Genevieve Jones-Wright was a public defender who ran for District Attorney in 2018 - she pushed for improving public safety, rehabilitation as opposed to increasing prosecutions as well as taking on mass incarceration. In October 2019, she was one of the main speakers at the Vanguard Annual event on progressive prosecution and is the latest guest on Everyday Injustice in the progressive prosecution movement. We discuss her career as a public defender, her criticism of the system, and her future ...
Jan 16, 2020•43 min
In October George Gascon resigned from his position as San Francisco District Attorney, moved to Los Angeles to challenge incumbent Jackie Lacey. He is running on a progressive platform. Listen as he describes why he made the move, discusses his campaign for district attorney in Los Angeles and talks about the strengths and shortcomings of his time in San Francisco as well as his decision not support Suzzy Loftus who was appointed to fill his position, but ended up losing to Chesa Boudin.
Jan 12, 2020•45 min
Joseph Tully is a criminal justice attorney out of Martinez who represented among others Paul Fullerton and Heidi Lepp. He is the author of a book called, California "The State of Collusion." He said in the book: "It sounds troubling and extreme but I see it every week as a criminal defense lawyer practicing criminal law in California: psychopaths in law enforcement – and they’re not the outliers!" He added: " It’s not surprising but it is outrageous that these dangerously flawed people make it ...
Jan 10, 2020•38 min
Eli Savit is an attorney, a law professor, and a former public-school teacher. A former law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Eli currently serves as the City of Detroit's senior legal counsel, where he leads criminal-justice reform work for Michigan's largest city. Eli Savit is running for DA in Washtenaw County, Michigan, home of Ann Arbour and the University of Michigan. He is running to replace a 28 year veteran DA who has run his office as a traditional law and order prosecutor. Eli is ...
Jan 06, 2020•37 min
In 2016, a group of anti-fascist counterprotesters clashed with neo-Nazis white nationalist rally June 26, 2016, at the State Capitol. Seven anti-fascist counter-protestors were stabbed and several hospitalized. Tried separately were three counter protestors who faced felony assault charges. THat case dragged on until early this year, where the protestors were able to plead to misdemeanor charges and accept a prohibition against participating in protests for a several year period. Everyday injus...
Jan 02, 2020•33 min
The Harvest Cycle Davidson v. El Dorado County case features two separate questions: the constitutionality of SB 1437 and whether Mr. Davidson was a major participant in a 2016 robbery and thus acted in reckless indifference to human life. The Attorney General’s Office takes the position that SB 1437 is constitutional but that SB 1437 does not apply in this case because Mr. Davidson played a key role in the underlying robbery. Meanwhile the El Dorado County DA disagrees and argues that SB 1437 i...
Dec 30, 2019•37 min
Davis Mayor Brett Lee comes on for his second monthly podcast. The big question the day before Christmas - did the council address core issues or were they simply putting out brushfires. Naturally the Mayor thought that the council was addressing core issues rather than putting out brushfires.
Dec 27, 2019•42 min
Trische Duckworth helped found Survivors Speak in February 2018. They have heavily focused on wrongful convictions due to Ms. Duckworth's work with the Vesey Family since 2014. As they explain: "We were birthed from the thought of people suffering and not having the courage or wherewithal to speak their truths. It was with that thought in mind that we began." It is their mission "to provide a platform for those taboo, unspoken truths, as well as for social injustices that others find it hard or ...
Dec 26, 2019•32 min
Nazgol Ghandnoosh is a Senior Research Analyst at The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization engaged in research and advocacy for criminal justice reform. Nazgol holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (2013). In the podcast, she talks about mass incarceration, how reform the system to attempt to cut the prison population in half while maintaining public safety and how we can end life in prison.
Dec 23, 2019•42 min
Michael Gennaco was hired as the police auditor by the city of Davis in the wake of the Picnic Day incident. Mr. Gennaco is a veteran auditor who has reviewed cases and incidents across the nation. Everyday Injustice talks with him about his job, the field of police oversight and how it has evolved over time, the advent of body worn cameras and high profile cases like the death of Kelly Thomas in Orange County.
