CALIFORNIA PRISONS
The deceased inmate was bunked with a man who said he killed another inmate to have his own cell, a newly unsealed autopsy reveals.
Hoa Quach, Patch
SAN DIEGO, CA -- A Donovan state prison inmate found days after the prisoner died in April 2017, was so badly decomposed that the Medical Examiner's Office was unable to determine his cause of death. An autopsy report unsealed Thursday indicates James Acuna, 58, was found dead April 24, 2017 after inmates complained of an odor that staff initially thought was a sewer problem.
The death of Acuna made headlines last April when TimesofSanDiego.com revealed that his body wasn't found for days at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a prison in the southern part of San Diego County. The San Diego County Sheriff's Department confirmed it appeared that Acuna was dead for two to three days before his body was discovered.
Vicky Waters, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which oversees the state prisons and parole system, said an internal investigation prevented the agency on releasing further details surrounding Acuna's death.
"Our internal investigation on this case is still ongoing. Once it is concluded, we will hold staff accountable if wrongdoing is found," Waters said.
Acuna came to Donovan in 2014 after being given a 16-year sentence for assault with a deadly weapon in Los Angeles County. He was jailed in the past for crimes in 1984 and 2000.
The heavily redacted autopsy report indicated the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office examined Acuna's body the morning of April 25, 2017.
"He was last seen alive by other inmates when he was playing soccer on April 21, 2017," the autopsy said. "At that time he had no complaints. He went to his cell and was reportedly not seen by other inmates after that time."
An inmate reportedly went to Acuna's cell but was informed by his cellmate, who was not identified, that Acuna had the flu. Acuna "appeared to be on the bottom bunk covered with a blanket," the autopsy said.
"On April 23, 2017 inmates complained of an odor coming from the decedent's cell. Staff though (sic) it was related to a sewer system problem and filed a work order," the autopsy said. "On April 24, 2017 staff made entry into the cell and found the decedent unresponsive under a blanket on his bunk with signs of decomposition. At that time his cellmate did not want to let them enter the cell or attempt to wake the decedent. The decedent was moved by staff from the bunk to the infirmary where his death was pronounced."
The autopsy went on to say an "investigation revealed the decedent's cellmate was incarcerated for the death of his father who was found decomposed under a mattress in his home. During an interview with a mental health care professional in the correctional facility the decedent's cellmate stated he had murdered his former cellmate to get a cell to himself when he was incarcerated in Kern County."
An examination of Acuna's body showed he had "a mild to moderate state of decomposition" by the time the autopsy was conducted. It also noted "minor blunt force injury of head and extremities."
"The only traumatic injuries noted were small abrasions on the left side of the forehead, scabbed abrasions on the left wrist and knees, and a small abrasion on the palmar surface of the right the hand and right forearm covered with bandages. The brain was decomposed and markedly softened," the autopsy said.
The autopsy noted that Acuna suffered from cirrhosis of the liver due to a chronic hepatitis C viral infection.
"Examination was limited by decomposition artifact," the autopsy said. "The only demonstrable natural disease was his hepatitis cirrhosis due to chronic hepatitis C viral infection. Sudden death has been associated with hepatic cirrhosis; however, the decedent was not clinically in liver failure and was not known to be jaundiced. Although it is certainly possible that the decedent died of natural causes related to his liver disease, focal bronchitis, and/or (redacted) due to homicidal violence cannot be completely excluded."
CALIFORNIA INMATES
Cathy Locke, The Sacramento Bee
Q: Who was responsible for the murder of Scott A. Stewart, age 22, in Folsom on Halloween night 1982?
JENNIFER, CARMICHAEL
A: David Lamont Williams of Camino was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for the fatal stabbing of his friend, 22-year-old Scott Arthur Stewart.
Williams stabbed Stewart numerous times after the two got into a fight Nov. 1, 1982, at a Folsom residence, according to a story in The Sacramento Bee. He dumped Stewart’s body in a field near Folsom Junior High School and covered it with grass.
Williams was arrested after telling his Montrose Drive neighbors that he had stabbed a man. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
Now 55 years old, Williams remains incarcerated at California State Prison, Corcoran.
CALIFORNIA PAROLE
Chris Vanderveen, 9News
A man dubbed a “sexually violent predator” by the state of Colorado might be headed back here after California authorities determined the parolee violated terms of his parole while trying to quietly live in Sacramento suburb.
Christopher Lawyer, 42, moved to California from Boulder in October under terms of the Interstate Compact Agreement. The request to move to California was approved, in no small part, because Lawyer’s aunt in Carmichael, California, had agreed to take him in.
Lawyer pleaded guilty in 2001 to sexually assaulting a woman delivering newspapers to a Boulder apartment complex the year prior.
Released from prison in 2016, Lawyer struggled to find a place to live in the Boulder area. He spent some time with his mother before parole officers determined he had violated his parole by viewing pornographic materials. He received 180 days in prison for the violation.
Following his release, he also periodically lived in the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless after a request to live in Jamestown was denied.
