Court Digest

California
AG won’t seek charges in fatal police shooting of Bay Area man
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California’s attorney general will not seek criminal charges against a police officer who in 2020 fatally shot a man outside a pharmacy in the San Francisco Bay Area amid national protests over the police killing of George Floyd, his office announced Tuesday.

A Vallejo police officer fatally shot 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa on Jun 2, 2020, after responding to reports of suspects stealing from a pharmacy as peaceful protests and civil unrest swept across the country following Floyd’s killing a week earlier in Minneapolis.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta found there was not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jarrett Tonn, who was a detective with the Vallejo Police Department at the time of the shooting, did not act in self-defense or in defense of his partner officers.

“Sean Monterrosa’s life mattered and there is nothing that can make up for his death. His loss is and will continue to be felt by his family and the Bay Area community,” Bonta said in a statement.

“My office remains committed to doing everything in our power to prevent these kinds of incidents from occurring and putting forward policy solutions to help ensure law enforcement are responsive to the needs of their communities,” he added.

Tonn fired a rifle five times through the windshield of his patrol pickup, hitting a kneeling Monterrosa once in the head. Police said they initially thought Monterrosa was carrying a handgun in his waistband. But they found a hammer in the pocket of a sweatshirt he was wearing.

Video released by the Vallejo Police Department a month after the shooting shows Tonn firing from the backseat of the moving vehicle that was carrying two other officers.

The windshield of the patrol pickup truck, considered a key piece of evidence in the case, was destroyed, leading city officials to seek a criminal investigation into how that happened. Bonta took the case in 2021 after Solano County District Attorney Krishna Abrams recused herself.

Bonta found there was no destruction of evidence by the Vallejo Police Department and said that the officers who replaced the windshield were not involved in the shooting.

“The officers did not act with a criminal intent to suppress or destroy evidence when they had the windshield replaced and returned the vehicle to service,” he said.

Michelle Monterrosa, Sean Monterrosa’s sister, said Tuesday she found Bonta’s decision frustrating and disappointing. “It’s just really disappointing that we see people put their political careers ahead of actually doing what they need to do to bring justice to our loved ones,” she said.

Tonn was terminated last year after an independent third-party investigation determined he violated several department policies, including using deadly force that was not objectively reasonable, failing to de-escalate the situation, and failing to activate his body-worn camera in a timely manner.

The Vallejo Police Department has come under repeated criticism in other cases as well.

The month after Monterrosa’s killing, then-Police Chief Shawny Williams started an independent investigation after two people in the department said officers had their badges bent to mark on-duty killings.

The department has had several other controversial slayings by police, including that of Willie McCoy, 20, of Suisun City, in February 2019. McCoy was killed after he fell asleep with a gun in his lap in his car at a Taco Bell drive-thru. Six Vallejo officers fired 55 shots.

Virginia
Judge reverses decision, allows removal of Confederate memorial
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday allowed the Arlington National Cemetery to remove a century-old Confederate memorial one day after blocking the removal over a report that gravesites were disturbed.

At a hearing in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston said he issued the temporary injunction Monday after receiving an urgent phone call from the memorial’s supporters saying that gravesites adjacent to the memorial were being desecrated as contractors began work to remove the memorial.

He said he toured the site before Tuesday’s hearing and saw the site being treated respectfully.

“I saw no desecration of any graves,” Alston said. “The grass wasn’t even disturbed.”

Alston issued an 18-page opinion Tuesday evening to lift the injunction. He said the allegations that the removal efforts amounted to grave desecration “were, at best, ill-informed and, at worst, inaccurate.”

Cemetery officials sought to have the injunction lifted quickly. They said they are required by law to complete the removal by the end of the year and that the contractors doing the work have only limited availability over the next week or so.

In a statement Tuesday evening, the cemetery said it “will resume the deliberate process of removing the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery immediately. While the work is performed, surrounding graves, headstones and the landscape will be carefully protected.”

An independent commission recommended removal of the memorial last year in conjunction with a review of Army bases with Confederate names.

The statue, designed to represent the American South and unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot (9.8-meter) pedestal. The woman holds a laurel wreath, plow stock and pruning hook, and a biblical inscription at her feet says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Some of the figures also on the statue include a Black woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.

