Everyday Injustice

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.

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.

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 ad...

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.

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. Da...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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, prose...

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 n...

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 se...

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 L...

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...

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 im...

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 Projec...

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 unde...

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 exclude...

This is a story of redemption. So many people get caught up in the criminal justice system and never escape. Alfred Melbourne was a young man when he found himself involved with the criminal justice system. He fully admits he made "bad choices." At the age of 19, he committed a serious crime and ended up in prison until he was in his late 30s. Now, free for several years, he is trying to give back...

The Attica Uprising is an overlooked attrocity in American History - comparable to perhaps Mai Lai, Abu Ghraib, and the Battle of Wounded Knee. Historian Heather Ann Thompson, won the Pulitzer Prize for this account which takes us through the prison conditions, the brutal retaking of the prison and the horrifying coverup by state officials including Governor Rockefeller.

Vanguard speaks with Civil Rights Attorney John Burris who speaks about recent police shootings including Willie McCoy, Joseph Mann, Brandon Smith, and the state of policing and police oversight.

Lisa Rea is the president and founder of Restorative Justice International (RJI). RJI is an international association and network first created in 2008 through social media with over 6000 members and affiliates working for victims-driven restorative justice. Lisa talked about criminal justice reform, wrongful conviction, victim-offender reconciliation and restorative justice.

Davis Vanguard Podcast interviews San Francisco DA Candidate Chesa Boudin who discusses his race, the progressive prosecution movement and criminal justice reform For more information: http://davisvanguard.org and http://sfcourtwatch.org