While in California, neighbors of Lawyer’s aunt said they were left largely unaware that a registered sex offender had moved into the area and, in February, demanded answers from the local sheriff’s department.
Late last month, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department arrested Lawyer after finding Lawyer in violation of the terms of his parole. He was out past the time of his curfew.
Since then, investigators have also found an additional parole violation and have filed paperwork to send Lawyer back to Colorado. As of Friday, he remains in custody in California.
Melissa Roberts, Colorado Director of Adult Parole, told 9Wants to Know, “It is very likely [Lawyer] will be on his way back to Colorado.”
It’s not clear if the California parole violations will be enough to send Lawyer back to prison at this time, but Roberts said the state wants to know more about what happened.
“We are seeking additional information,” she said.
CORRECTIONS RELATED
Emily Alpert Reyes and Alene Tchekmedyian, Los Angeles Times
A man suspected of shooting two Pomona police officers, one fatally, is scheduled to appear in a Pomona courthouse Tuesday morning, records show.
Isaias De Jesus Valencia was arrested after a 15-hour standoff that began with a pursuit late Friday.
Police received a call about a reckless driver, and when the suspect refused to stop, he led police on a chase that ended when he crashed into a parked car. The man then ran into an apartment building, where he fired at officers from behind a door of a unit, police said.
He was booked on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, and is being held without bail, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department jail records.
Before the shooting, Valencia had a history of arrests in the Pomona area, according to public records.
Nearly three years ago, he was sent to state prison for illegally possessing a firearm and ammunition and discharging a gun in a school zone, as well as destruction of jail property, according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation press secretary Vicky Waters. He was out on probation roughly a year later.
Valencia had suffered from depression and drug addiction, according to Amos Young, an acquaintance who knew him through the Pomona church Kingdom of God Revelation Ministries.
Young also said Valencia had served in the military. Those who knew him had tried to offer him help without success, he said.
"He'd say, 'I'm fine, I'm fine,'" Young said. "No one could force him to go to Tri-City [Mental Health]. No one could force him to contact a rehab."
Detectives were still examining the crime scene Sunday afternoon on Palomares Street, where residents had been evacuated.
Later Sunday evening, hundreds of people attended a candlelight vigil outside the Pomona police headquarters for the fallen officer. Police officers wore black mourning bands with the number "16," Officer Greggory Casillas' badge number, over their badges.
Casillas, a 30-year-old father who had been on the job for six months, was on his last day of field training when he was killed.
A second officer who was shot in the face trying to save him was released from a hospital and is recovering from his wounds.
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
Crime in California increased in 2015, the year after voters reduced penalties for many drug and theft offenses. But a new study concludes the ballot measure, Proposition 47, did not cause crime to rise — findings a prosecutors’ group sharply disputes.
Researchers at UC Irvine compared 2015 crime rates in California to the rates in other states whose levels of specific crimes, like homicide, rape and larceny, had been virtually identical to California’s from 1970 through 2014.
They found that the 2015 rates in those comparison states were the same as California’s rates for violent crimes. While California appeared to have somewhat higher rates of larceny and motor vehicle theft in 2015 than those other states, the differences do not appear to be significant, the researchers said.
“The question isn’t whether crime went up, but what caused crime to go up,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. “Our analysis tells us Prop. 47 was not responsible, so it must have been something else,” such as poverty, inequality, guns or drugs. She said it was the first systematic analysis of the ballot measure’s effect on crime rates and has been reviewed by top scholars in the field.
“What the measure did do was cause less harm and suffering to those charged with crime,” Kubrin said. “It’s good to cut criminal justice costs, especially when that money can be earmarked for crime prevention programs.”
The initiative, being circulated for the November ballot, would make a third-time theft of $250 or more a felony punishable by a state prison term. Prop. 47 made all thefts of less than $950 misdemeanors, subject to county jail terms of a year or less. The measure would also allow DNA collection of those convicted of post-Prop. 47 misdemeanors and would roll back part of Prop. 57, a 2016 ballot measure that made some convicted felons eligible for early parole hearings.
Michele Hanisee, president of the prosecutors group, said the UC Irvine study admits that after Prop. 47 passed, “crime went up, savings on incarceration were minimal and the recidivism rate remains high.”
The post-Prop. 47 statistics on crimes like murder and rape were “irrelevant” because the initiative did not apply to those crimes, she said. But larceny, which had sentences reduced under Prop. 47 for thefts of less than $950, rose in California while declining across the United States, Hanisee said. And she said the study did not even consider drug crimes, whose sentences were also lowered by the 2014 ballot measure.
Asked about the criticism, Kubrin said drug crimes are very difficult to compare from one state to another, because of great variations among drug laws and enforcement and a lack of data. But she said she is confident in the report’s findings that Prop. 47 caused no increase in violent crimes or property crimes, including larceny.
“We collected 44 years of pre-(Prop.) 47 crime data,” Kubrin said. “I knew how politicized this issue was. I stand by the findings 100 percent.”
Laura Waxmann, San Francisco Examiner
Despite a steady decline in the number of youth sent to California correctional facilities, the state could spend more than $300,000 for each young person in the 2017-18 fiscal year.
