the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Game Day

All in all, these are exciting and perilous times. It really could go either way. Are we going to have 20 more years of the same, or are we going to move forward and put the last 20 years behind us? Thursday’s hearing will start to clarify things.

Finally, tonight —massive props to our colleagues over at the Times-Standard for fighting the good fight and winning. Last week, the T-S and their big, fancy San Francisco attorneys successfully argued for the unsealing of records in last year’s criminal indictment of two Eureka Police Department commanders. A criminal grand jury returned charges against former EPD Chief David Douglas and Lt. Tony Zanottiin December. It charged the two with involuntary manslaughter stemming from their command of an April 2006 confrontation between the police department and Eureka resident Cheri Lyn Moore, which resulted in Moore’s death by gunshot wounds fired by an EPD SWAT team.

The Times-Standard fought to have the grand jury testimony unsealed, and it won. The transcripts revealed many details about the indictment in the case, which has drifted far from the center of the county’s attention in the last two years. (See our two 2006 cover stories on the subject — “Scenes from a Shooting” and “Cause of Death,” April 27 and Sept. 21, respectively — for background on the case). The transcripts show that District Attorney Paul Gallegos‘ prosecution hinges on whether or not the two indicted officers should have sought a special type of court warrant before storming Moore’s downtown apartment, as had been done in other police standoffs in the county. Also, it revealed the somewhat strange spectacle of Gallegos contradicting and arguing against an expert witness he had called to testify to the grand jury.

The Times-Standard‘s coverage of the unsealed grand jury testimony has been excellent; we won’t attempt to add to it here. (If you’ve missed it, last week’s articles are still on the paper’s web site.) But we did want to take a moment to thank the Times-Standard for defending the public’s access to legal proceedings undertaken in the public’s name, against a public agency. And while we’re at it, we’ll also thank Gallegos for not opposing the Times-Standard‘s arguments. This is how it’s supposed to work.

The arraignment of Douglas and Zanotti continues on April 1. Their attorneys have asked for the case to be dismissed.

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