Colin Flaherty Random by-lines.

"It is also abundantly clear that Kelvin Wiley would still be locked up were it not for the efforts of an investigative reporter acting on his own, Colin Flaherty, who dug for the facts that should have been seeking to prove Wiley's guilt or innocence."

Lionel Van Deerlin

San Diego Union-Tribune

The rest of the story...

Column: Lionel Van Deerlin

WRONGFULLY CONVICTED
Justice system too often blinds itself to facts

Author: Lionel Van Deerlin; VAN DEERLIN represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 18 years.

Article Text:

Arecurring theme in every political season is the perceived need for a tougher stance against crime. Politicians often sound like Wyatt Earp in promising to crack down on the bad guys. They're for more cops, faster trials and longer jail sentences.

It's a winning hand. Most polls find the fear of street violence on people's minds as acutely as their concern for the economy. They like to hear a candidate state the obvious -- that we must show more concern for the victim of crime than we do for the criminal. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key."

Yet we have been beset this year by a series of well-publicized and troubling instances in which innocent persons, usually black or Hispanic, were falsely accused, arrested, convicted and hustled off to jail for crimes they did not commit. At worst, these were victims of framed evidence. At best, they suffered from shoddy police or court practices. Almost invariably, the long months taken in setting them free have compounded society's offense against the innocents.

There is another seeming invariable: Justice is achieved only when someone outside the court system sets out to expose its blunders.

Most egregious of recent cases was that of two black men who spent 17 years on San Quentin's Death Row after their conviction in the fatal shooting of a Los Angeles sheriff's deputy in 1975. Information assembled by a charitable foundation persuaded a judge that the two were railroaded by police detectives frustrated over failure to crack the case.

Soon afterward, the Texas prison system was compelled to release a young Chula Vistan long after he was put away on robbery charges at a trial to which he was unable to summon witnesses who could have proved the charges false. These included an employer and fellow workers who would swear the defendant was on the job in a fast-food establishment on the night of -- and more than 1,000 miles from -- the crime.

And now the windup of yet another such case. In Vista court, Superior Judge J. Morgan Lester last week set aside a conviction on which 30-year-old Kelvin Wiley had spent nearly a year in Soledad State Prison.

It had been the sort of case likely to inflame, involving a busted love affair between a handsome black man and a striking blonde -- both successful and upwardly mobile in a chic suburban neighborhood.

The romance had blossomed through two years in which the pair shared an Encinitas condo with the woman's two young children, visited the night spots, even vacationed together in Hawaii. It hit the rocks when Wiley tired of their relationship and the woman -- 29-year-old Toni Di Giovanni -- refused to let go. She subjected Wiley to endless abuse including public, often obscene confrontations.

The drama of unrequited love culminated when Toni, found on her condo floor with a belt around her neck, claimed Wiley had tried to kill her. Conviction in his subsequent trial turned on evidence offered by the woman's 10-year-old son Eric, whom jurors found "angelic as a choir boy."

The child testified he had seen Wiley's easily distinguished Bronco vehicle driving by the condo around the time of the alleged assault. Long after Wiley was put away, evidence adduced totally outside official channels upset the conviction. Prodded by conscientious grandparents, Eric Di Giovanni admitted he'd lied to help his mother.

With the conviction finally set aside last week, Steve Casey, a highly regarded assistant to the district attorney, offered an observation that was both accurate and fatuous. He said false convictions are "reasonably rare," adding: "We are not in the business of convicting innocent people."

Well, we must surely hope he's right about that. Not since England's 17th century Bloody Assizes, or the Salem witch trials, have Anglo-Saxon courts deliberately set out to rack up the guiltless.

Casey also told reporters that prosecutors move quickly to correct their occasional mistakes. But everything is in the point of view. A pace deemed swift by the DA's staff, on its 9-to-5 schedule, may look different to a prisoner waiting it out through the long winter months at Soledad.

It is also abundantly clear that Kelvin Wiley would still be locked up were it not for the efforts of an investigative reporter acting on his own, Colin Flaherty, who dug for the facts that others should have been seeking to prove Wiley's guilt or innocence.

Flaherty didn't have to look far. The telling evidence that finally set Wiley free was obtained from neighbors living in three condos less than 100 feet from the scene of the non-crime -- not one of whom had been interviewed by DA's investigators or counsel for the defense.