Defend Arlington, in conjunction with a group called Save Southern Heritage Florida, has filed multiple lawsuits trying to keep the memorial in place. The group contends that the memorial was built to promote reconciliation between the North and South and that removing the memorial erodes that reconciliation.

Tuesday’s hearing focused largely on legal issues, but Alston questioned the heritage group’s lawyers about the notion that the memorial promotes reconciliation.

He noted that the statue depicts, among other things, a “slave running after his ‘massa’ as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?” asked Alston, an African American who was appointed to the bench in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump.

Alston also chided the heritage group for filing its lawsuit Sunday in Virginia while failing to note that it lost a very similar lawsuit over the statue just one week earlier in federal court in Washington. The heritage groups’ lawyers contended that the legal issues were sufficiently distinct that it wasn’t absolutely necessary for Alston to know about their legal defeat in the District of Columbia.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who disagrees with the decision to remove the memorial, made arrangements for it to be moved to land owned by the Virginia Military Institute at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley.


California
Heroin dealers  orders get 24 years in prison
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Two Southern California brothers who ran a heroin-delivery operation — taking telephone orders from customers using code words like “taco” — have been sentenced to 24 years each in federal prison, prosecutors announced.

Julio Cesar Martinez, 45, of Riverside, and Victor Martinez, 46, of Hemet, parts of California’s sprawling Inland Empire, were sentenced Monday. Both pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy to distribute heroin and acknowledged distributing at least 29 kilograms (64 pounds) of the drug in Orange County, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office.

The ring operated from at least September 2003 to July 2021 and sold heroin that was smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico by couriers who sometimes hid the drug in their body cavities, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Call centers run out of workers’ homes handled orders from buyers who used the names of Mexican foods to buy drugs. A gram of heroin was a “taco” and an ounce (a little over 28 grams) was an “enchilada,” authorities said.

Runners then delivered the order and took payment.

One customer died in 2016 in Orange County from overdosing on heroin and other drugs, prosecutors said.

Other members of the ring placed the money in bank accounts in deposits of $10,000 or less to evade federal reporting requirements, prosecutors said.

“These two brothers took drug dealing to another level by operating a heroin-delivery service that profited on the addiction and affliction of others,” U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said in the statement. “While they and their families lived lavishly, these defendants ignored the destruction they caused in our community. Today’s sentence sends a clear message that we will not stand for misconduct of this sort.”

The brothers were among more than a dozen people targeted under what authorities called “Operation Horse Caller,’’ a five-year federal effort to dismantle the ring.

Prosecutors said that so far, sixteen people have been convicted because of the effort.


New York
Judge releases  names mentioned in Epstein lawsuit documents
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge has ordered the public disclosure of the identities of more than 150 people mentioned in a mountain of court documents related to the late-financier Jeffrey Epstein, saying that most of the names were already public and that many had not objected to the release.

The people whose names are to be disclosed, including sex abuse victims, litigation witnesses, Epstein’s employees — and even some people with only a passing connection to the scandal — have until Jan. 1 to appeal the order, signed Monday by Judge Loretta A. Preska.

For several years, Preska has reviewed documents sought by the Miami Herald from a civil case, filed by one of Epstein’s victims, that eventually was settled.

Many of the records related to that lawsuit were publicly released in past years, but on Monday the judge made determinations about some portions of the records that were initially withheld on potential privacy grounds and what can be made public about certain people mentioned in the records.

In many instances, she noted that individuals had given media interviews or that their names had previously emerged publicly in various ways, including at a trial two years ago of Epstein’s associate and former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Preska concluded that some portions of the records should remain confidential, including those identifying people who were children when they were sexually abused by Epstein and had tried to maintain their privacy.

The Epstein case has spawned countless conspiracy theories about the possible involvement of rich and powerful people in sex trafficking.

The three criminal cases brought by federal and state authorities, however, have focused on allegations about sexual abuse by Epstein himself and Maxwell.

Epstein took his own life in August 2019 in a federal lockup in Manhattan as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. He was accused of luring numerous underage girls to his homes under the guise of giving him massages, and then sexually abusing them.

Maxwell, 61, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was convicted in December 2021 of helping Epstein recruit and sexually abuse underage girls.