 How do you know if he's on Facebook or not? Yeah. I mean, it's my part of the program. I'm friends with her. And I'm really well-known on Facebook. So, yeah. So, we're so happy to be here. And I promise to help if you're working here. I do. Why don't we, everybody, wait a minute. Yeah. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Yeah. Well, I'd like to introduce, without any further ado, Mackinzales. It's always difficult to hear about all my political defeats. I've run four times in one-one race in baseball. That wouldn't be a very good average. You know, I grew up in a town in South Texas, McAllen, Texas. And you're not missing anything. Don't worry. I grew up in South Texas and McAllen, Texas. And I became an attorney. And I started work in the public defender office in San Francisco. And I spent about a decade doing that work before, as David mentioned, I ran for district attorney. I ran because I'd represented a young person in a marijuana case. And the district attorney, who was considered the most progressive district attorney in the United States, wanted jail time for a kid that was basically smoking pot on some steps on Haight Street, which was against the law back then. Not anymore. And so in negotiations with the district attorney, the head of the narcotics unit, it was actually an attorney that had smoked pot in my house at a party. And it was very interesting because the defense attorneys, the public defenders, weren't smoking pot, and all the DAs that came through were. And so he's telling me how they're going to have to make an example of this young person. He was like 23 years old and was going to college. He had no priors. And the judge, who's now on the Ninth Circuit, very conservative judge, did, in fact, sentence the defendant to jail. And at the time I said, if you do this, I'm going to spend all of my resources telling people what you're doing. I mean, I'll take out ads in the paper, I'll go on the radio, I'll run for district attorney. I mean, I'll do whatever it takes. So the next day I was in a courtroom and that attorney walked through, the head of the narcotics unit, and said, you better get your filing money together. And it was really just an insult. So I did, and I ran, and his boss had to listen to me at all these various debates, explain to him what they were doing wrong. I was elected the next year to the city council, the board of supervisors. I was a member of the Green Party, and a couple years later became the president of the board of supervisors. I was not expected to win the mayor's race, that I got into. And in many respects, I was not a very good politician. I had closed my bank account after being elected to the board of supervisors, and when we were making planning decisions, I would often get checks from some of the parties that were appearing before me, and it was so weird. It was like, why are they sending me money? But they just understood that that's what you did. You're supposed to pay your respects to the politicians by giving them $500 for their next race or something like that. We would just send it back, of course, my office. But I thought getting elected mayor might be easier than having to put together eight out of 11 votes to override a mayoral veto, and that's what motivated me to run. I got into a runoff with very low vote totals. I had about 19-20% of the totals. It was a wide field, and Newsom had over 40%, I think 42%. So he was expected to win, and it became a very close race. Unfortunately, there were a lot of progressive allies, labor unions, et cetera, who as they tried to assess who they should support, they basically went with him because he was going to win. And in the week before the election, he started saying, oh man, if we knew it was going to be this close, we might have done this different. And probably my greatest injury in politics was when the union representing janitors that I had marched with endorsed my opponent, even though all the guys in the room knew me because the heads of the union in Sacramento told him to do that. I returned to private practice. I didn't seek reelection of the Board of Supervisors. I started a progressive law firm. It was a bunch of lefties, a Green Party attorneys, about six, seven, eight of us at the peak. We filed lawsuits against district attorneys, against police, against grand juries, against businesses like Comcast and national hotels not paying the minimum wage. We got into big fights that we didn't have the resources to fully do, but we had some attorneys that were so talented that they could single-handedly fight entire law firms. I want to tell the story of some of these cases in Davis because it's really just shocking. And I'll remind you, David, in 2006 there was a group called Carol who was trying to advocate for a citizen oversight of the police department. I wrote an opinion editorial with my law partner at the time that was published in the Davis Enterprise defending the right to speak anonymously because the police were trying to go on chat rooms and try to figure out who was behind the citizen's effort at oversight and try to figure out where the money was coming from. So there are a lot of us that have participated, as you are doing, to make this community more progressive and, you know, I think we're all in it together. The case you mentioned, I want to just talk about Khalid's case, the goat case, because it's a fascinating example of obvious bias. He was represented by another attorney