of Judge Real now removed, no one in either the Sanchez or the prosecution camps, appears to be complaining.
NOTE: In the interest of transparency, it’s important that I tell those of you new to this story that I consider Alex Sanchez a respected and valued friend. This means that while I work very hard to give readers the most factual possible information on the issue, I also have strong feelings about this case.
In a well-reported story in Sunday’s LA Times Robert Faturechi writes that the FBI is investigating beatings of inmates and misconduct by deputies in the LA County Jail system—indicating a far wider probe by the Feds into abuse inside the jails than had previously been disclosed.
This is good news.
It had already been reported that the FBI was looking into the alleged beating witnessed by ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim earlier this year. But Faturechi’s story indicates that the probe goes much further than the Lim case. (We have heard rumors that it is even wider still.)
One of the most intriguing tidbits from Sunday’s story is the little matter of the cell phone: It seems that FBI agents managed to sneak a cellphone to an inmate in the hope that they would get unfiltered reports from inside the jail.
Here’s a clip:
The inquiries include allegations that deputies broke an inmate’s jaw and other facial bones and beat another man for two minutes while he was unconscious.
Their investigation created a flap recently when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department brass discovered that an inmate inside Men’s Central Jail was an FBI informant equipped with a cellphone he was believed to be using to communicate with agents on the outside.
Sheriff Lee Baca, who had not been notified by the feds of the plant inside his jail, is expected to meet with U.S. Atty. André Birotte Jr. soon to discuss the phone incident and the growing tensions between the two law enforcement agencies.
The problems of abuse and mistreatment inside LA County’s huge jail system are longstanding (See Part 1 of WitnessLA’s DANGEROUS JAILS series by Matt Fleischer). Yet, despite years of civil rights lawsuits, reports by the ACLU, and a plethora of anecdotal reports by laypeople who work or volunteer inside the jail , there has been little outcry from the public and/or pressure from policy makers for genuine reform.
The news that the FBI is investigating the abuse and that the investigation appears to be widening in scope and seriousness…is a very good sign.
When California Lawyer Magazine contacted Pulitzer-winning author/journalist, Edward Humes, to write something about the case of Alex Sanchez (published in their February issue), Humes said he first took the story assignment because he was intrigued by the notion that someone as beloved as gang intervention leader Sanchez was said to be living an elaborate double life.
“That becomes the HBO movie, right?” he said.
But as Humes delved into the details of the case and began going to Sanchez’ hearings in federal court, presided over by Judge Manual Real (a character so extravagantly quirky that he begs to be incorporated into a novel), Humes says he began to wonder if perhaps the real story wasn’t something quite different than the tale he first imagined.
As most WitnessLA readers know, Alex Sanchez is a former MS-13 gang member turned highly respected gang violence reduction activist who has been accused of a long list of Federal racketeering and conspiracy charges. According to the government’s case, the supposedly reformed Sanchez never reformed at all, but remained, in reality, a MS-13 shot caller who ordered at least one murder.
Since most LA media outlets have all but ignored the story, I wanted to know more about how and why Humes became interested. Hence our conversation.
Humes told me that one of the things that first caught his attention when he began to get into the case was the fact that bulk of the evidence that the federal lawyers presented against Sanchez focused on four wire-tapped conversations in which Sanchez took part. “But you have these dueling interpretations of the main quotes.” Humes said. As he writes in his article, the government’s interpretation is provided by an LAPD gang expert named Frank Flores. The defense had the conversations independently translated by gang intervention and recovery expert Father Greg Boyle.
I asked Humes what he thought of the discrepant interpretations. “Frankly, Father Boyle’s version of the conversations make a lot more sense in context,” he said
After looking at the dueling translations, Humes said he began to wonder why the government’s interpretation of conversations and events seemed all to require an assumption of guilt.
