VALLEJO, CA – Coming out of a legal letdown, medical marijuana defendant Galen Lawton is hoping for better luck at the polls than he’s gotten in the courtroom. The Fairfield City Council candidate lost at a crucial pre-trial hearing on his criminal case last Friday, meaning that he will soon face trial for drug offenses. In spite of this blow, Galen staunchly maintains his innocence and preserves his optimism about today’s local election.
Galen, who is vying for one of two open seats on the council, stands accused of cultivation and possession of marijuana for sale. His wife Laura Lawton has also been charged for these crimes, and will go to trial as a co-defendant in the case. Their three-year long criminal prosecution is likely to come as a surprise to some who have followed Galen’s decidedly ‘tough on crime’ campaign rhetoric.
One of the billboards advertising Galen Lawton's campaign for Fairfield City Council - photo by Vanessa Nelson
In the position statements on his official website, www.voteforlawton.org, Galen claims that “Fairfield has become a haven for career criminals,” and offers incarceration as the solution for these repeat adult offenders. “Bad people should be locked up,” he says unambiguously. In later comments, he uses even stronger language, talking about “eradicating” them from the streets.
Even though he’s facing serious criminal charges himself, what separates Galen from the “bad guys” is a doctor’s recommendation and the blessing of state law. A voter initiative passed in 1996 gave Californians the right to legally possess and cultivate marijuana under the approval of a physician, and it’s this medical exemption that Galen will be using as his defense during trial. He insists he’s a qualified patient and that all the marijuana found during a search of his home on December 23rd, 2004, was for legitimate medical use.
Solano County authorities, on the other hand, argue that the couple headed a marijuana sales operation. To this end, prosecutors claim that pre-packaged baggies and other indicia of sales were found at Galen’s residence and at his hydroponics business “Everything Green.” Police also reported the seizure of 118 marijuana plants, over a pound of processed marijuana, and more than eight thousand dollars in cash. In the eyes of Deputy District Attorney Jeffrey Kauffman, this evidence supports the theory of a commercial operation.
The Lawtons’ legal strategy has been to attempt to suppress the evidence through pre-trial motions. First off, the defendants claim that they were both arrested without an arrest warrant. Secondly, in what defense termed “outrageous governmental misconduct,” the motions detail mistreatment during the Lawtons’ detention, arrest, and week-long stay in jail. Determined to get the charges against their clients thrown out, defense attorneys argued the motions and presented witnesses at last Friday’s hearing.
Defendants Laura and Galen Lawton (middle) confer outside the courthouse with their attorneys - photo by Vanessa Nelson
The first witness on the stand was Jausiah Jacobsen of the Fairfield Police Department, an increasingly familiar figure in Solano County courtrooms. During direct examination from the prosecutor, Jacobsen described the events of December 23rd, 2004, when he and ten other officers burst into the Lawton home, held the occupants facedown at gunpoint, and turned the residence upside down looking for drug evidence.
According to Jacobsen, he searched the house with his gun at a ‘low-ready’ position, which he described as being “where you can use it, but not threatening anyone with it.” Other officers, he admitted, had submachine guns, but they believed they would need the assault weapons to defend themselves. On the stand, Jacobsen insisted that suspects in narcotics cases are considered especially dangerous, and so he had reason to fear for his life during the entry.
But defense attorney Omar Figueroa questioned the strength of the officer’s fears about safety, asking why the search team didn’t take the opportunity to videotape the supposedly perilous entry into the house. After all, the officers had brought along a video camera for the purpose of documenting the seized evidence. “If it was a dangerous situation, why not get it on tape?” Figueroa asked, referencing the entry into the Lawton home.
Jacobsen sneered his comeback, maintaining his claims of peril. “I would rather have a gun in my hand so I could protect myself, rather than watch myself get shot,” he retorted.
Another point of dispute was the degree of force used to subdue Galen Lawton. When the officers encountered the man of the house, he had just emerged from the shower and was clad only in a towel. They ordered him to the floor, but it took physical force to bring Galen down. “There was hand contact,” Jacobsen recalled on the stand. “I’m not sure what. It was not violent.”
Figueroa was skeptical about the justification for force, confirming with the officer that Galen had nothing hidden in his towel and was therefore visibly unarmed. But Jacobsen refused to verify the defense attorney’s description of Galen being pulled down to the ground by his ponytail and dog-piled by officers. Instead, Figueroa was forced to settle with the admission that the defendants were handcuffed immediately and kept in cuffs for the entire duration of the search.