that was urging him to take a plea deal. He came to us and asked us if we would handle it. I was worried that if we took the case over, the judge would want us to go to trial like that day because we were substituting in his counsel on trial date. But we got ready, I showed up, I think it was Judge Fall, and they were extremely hostile to somebody representing, you know, his case. And I remember when I appeared in front of him, he said, okay, I understand you're going to be the new attorney on the case. Is that correct? And I said, yes. My name's Mackenzole as I'm going to file a general appearance on the case. And the first thing he said to me was, I'm sorry counsel, did you mean to say yes, your honor? And I said, no, actually I meant to say yes, which is what I said. And that's literally how it started. But this is what happened to Khalid. He was actually, he had gone to, he was Muslim, he had gone to one of the California agricultural schools and was very interested in state-of-the-art technology. He was married to, you know, California, Caucasian, blonde-haired woman. They were a great couple. They had kids. They were super happy, just law-abiding people. And they had the best fencing for goats in this entire region. But goats are pretty crafty. And these guys would charge the fencing and get through it. Not a big deal. You have dogs to round them up. It's a rural area anyway. And rounding them up, it's just something you have to do as a goat rancher. Well, Khalid had a problem which was there was a crop-dusting operation nearby. And if the planes came in too low, the goats would be frightened and charge the fencing. And so that was actually what was causing them to get out of this state-of-the-art electronic fencing. Typically, it's like getting a parking ticket. It's an administrative code violation. They just write a ticket and you probably pay, I don't know, $5 per goat. I mean, if anybody even cares. In this case, they did criminally prosecute him for over 100 violations. We brought a motion. It's called a Murgia motion that shows discriminatory prosecution. And every other goat rancher, Caucasian goat rancher, came forward to sign declarations that in the same time period, they had had their goats get out more often than him and had never been prosecuted. Never even had a ticket written. And we were able to subpoena those records. And ultimately, it was dismissed when we made these allegations. Judge Fault denied that motion and we threatened to make it as a trial defense when the DA gave up. Another case we handled was the young woman Halima's case. Juvenile charged in a hit-and-run. What had happened was her mother with her brother's mother and the mother's sons had gone to the supermarket. I think it was raining or something. And in parking the vehicle, she bumped another car. They didn't pay any attention to it. It wasn't like a big deal. This was a super minor situation. She went home and I guess someone had written down her license plate and the police came and told her what had happened. She said, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I mean, this is a wealthy family. They've got, you know, good, solid jobs. I mean, they've never been in trouble at all. And she's like immediately like, oh my God, give me the information. I'm so sorry. I absolutely mind it. I was on the way home to get dinner, et cetera, et cetera. She immediately contacted the other party, paid for it, the whole thing. The cops got it in their head that her daughter was driving because whoever saw it thought it was a younger person. And the son said that that wasn't true. The mother, et cetera, et cetera. And literally that got criminally prosecuted. When I appeared in court with my law partner Whitney Lay, African American from Chicago. We had met in law school. Great. Just a brilliant lawyer, the best legal writer I've ever been with. We appeared in front of this judge and he was very unhappy that we were there. And so he started with this sort of like, okay, well, when are you coming back for the pre-trial conference? And we said, well, what about the 16th? No, that's too far away. Okay, how about the 12th? I'm not available on the 12th. Okay, how about the 11th? How about the 10th? I mean, I put out five or six dates. Then I said, well, Your Honor, why don't you select a date and we'll be here? You know, I just said it like that. And he said, you know, counsel, I don't appreciate you talking to me like that. He says, why don't we do this? I'm going to put the matter over till tomorrow and we can pick a date tomorrow. Now he was doing that because he knows we're driving to San Francisco and have to come back. And I appeared on a lot of cases in Davis where that was the deal. They would call my case last. If I walked out of the courtroom, they try to call it. When I wasn't there using the bathroom or something like that, it was really quite ugly. And I represented the head of the housing authority, David Serena, who had a high performing agency. When he traveled, they shared rooms and slept on the floor. I mean, he worked with Cesar Chavez back in the old days. And the Republican grand jury kept issuing reports saying it was a low performing agency and alleging that he was misusing monies and staying in lavish hotels. And we contacted them and said, look, before you issue your report because you did it last year and you did it the year before that, why don't you just tell the truth? I mean, here are the documents, none