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