“The Supreme Court is very clear that the prosecution’s job is-–not to win—but to see that justice is done. So one of the questions I still want answered is why are they so convinced that he [Sanchez] is dirty since they haven’t produced convincing evidence so far? There may be a lot more at the trial, but based on what they’ve produced so far….”
As to whether he has a gut feeling about Alex Sanchez guilt or innocence himself, Humes won’t commit. “Let’s just say that basically I have a lot of questions about the government’s case. And they need to be answered.”
Humes’ willingness to ask questions has produced an even-handed, thought-provoking and informative look at the case thus far.
Below you’ll find a clip from the story’s opening. But be sure to read the whole article from beginning to end. it’s more than worth your time.
[FIRST, ONE SMALL NOTE: The Sanchez trial was supposed to have begun yesterday, on Valentine's Day. It has now been delayed until September 2011, at the earliest. With the ever-receding trial date in mind, it is worth remembering that, had Sanchez' attorney and supporters not managed to get the presiding judge to reverse himself and grant Sanchez a $2 million bail (and even that only after four bail hearings and the intervention of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals), the defendant---whether guilty or innocent---would have remained in jail from June 2009 until....whenever.]
The four phone calls that put Alex Sanchez in jail—and in the middle of a massive federal racketeering and conspiracy case—were angry, profane, and seemingly illuminating. They opened a rare window not only onto the brutal, secretive, backstabbing world of one of America’s most notorious street gangs, but also on the life of Sanchez himself, a nationally prominent anti-gang activist in Los Angeles credited with steering hundreds of young people away from lives of crime and violence.
What Sanchez didn’t know in 2006 when he participated in those calls was that the FBI was listening in. Nor could he have guessed that the words he spoke would help convince a federal-local investigative task force that Sanchez was leading a double life, publicly opposing gangs in his day job, then moonlighting after hours as a leader or “shot-caller” of the Los Angeles street-gang-turned-international-crime-syndicate known as Mara Salvatrucha—MS-13.
The feds characterized one conversation in particular as a smoking gun. It was a conference call with several known members of MS-13, who continually referred to Sanchez as Rebelde, Spanish for rebel, his old nickname from the gang life he’d supposedly left behind 15 years before. The men on the tape debated what to do about an El Salvador – based gangster known as Camarón (the Shrimp), whom Sanchez accused of falsely branding him a police informant—a veritable death sentence in these circles. Sanchez wanted to turn the tables: “He has to face the consequences,” he urged. “We have said it, we go to war.”
Little more than a week after that exchange, the lifeless corpse of Camarón, whose real name was Walter Lacinos, was found shot through the head in La Libertad, El Salvador, a hotbed of MS-13 activity.
Had the FBI just heard Sanchez’s alter ego, Rebelde, order a hit on Camarón? That was the story the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles offered at a press conference in June 2009 to announce a historic racketeering indictment against Sanchez and 23 named MS-13 members.
“Today in Los Angeles, where the MS-13 gang was formed, we are holding its leaders accountable for the violence and intimidation they have used to bring terror to the citizens living and working within the gang’s territory,” then-U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien told reporters. The indictments marked the latest assault in a nine-year war on MS-13 by the FBI, which had used 21 court-ordered wiretaps to monitor thousands of phone conversations.
The wiretaps had already helped build an earlier state case against the alleged top shot-caller for MS-13 in Los Angeles. (It also appears that the FBI had made informants out of the alleged “CEO” of MS-13’s worldwide operations, as well as his second-in-command.) Now the recordings were being used in an effort to bring down Sanchez, a poster boy for the gang-prevention efforts that many law enforcement officials reflexively distrusted.
The latest indictments charged that the defendants had conspired to engage in extortion, drug dealing, robbery, witness intimidation, and seven murders. The complaint also described a failed conspiracy to assassinate one of the government’s top gang experts, Detective Frank Flores of the Los Angeles Police Department.