The defense then attacked the basis for the Lawtons’ arrest, in response to which Jacobsen leaned heavily on interpretations of the seized evidence. According to the officer, the Lawtons were running what appeared to be a sales operation. For instance, he said, their home contained a lot of marijuana plants, a scale, and processed marijuana that was packaged into pre-weighed amounts. When asked by Figueroa why he thought 118 plants was a high number, Jacobsen didn’t know. “It seemed like a lot to me,” he shrugged. After admitting that the plants were small and that the scale was digital rather than the triple-beam style, Jacobsen dug in his heels. He refused to concede that the bags of marijuana contained wildly varying amounts. “Some were consistent weights, some were not,” he said vaguely.
Defense attorney Omar Figueroa represents Galen Lawton - photo by Vanessa Nelson
“But with marijuana for sale, isn’t it usually weighed out to a specific quantity?” Figueroa inquired of the officer.
This consideration caused Jacobsen to pause, and the moments of silence prompted Judge Allen P. Carter to jump in with his own characterization. “Dime bags…?” the judge suggested.
Jacobsen eventually admitted that marijuana for sale is usually weighed out to consistent quantities, but gave an explanation for the varying weights of the baggies seized from the Lawtons. It was, he suggested, a matter of evaporation. “Marijuana changes weight based on drying up,” was his simple reply.
This suspicion of sales, according to Jacobsen, was what caused officers to arrest the Lawtons in spite of their claims of legal medical use. When the defense began questioning the witness on this subject, prosecutor Kauffman issued a quick objection on grounds of relevance, but the judge permitted the inquiries to continue. Jacobsen then admitted that the officers did nothing to follow up on Galen’s assertions about his status as a medical marijuana patient, nor did they verify the legitimacy of the medical marijuana documentation they discovered during the search. In Jacobsen’s characterization, the Lawton home contained a dangerous narcotics sales operation, not a private medical grow.
Defense attorney James Clark also drove home a series of points on the perceived danger of the search, initiating his own line of questioning about Jacobsen’s safety. Clark established that the officer had no knowledge of guns in the household, and also got Jacobsen to admit that he had no reason to believe the defendants would be prone to violence. Clark then asked if anything was found in the home that would justify the use of excessive force, and Jacobsen gave a plain “no.”
Defense attorney James Clark represents Laura Lawton - photo by Vanessa Nelson
Since there was no specific reason to for Jacobsen to believe he would encounter violence, and since nothing was found in the search to indicate a danger to bodily safety, Clark began to speculate about malicious reasons for what he described as “an elevated level of force.” He also attempted to cast doubt on the veracity of the officer’s police report, and perhaps even on his degree of honesty on the stand. Towards this end, the defense attorney made a trip into Jacobsen’s legal past and paraded out one of the skeletons.
Though Jacobsen is no stranger to a courtroom, he's not always on the witness stand. In fact, he's known to have been caught on the other side, as the defendant in a lawsuit alleging police misconduct. Multiple accusations of brutality have been made against the officer, but most notable is a February 2004 incident in which a particularly severe beating sent a man to the hospital. The victim, Bijon Lee Hughes, had been double-parked while dropping his son off at a day care facility, and returned to the vehicle to find Jacobsen investigating the parking violation. Witnesses report that the officer immediately ordered Hughes to the ground, but Hughes refused to get down onto the muddy street in his business suit. Upon this refusal, Jacobsen beat Hughes multiple times with his baton, subduing him as a circle of outraged onlookers crowded around and protested the beating.
Hughes was taken to the hospital and then briefly to jail for resisting arrest, but the charges against him were soon thrown out. Once free, Hughes filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Jacobsen and the City of Fairfield. The suit claimed that Jacobsen has a "malicious racial bias" against Hughes, who is a black man, and claimed that the officer ordered Hughes down on the ground in order to humiliate him. The suit also documented an attempted cover-up operation by the Fairfield Police Department, alleging false reports and the intentional exclusion of witness statements. The incident led to a hefty settlement and a departmental transfer for Jacobsen, but not much changed as far as the officer's behavior. Just months after the Hughes beating, Jacobsen was forcing yet another unarmed black man to the ground, and the defense wasn't about to let this parallel slip by without emphasis.
Referencing the Hughes suit, Clark made a quick and skillful incision in Jacobsen’s armor. “Weren’t you sued for filing false police reports, and didn’t the City of Fairfield have to pay—”
Kauffman objected aggressively at this point, interrupting to yell out, “Improper!”
Judge Carter was calm, turning to Clark and asking, “You’re trying to impeach the witness, is that it?”
The defense attorney shot back a winning smile. “I’m doing my best your honor,” he said pleasantly.
Forced to answer the question, Jacobsen opted to leave ample room for ambiguity. “I was sued and it was settled,” he explained simply.