The case reflects no credit on those so-called "officers of the court." Not, obviously, on Wiley's public defender. Not on prosecutors who showed scant desire to see justice done. Not on jurors who admitted to their doubts about Wiley's guilt. And not, alas, on a judge whose own errant assumptions regarding the credibility of principal witnesses clearly shaped the trial's outcome.

Do I imagine things? Acquitted on charges of attempted murder and burglary, Wiley was found guilty only of "battery with serious bodily injury." At sentencing time, the prosecutor admitted that Toni Di Giovanni's testimony had not been "completely honest." The probationary report astonishingly noted that when "demonstrating the manner in which she had been strangled, (she) held her hands in a position which would have been inappropriate to defend herself and appropriate for strangling herself."

And Judge Lester, who had likened the woman to mythological sirens luring sailors into deadly waters, now acknowledges that her ex-lover was "deprived of witnesses who could have helped his case."

Not in Bosnia, this. Not even in Texas. Right here in San Diego County.

Some links to other by-lines and ghost written pieces.

Who Are We? AND WHERE ARE WE GOING? - San Diego Magazine - October 1995 - San Diego, California

San Diego Magazine - October 1995 - San Diego, California

Valley Fever - San Diego Magazine - September 1995 - San Diego, California

Wal-Mart goes green

PC Games Mailbag - February 27, 2002

How Can We Miss You if You Won't Go Away? - voiceofsandiego.org: Letters

One man's dirt another's sand

San Diego Source > Commentary > Columnists > Now for something completely different: The sale of the Del Mar Fairgrounds

Paul Dobson: from bare knuckles to brass rails. (Dobson's, a San Diego, CA, restaurant) (Profile) - San Diego Business Journal | HighBeam Research - FREE trial

Thank bureaucrats for sandless beaches

Summer spy serial - Chapter 2: Sweets for the Sweet - The Washington Post

Disaster that didn't happen

Solana Beach shrinks property rights

Draw More Attention to Your Business - BusinessWeek

County's anti-growth strategy a big success

Fossil fuels cost us plenty: Billed as 'cheap,' their hidden costs are high indeed. Think BP

Big Brother is a water cop

Conviction Set Aside as Boy Recants : Justice: Judge tosses out guilty verdict in case of man who spent 1 1/2 years in state prison. - Los Angeles Times

Outrage comes once a year

Here comes Wal-Mart, there goes carbon | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

Cities vigilant about pollution of others

Heroes slice through red tape

Colin Flaherty: Is it ecophobia if they’re really out to get you? | Contributors | projo.com | The Providence Journal

Wal-Mart Goes Green: The World's First Quintuple Play | Alternative Energy Stocks

Wal-Mart eschews carbon - SignOnSanDiego.com

Don’t Touch the Water - New York Times

Colin Flaherty -- book excerpt.

Robert Frost and All That Jazz.

Robert Frost said “home is the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Needing a place to call home for a few days, I naturally found myself at the Bally’s casino in Las Vegas. When my business slowed down a year or so ago, so did my trips to Vegas.

But offers of free rooms at the nicest places in town kept coming via email right on schedule.

But first I would have to find a phone, my Iphone was still in Iowa. It took an hour and several incredulous looks from casino employees before someone could successfully direct me to a pay phone. Not having a cell phone is today’s unforgiveable social sin.

Finally I found a pay phone, hidden way in the back of a little used part of the casino.

A few minutes later I was giving some pleasant stranger a number on a player’s card, and, as if I were rubbing a magic lamp, a wish for five free nights free at their hotel was granted.

I must have lost more money that I remember at these places. They were all too eager to have me.

But soon all the grime of a few days on the road was swirling away down a very nice bath tub in a large and comfortable suite, thank you very much.

It takes a while to figure this out, but Vegas probably has more normal people than any other city in the country.

Despite the movies and whatever, most people in Vegas are not bumping boogies with Paris Hilton at some crazy fancy nightclub.

Most are just normal, if not slightly upscale people who would like to find some trouble or excitement, but more to tell the folks back home than actually be a part of it.

This is the greatest city in the world. And every staid urban planner should be required to spend some time here to take in the whimsy and creativity and explosive imagination it took to build this town.

Then they should be required to add some of that to every project they poo-poo so often before feeding it to a grinder that makes them all come out the same.