This was a major breakthrough in the fight against MS-13, proclaimed then-LAPD Chief William Bratton, speaking at O’Brien’s press conference. He branded the gang “a cancer … that lacks a single redeeming quality.” And yet no aspect of the story drew as much attention as the charges against Sanchez.
Read on.
The video is from March 2009 at UCLA where Alex Sanchez was on a panel examining “Global Perspectives of Youth and Violence.” Three months later, Sanchez would be arrested by the FBI for racketeering and conspiracy, charges that could get him sentenced to life in prison.
As you may or may not have heard, the FBI is now very worried that bad guys are texting and Skype-ing and Facebook-messaging each other (Duh!), and that law enforcement can’t wiretap these forms of communication the way they can cell phones, land lines, email and the like.
Okay, one can understand the concern.
As a consequence the feds want to change a one or two things.
Many critics are flagging this as a privacy issue. But it’s much worse than that.
What the FBI and other law enforcement agencies involved are really looking for is the ability to control the design of the technology itself.
Charlie Savage of the NY Times has a very good grip on the basics of what is being proposed. So begin by reading his story.
Here’s how it opens:
Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.
[BIG SNIP]
James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.
“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”
Dempsey is not exaggerating.
The Feds are asking to change and approve the next generation architecture of such technologies as Skype, Facebook. and others, in such a way that limits peer-to-peer communication.
Not good.
The discussion Monday on Patt Morrison’s showwas particularly good—and alarming— on the topic. So listen.
(Susan Landau, formerly of Sun Microsystems, now at Harvard, and Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative, are both especially good on the show.)
This is only the beginning of the conversation. It is an issue that is very much worth your attention.
For those of you following the Alex Sanchez case, Tom Hayden has a story in the Nation that gives more of the details of the hearing that took place earlier this month.
Hayden describes how Sanchez’ attorney, Kerry Bensinger, makes some intriguing legal points. I don’t think Judge Real will buy them, but Real seems to enjoy defying the expectations of others, so who can say?
PS: Be forewarned, Hayden weaves into the story the issue of the controversial fatal shooting of Manuel Jaminez by an LAPD officer in Westlake, which I think mixes apples and oranges. But whatever. Read the Sanchez material. His remains a very painful case—but also an ever more interesting one.
Around 11:30, at the end of the closed hearing that began at 10 a.m. Alex Sanchez attorney Kerry Bensinger came out of the federal courtroom to talk to Sanchez family and a very, very small handful of supporters, whom he drew into a side room and broke the news. U.S. District Judge Manuel Real had granted Alex Sanchez bail.
One thing that can be said for the staggeringly quirky Real, he continues to surprise. This time the surprise was a good one for Sanchez and family.
The bail amount is set at $2 million. It is to be divided into $1 million in properties, $1 million in surities.
Since Sanchez supporters and family have already gathered $1.4 million in property, and $1 million in surities, “it’s only a matter of the paperwork,” said Monica Novoa, a Homies Unidos board member who is very close to the family and thus was in the room.
Understandably, there will be stringent restrictions, which have been agreed upon but not been spelled out publicly. (There will, for instance, be no contact allowed with active gang members.)
“But any of it’s fine,” said Novoa. “We really feel that this is the beginning of a fair trial for Alex. He’ll be able to see his family, sleep in his own bed, meet with his attorney, and work for his own defense. That’s all we ever asked for.”
As to who was inside the closed hearing, there were assuredly LAPD officers. And there was supposed to be someone from inside City Hall or failing that, someone who works closely with City Hall and who knows the LA gang world and the gang intervention world. (Connie Rice, for example, would be on the latter list.)
I have heard floating rumors that the City Hall someone inside the closed courtroom may possibly have been City Council Member Tony Cardenas.
If true, this makes a great deal of sense. The mayor’s gang czar, Guillermo Cespedes, could have concievably been called in but he’d have had little or nothing concrete to add to the conversation in the way of personal knowledge, as he didn’t take over his post until September (Sanchez was arrested last June) and prior to the gang czar gig, he was running Summer Night Lights thus would have had no reason to deeply interact with Sanchez and the area of town in which the government alleges Sanchez was operating.