But the witness would not get off the hook so easily when Figueroa resumed questioning. “Weren’t you accused in that lawsuit of having a bias against African Americans?” Figueroa asked, going straight to the heart of the controversy. Jacobsen was cagey and said he didn’t know, slyly suggesting that the suit was settled before he’d even had a chance to read its claims. Nonetheless, the officer asserted that he did not have a bias against African Americans, and that he didn’t know or care whether Galen Lawton was African American.
Figueroa quickly challenged the claim that Jacobsen was ignorant of the defendant’s racial identity. “But you put ‘B,’ for black, on the arrest report,” the defense attorney pointed out.
“He gave that information,” Jacobsen countered, referring to Galen. “You can’t tell if he’s black by looking at him.”
Figueroa continued by prodding about the suit’s claims of false police reports, asking why Jacobsen had omitted certain facts from his report on the search of the Lawton home. When the defense attorney began to inquire about why the presence of particular officers was not mentioned in the report, the witness finally protested. “I can’t put everything that happened there, or else it would be like reading ‘War and Peace’ every time,” Jacobsen said, exasperated.
In spite of this reluctance, and over the objection of the prosecutor, Figueroa still pushed the officer to answer. “I think it’s relevant,” the defense attorney declared.
“I’m sure you do,” Judge Carter said dryly. “But I don’t, and it’s my decision.” And following that pronouncement, Jacobsen was excused from the stand, making way for the next witness.
Christopher Gamble, a longtime friend of the Lawtons, was the next person to testify. But immediately after he was sworn in, the prosecutor objected on the grounds that this witness had heard all of Jacobsen’s testimony. “He was in the courtroom all morning,” Kauffman observed, “and it was my understanding that non-testifying witnesses were to be excluded.”
Clark stepped forward on this matter, explaining that Gamble was an unexpected witness. “I didn’t realize he had relevant testimony until a few minutes ago,” the defense attorney explained.
Gamble was permitted to testify in spite of the prosecutor’s concerns, but it turned out there wasn’t much to object to anyway. As it turned out, the witness had gone to the Lawton home while the defendants were still in jail, and he had made a few key observations about the condition of the residence at that time. “It was in total disarray,” he said soberly. “There were clothes everywhere, the drawers were emptied out, and the toilet had overflowed – there was water all over the floor.”
Although it was not the only time the suspicious overflowing toilet would be mentioned, Gamble was dismissed from the stand after giving his descriptions. As a witness, his testimony was remarkably brief, yet he painted a compelling picture of the destruction of a home at the hands of malicious officers.
And out of that image of devastation came the final witness, Laura Lawton, who appeared to embody the trauma of the event. Sitting still and wide-eyed on the witness stand, she had an undeniable air of tremulous fragility. When Clark inquired if this was her first time testifying, she admitted that it was. His next question asked if she was nervous, and she confirmed this with a shy, tense smile. As her testimony progressed, however, the expression of her emotions flowed more freely, and she gave vivid illustration of her ordeal at the hands of the officers who invaded her home.
That invasion came early in the morning of December 23rd, 2004, as the couple was getting ready for a busy day that included work and preparations for upcoming holiday festivities. It was their first Christmas in a new home together, but there was something more exciting than candy canes and stockings hung by the chimney – after three years of trying to conceive, Laura was finally pregnant. It was a special time indeed for this couple, but a sudden pounding on the door signaled the abrupt end of all these joys.
The officers would ransack the new home, turning it inside out while the helpless owners were held at gunpoint and threatened. The Lawtons would then spend the holidays apart, suffering in separate jail cells for seven days while awaiting a bail hearing. And, perhaps worst of all, Laura had a miscarriage directly following the stint in jail. She would be left in a state of devastation, too shaken to function at work and too terrified to be at home alone. In a voice strained by emotion, she told a courtroom full of listeners all about it.
At 7:30 that morning, Galen was just stepping out of the shower and Laura was on her way downstairs to fix him a cup of coffee. She was midway down the stairs, as she recalled, when a knock on the door stopped her in her tracks. It was early for an unexpected visitor, so she called out to ask who it was. The yell back told her it was the police, and she proceeded down to the door. As she opened it, officers in riot gear pushed the door forward on her and spilled into her home, shouting and wielding assault rifles. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, there’s guns in my house…Oh my God, this is what they use in the war!’” Laura remembered, conveying her panic.
Continuing, she described being thrown down at gunpoint at the same time Galen was tackled to the ground. “They grabbed him by the hair and took him to the ground and piled on top of him and were holding guns to him the whole time,” she recalled, demonstrably shaken by the memory. “And I could hear the thud when Galen was thrown to the floor. I remember thinking, “He’s naked and they’ve got him on the floor.’ The towel had fallen off and he’s laying there naked with all these police officers on him.”
