http://www.radiolibre.org/brb/
According to her phone message today, jury selection begins in her case tomorrow morning (July 3) in Monterey Municipal or Superior Court, presumably around 9 AM or so. She’s a determined activist insisting that police respect the rights of community members–refreshing in this time of compliance, collusion, and confusion.
Traffic stop becomes criminal case for homeless woman
Sunny Fawcett sits on a bench outside the doors to Monterey County Superior Court Judge Albert Maldonado’s courtroom, sandwiched between a friend and her pastor. “Should we pray?” one of them asks. “Let’s pray.”
They clutch hands, bow their heads and the prayer Fawcett offers is this: Please God, let me get moved to another courtroom with a different judge.
By a rough count of the docket sheets Fawcett pulls out of a tote bag, this is about the eighth time since November she has spent hours waiting at the Salinas courthouse. On this day, June 10, she would wait nearly nine hours as Maldonado decides what to do with her, to figure out whether her case could be set for jury trial this week, or put off. Maldonado could easily pass it to another judge or rule on it himself, but chooses to delay, and Fawcett must travel to Salinas regularly to wait.
Just after midnight last Nov. 19, Fawcett was pulled over for driving her Dodge minivan too slowly down Garden Road. But what should have been a simple catch-and-release traffic violation morphed into a criminal case when Fawcett was cited for a misdemeanor count of delaying a police officer. (That’s what I said: Who knew that one even existed?)
The slow driving wasn’t the delay. What happened next was.
Fawcett, a 62-year-old Monterey County resident, pulled over but refused to turn off her car’s engine or open the driver’s side window more than about 2 inches. She asked John Olney, the officer who pulled her over, a lot of questions, along the lines of “What was I doing wrong?” and “Why are you stopping me?”
She also didn’t have her actual physical driver’s license – although she had a receipt proving she had just paid to get it renewed – and she took a while getting that, her vehicle registration and proof of insurance out and handing it to Olney through the small opening.
To Olney’s credit, he was pretty patient with Fawcett – a dashcam video of the 20-minute-plus exchange bears that out. When she asked him to call Monterey Police Chief Phil Penko to the scene, the officer explained the chief was probably home and asleep. “The best I can do is two sergeants,” he told her, after his supervisor and the supervisor’s partner arrived.
“I’ve been doing this for eight years,” Fawcett tells him, “and this is highly irregular.”
“I’ve been doing this for 17 years and you’re the first one that’s ever done this,” Olney responds, “so this is highly irregular.”
By “this,” Fawcett means living in her van. She’s one of the chronically homeless that have been in the news in Monterey the past few months, although you would never guess it to look at her. She takes great pains with her appearance; her clothes are clean, her makeup applied with a deft touch and a decorative flower sits in her long, red hair. In earlier years, she was a mom, a part-time teacher and a community college student. As for how she became homeless, she offers only that a number of family members died in recent years.
“I tried to raise my daughters to take care of themselves and they help me as they can,” she says, then pauses and adds, “Things are rough for everyone.”
When Olney pulled her over that night, the road was dark and there was little traffic, as evidenced by the video. Fawcett was scared – any woman pulled over late at night in an unpopulated area is scared.
Penko says he spent time speaking with Fawcett, including a recent lunch at a local Denny’s, to discuss the case. He says she’s had a number of driving-related encounters with his officers, many of which have gone undocumented. Olney “could have handcuffed and arrested her,” he says.
“Quite frankly, she’s been given a number of breaks,” Penko tells me. “But here’s this poor woman in her 60s who is frightened and can’t grasp the significance of her actions. The only thing that will make this better is to recognize the significance of her actions.”
Did she delay Olney? Maybe. She asked a lot of questions and took her time providing her documents. She had been pulled over last year and given a warning for a busted headlight. But there’s no evidence any urgent calls came in during the time Olney had her stopped.
Now Fawcett faces a trial. She’s asked for a jury, which is her right. If she’s convicted, the fine is a few hundred dollars she doesn’t have and a jail sentence she won’t serve because of overcrowding.
I watched the deputy public defender assigned to her case as he tried to explain to her why, when you’re driving, you have no inherent right to privacy, and why, if an officer asks to see your license, you’re required to show it.
“The scenario would have been different if you were at your home,” he tells her.
“But I don’t have a home,” she says.
Minor inaccuracies in any story can drastically change the understanding of the situation. Where-as this article is written before the matter went to trial, there were already inaccuracies and innuendos which are false.
According to Sunny she has “never” had a headlight out or damaged. She has been pulled over three times by Monterey Officers claiming she was driving with her lights off. In all three instances she argued that her lights were on and she was released without a ticket after showing the police her “papers” (picture ID. , registration, driver’s license, and insurance). Local Monterey Peninsula Police do this “illegally”. They “practice” pulling us over in the hopes we might have been drinking or don’t have insurance, or that we have outstanding warrants ,etc. This is an illegal practice that is being condoned. Once this matter made it to court is where you begin to see the real problems we have in our justice system. The jury selection process included a pooling of over 100 jurors in order to select 12. The majority pooled said they did not trust the police, and then they were dismissed. The remaining jurors don’t necessarily represent our peers. Most had some affiliation with military, court, or government in some way. Best described as “scary”. It was an acting sham on the part of the police,Judge, and Public Defender’s office. Within the Jury itself, it only required that one or two were hold outs in order to get a lesser conviction on “something”, because be ALL know we are sinners and therefore GUILTY of something. In this case we are all guilty of perpetuating a system that has been corrupted for a long time. “911 was an inside job”
Bob Oliver 831 383-2676 boboliver9@gmail.com
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