of this is true. You keep putting out this false information. What was going on was it was all Republicans selected by Republican judges and conservative Democrats. And they were in effect trying to undermine him because he was building housing for poor people. So we filed a lawsuit against the Superior Court and the grand jury in this county in Yolo County and just said, you can't do it. The way you're picking grand jurors is like your friend. There are no Latinos on the grand jury. It's just completely discriminatory. The next week they filed, I don't know, 40-something charges against David for misappropriation of public monies. All felonies. What had he done? Well, he had a girlfriend who he later married and she had two children, minor children, and they were getting medical and dental benefits via his employment with the county. And so they had decided, I think they'd been to the dentist one time. They'd gone to the doctor a couple of times and they decided this was criminal activity. So fortunately for us we had filed a lawsuit against the Superior Court so they recused themselves because they were being sued. And they had to bring in a judge lucky for us from Berkeley, California. You know how this turns out. And they put a death penalty prosecutor on the case who was extremely rude. And I just said, look, a crime has not occurred. We're not going to plead guilty to something. And at the preliminary hearing we're able to show, I forget if it was the medical or the dental benefits, but one of the benefits, in fact, the law did allow these children to get the benefit from him because they were living in his house. And as to the other benefit, they were not entitled to get it. However, my point was he never lied in the application. The county gave him the benefit. He told the truth. He says, no, I'm not married to their mother. They're living in my house, whatever, whatever. Your mistake doesn't make it a crime. He just applied for the benefit and you gave it to him. That's your problem. And if you want him to pay you back, you know, a couple hundred dollars, ask him. And that was that. Let me tell you a couple of things. You know, I know everyone's been sitting a long time and if you're bored by all means leave. But I mean, all these memories are coming back because we really litigated these cases and we cared very deeply about trying to do the right thing. We handled other cases here. I don't recall any of them resulting in a conviction. So it turned out pretty well. The Garcia Zarate case that I handled, you know, just kind of swept up in the, with media attention because of our current president. I may not recall, but he had, well, you recall this, but not the time period with the case I handled. He had announced he was running for president after coming down the escalator at Trump Towers and he disparaged Mexicans and Mexican immigrants and saying, you know, they're not sending their best people, et cetera. Everybody laughed him off. This was a joke candidacy. Two or three weeks later, Kate Steinle dies on Pier 14, a populist tourist location in San Francisco. Young, beautiful, her whole life ahead of her and she's with her father when she gets shot in the back. It seems completely senseless. And my client, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, in his forties, is arrested. He had been deported, oh, I don't know, about five times. He had seven felony convictions. And so Trump started talking about his case and talking about what a terrible fellow this was. And I was in Colorado when the elected public defender, Jeff Adachi, called me up and said, hey, we've got this case. Will you take this case? And he was wondering if I had bandwidth because I was handling another serious murder case at the time. And I said, sure, I'll do it. All we knew at the time was, you know, he had shot this woman at point-blank range is what we understood. And he had confessed to it, to a TV camera that weekend. And so I went to see him. I flew back the next day. I went to see him. And immediately I could see there were some mental health issues going on, very simple. But he had no violence in his background, no history of any kind of violence. And he just, he didn't know Catherine Steinle. He had no reason to hurt her. This was not like a robbery gone bad. He never committed a robbery. He never committed a theft. This guy was just not the way he was being portrayed. And so we were able to show pretty clearly, but it was hard to get the media to hear this, that he was seated on the pier when the gun was fired. The bullet struck about 12 feet from where he was and traveled another, I believe it was 70 or 80 feet before it struck Steinle in the back. It's a totally freak occurrence. You could be an expert marksman and not be able to ricochet a bullet off concrete and accurately hit someone that far away. He got up and split. And that was kind of, that was the case. I started realizing that his prior convictions were actually very minor when you broke them down. And I want to talk to you a little bit about them because one of the takeaways is how bad immigration law is and how things like sanctuary city and Kate's law get wrapped up into a narrative that, you know, it's like, it doesn't fit. This isn't the right case to be dealing with national legislative solutions. Here's why. He had in the early 1990s while he was up in the state of Washington, he had some, what were drug cases. Today, they would all be misdemeanors. They