`Fair trial’ doesn’t mean it’s fair to everyone
You just want to scream “Unfair!” about so many aspects of Evin Yadegar’s tragic death four years ago and the yet-again-postponed trial of the officer who killed her.
Most obvious is that she didn’t have to die. Stanislaus County Deputy Sheriff Justin Wall had many options when the Modesto woman, suffering a mental health crisis in February 2017, edged her car around his parked patrol vehicle after leading authorities on a slow-speed chase from Salida to Ripon. He chose the least patient and most extreme — opening fire four times — and she paid with her life.
It’s not fair when someone — in this case, Yadegar’s husband — asks law enforcement to help a loved one in danger, and an officer responds by killing her.
It’s never fair when someone ends up in the morgue as a direct result of an officer breaking his or her own department policy: Shots fired at or from a moving vehicle are rarely effective. Deputies should move out of the path of an approaching vehicle instead of discharging their firearm at the vehicle or any of its occupants.
It’s not fair that taxpayers continue to pay Wall’s salary, year after year, as he works a non-patrol job at the Sheriff’s Department, while less-privileged defendants charged with ending someone’s life languish behind bars.
The halls of justice are lined with defendants who can’t afford to post bail, to keep working while awaiting trial, to hire pricey lawyers and to switch them out just before trial. Many would say that the entire system was designed to be anything but fair.
It’s not fair to crime victims’ survivors when justice repeatedly is put off.
Wall’s manslaughter trial recently was continued a fourth time. The first was because COVID-19 travel restrictions prevented a witness from flying in, then Wall’s first attorney retired, then his new defense team wanted to hire a sleep-loss expert. Now — only weeks before his March trial date, a year later than he initially was due to face justice — Wall says he can’t get along with his new attorneys and needs newer ones.
The Modesto Bee stands behind the American jurisprudence precept — a constitutional right, no less — that defendants must receive a fair trial. That includes effective assistance of counsel, or a competent attorney. And no judge wants to face the certain appeal that would result from forcing a trial to proceed when a defendant and his lawyers have had, as cited in this case, an “irreparable breakdown.”
Wall’s newest attorney said he can’t be ready before October at the earliest, and gave every indication that he’ll probably need even more time.
Stanislaus taxpayers paying a price
It’s expected, then, that taxpayers will continue for another eight months, at the very least, to pay Wall’s salary, which in 2019 was $89,000, according to Transparent California. Taxpayers will continue to pay his medical and other accruing benefits, which that year brought Wall’s total compensation to $121,303 — a drop from the $141,600 he got in 2017, mostly because he’s no longer receiving overtime pay.
The Sheriff’s Department continues to harbor an employee who broke department policy, resulting in someone’s death. What other manslaughter defendant gets that kind of treatment?
Remember that Yadegar’s survivors accepted $7 million from Stanislaus County to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit. The county would never agree to a deal of that magnitude unless they feared that a civil jury could award substantially more, maybe many times more, if the lawsuit were to proceed to trial.
In other words, the county (or its insurance) paid up because it wasn’t a righteous shoot. It was anything but.
The settlement may have been the fairest part of this whole thing so far, but waiting years to see justice done in criminal court can be excruciating for victims’ families, and erodes public trust in the justice system.
Justice delayed is justice denied.