Pubdate: 07 October 1998 Source: Anderson Valley Advertiser (Boonville, Mendocino County, CA) Copyright: (c) 1998 Anderson Valley Advertiser Contact: (707) 895-3355 Author: Bruce Anderson, Editor, Anderson Valley Advertiser SATURDAY NIGHT WITH THE CAMO BUDDIES Helen Ochoa is a 68-year-old Leggett woman in failing health. For many years, she and her husband, Bill, devoted many thousands of volunteer hours to the safety and welfare of people living and traveling the northern reaches of Mendocino County. For most of three decades, the Ochoas' Leggett home served as emergency central for Mendocino County's deepest outback. Ambulances and fire trucks got their directions from the Ochoas' command center. Both Helen and her husband would often rouse themselves in the middle of the night to aid a stranded motorist or transport an injured neighbor to the hospital. Name the go-to people in your community and substitute the name Ochoa and you will understand the Ochoas' standing in the Leggett-Laytonville area. When Bill Ochoa died a few years ago, a neighbor who doesn't seem to have anything better to do than monitor the property of the widowed senior citizen next door, sicced the county's Department of Environmental Health on Mrs. Ochoa because, the neighbor alleged, the old lady's septic tank wasn't working properly. Environmental Health, conveniently among the missing when it comes to the toxic behavior of the county's largest employers, wasted no time visiting the widow's modest property on the banks of the Eel, only minutes from Highway 101. Environmental Health also managed to visit Mrs. Ochoa's theoretically confidential file sequestered at the Department of Mental Health, a second highly politicized agency whose craven, incompetent staff has managed to kill three of its "clients" in as many years as one of its psychiatrists goes unprosecuted for beating his wife. As you see, we are neck deep in the usual Mendo morass of official misconduct, wholesale snitching, tax-funded bullying, and random confirmations that the authorities themselves are, likely as not, completely ape shit. Mrs. Ochoa's worldly goods consist of her small piece of Eel River property and her meager monthly Social Security stipend. But she's got billions of friends and support. Helen Ochoa's home parcel is small but, it seems, highly coveted, which may account for the ongoing harassment she faces in what might gave been her golden years. Beset by the relentless neighbor and the neighbor's allies in what passes for legitimate authority in Mendocino County, Mrs. Ochoa scraped up enough money to hire an attorney to defend herself against the official onslaught and her neighbor's hyper-vigilance. Her septic system works perfectly; there is no evidence it has ever malfunctioned. That case is at the deposition stage and just may be related to what happened two Saturday nights ago. About ten o'clock, Saturday night the 26th of September, comes the cop-style jackhammer knock on the Ochoa door, just west of the Leggett School. Mrs. Ochoa and her 19-year-old granddaughter, Leeann St. Clair, are confronted by Bruce Smith and elements of the Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team. The Camo Buddies were at the door! It was Old Ladies Night in Leggett! Deputy Smith and his fellow tax-funded commando fantasists were picking up some serious OT picking off senior citizens to pad their annual devil weed stats. The Great Crusade against cannabis being no respecter of age, what followed, I understand from outraged neighbors, was an hour or so of low-intensity bullying by the forces of law and order. But Helen Ochoa is not easily intimidated at remarks from publicly-funded cartoon cops like "Jail is a hard place for people your age," and "If you don't admit the marijuana garden is yours we'll add on the guns and your bail will be a lot higher." The guns were old hunting rifles belonging to the late Bill Ochoa. They were locked up in a gun cabinet. Smith and his overtime banditos are alleged to have busted open the gun cabinet and made its antique contents sound like a Mexican Mafia's pot field arsenal of AK-47s. Helen Ochoa didn't budge. Neither did Miss St. Clair who just happened to be visiting her gran's house when the camo clowns arrived. The young woman and the senior citizen were cuffed, stuffed and sped south to the County Jail in Ukiah where they spent most of the next three days. Judge Joe Orr used to live with the Ochoas. Orr is the sitting justice court judge for the large but sparsely settled area from Laytonville north to the county line and east to where the Eel meanders north to Alder Point, and