Anyway ..

Across from the hotel, I found myself walking past a dirt lot that was crappy even by dirt lot standards. The sidewalk, however, remained. And it contained a walk of fame containing big brass plaques imbedded in the sidewalk surrounded by churchlike Italian marble.

All commemorating famous jazz musicians such as Louie Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Rich, Duke Ellington, and seven or eight others. A few yards down was space for another dozen plaques.

Whatever they were yesterday, today they welcomed people on the way to and from a bus stop in front of a dingy grocery next to the dirt lot littered with bottles and boxes.

Someone learned about jazz the hard way. Just as my buddy Dan and I had.

Dan, also known as Base Camp, took a small soda shop and bait shack at the end of a pier and turned it into yuppie hangout, complete with palm trees, live music, and expensive coffee.

Thousands of people walked by the place every day, amazed at the turnaround, and dozens every day looked in, almost in wonder, and said “You guys should have jazz there.”

We were not fans of jazz, but Dan said ‘why not?” And for some reason San Diego had lots of famous jazz players who were eager to play, including many people who played with the same people remembered and forgotten in marble and brass in Vegas today.

So we kicked out the guitar playing kids and replaced them with a guitar and drums and piano and maybe a trumpet and sometimes someone to sing.

Aging hipsters walking by saw the jazz kit and told us how great it was we had jazz.

It was a disaster.

Jazz fans are cheap. I cannot tell you how many times someone would come in and ask for hot water then pull out a tea bag.

Not many people showed up. And we promoted it just fine, in case you were wondering.

As soon as Dan went back to finding some dirty looking young guys who somehow could keep a reggae beat on two old guitars and a beat up old drum, hundreds and hundreds of kids would arrive early, stay late, and pay ridiculous amounts of money for a can of Budweiser.

But I had bigger things to worry about than decaying plaques to ancient and forgotten musical cults. I was breaking my oldest and firmest rule: Only go to Vegas with lots and lots of money.

And soon as my free rooms went away, I would have to find a way to refill the old pockets. I’ll have to check and see what Robert Frost has to say about that.

From Aspen.com

Colin Flaherty

http://aspen.com/aspen/colorado/articles/hunter-thompson-aspen-enough

Hunter Thompson: Aspen Enough!

Submitted by Colin Flaherty on Thu, 04/02/2009 - 23:19

Hunter Thompson is dead. He killed himself 40 years ago when he figured out it was a lot easier being a circus clown with a typewriter, a bottle of bourbon and some drugs instead of being a writer. It just took a while.

So it is time for Aspen and everywhere else to give it a rest.

How many more people do we need to make the Thompson-inspired drunken/doped-up trudge to Woody’s before we all figure out he was just a drug addict with nothing more to say than ‘watch me as I get high.’

Just a few weeks ago Lily Tomlin was in Aspen. In the press run-up to her show, Tomlin remembers downing 13 shots of Wild Turkey at one of the local watering holes. She was disappointed that the bar did not have a plaque commemorating that historic occasion.

Hunter Thompson may have been an idiot but he also left a legacy. Lily Tomlin was trying to be a part of it.

Drinking 13 shots; smoking 13 joints; taking 13 handfuls of acid, Phenobarbital and other drugs is not an accomplishment. To state the obvious.

Neither is it a substitute for having a real life.

But the legacy of Hunter Thompson is that a whole lot of people still think it is.

The latest clowns are some lawyers (sorry for being redundant) who are putting up some kind of scholarship they say is worth a thousand bucks to give to some current or aspiring drug lawyer. They named it after Hunter Thompson and the seminar will be right here in good ol’ Aspen and feature all the ways that people who smoke pot and hire lawyers can now do so without worrying about the legal consequences.

Maybe Johnny Depp can make a movie out of it.

I scanned one of the Big Losers biographies that came out last year. As you might expect it was all about a wasted life dressed up in the gauzy memories of famous and semi-famous people who used to be amused by his drug fueled antics.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

So the book went on: one failed relationship after another. One drug trip. Blah Blah Blah. Hahaha.

But at the very end of the book, the author puts it all in perspective: Thompson did all the clownish things he did all because he “loved the constitution.”

That is the biggest joke of all. Hunter Thompson loved only one thing. The attention he got from taking a lot of drugs and sitting in front of a typewriter hitting keys almost at random.