Just nine youths from San Francisco were committed to state correctional facilities as of December 2017, down from about 108 youths in 1995, according to Mike Males, a chief researcher with the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. The nonprofit’s mission is to “reduce society’s reliance on incarceration as a solution to social problems.”
A report released by the organization last month shows the rising costs of the Division of Juvenile Justice, California’s state youth correctional system, stand in stark contrast with a steady statewide decline in youth populations committed to its facilities.
Taxpayers in San Francisco and other counties with low DJJ commitments ultimately foot the bill for many counties that rely on state-run juvenile facilities, according to CJCJ Policy Analyst Maureen Washburn, who authored the report.
Washburn explained that counties only reimburse the state for a small share of DJJ costs.
“Counties that send young people to DJJ [from juvenile court] are required to pay the state $24,000 a year for each young person, that’s a small fraction of the full cost of [more than] $300,000,” Washburn said. “It’s up to state to cover the full cost, on the backs of taxpayers.”
The California Department of Finance initially projected an average of 779 youth would be held in state facilities daily in the 2016-17 fiscal year; that number was reduced to 615 halfway through the year.
This fiscal year, California will likely spend a record-high $317,771 per person in DJJ facilities, though earlier estimates predicted a cost of $252,041 per youth. The discrepancy is attributable to the “lower than predicted DJJ youth populations,” according to the report.
The 2018-19 Governor’s budget proposes spending $190.3 billion in state funds, as well as expanding DJJ to a larger population of young adults with a budget increase of nearly $4 million.
State spending on correctional facilities rose by 13 percent, despite DJJ facilities operating at about one-third of their design capacity and facing a steady decline in population over the last six years. The division “has maintained fairly static staffing levels and high fixed costs,” resulting in three consecutive years of budget growth, according to the report.
A request for comment on the rising costs was not returned by press time, but DJJ spokesperson Ike Dodson said in an email that the division “provides education and treatment to California’s youthful offenders up to the age of 25 who have the most serious criminal backgrounds and most intense treatment needs.”
Reforms over the last decade and a half, such as state funding for counties to operate youth facilities, have shifted more responsibility of managing juvenile offenders to individual counties.
“What has been shown in research to make a difference for young people is not to be placed in large, congregate, far away facilities but to be kept closer to home in community-based or county-run alternatives to state system that allow them to maintain close connections to family, friends and the community,” Washburn said.
But demand for space at local facilities is also waning.
In June 2017, CJCJ counted 8,195 empty beds across the state’s county juvenile facilities, and youth arrests have fallen continuously since 2007.
In San Francisco, the total arrests of youth under 18 dropped by 80 percent, from 4,271 in 1995 to 840 in 2016, according to Males.
“A small part of these massive declines was due to the drop in young populations, and drug and property felonies are affected by changes in state laws,” Males said.
Recent data shows that San Francisco made only five DJJ commitments out of 454 juvenile felony arrests.
A local focus on diversions programs and alternatives to institutionalization have resulted in San Francisco being among the counties with low rates of sending youth to state correctional facilities.
“Our judges are very enlightened and San Francisco is very resource rich,” said Patricia Lee, managing attorney of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Juvenile Division, who is credited with transforming The City’s juvenile justice system with a focus on rehabilitation. “We have been virtually 99 percent successful in contesting serious DJJ recommendations over the past 30 years.”
OPINION
Thomas R. Parker, Assistant Special Agent in Charge (retired), Los Angeles Regional Office Federal Bureau of Investigation
The proposed Initiative for Public Safety relies on falsehoods and empty scare tactics in its quest to reverse successful statewide criminal justice reforms.
There are no automatic releases under Prop. 57, and anyone serving a sentence for a violent offense is excluded from such consideration.
Further, there is no data that supports the conclusion that prisoners released from incarceration as a result of Prop. 47 and 57 mandates have been responsible for increased crime rates anywhere in the state.
Police personnel shortages, the low priority assigned to property crime prevention and investigation, and a lack of resources invested in juvenile crime prevention contribute to an increase in property crimes, though between 2010-2016 overall property crimes decreased statewide by three percent.
Our state prisons and county jails are overcrowded and California leads the nation in numbers of incarcerated people. The federal courts have taken the unusual step of ordering Gov. Jerry Brown to reduce prison populations significantly. The Initiative for Public Safety ignores those orders.
Providing incentives for incarcerated people to complete educational, treatment and occupational programs has consistently reduced the likelihood of recidivism after their release and accomplishes much more than simple re-entry into the community without effective rehabilitation efforts.
Indeed, before a convicted criminal is released, a parole board hearing is held to make sure the person is safe to be returned to the community. The proponents of this ill-advised initiative fail to disclose that 80 percent of the parole hearings held under Prop. 57 have resulted in denial of applications.
Your readers deserve the facts. As someone who has dedicated my entire life to law enforcement and the criminal justice system, I can say with great confidence and professional pride that criminal justice reform is working and we must stay the course.