Dec 20, 2019•40 min
Joe Kimok is progressive candidate running for Broward County State Attorney in Florida. One of eight Democratic candidates vying for the August 2020 primary in a race dominated by the specter of the Parkland shooting and the upcoming death penalty trial for the shooter next year. Joe Kimok is running as the reformer candidate. We talked extensively about the Parkland shooting and the death penalty. He talked about bail reform, the decriminalization of marijuana and sex work, police accountabili...
Dec 13, 2019•36 min
In 1986, Dusty Turner was convicted of 1st degree murder and abduction and sentenced to 82 years in prison in Virginia - a state lagging behind in criminal justice reform and which has no parole. A former Navy SEAL, Dusty had hooked with a woman one night. He and his friend, Billy Joe Brown, drove to the Bayou, a nightclub in Virginia Beach, where Jennifer Evans, who was with two female friends, introduced herself to Dusty. At 1:15 am, Jennifer stayed at the bar with Dusty and Billy as her frien...
Dec 11, 2019•35 min
The Vanguard meets with ASUCD President Justin Hurst, along with Vice President Shreya Deshpande, Adam Hatefi and Francois Kaeplin. They talked about their plans for 2020, the fee referendum that is coming up along with three controversial admends that are up for a vote as well.
Dec 06, 2019•28 min
The Vanguard meets with Adam Hatefi and Francois Kaeplin of ASUCD and discusses the problems with UC Path - the payroll system snafu that has led to hundreds of students not getting their pay. We also discussed among other things: student loan issues, district elections, student housing and more.
Nov 26, 2019•36 min
From 2003 to 2008, George Powell III had been living in that town which had a large soldier presence and working on music. He appreciated the solider population there but found the Killeen police mistreated soldiers. He notes one instance where soldiers would be playing his music too loud and they got pulled over and ticketed by the police officers. He wrote a song where he thanked soldiers but addressed the harassment the police gave to him (https://www.justiceforgeorgepowell.com/thank-you-sold...
Nov 22, 2019•38 min
This is our first of our monthly podcasts with Mayor Brett Lee. Davis Mayor Brett Lee discusses critical issues facing Davis: homelessness, the respite center, traffic congestion at Mace, housing and economic development.
Nov 18, 2019•46 min
David Thorne is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for allegedly hiring an acquaintance to kill the mother of his son, however, he never hired anyone nor did the acquaintance do the crime. Sometime between the evening hours on March 31, 1999 and 12:00 p.m. on April 1, 1999, Yvonne Layne, a mother of 5, was murdered in her home with one solid and steady slit to her throat. David Thorne was convicted of complicity to aggravated murder/murder for hire on January 25, 2000 by a...
Nov 15, 2019•30 min
Imagine you have been arrested and held in custody for years for a crime you did not commit and deprived the right to see an attorney. Incredibly that's what happened to James Faire and his wife Angela. James Faire of Tonasket was originally charged in Okanogan County with several crimes after he allegedly ran over Debra Long of Issaquah and George Abrantes of Marysville with a pickup truck during a confrontation in Tonasket, Wash., in 2015. Long died and Abrantes was injured in the incident. Fa...
Nov 12, 2019•44 min
Tio Dinero Sessoms was 19 years old when two Sacramento homicide detectives interrogated him about a deadly home invasion he says he didn’t participate in. November 1999. He would be coerced into taking a false confession and even when the appellate courts overturned his sentence, he was forced to take a plea agreement for time served rather than receive his full exoneration.
Nov 05, 2019•37 min
Elizabeth Kim, the President of the Sacramento Branch of the National Lawyer's Guild talks about her arrest at the age of 19 for a small quantity of marijuana, how that turned into a felony drug conviction, and how she continues to pay for that crime even 15 years later as she has become an attorney and moved on with her life. She also talked about her work with the National Lawyer's Guild and the Stephon Clark case and lack of accountability for police and prosecutors in the current criminal ju...
Nov 01, 2019•40 min
In 2009, Ajay Dev was wrongly convicted of 76 counts of raping his adopted daughter and sentenced to 378. Now a decade later, he is having his Habeas Corpus hearing in Yolo County attempting to exonerate him. Listen for the first time as he talks about his experience behind bars in a California Prison and listen to people around him talking about his case and how the jury got it wrong.