were basically drug possession. However, in like 1993, he pled guilty to one for possession for sale. Now the report, I read it, he had no money on him and there was residue in a plastic baggie. The police thought he was in a drug transaction. They offered him, I don't know, credit for time served deal if he pled guilty for possession for sale. He pled to, it's not a big deal. He already had some felonies. And these were, this is drug activity in between his laborer jobs and out of season while he's just trying to survive. Well, the federal law, it's 8 USC 1326. Chuck mentioned this statute because it relates to illegal entry into the United States. And I want to break it down for you like this. If you come from Mexico, the United States without documentation, you're going to get deported. Maybe you'll be in custody for a little bit before they deport you. Maybe you'll get six months or a year. Maybe if you're a repeat offender, they'll hold you for a couple of years. But that's pretty much, that's it. The universe is relatively, you know, you know what it is. However, if you have been deported on what's called an aggravated felony, murder, rape, all the sex crimes, explosives, right? You're going to do your jail time in the United States, then you're going to be deported. And if you come back to the United States, you're facing 20 years and it's not a joke, like you'll get a lot of jail time. Okay, that kind of makes some sense. If you did a serious crime here, we really don't want you back. Problem is aggravated felony includes murder, rape, all those offenses and any amount of drug trafficking. So any marijuana felony, the sale or possession for sale, any small amount of any other contraband means that Garcia Zarate, when he played guilty for possession for sale for virtually no jail time to some residue in a bag, he's now facing 20 years every time he comes here. First time he came, they negotiated it, five-year sentence. He appeared in court, I think, two times. Did his five years, they deported him, he came back for work because, you know, in certain parts of Mexico, there's really extreme poverty. They catch him, he's committed no crime other than entering. They negotiate six years. He does six years, gets deported, comes back, they offer him seven years this time. So he does five, six, seven, okay? Part of why he keeps coming back is he doesn't understand why he's getting the jail time because he's got, like, some cognitive issues. And so he doesn't understand, like, what he did to merit this, and so he's not changing his behavior. So the feds are about to deport him, but San Francisco has an old warrant for him. It's a 20-year-old marijuana case, and they've ignored it every other time they've deported him. But this time they bring him to San Francisco. San Francisco, he appears in a courtroom, they dismiss it immediately, and the feds don't pick him up because the San Francisco sheriff wants there to be a legitimate warrant or probable cause document from the courts to release him to the feds. The feds don't get the document. San Francisco actually holds him in custody for about two or three weeks without any legal reason, and finally they just let him out in the street. He goes out on the street, he's just living on the Embarcadero, he's wearing clothes he found. They won't hire him in the Mexican restaurants, but they feed him a little bit. He doesn't beg for money, he doesn't steal. He literally looks so poor when people are walking by in an affluent tourist area that people just give him their leftover dinners that they're taking home. They're like, oh my God, would you like this? That's literally how he's surviving. And he does that for about three months before this incident happens. And he swears up and down, he found a gun at the seat that he sat down on the pier, wrapped up in something. He investigated it and it fired the bullet. And that's what he said. Now, it was hard for people to believe that you could actually find a gun on the pier, wrapped up. But then stop and think about it. We have over 100 million guns in our society. I mean, it's a crazy number. There are accidental shootings that happen every day. I think it's something like 40 every day. If somebody dies, I think the numbers, three people die every two days from an accidental shooting. So it turned out we were able to get some surveillance footage from about, I don't know, a quarter mile away from a fire boat. It was grainy, but it revealed something very significant, which was before Garcia Zarate sat down at that chair. There was a congregation of about six, seven people. They had a nap sack or a bag with them. They were talking. They were there. They were together for about 20 minutes. They weren't tourists. This is a pier that everybody walks on to, walks down to the end, looks at the site and walks off, which is what Catherine Steinle was doing with her father. Garcia Zarate didn't do that because he's just a homeless guy sitting on a chair swiveling around. But these people could very well have been discarding a gun. Now, why would they discard the gun? It turned out to belong to a Bureau of Land Management Ranger who had left it unsecured in his vehicle, and it had been stolen a few days earlier. And we argued very clearly that Garcia Zarate had no history for stealing. He had not tried to offer any object for sale in the preceding days that he was arrested. And I mean, I don't even think he had 10 cents in his pocket. And there