Rest in Peace? I don’t think so.

She's no MBA, but Yvonne Jackson knows SBA lending

San Diego Business Journal, June 29, 1992 by Colin Flaherty

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5247/is_n25_v13/ai_n28615377/?tag=content;col1

First International executive has made her bank a lending power

If Yvonne Jackson were an MBA, she would have known that banks can't increase profits and market share in a recession. She would have learned that slow times mean sluggish profits, holding on to what you have and not wasting money hunting for new customers that probably aren't there.

Luckily for First International Bank, Jackson is not an MBA.

Jackson is the bank's senior vice president in charge of Small Business Administration lending. Since coming to First International less than two years ago, Jackson has successfully challenged the traditional wisdom about hunkering down during a recession. She has increased the bank's SBA portfolio tenfold, taking it from 22nd to second place in loan volume in San Diego in 1991. In May, the SBA named Jackson the Financial Services Advocate of the Year locally, and she went on to win top honors in the county, the state, the western region and placed second in the country.

A New Horse in the Race

For local banks such as First International, SBA loans are an increasingly lucrative source of business. With the savings-and-loan money spigot turned almost all the way off, borrowers are turning to SBA loans because terms are better (that is, longer), qualifying is easier and rates are about the same. Small companies buying their own buildings have found the 10-percent-down requirement of SBA loans particularly attractive.

Locally, the Bank of Commerce has dominated SBA lending for as long as anyone can remember. Last year it captured an estimated 35 percent of the market with $25.4 million in loans. While this is still a big margin, it's down from the almost 50 percent Bank of Commerce enjoyed in the late 1980s.

Do Jackson and First International have what it takes to beat Bank of Commerce at the SBA lending game? For his part, Peter Q. Davis, president of the Bank of Commerce, says he doesn't worry too much about Jackson gaining on him. "I'm aware they were second last year," Davis says of First International. "If someone does emerge into a firm second, then I'd feel we had some competition."

Still, Jackson and First International are threatening to make local SBA lending a two-horse race. First International last year accounted for about 15 percent of the local SBA market, with loans of $11 million. Jackson expects the gap between Bank of Commerce and First International to continue to shrink.

Jackson's employers, her customers and the SBA attribute that success to Jackson.

"Before Yvonne, our SBA loan department was little more than a convenience for our existing customers," says Norm Richins, president and chief executive officer of the Chula Vista-based bank. "Now it's an important revenue center, as well as a source of financing and support for firms that more traditional lenders think are too small to be worthwhile."

From Secretary to Executive

Jackson began her banking career 24 years ago. She had just arrived in San Diego after earning a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Her first career stop was San Diego Trust & Savings, where she started out in the bank's trust department and later became executive secretary to the chief operating officer, Ollie James.

"As a secretary inside the executive suite, there was a very good opportunity to see how San Diego Trust grew, how they managed the bank and created a very solid institution," Jackson says. "I observed several different management styles, and I saw what worked and what didn't. This was the ultimate management training experience."

After several years as a secretary, Jackson entered San Diego Trust's management-training program, where she learned branch banking and eventually became a loan officer.

In 1981 she left San Diego Trust to join the Money Store, one of the country's top purveyors of SBA loans. There she worked for Rita McCoy, founder of the defunct Woman's Bank, who had just returned to San Diego after a stint in the upper echelons of the SBA as an appointee of President Carter.

"I was a loan processor there, which, after being a loan officer, was a step down. But Rita wanted me to learn about SBA lending from the bottom up," Jackson says. This she did, rising in five years to loan officer and assistant manager. In 1988 she moved to the Bank of San Diego, where she was second in command of the organization's new SBA department.

There she met Richins, who left the Bank of San Diego in 1990 to head First International. He recruited Jackson right away to run his SBA department. The first year, their goal was $5 million in SBA loans. They met that goal, and within two years, Jackson had exceeded it by more than $10 million.

"We specialize in customer service to small business clients," Richins says. "Some of our customers are first-time borrowers. An unusually high percentage are women and minorities. Yvonne doesn't just give them SBA loans, she helps them see how the loan complements their overall financial plan. Many borrowers don't have a business plan when they first come in. They do when they leave. And, once complete, some realize they didn't need a loan, but rather tighter cost controls or improved production or better marketing. This improves their business -- and ours, too, by strengthening our relationship."

Continue.