There is former gang czar, Jeff Carr, the mayor’s chief of staff. But Carr, while he’d worked with Sanchez and would be deemed knowledgeable, would have been unwise to come down on one side or the other of this very controversy-fraught case because, either way he leaned he would risk alienating a group that is important to the mayor. In short, his appearance, no matter how super secret, would have been a no-win for Carr or his boss Antonio.
Cardenas, however, is arguably the most knowledgeable of the three. He has a long-term professional relationship with Sanchez and other gang interventionists and gang recovery agencies—and with the police— due to his multi-year chairmanship of the Council’s Ad-hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development. Thus, with the right phone calls, he was in a position to gather some genuine intel from both sides of the argument, plus he likely has a gut take on the case of his own.
Although I have criticized Cardenas plenty of times over the years, I have also known him to, at times, show an unusual amount of moral courage when the cameras were turned off and there was nothing to gain, especially for a politician.
So, while I don’t know if the mystery City Hall person was Tony Cardenas, he would be my pick as the one whom Judge Real would have been wise to call. Had he been called in, I would like to think he would have told what he believed to be the real truth—whatever that real truth might be.
More as I have it.
UPDATE: Both Tom Hayden at the Nation and Tom Diaz at Fairly Civil report that, according paperwork filed in the federal district court, the prosecutor’s witness list has been made public.
Diaz notes that the three expert witnesses made available by the prosecution were:
1. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robert W. Clark, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office.
2. LAPD Capt. Justin Eisenberg, Commanding Officer of the Gangs and Narcotics Division.
3. Former federal prosecutor Bruce K. Riordan, now Director of Anti-Gang Operations for the L.A. City Attorney’s Office. Riordan is also Chief of the Gang Division and Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division.
I know little about the first two, but Bruce Riordan in particular was a smart choice. He has a broad base of experience and he is very much a straight shooter. What his opinion would have been on the issues surrounding Sanchez and his bail is unknown.
The identity of the witness or witnesses called by Sanchez’s attorneys remains sealed.
Wednesday January 13, at 10 am, Judge Manuel Real will conduct yet one more hearing (or the second part of one more hearing) into the matter of whether or not Homies Unidos founder Alex Sanchez should be allowed bail.
Last week, if you’ll remember, Judge Real surprised all concernedby asking to talk to at least two experts in LA gang intervention and enforcement who could give an opinion as to whether Alex Sanchez was indeed an MS-13 a shot caller and a danger to the community as the prosecutors have insisted. The Judge wanted individuals with no dog in the fight, like maybe someone from the mayor’s office, he said, and perhaps some upper echelon type from the LAPD or the Sheriff’s Department. The “experts” had to be mutually agreeable to both the government’s attorneys and to Sanchez’s court appointed lawyer, Kerry Bensinger.
For the past week calls and emails have flown around the city as those even tangentially involved with the case madly opined and speculated about who those experts could and should be.
The court promised to be packed with spectators and supporters. But then on Tuesday afternoon, another surprise: Yes, Judge Real would hear testimony by the newly-chosen experts, but behind closed doors. In other words, the hearing would be closed to all save the attorneys.
This latest move fueled even more speculation about who the “experts” might be and what they intended to say—either for or against Alex Sanchez— that they did not want to state in open court.
The hearing will take place at the federal courthouse at 312. N. Spring.
In the courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real, the latest bail hearing for Alex Sanchez, held took a sharp turn on Wednesday morning, causing Sanchez supporters to bask cautiously in what seemed to be a small but tangible glimmer of hope.
The changed atmosphere at the hearing seemed presaged when Sanchez was ushered into the courtroom in casual slacks and a shirt, rather than the jail house jumpsuit and shackles that have characterized his previous appearances. On the way in, he managed to flash his family a smile that, while it did not exactly make it to cheerful, was clearly striving for upbeat.
