to lovelle mixon and beyond

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On January 30th, an overflow crowd filled the hallway of the Rene
Davidson Courthouse in an effort to gain access to the bail hearing. Family
members and an undisclosed number of BART officers had been escorted
into the courtroom by a back door, and the nearly 100 gathered in the
hallway were promised 44 available seats for the hearing. After some 20
had entered, the crowd was told that the courtroom was full. Spontaneous
chants of “We are all Oscar Grant!” filled the hall, clearly audible to those
within the courtroom itself, and at one point county police attempted to
forcibly remove the crowd, seizing people one-by-one and pushing them
into the elevators.
Inside the hearing, Mehserle’s newly-contracted attorney Michael
Rains, who previously got corrupt OPD officers off in the Riders case, was
making the case for bail. 12 Mehserle had yet to open his mouth about what
happened that night on the BART platform, a refusal that many interpreted
as individual cowardice given the protests rocking the city. But if he wanted
bail he would have to say something, and in the end, that “something”
was not convincing at all. Mehserle’s lawyer simultaneously suggested
that Mehserle meant to deploy his Taser against Grant, while adding that
he thought Grant was reaching for a gun. Again, both claims have been
thoroughly discredited: Mehserle had removed his Taser, which bears no
resemblance to his gun, from the opposite side of his belt earlier, and Grant
was face-down with Pirone holding his neck, showing no signs of struggle.
Moreover, if Grant were reaching for a gun, surely Mehserle would
admit to purposefully pulling his own weapon. But there was a method to
this madness, and it was this: Mehserle had to mention the Taser defense
to leave open the possibility of a reduced charge, but he had to add that
he thought Grant may be armed to leave open the possibility for a total
acquittal under the tried-and-true police defense of “justifiable homicide.”
Luckily, Judge Morris Jacobson noticed the ambiguity and wasn’t buying
it: Mehserle, Jacobson acknowledged, did indeed represent a flight risk, and
his contradictory story made him a potential danger to the community. 13
However, under California guidelines, and since this was not a capital
murder case, the judge nevertheless granted Mehserle a bail of $3 million.
But concealed beneath this seemingly “technical” bail decision was a more
12 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/12/14/BAG75ABBIT1.
DTL&type=printable.
13 http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11591101?source=most_emailed.