Busy week? We get it. Here are some highlights from the cover to get you caught up. Not long after he was elected as Mendocino County’s district attorney in 2011, David Eyster instigated an innovative — and lucrative — new program. County residents charged with certain marijuana felonies — usually possession with intent to sell […]
Courts
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The Escalation of ‘Wild Bill’
It was about 2:45 p.m. on May 6, when a Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputy and a sergeant arrived at a residence on Shelter Cove’s Kelly Road, where 55-year-old William Lloyd Nelson was living. Several weeks earlier, Nelson’s girlfriend of 15 years, and the mother of his son, filed a request for a domestic violence restraining […]
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Unsealed
Two young people gunned down in the middle of the night at a house party in Arcata. A beloved priest tortured and bludgeoned to death in his Eureka rectory. Two men killed execution-style in a home in a nice, quiet neighborhood of Eureka. Each of these crimes stilled the local community, capturing waves of media […]
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A Capital Question
As the race to become Humboldt County’s next district attorney hits full stride, a trial quietly looms in the background — the first local death penalty case in decades — with the potential to bring the issue of capital punishment front and center in the campaign. With little attention or fanfare, Humboldt County District Attorney […]
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EPD Assault Case Dismissed
The Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office dropped its nine-month case against Eureka Police Sgt. Adam Laird Friday after prosecutors decided they couldn’t prove the officer used excessive force in a 2012 arrest and attempted to cover it up. “Based on new evidence the people have discovered, we don’t believe we can prove this case beyond […]
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HumCo and HumCPR Showdown
Humboldt County and Lee Ulansey — the recently appointed county planning commissioner and former director of the Humboldt Coalition for Property Rights — will argue a public records case before a judge this week. With the help of Eureka attorney Allison Jackson, Ulansey has been asking the county for attorney records for more than a […]
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Pain Doc Loses Her License
Effective at 5 p.m. today, former Eureka doctor Fran Day will not be allowed to practice medicine in the state of California. The doctor’s license already had been suspended for more than two years. Today the Medical Board of California officially revoked it, after Day, who specialized in pain treatment and psychiatry and practiced medicine […]
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Floyd Squires Defends Himself
Eureka’s most notorious slumlord took the stand this morning to testify in his own defense while an attorney for the city of Eureka peppered him with questions about mold, cockroaches, faulty plumbing and overdue repairs at several of his properties. Alternately nervous, evasive and defiant, Squires claimed to have completed most of the repairs necessary to […]
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SoCal Dispensary Owner Could Face Life in Prison
That’s correct: A cannabis dispensary owner could wind up serving the kind of prison term that’s typically reserved for society’s most heinous and violent criminals. Aaron Sandusky was operating three medical marijuana dispensaries in compliance with state law, but over the weekend a federal jury convicted him of a handful of drug-related charges that carry […]
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L.A. Times Says Arcata’s Panhandling Ordinance “Goes Too Far”
In an editorial that’s bound to make the Arcata Chamber of Commerce wince, the Los Angeles Times today came out against the city’s 2010 panhandling ordinance, saying: The city’s frustration is understandable, but its remedy is too broad and too punitive, emblematic of the excesses that many municipalities succumb to in confronting the unsightly but […]
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No Crime Here, Jury Says
In the first trial test of a new law, a Humboldt County jury decided this morning that the three people who lit candles outside the county courthouse after 9:30 p.m. did nothing illegal. The verdict comes despite the county’s attempt to ban most people from being on courthouse grounds between 9:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. […]
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Jury Ponders … And Ponders
A jury is taking plenty of time thinking about a new law — specifically about whether it should convict three people accused of defying county limits on courthouse protests. Jurors went home at midday Tuesday with no verdict, and now have deliberated for longer than it took to try the three, who stood with lighted […]