At the last bail hearing, Judge Real repeatedly interrupted and corrected Sanchez’s court-appointed attorney, Kerry Bensinger, disallowing most of the material that Bensinger sought to present in order to counter the prosecution’s contention that Sanchez should be denied bail as he was both dangerous and a flight risk. However yesterday’s Judge Real appeared to be in a whole different mood and, while he questioned Bensinger at times, he remained even tempered.
Perhaps the oddest moment in the exchange was when Carpenter told the judge that the defendant’s supporters had “publicly stated” that Sanchez “could not get a fair trial” in Real’s court.
Well, what evidence did she have of such a thing? the judge wanted to know. (Cough—this blog and the Nation magazine—cough, cough) Surely the defendant and his lawyer had not stated that?
“No, no,” said Carpenter, back-peddling rapidly, Mr. Bensinger had not made any such statements. “But the defendant’s supporters certainly have, including one who had signed an affidavit of surety.”
(At this, veteran civil rights attorney Jorge Gonzalez elbowed Tom Hayden who, at an earlier hearing, had offered his house as part of a guarantee of bail for Sanchez. Hayden studiously ignored the elbowing.)
Judge Real, however, fastened on to the statement with gusto. “But those are lay people,” he roared. “They don’t know anything about the law!” Appearing fond of his words, Real repeated them. “That’s someone who knows absolutely nothing about the law!”
Then Real fixed Carpenter with a steely gaze. Surely she wasn’t trying to paint the defendant with those statements, he asked her. At that Carpenter backed away from the subject altogether and turned to explaining why Sanchez was a flight risk.
This too, Real challenged.
Well, where exactly would he flee to? the judge wanted to know. Carpenter hesitated. “Where will he go?” Real asked again. After all, Real pointed out, Sanchez had been granted political asylum because of the danger El Salvador presented to him, did the government have any reason to believe he would flee there?
The government did. But in a complete 180 from his hardline view of Sanchez’s flight risk potential at the last bail hearing, Real further questioned the prosecution’s assumption. Carpenter was left muttering something about Sanchez fleeing to South American countries without extradition treaties while the judge looked exasperated.
Yet the most startling incident came slightly later in the hearing when Carpenter was explaining why Sanchez was too dangerous and gang involved to be granted bail and Real again challenged her assertions. Had Sanchez been arrested or had any kind of negative police contact in the years between the asylum decision and the case before the court? Sanchez asked. He had not, Carpenter admitted.
Well, Judge Real said finally, “Isn’t there a possibility that you and Mr. Bensinger can get together and choose someone, maybe the person in charge of gang programs for the City, or someone of like authority with the LAPD who could come in and testify whether they have any evidence of continuing gang involvement by Mr. Sanchez. Perhaps we could arrange for a closed hearing to allow that person to testify frankly without fear of revealing critical information.” [These notes on dialogue are approximate.]
The 40 or so observers in the court tried not to stare open-mouthed.
And with that, Judge Real ordered the hearing to resume on January 13, 2010, at 10:00 a.m. The gavel came down. And that was that.
“What to make of it?” wrote Jorge Gonzalez when he emailed me later. “Who knows? Is the Judge merely making like he is sincerely considering the defense arguments for the appellate courts and the public?” (As a trial attorney, Gonzalez is very familiar with Real and his courtroom habits.) “Maybe, but if he leaves the door open a crack [Bensinger] is obligated to stick a foot in and put forth more positive evidence for him to consider. He will make the case that surely there must be a way that, given certain conditions, the rights of the defendant and considerations of the safety of the community can be satisfied.” It looked like supporters came out of the courtroom cautiously hopeful, he said, “that they might be able to persuade the Judge of the merits of that statement.”
