Cecil announces intended rulings
on Bortin phone, visit recordings
SACRAMENTO 8/8/02 -- Some editors considered Judge Thomas Cecil's rulings on three dicey issues raised in a pre-trial defense motion by Michael Bortin to be "just inside baseball," and they passed on it.
That the government won hands down on all points whether jailers could share recordings of Bortin’s out-going telephone calls with prosecutors further dimmed the editors' interest. The status quo was preserved, so who cares?
In tentative rulings Cecil indicated that whatever recordings jailers in Oregon and California may have made of Bortin’s social out-going calls could be shared with investigators and prosecutors for evidentiary purposes.
The 14-year veteran of the Sacramento County bench also indicated Aug. 8 that he would allow the jailers to similarly share tape recordings of Bortin’s jailhouse social visits.
Editors have every right to run what they want, but this kind of intentional ignorance only exacerbates the rapid disappearance of what few remaining civil rights we have.
Here is what one wire service editor decided was too subtle for international readers to understand or care about.
Bortin was arrested in Multinomah County, Ore. Jan. 14 on a no-bail Sacramento County, Calif. arrest warrant alleging his involvement in the slaying Myrna Opsahl during a 1975 Carmichael bank job.
Bortin initially balked at extradition, but soon decided to cooperate. He was brought to Sacramento County where he joined his old Symbionese Liberation Army pals Emily Montague, William Harris and Sara Jane Olson in the county jail.
Olson had already been convicted for hr part in a separate SLA crime and was serving a prison term, but temporarily held in the county jail.
A police court judge set bail for Montague, Harris and Bortin at $1 million. Montague and Harris made the big number. Cecil later reduced Bortin’s bail to half a mill and he popped for that, too. They are all now free on bond, except for Olson who’s doing her two-plus year term in Chowchilla.
Nonetheless doubts and issues still surround what jailers in Oregon and in Sacramento may do with tape recordings made of Bortin’s out-going calls and personal in-person social visits he had with friends and families in the two jails.
Also problematic is the question whether jailhouse phone and visit taping policies and how prosecutors might exploit them. This issue has come up before in prior Sacramento County cases, including the notorious People v. Hronis & Bertsch.
Law enforcement justifies the policy on the grounds of "officer safety" and "institution security" routinely record out-going calls by prisoners. Deputies "monitor" these calls for content.
After all, an inmate might, just might, call a friend on the outside to hatch a plan to break out of jail, the hypothesis goes.
Signs and recorded notices that the visit or call might monitored is given, thus inmates are given the "choice" of not making the call, the justification goes. Acceptance of the notice constitutes permission to tape, law enforcement contend. Appeals courts have given the benefit of the doubt to such thinking.
A further wrinkle is put in the matter in Sacramento County, where a computerized Jail Inmate Management System (JIMS) tracks many facts about inmates - from birth date to next court date to the names and purposes of all of an inmate's visitors, including attorneys, investigators, psychiatrists and assorted experts and doctors.
The problem is these "safety" monitorings are being shared with prosecutors and prosecution investigators in order to enhance the prosecution's case, either by strengthening it's own hand or by exploiting weaknesses in the defense discovered by eavesdropping.
In a recent ruling the California Supremes declared that inmates have "no reasonable expectation of privacy." They likened being in jail to being "in the back seat of a police car" where law permits surreptitious taping.
Some intrusions into a prisoner’s privacy rights are only to be expected when incarcerated in an institution, Bortin’s lawyer, James Bustamante agree. But the further uses of the information gathered under the guise of “safety” for the institution go far beyond law enforcement’s legitimate needs, Bustamante said.
In asking Cecil to bar the prosecution’s use of the information on the tapes, Bustamante argued that:
1) The laws as currently interpreted were intended to help protect “institutional safety,” not to help district attorneys prosecute their cases;
2) Such privacy intrusions were aimed at convicts serving time, not pre-trial detainees;
3) Poor defendants were unfairly prejudiced simply because they could not afford to make bail.
A similar problem involved DA’s access to JIMS, a comprehensive computerized Jail Inmate Management System that records who visits each inmate and for what reason.
Cecil did not rule Thursday, but at the end of the hearing told Bustamante that he could expect to see the final rulings to give the government “everything it wants” on these issues.
Afterwards said that he did not believe the government would learn much from the 21 tapes Multinomah County jailers shipped to Sacramento DA investigators, or from the unknown number of tapes Sacramento jailers may have preserved from Bortin’s time in the Lorenzo Patino facility.