Oct 02, 2019•55 min
Joe D. Martin joins us live from his Tennessee Prision. His story from a Change.org petition: "Joe D. Martin, Jr., did not receive a fair trial in 1996. As a result, he was wrongfully convicted and has been wrongfully imprisoned for 23+ years. He was found guilty of first degree murder and two attempted murders for which he is innocent. His conviction rested on the use of perjured testimony, prosecutorial misconduct and closed-door deals made with State’s witnesses, as well as, intimidation of d...
Sep 24, 2019•35 min
This is from the Generation Why Podcast: "Ronnie Long. April 25, 1976. Concord, North Carolina. A man enters a home through an upstairs window and rapes the woman who lives there. Detectives work quickly to solve the case. Within 15 days of the attack, the woman will head to court after being asked to go there to see if she could recognize the man who had raped her. After an African-American man named Ronnie Long walks by where she is sitting, she positively identifies him as the one responsible...
Sep 20, 2019•36 min
Paul Fullerton was a well decorated firefighter for over 20 years with the UC Davis Fire Department. A work-related injury led him to use medical cannabis and ultimately brought this law abiding citizen into the focus of agents of YONET, who targeted him and his business, until they finally found an excuse to arrest him and his wife, and threaten to take away his daughter and livelihood. Having served his 90 days of house arrest, after a misdemeanor plea agreement, Mr. Fullerton came forward to ...
Sep 16, 2019•1 hr
In 1995, Obie Anthony was 19 years old when he was convicted of murder and attempted robbery. Despite no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, prosecutors relied on testimony from an informant - a convicted killer and pimp who ran a house of prostitution near the scene of the crime, and who claimed to have seen the shooter. In 2008, the Northern California Innocence Project working with Loyola's Project for the Innocent, took on his case.The court vacated Anthony’s conviction on Septemb...
Sep 10, 2019•26 min
This is one of the worst stories about official corruption we have seen in recent times in California. Back in 2014, Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders was the keynote speaker at the Vanguard's annual fundraiser and spoke about the Jailhouse informant scandal of Orange County. The case kept going - on and on. The basics of it were that the public defender, Mr. Sanders, uncovered evidence that the Orange County DA's office and Sheriff's Department were systematically planting informants with...
Aug 31, 2019•45 min
Anthony Hernandez was arrested and spent a month in custody because of racial profiling and presumptions by the arresting officer. It might have been far worse had it not been for the persistence of his defense attorney, who kept demanding that prosecutors turn over body camera footage of the incident from the arresting officer. Once the officer turned it over to the prosecutor’s office, almost immediately the Sacramento DA dropped the charges. The Vanguard speaks to Attorney Jennifer Mouzis abo...
Aug 26, 2019•35 min
In 1974, in the small town of Union City California, a 13 year old girl was found, floating in a creek. Having no leads, the police at some point focused on a 19 year old security guard, Marvin Mutch. He would serve 41 years in prison having been released in 2016. Many believe him to have been innocent. The evidence seems overwhelming that it was someone else. And yet the best the Innocence Project could do is get him out on parole - twice - once in 2006 when Governor Schwarzenegger reversed it ...
Aug 22, 2019•57 min
Emmitt Lewis and Michael Wilson who were convicted of first degree murder stemming from a 2003 robbery that turned into a car chase, became the first people in San Francisco, and among the first in the state to have their murder charges vacated after a contested evidentiary hearing. San Francisco Superior Court Judge John K. Stewart vacated the conviction during an evidentiary hearing granted under Senate Bill 1437. We talk to his attorney, Public Defender Niki Solis, who defended him at his ori...
Aug 20, 2019•42 min
The story of Jeffrey Deskovic is a classic case of a wrongful conviction. At the age of 17, he was accused of raping and murdering a 15-year-old school classmate. This was despite the fact that his DNA was excluded from the DNA found at the scene and despite the fact that he recanted on his false confession. In 2006, 16 years later, a new DA authorized DNA testing and this time it not only excluded his DNA from the scene but the DNA was found to match another man – a man serving a life term for ...
Aug 18, 2019•54 min