were other things of value stolen from the vehicle, laptop computers, credit cards, all kinds of stuff. There were many things that happened during the trial that frustrated us because I felt the judge wanted a different outcome. He is a Schwarzenegger appointment, and he did a lot of things that we think resulted in Garcia Zarate not getting a fair trial. Now, he was found not guilty of the murder and manslaughter charges, and that's why it was celebrated as a big victory. But he was convicted of gun possession, and I'll give you an idea of why that shouldn't have happened. Basically, the judge would not instruct the jury on this idea of a momentary possession. And think of it this way. If I hand you a bag and you don't know what's in it, and you say, what's this? And I say, oh, have a look, and you open it, look in it, and there's contraband in there, and you put it on the ground. You say, I don't want this. You hand it back to me. Have you committed the crime of possessing that contraband? Well, I think the answer is no. You didn't know. You had no knowledge. And once you had knowledge, and it was in your hand, the only possession you had was to get rid of it. Well, that was what we were trying to explain to the judge, that, look, Garcia Zarate did not know it was a gun. He's handling it. It fires. At that moment, the jury says, well, it is in his hands. Is he guilty of possession? And they asked for instructions from the judge, and he would not properly instruct them on the law. There were a lot of other things that happened. The Bureau of Land Management Officer was allowed to testify to all the safety precautions he took, but the judge wouldn't let us tell the jury that he actually had a second loaded firearm in the car, also not secured properly, that had not been stolen. Things like that. And one of the things that, in the course of this trial, that was most frustrating was that the firearm that he had was an elite firearm that can be fired with a very low trigger pull. The factory trigger pull of this gun, when it's in single action mode, is like 4.4 pounds. And this is a gun without a safety. It's meant for law enforcement to be able to reach for this gun and start firing, not to be messing around with the safety. This is a gun you have as a secondary weapon that you reach for if you're in trouble. That's the concept. It's a very well-made firearm, but it's got a very light trigger pull. So we were trying to demonstrate how low the trigger pull was to the jury, and we were making a simulator that couldn't actually fire a bullet, but would allow a jury to test the simulator. We had a firearms expert in Canada making the simulator, and we told the court about it. We weren't in possession of it yet, but it was in the mail to us, and we told them when we got it we would turn it over to the DA. They could test it and the whole thing. Well, the DA was very upset. So there was no simulator. We're going to object if the jury should see the real gun. So we said, fine, let them test the trigger pull on the real gun. The judge said, great, we're all in agreement. Well, a few days later, the DA changes her mind. Before I can even be heard on the subject, the judge agrees with her. And so the DA argued to the jury that 4.4 pounds is like lifting a 5-pound bag of sugar. That's what it takes to fire this gun. When the truth was squirt guns, our expert tested some children's squirt guns at trigger pulls of like 4 pounds. I mean, this is a very light trigger pull, and this was the kind of gamesmanship that was happening in court. Anyway, I could go on and on. Let me just say a couple of other things about the law. I mentioned this idea of this illegal re-entry based on the aggravated felony. I want to just say about sanctuary city. I think it hurts us when everybody is presenting sanctuary city as a municipality fighting the federal authority and that we want to have our own laws and we don't have to follow what the feds are doing. I don't think that that works because we're a nation of laws and that seems to make sense to people. They don't understand what are we going to do, be ruled by local authorities when there's federal law. And here's why that argument is wrong. What has happened in a 10-year period, it was proven that ICE and Homeland Security arrested 1,500 U.S. citizens by mistake. They put detainers on them. They would call the sheriff of a county and say, put a detainer on that person, we're going to deport them. It turned out they got it wrong 1,500 times in that time period. So the courts in Nevada, North Dakota, Rhode Island, I think Utah, a number of different places said, no, no, no, you can't do it that way. You have to present probable cause, a warrant, a probable cause instrument that says this person is not a citizen and subject to deportation. We have to see that before the municipality does what you want. That's what's actually going on. It's the federal authorities, ICE and Homeland Security that don't want to follow federal law. It's the municipality that's following federal law because federal law gets interpreted by the courts. And that's really the fight. The final thing I want to say is, you know, I was thinking about why is it that immigration is such a hot topic right now? Why is it that there's so many people here in this country that appear to be here without documentation? Like was it always this way when I was growing up? Was it this way? It just seems so peculiar that this is so much a