marijuana grows in great visible fields like Kansas corn. Alerted that his old friend Helen Ochoa had been hauled off to the County Jail on a Saturday night, Orr called the jail and asked that Mrs. Ochoa be released on her own recognizance. Doing the right thing isn't necessarily doing the legal thing, although Orr quickly backed off when a lot of indignant harumphing about judicial favoritism began in the local media, and even though presiding judge of the county's courts, Eric Labowitz, said Monday that a judge had every legal right to call the jail to suggest a person held there be released on his or her own recognizance. But Mrs. Ochoa stayed in jail on the original warrant auto-signed by Cindee Mayfield, Lousiana-Pacific's and Jared Carter's contribution to California jurisprudence, and confirmed by Judge Ron "Hum Baby" Combest of Covelo, neither of whom had either the sense or the ordinary humanity to see an elderly woman of years of upstanding citizenship in the dock on a comprehensively phony beef. Bail was kept at $40,000 for both Mrs. Ochoa and Miss St. Clair. The late Bill Ochoa's hunting rifles became an additional felony charge, you see, because the Overtime Banditos claim the North County senior citizen was not only growing pot, she had guns on the premises, adding up to felony cultivation plus felonious possession of firearms at a place where devil weed is believed to be cultivated. From Saturday night until late Monday the Ma Barker of Leggett and her menacing granddaughter were off the streets of Mendocino County, and solid citizens from Rockport to Yorkville rested easier in their beds. An indignant editorial in the Ukiah Daily Journal marveled at how local judges and the judges' protection agency called the State Commission on Judicial Performance stonewalled the Journal when staffers tried to find someone in authority to talk to about Orr's call to the County Jail on behalf of his friend, Helen Ochoa. Where's the surprise? Federal, state, and certainly Mendocino County fudges have been beyond all but electoral accountability for years, and electorally they are also all but a demagogic line or two beyond even that slim tether. Just in the last year we've seen DA Susan Massini dispatch Judge Henry Nelson to expel Joel Steed, last year's Grand Jury foreman, from the Grand Jury room of the County Courthouse. A judge will run a political errand expelling a former Grand Juror from his work site for the DA because she's unhappy with the Grand Jury's assessment of severe dysfunction in her office? Yes, he ran it and they both got away with it. On the heels of that one, presiding judge Eric Labowitz issues a barely coherent statement that future county grand juries should include the self-serving rebuttals of the public agencies the grand jury criticizes. Why Labowitz's sudden public appearance on the teensy issue of grand jury report format? Think collegiality; several powerful county department heads (by the standards of Mendo-Lilliput, anyway) didn't like the fact that for the first time since the berserk reverend from Redwood Valley, Jim Jones, Mendocino County saw Mr. Steed and company render a competently critical report on several public bureaucracies--including the DA's ever-bubbling caldron. Of course, Labowitz isn't going to censure or otherwise add to the discomfort of Joe Orr on the Ochoa matter, After all Labowitz, and much of the rest of the local judicial posse, just got their lawyer-colleagues in the state legislature to elevate their outback, once-a-week justice court sinecures to Superior Court status, complete with a lucrative raise. The reason? Why, to ensure "the quality of justice" of course. These guys (and their token gal Mayfield) have a terrific deal going here -- life jobs at big pay with no supervision. (Conrad Cox was the only judge to resist the in-house promotion of his junior colleagues.) None of them are about to go out and blab to the papers about one of their co-beneficiaries, even though they are definitely not fond of one another. Adding to this only-in-Mendoland farce, is the fact that most of the County's judges were themselves committed pot smokers during that period of the late sixties and early seventies when the secure middle-class dropped out for a while to take dope and engage in serial hepatitis sex. When the counterculture fad ended in a sort of mass national amphetamine psychosis, the people who now occupy all levels of Mendocino County's public powers apparantly dropped back in as blithely as they'd dropped out. In other words, we've got pot smokers sending other pot smokers to jail. - --- Checked-by: Richard Lake