The Response of the DA to My Motion for Sanctions

Two days after my request for sanctions had shaken loose the calibration records, I received the response to the sanction request. As it happens, the envelope turned out to be the only piece of paperwork I didn't save in this case.

In this letter, they made at least one false assertion - that they did not receive a copy of the motion for discovery at the July 25 motion hearing. In fact, I handed a copy to Robert Martinelli right in front of Commissioner Heath. It probably fell through the cracks when Robert Martinelli failed to follow up on his commitment to discuss it with Ms Deng (the DA), and/or failed to tell Mr. Cho, who took over the case, about it.

It's a shame I didn't bring up this fact in my September 12 followup hearing and my trial. I think at the time, though, my thought was as long as the request for sanctions had been enough to finally get a meaningful response out of them and cause them to at least marginally uphold their obligations under Californa Penal Code Section 1054.5(b), there was no reason to pursue it further other than the sheer joy of hammering government employees with the letter of the law. And by then my "hammering arm" was starting to get a little tired as you can see by size of this website, so I decided to just let it slide.

The four pages of the response are below:

Now, first off, they say that they didn't receive a copy of the "informal request for discovery" until August 4th. Well, what they actually got on July 25, and August 4th, was a formal motion for discovery.

I'll grant them that the court clerks fouled up the delivery of the informal request for discovery by not delivering it to their office even though it was specifically addressed to them - necessitating scheduling a motion hearing - but what did they think the July 25 motion hearing was for if not for them to have a formally-entered motion given to them?  Why would I have gone through the motions of a motion hearing without giving the DA's office a copy of the motion I was entering? Their claim strained credulity. And even if the statutory clock did start running on August 4th, it had long since run out on August 30th when this letter was drafted!

Next, they went through the points on the motion for discovery one by one, and did something fairly similar to what the Fremont DA did for my wife's speeding ticket - indicated "not available" for anything they or the police officers they were working with didn't want to bother digging up.  That was enough to scuttle the Fremont DA's case, but I had to do a bit more work here. The handwritten notes beside each item were my notes from my September 12 hearing. More details are on that page.

The map showing the area of the violation was provided in response to number ten, even though it's not quite relevant to what was requested. It's actually kind of funny how close they came to meeting the CVC 40802(b) requirement to define a local street or road in terms of this map.  They had the map in their hands, but they didn't use it!

And in any case, now that they acknowledged that they were aware of the 15-day statutory deadline, the discovery items started coming in at a slightly quicker pace - the officer's training records arrived on September 6th, just a few days before the follow-up motion hearing.