thing. And it turns out that in 1952 there was a national immigration law that was passed that changed something in the law that is causing the problem that we have now. And it relates to something in law that we call statute of limitations. So when you commit a crime, typically you have to be prosecuted for it within a certain amount of time. So like let's say, unless it's murder, right, there's no statute of limitations on the crime of murder. But let's say you commit a misdemeanor. Some states you have to be prosecuted within a year or within three years. Some states with felonies have three years statute of limitations. Some maybe go to five years. And what this means is I could admit to doing a crime 10 years ago, hey, I stole that stuff from you when we were roommates. I'm sorry I shouldn't have done it. You can't prosecute me for it just too many years ago. Well, this law in 1952 changed the statute of limitations for illegally entering the country. Because that's the crime, right? You illegally entered the country without documentation. So the clock starts the day you entered. And let's say five years later, they can't prosecute you for it. Now you're not a citizen, so you have to apply to become a citizen. But the law had a built-in amnesty. What did the law do? The law changed the statute of limitations not to start running from when you entered, but to start running from when you were discovered here without documentation. Which meant you never obtained amnesty. And that's why you've had this proliferation of these cases. Anyway, I've talked enough. It's a real delight to be back and to David and Cecilia. I really appreciate everything you guys have done because from the very outset, I mean you guys just took on so much. You were always supportive. Anytime we needed anything, they were there 100%. And congratulations on this event and everything you've done. Thank you. So we do have a little bit of time for audience questions. And there are mics on the side of the room. Try to actually ask a question if you're interested rather than making a statement. Because we don't have a lot of time. But if you have a question, you can get up behind the mic and ask it. Or if you just want to go, then that's fine too. So I don't know. Does anyone have a question? I've got a question. Okay, perfect. For Mr. Gonzalez, if you don't mind. There's a scenario going on right now in Guatemala where we have like seven or eight thousand Guatemalans or whatever is going on in those central countries that may be reaching the border within the next two to three weeks. And the dummy in the White House has sent like 800 troops to the border. They may not all get there, the seven or eight thousand, but some of these people are going to wind up at the border from my understanding, you know, they're escaping a life of crime being committed against them. What happens there once they get to the border? Well, I think for me, I'm most interested in the kind of rhetoric of how these folks are perceived because, you know, it's very different. Like the way you think of like illegal immigration, you know, undocumented people coming here, when you understand that they're fleeing American foreign policy decisions, then you get it. Like there's like literally the tens of thousands of guns that we have sold into Mexico contributing to the rampant crime there and the drug cartels, or you take something like NAFTA where you've got, you know, our subsidizing of American corn so it can be sold for less than it can be grown in Mexico means that you're putting Mexican farmers out of work. And it starts to feel different about why are they are coming. And I think, you know, I'm not an expert in foreign policy, but I think the same argument goes for folks coming from Central America. So many of those nations are ravaged by, you know, certainly the 20th century, United States, you know, really undermining of democratic regimes, etc. There. What's going to happen when they get here? I mean, folks can come and make application for asylum. I think that that's going to be the process. The question of whether or not Trump's tactics of trying to harm people physically and mentally to injure them so much that they give up. I mean, I don't know how that plays out. I am bothered that a rule like illegal reentry for an aggravated felony that applies to any amount of marijuana sale has been on the books for God, two, three decades. I mean, ever since I've been a lawyer and even the Democrats have got to change that law. Sure. I wonder if you could advise us in the vanguard or any tonight about concrete things we can do, like it's disturbing to read the story about Maria. What do we do? I think last year we knew what to do. We worked for a new public defender and we came, I mean district attorney and we've came close, but what do we do this year? Well, one thing I like to do is I like to write the truth and I like to put people's names in those articles and make them read about the injustices that they're engaged in because it bothers them. And when they're friends or they Google themselves, these articles are out there in the world. And I'll tell you, we had some public defenders run for judge and in San Francisco it was very hard to beat incumbents but they ran against conservative judges. And the judges were sitting court of appeal judges and a state supreme court judge basically got out there and were writing, you know, letters and editorials to the legal paper saying what