Tom Hayden’s reaction was similar. “Taken literally,” he wrote in his own email after the hearing, “the judge’s order means that the city’s top gang reduction official, Guillermo Cespedes, and a top LAPD gang expert appointed by the new Chief Charles Beck would be asked, or even subpoenaed, to state what they know about Alex Sanchez from the past decade. Since city and police officials have often collaborated with Sanchez in the past, the public record might place them at odds with former CRASH officer Frank Flores, the prosecution’s expert witness.”
But, like Gonzales, Hayden was reluctant to be too optimistic. “There is no predicting whether this represents an unprecedented approach to conflict resolution,” he wrote, “or merely a step by the judge to prove to the critics that he is holding an exhaustive hearing, and armor-plating himself against a future appeal, before denying Sanchez bail once again. ”
And so the all-too-human legal drama continues. Stay tuned.
PS: And, for those of you who are not as entirely riveted by the Sanchez drama as some of the rest of us, take a look at this article on the already controversial UCLA study that contends legalizing undocumented immigrants would boost California’s sagging economy. Anna Gorman reports for the LA Times.
PPS: OMG, how could I have missed this?! Apple has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SF on January 26 [changed to Wed, 1/27] for a “a major product announcement.” OMG! OMG! Could it be? An Apple tablet! An iReader! (Cue loud version of Apple boot-up cord along with visual of Apple logo bathed in heavenly shaft of light.)
David Carr at the NY Times is busy making up possible names for the possible thang (which is already possibly named the iSlate).
Hmmm. Must cut down on consumption of food and electricity so that I can afford the doubtlessly absurdly expensive gadget if indeed it is to be introduced in exactly 20 days. (Not that I’m counting.)
(And yes, this is a social justice issue. How could you think otherwise?)
PPPS: Oh, yeah, and the governor gave some kind of speech. More on that later on.
FEDERAL BAIL HEARINGS & GROUNDHOG DAY: WHO JUDGES THE JUDGES?
Alex Sanchez, the gang intervention leader and Homies Unidos founder who was indicted last June on federal Rico charges, is going back to court at 10 a.m. on Wednesday January 6 for another bail hearing.
It will be his third.
Most criminal cases feature a single bail hearing. From the beginning, however, Alex Sanchez’s situation hasn’t been “most cases.”
(For the back story on the arrest of Alex Sanchez start here and read from the bottom up.)
The hearing will take place in the same federal courtroom with the same federal jurist who presided over the last hearing—namely US District Court Judge Manuel Real.
The new hearing was ordered by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, an action that was viewed as both good news and bad news by Sanchez’s supporters and his court-appointed defense attorney, Kerry Bensinger. Good news because there is to be a new hearing at all after Sanchez was denied bail twice in a row. Bad news because the hearing is back with Judge Real, who is the guy who was the most recent and vociferous denier.
In late November, Sanchez attorney Bensinger filed a brief with the 9th Circuit in an effort to get a new hearing by a new judge, contending that with Real his client did not receive anything resembling a legally proper hearing and that Sanchez would be unlikely to receive a fair trial with the controversial judge either.
The government prosecutors subsequently countered with their own brief and everyone waited to see what the 9th-ers would say.
On December 22, the appeals court delivered its ruling. The 9th Circuit panel told Real he would need to set up a new hearing and, delivering a slight whack to the judge’s metaphorical hands, the panel set down some requirements. As Tom Hayden notes, Real was to “accept and consider” evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Sanchez would be a danger to the community if released on bail. He was also to consider the “preponderance of evidence” in deciding whether Sanchez would be a flight risk.
In other words, the 9th Circuit kinda sorta conceded that Real did not do the swellest of jobs with the last hearing, but they were not willing to go so far as to take him off the case.
