S.J. mayor, police oppose release of suspects
Defense attorney characterizes response to home detention as ‘temper tantrum’ by law enforcement
SAN JOSE >> Three weeks after two men charged in a deadly Halloween shooting were granted supervised release by a judge, San Jose police, the department’s officers union, and the mayor have launched a full-scale rhetorical assault on that ruling.
The Police Department tweeted Tuesday night that “the system has failed.” Mayor Sam Liccardo, also in a tweet, sharply criticized the decision the same night.
“I appreciate the purpose of bail reform, but releasing a homicide suspect without bail is outrageous,” Liccardo tweeted Tuesday night. “The pendulum has swung too far, and it’s our neighborhoods that endure the most crime that suffer as a result.”
Efrain Xavier Anzures, 27, and 26-year-old Alfred Richard Castillo II, 26 were charged with the fatal shooting, which took place the afternoon of Oct. 31 on Great Oaks Parkway. That’s when police found 27-year-old Isaiah Gonzalez gravely wounded; he later died at a hospital.
So why are officials weighing in now when the releases — home detention for Anzures and electronic monitoring for Castillo — were ordered Nov. 10? It appears to be tied to an NBC Bay Area news story broadcast Tuesday evening.
Renee Hessling, Anzures’ attorney, characterized the outcry as a “temper tantrum” over legislatureand voter-approved criminal justice reform laws, as well as a landmark state Supreme Court ruling earlier this year ordering trial court judges to employ a higher standard for jailing someone pretrial for public safety reasons.
“I am floored that this has become a story. The judge did exactly what the law says,” Hessling said. “Law enforcement can’t stand people not being thrown in jail and getting locked away every time they arrest someone.”
Court records show no filed opposition from prosecutors responding to Hessling’s bail motion for her client’s release. The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office did not respond
to a request for comment Wednesday.
According to police, on Oct. 31 Gonzalez was driving a car and collided with several vehicles about a mile north of the crime scene. Two men in one of the damaged cars followed him to Great Oaks Parkway, where the shooting happened. Anzures was charged with murder and an enhancement for allegedly using a gun, and Castillo was charged with assault with a deadly weapon for using his car in the alleged crime and allegedly being an accessory to murder after the fact.
Hessling said Anzures’ lack of criminal history, his steady employment and education, and family and community letters of support factored into Judge Philip Pennypacker’s decision to grant him pretrial release.
“Mr. Anzures hasn’t posed a threat to public safety since his release and has been 100% compliant with everything expected of him,” she said. “Mr. Anzures was a law-abiding citizen that saw an individual driving recklessly in a neighborhood where children were trick-or-treating, and he wanted to stop that person from hurting people.”
The county Superior Court declined to comment specifically on the case but said in a statement that “every judge reviewing a case for release is required to give individualized consideration to the person appearing before them …”
Even with the new bail and jailing standards in place, a person charged with murder and getting pretrial release is still relatively rare. It happened recently in another San Jose homicide, when Margarita Santillan was granted lowered bail and supervised release in August after she was charged in a shootout that ended in the death of a 13-year-old boy. A major factor in that decision by Judge Shelyna Brown was video surveillance that Santillan’s attorney cited to mount a self-defense argument.
As it happens, Santillan is Gonzalez’s aunt; she raised him since childhood and considers him her son. She rejects any connections drawn between her release and that of the two men charged with killing Gonzalez.
“I had to pay $100,000 bond for protecting my family, and these people brutally murdered my son and got out without bail,” Santillan said in an interview. “There’s no comparison.”
“My son was unarmed,” she said. “There’s no way that they could say that was self-defense.”
Legal analyst Steven Clark, a criminal defense attorney and former county prosecutor, said the evaluations in these two cases are examples of the high court’s directive to abandon a “cookie cutter” approach to jailing people based primarily on the severity of their charges.
“People point to a situation where people are on pretrial release and commit other crimes. That’s a legitimate public concern,” he said. “Should it not also be a serious public concern that someone may spend a significant time in jail yet is later exonerated? How do they get their life back?”
That has not stopped the current rhetorical arms race over the release of Anzures and Castillo. Police also tweeted that “Our community deserves better, the victim’s family deserve better.”
The Police Department also brought up, for the first time, that 41-year-old Oscar Medina Soto absconded to Mexico while on supervised release after being charged in a Jan. 10 fatal shooting in East San Jose.
The San Jose Police Officers’ Association joined the fray by taking aim at the ACLU and reiterating a long-standing lament by police and prosecutors about Proposition 47, a reform initiative that lessened criminal penalties for theft crimes like shoplifting and simple drug possession.
To Hessling, the law enforcement resistance won’t change the evolving laws and standards that have been affirmed repeatedly by the state courts.
“This was a carefully crafted media agenda by the police to counter the reforms that every single one of us working in the Hall of Justice is trying to promote,” she said. “The police need to get on board.”