an outrage it was and every lawyer should oppose this kind of attack on the judiciary. It was all rubbish, right? But one of the judges that signed on to a letter was a supreme court judge, Democratic appointed, who basically taught at Stanford, I mean my alma mater. He never even did a deposition. He'd never tried a case. And it was like, you know, I wrote an article that in parts basically said to him, you're not even as qualified as these people like shut up, you know. And I didn't say it that way but the point was made which was, you know, this is democracy. People are running for office. If you don't want judicial elections then change the Constitution. That's the way the law, and you're supposed to uphold the law, not attack it, you know, and that sort of thing. So I think it's very effective. That's just something you have to do. You'll get better at writing things. My writing has gotten better. You may be a great writer to start with but I just mean, you know, and whether you publish it in the newspaper or you create your own places to publish it. People read it and find it. And it gets circulated. Everybody knows the details of what's happening to somebody and they can join forces and the powers that be feel the pressure. Hi, my name is Desiree Rojas and I'm a resident of Davis. For many years we have been fighting this DA, Jeff Rising. He attacked Maria Grihava. We were part of the community that supported Maria. Thank God they dropped the, I guess it was a complaint. So in the press conference that we had before she entered the courthouse, we stated in our press statement that we are demanding that Javier Veseda, the Attorney General, to conduct expeditiously an investigation into prosecutorial misconduct. And so my question is, what can we do to really put the pressure on him to do his job to get this DA to start the investigation? Well, I think the State Attorney General has a good reputation and I don't know him personally. I've heard him speak. But personally, I like when, you know, a lot of times people in authority hide behind the strict reading of the law to say, well I'm just, you know, charging you with a crime that you may have committed and it looks like you committed. A very powerful tool is the case I mentioned earlier, the Murgia case, which basically allows you to get your case dismissed if you can show discriminatory prosecution. And in this case, you have a Latina woman who is being singled out. The question is, is there anybody of any other category, you know, in terms of gender or race, that they have not criminally prosecuted, that they could have for the very same thing? It's a very powerful tool and it's been used, I've used it successfully to allege that, hey, why are you only arresting the Latino guys selling drugs in the city square and not the African-Americans or Caucasian guys who have a marijuana club around the corner or whatever, or, you know, out at San Quentin. There would be fights in the jail and only the African-American guys who get prosecuted in the county courthouse. The Caucasian guys that gotten fights out, it's an administrative matter, we'll deal with it in-house. That's a Murgia motion. And what Murgia does is it gives you, if you can make a showing that there appears that there might be discrimination here, you can ask to subpoena and to make the prosecution turn over the records that you need to prove your situation. So, for instance, in the marijuana case, a Latino arrested in a drug case, I put together a declaration with the names of 40 or 50 other guys being charged for the same offense, all of whom were Latino. So, I was saying, okay, here, I'm showing you all the guys being prosecuted. I want to see the records, like, show me who's being arrested so I can figure out why you're not prosecuting them. And so that's worth asking a lot of questions in trying to sort that out. And if you've got a district attorney that has run for office, I would scrutinize his own campaign finances, you know? That's a great idea. Thank you. Hi. You said a few minutes ago that local municipalities want to obey the laws, but it's the feds that don't, and it's pretty obvious we know that. So, I'm trying to understand the mentality, and this is a pattern throughout the Trump administration, not just locally or with immigration issues, but I'm trying to understand this whole thing that they do, not wanting to follow the laws. Is it because they think, well, first of all, it's arrogance, we know that, and it's a lot of other things, but do they think we're going to push it until someone sues us, or do we think, or do they think the laws don't apply to them, or do they think, what's this mentality that's pervasive? Well, they're bullies, fundamentally, and what they're doing is they're going to put pressure to make Congress change the law. So, or to get judges on the bench that aren't going to agree with those other judges, and what they're doing is they're basically saying, rather than follow the law, we're going to ignore it, and every time someone like Catherine Steinle gets hurt, we're just going to blame the municipality. And eventually, people are going to get so upset that the law's going to change, you know? They have the long view, and they're willing to let a lot of people get hurt in the process, unfortunately. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, everybody, for coming tonight, and thank you to all our speakers and everybody who spent their time here. Thanks.