“I think part of the problem is that, off the bench, everyone likes Judge Real. Off the bench, he’s very charming,” said LA criminal defense attorney Harland Braun when we talked about the matter a few weeks ago. But on the bench, Real is considered by many, Braun among them, to be an irrational tyrant who actively skews proceedings toward whichever side he believes should prevail. “He does things like make faces at the jury during testimony, and signal to the prosecutor when to object. It’s a totally unnatural situation.” (Braun has been up against Real many times over the years and is among those who have been vocal about their opinion that the judge, who will be 86 later this month, should retire, or at the very least, step down to part-time “senior” status, for which he has been eligible since 1985.)
“But really, I blame the 9th Circuit,” said Braun. “They know what’s going on. But they don’t have the guts to do anything about it.”
Whatever the case, Sanchez supporters don’t seem to hold out lots of hope that Judge Real will reverse himself and grant bail. Yet there is much interest as to whether, in order to placate the 9th Circuit, the judge will allow some of the testimony and lines of questioning that he excluded last time Sanchez was in his courtroom.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE ACCIDENTAL TRANSFER
To make matters even more perplexing, for a while it looked as if Judge Real was indeed going to be off the case, but not because of the doings of the 9th Circuit.
During the time when Sanchez and company were waiting for the 9th to make up its mind, an odd thing happened: Bensinger unexpectedly received notice on December 9 that Real had been taken off the case and it had been assigned to a new jurist, a Judge Christina Snyder. The order was signed by Judge Snyder on December 2, officially filed two days later.
Sanchez supporters were ecstatic at the news, but Bensinger was also surprised because the only request he had made was through the Court of Appeals, and that was still pending.
Eventually it was learned that an attorney for one of the other 18 defendants named in the federal Rico case of which Sanchez was a part had filed a request for a transfer to Judge Snyder. The attorney applied for the judge swap under a legal protocol known as a “low number request.” It seems this other defendant had been tried in front of Snyder in a nearly identical case in 2006, thus could conceivably qualify for the oddly named low number request (which in state court is called, much more sensibly, a “notice of related case”)—the idea being that a judge who has already tried a defendant for a nearly identical offense has less of a learning curve so therefor can more easily speed things along.
But since this was a RICO case with a zillion other defendants all legally joined at the hip, a transfer of one case meant a transfer of all. Judge Snyder could say yes or no to the request, depending upon her schedule and her take on the matter. It appeared that on December 2, Judge Christina Snyder said yes –and signed the order.
But a few hours after receiving notification of the transfer, Bensinger got a call from the federal prosecutors who said they had talked to Judge Real’s clerk, that Judge Snyder’s signing of the order had been a big silly mistake, and that Real wanted the case back, thank you very much.
Since Bensinger had gotten no official notice of the second judicial switcheroo, he didn’t know what to think. But, a day or two later still, Bensinger did indeed get yet another order, this one signed by Judge Gary Allen Feess, the Chair of the Case Assignment and Management Committee.
(If Judge Feess’s name sounds familiar, he was the fellow who oversaw the LAPD’s Federal Consent decree.)
Feess wrote that United States District Judge Christina Snyder had “inadvertently signed a transfer order…” (How one “inadvertently” signs a transfer order is unclear. But okay.) However, wrote Feess, “…the current case is at such an advanced stage and Judge Real has spent such substantial time and effort on the matter that no judicial economy would be achieved by a transfer at this late date.” The transfer order was thus VACATED (Judge Feess’s caps, not mine) and “…the matter is ORDERED to be returned to Judge Real’s calendar for all further proceedings.”
And so it was.
Onward to January 6.
NOTE: FOR A LESS SANCHEZ-FRIENDLY but always exceptionally informative view of some of these same matters, be sure to check Tom Diaz’s post at Fairly Civil.
OH, AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF COURTS AND CASES, THERE IS THE MATTER OF KEVIN COOPER
Without knowing lots more about the case, I don’t have a strong personal opinion on this man’s guilt or innocence, but whatever your view, the issue—which was written up in the LA Times on Sunday by Carol Williams—-makes for troubling reading.
January 13th, 2012 by 
Celeste Fremon
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