However, “we feel strongly about it,” Bustamante told reporters.
on Bortin phone, visit recordings
SACRAMENTO 8/8/02 -- Some editors considered Judge Thomas Cecil's rulings on three dicey issues raised in a pre-trial defense motion by Michael Bortin to be "just inside baseball," and they passed on it.
That the government won hands down on all points whether jailers could share recordings of Bortin’s out-going telephone calls with prosecutors further dimmed the editors' interest. The status quo was preserved, so who cares?
In tentative rulings Cecil indicated that whatever recordings jailers in Oregon and California may have made of Bortin’s social out-going calls could be shared with investigators and prosecutors for evidentiary purposes.
The 14-year veteran of the Sacramento County bench also indicated Aug. 8 that he would allow the jailers to similarly share tape recordings of Bortin’s jailhouse social visits.
Editors have every right to run what they want, but this kind of intentional ignorance only exacerbates the rapid disappearance of what few remaining civil rights we have.
Here is what one wire service editor decided was too subtle for international readers to understand or care about.
Bortin was arrested in Multinomah County, Ore. Jan. 14 on a no-bail Sacramento County, Calif. arrest warrant alleging his involvement in the slaying Myrna Opsahl during a 1975 Carmichael bank job.
Bortin initially balked at extradition, but soon decided to cooperate. He was brought to Sacramento County where he joined his old Symbionese Liberation Army pals Emily Montague, William Harris and Sara Jane Olson in the county jail.
Olson had already been convicted for hr part in a separate SLA crime and was serving a prison term, but temporarily held in the county jail.
A police court judge set bail for Montague, Harris and Bortin at $1 million. Montague and Harris made the big number. Cecil later reduced Bortin’s bail to half a mill and he popped for that, too. They are all now free on bond, except for Olson who’s doing her two-plus year term in Chowchilla.
Nonetheless doubts and issues still surround what jailers in Oregon and in Sacramento may do with tape recordings made of Bortin’s out-going calls and personal in-person social visits he had with friends and families in the two jails.
Also problematic is the question whether jailhouse phone and visit taping policies and how prosecutors might exploit them. This issue has come up before in prior Sacramento County cases, including the notorious People v. Hronis & Bertsch.
Law enforcement justifies the policy on the grounds of "officer safety" and "institution security" routinely record out-going calls by prisoners. Deputies "monitor" these calls for content.
After all, an inmate might, just might, call a friend on the outside to hatch a plan to break out of jail, the hypothesis goes.
Signs and recorded notices that the visit or call might monitored is given, thus inmates are given the "choice" of not making the call, the justification goes. Acceptance of the notice constitutes permission to tape, law enforcement contend. Appeals courts have given the benefit of the doubt to such thinking.
A further wrinkle is put in the matter in Sacramento County, where a computerized Jail Inmate Management System (JIMS) tracks many facts about inmates - from birth date to next court date to the names and purposes of all of an inmate's visitors, including attorneys, investigators, psychiatrists and assorted experts and doctors.
The problem is these "safety" monitorings are being shared with prosecutors and prosecution investigators in order to enhance the prosecution's case, either by strengthening it's own hand or by exploiting weaknesses in the defense discovered by eavesdropping.
In a recent ruling the California Supremes declared that inmates have "no reasonable expectation of privacy." They likened being in jail to being "in the back seat of a police car" where law permits surreptitious taping.
Some intrusions into a prisoner’s privacy rights are only to be expected when incarcerated in an institution, Bortin’s lawyer, James Bustamante agree. But the further uses of the information gathered under the guise of “safety” for the institution go far beyond law enforcement’s legitimate needs, Bustamante said.
In asking Cecil to bar the prosecution’s use of the information on the tapes, Bustamante argued that:
1) The laws as currently interpreted were intended to help protect “institutional safety,” not to help district attorneys prosecute their cases;
2) Such privacy intrusions were aimed at convicts serving time, not pre-trial detainees;
3) Poor defendants were unfairly prejudiced simply because they could not afford to make bail.
A similar problem involved DA’s access to JIMS, a comprehensive computerized Jail Inmate Management System that records who visits each inmate and for what reason.
Cecil did not rule Thursday, but at the end of the hearing told Bustamante that he could expect to see the final rulings to give the government “everything it wants” on these issues.
Afterwards said that he did not believe the government would learn much from the 21 tapes Multinomah County jailers shipped to Sacramento DA investigators, or from the unknown number of tapes Sacramento jailers may have preserved from Bortin’s time in the Lorenzo Patino facility.
However, “we feel strongly about it,” Bustamante told reporters.
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