Lois Henry: Cracks in Kern's system a grave threat
Domestic violence court needed
| Thursday, Aug 13 2009 10:39 PM
Last Updated Thursday, Aug 13 2009 10:43 PM
These are Lois Henry's opinions, not necessarily The Californian's. Her column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Call her at 395-7373 or write lhenry@bakersfield.com.
Read archived columns at Bakersfield.com/henry or weigh in on this topic on her No Holds Barred blog at Bakersfield.com/blogs.
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Lois Henry
The deaths of Annette Sowders and her mother show at least two substantial cracks in Kern County's domestic violence protection system that need fixing -- pronto.
This isn't a drawn-out, new-law kind of fix. It's up to us to handle.
Sowders and her mother, Sharon Cannon, were gunned down in their home at 2:30 a.m. last Saturday by someone wielding a 12-gauge shotgun. Robert Fuller, Sowders' estranged husband, was arrested a short time later, a 12-gauge shotgun with him in his truck.
Guns
Sowders had a restraining order against Fuller that mandated he either turn all his guns over to the sheriff's department or sell them to a licensed gun dealer. In fact, he was twice ordered to dump the guns and provide a receipt showing he had done so.
Though he said in court documents that he'd rid himself of the weapons, he didn't provide documentation -- and apparently no one ever made a fuss over it.
That was the first crack, which then gets wider when you understand there's no way for anyone, including law enforcement, to check on the guns. Officers can't go storming into people's houses without probable cause.
In Fuller's case, sheriff's deputies did seize two handguns after he shot himself in the chin with a .44 magnum in April, giving them enough cause to get a search warrant. But they didn't find any other firearms in his trailer and no criminal charges were filed against him.
According to documents buried in one of his several divorces, Fuller had more than a dozen rifles, handguns and shotguns.
There must be a way to shoe up the firearm loose end. Perhaps the court could mandate guns go only to the sheriff's department and require the documentation come directly to court from the department, which would eliminate the "good faith" receipt loophole.
That won't keep someone from lying about having guns in the first place, or illegally getting more guns. But ordering a potentially violent person to get rid of guns without any kind of accountability is pointless.
Bail
Fuller was arrested twice for violating the restraining order (at least five other violations reported).
He bailed out the very same day of both arrests.
That's because both arrests were subject to a "bail schedule" which put bail at a set amount -- $5,000. Fuller never had to go before a judge who could have reviewed the full case and seen an escalating pattern of harassment and possibly kept him in jail. And that's the second big crack in the system.
"Both of those are the very things the Domestic Violence Advisory Council was working on," Nada York, past president of the council, told me.
She said the council is resurrecting its criminal justice committee, which includes members of law enforcement, victims' advocates and court officers, and looked at similar issues several years ago.
There are a couple of ways to fix the bail issue right off the bat. First, bail is too low, she said. And there's a little-known code section officers can use to ask judges for higher bail based on exactly the kind of escalating circumstances seen in the Sowders case.
"We know officers get frustrated because the perpetrator keeps bailing out and they're just not aware that that tool is available to them," she said.
The committee would also address the firearm issue. "It's a maze that officers and courts have to navigate and we have to find a way for them to get through that maze so the right person gets the right information and those guns get confiscated."
Ultimately, what's needed is a domestic violence court to better track these cases, which studies have shown get continued two and three times more often than other cases.
The cost of creating a new court, she said, would be offset by reducing continuances and repeat visits by law enforcement. Not to mention the cost in lives.
Michael Runner, director of legal programs in the San Francisco office of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, also wondered if law enforcement and the District Attorney's office could improve communication and urgency in these kinds of cases. "For all those violations he (Fuller) had, I don't understand why charges weren't filed," Runner said. He mentioned a report several years ago by the Attorney General's office that documented a severe lack of enforcement on the prosecution side.
I tried to check Kern's prosecution rate on restraining order violations (Bakersfield Police makes about 250 such arrests a year and the sheriff's department responds to about 463 reports of violations a year).
But the cases are prosecuted in a myriad of ways, such as being sent back to civil court if that's where the restraining order originated, or hooking the perp up on a probation violation instead of opening a new case, so they're nearly impossible to track.
In Sowders' case, the arrests and the many reports she made of Fuller violating the restraining order weren't sent immediately to the DA for charges.
Senior Deputy Michael Whorf told me there's a time delay getting the paperwork downtown that varies depending on a lot of outside factors, but he was sure the DA had most, if not all, of the reports on Fuller's violations by now.
That's cold comfort to Sowders' cousin, Jeanne Dillman, who last spoke to Sowders and Cannon the Friday before they were killed. Sowders had been making the rounds between court, the DA's office and the sheriff's department trying to make sure Fuller was prosecuted.
Finally, Dillman said, Sowders was told by the DA's office they didn't have the sheriff's reports. She went back to the sheriff's department, which gave her a handful of request forms to get the reports to take to the DA herself.
"That's what they were doing Friday night," Dillman told me. "When I last talked to them, she and Sharon were at the dining room table filling out those request forms."
She never spoke to them again.