It was at this point, the defense argued, that the Lawtons were improperly arrested. Though too panicked to remember precisely what words were used, she testified that the officers announced she was under arrest while she was on the ground. “It was just chaos,” Laura said while trying to remember the officers’ exact words. “I was just looking at the barrel of the gun. It was pointed directly at me.”
“Criminologists call that ‘weapon focus,’” Judge Carter commented, listening intently.
Such an analysis was bolstered by Laura’s statement that she has suffered vivid, recurrent nightmares about guns ever since this incident occurred. It was at its worst immediately following her arrest, at which time her functioning was so impaired that she ended up losing her job in addition to her unborn baby. “I couldn’t sleep at night,” she admitted, trembling as she described the experience. “It was scary.”
According to Laura, however, a focus on the weapons was unavoidable, because the guns were kept on them at all times after entry. “I was scared to death. I just wanted them to stop pointing guns at me,” she said, a desperate, pleading sound still in her voice. “There was always someone there with a gun on us. Even later, when I had to go to the bathroom, I went there with a gun on me.”
Focusing as she did on the weapons, Laura was able to describe the guns with detail and confidence. She unequivocally refuted Jacobsen’s claims that the guns were held in the ‘low ready’ position. She also attacked the logic of such a hold. “If you’re going to pull out a gun, why point it out the window or at the ceiling?” she asked rhetorically from the stand. “They were pointed at us.”
It was when officers were pulling her up from the ground that Laura experienced the first signs of a physical problem – she lost consciousness. Once she came to, she reported, the officers yelled at her for fainting and warned her not to do it again, but Galen yelled back at them that she was pregnant. Both suspects were then placed on a sofa in handcuffs, but for hours Galen was given nothing to wear. With the front door wide open and nothing to shield him from the winter weather but a flimsy towel, it was a long, cold morning for Galen.
At the end of the hearing, the prosecutor would defend the deprivation of clothing by noting that cash evidence was discovered in Galen’s pants during the search. “The police found money in his pants,” Kauffman spoke the words as though finding cash in pants pockets was an outlandish thing indeed. “Of course they didn’t let him go get dressed.”
To Laura’s surprise, the open door let in more than just cold air. It also let in a stream of “all kinds of other officers who were just showing up to spectate.” As she related on the witness stand, she overheard one of these officers try to strongarm Galen into submitting to an interrogation session. “He wanted to question Galen about my brother’s murder, and said, ‘If you don’t go downstairs and talk to us, we’ll arrest you for murder.’ And then I piped up and said, ‘It’s about time you did something about my brother’s murder because you haven’t done anything.’”
But, according to Laura, the officers who came by for the show were mostly in the mood for celebrating. “They were having a great time,” she said on the stand. “They were high-fiving each other and ordering out for Starbucks, and having a good ole time.”
An incessantly barking dog, however, put a bit of a damper on the party atmosphere, and, as Laura recalled, one annoyed officer announced that he was going to shoot the pooch if it didn’t stop barking. Laura described her pet as an elderly, invalid rottweiler with ears that had been sewn shut and legs so arthritic that it couldn’t even climb the steps to the house. She testified that she begged the officers not to kill her dog, and was eventually allowed to let him outside instead, where he would no longer be a nuisance.
Galen and Laura Lawton were incarcerated in Solano County over the 2004 winter holidays - photo by Vanessa Nelson
At the end of the day, Laura was taken to the police station for questioning, during which she said officers were surprised to discover that no one had bothered to read her the Miranda rights. Later, during intake at the jail, she was given a pregnancy test, but then she was reportedly told that the results were negative. According to Laura, she went promptly to her doctor after being released from jail, and he confirmed her pregnancy. Within a week or two, however, she miscarried.
During cross-examination, Kauffman grilled Laura on the reason for the miscarriage. When she replied that it was caused by stress, the prosecutor brought up her panic disorder, implying that stress is frequent and commonplace for her anyway. Kauffman also suggested that Laura had been too focused on the guns to have reliably witnessed much else, and he started to rattle the witness by saying she had made contradictory statements about whether she had seen her husband get tackled. “Did you hear a thud or did you watch him get taken down?” he asked. “Which one?”
One might have expected the witness to crumble under the pressure of the cross-examination. It had been a long, emotionally-charged day of testimony, and the subject matter was highly traumatic for her. At the mercy of a word-twisting prosecutor, Laura could easily have reached her breaking point. But it was here that her true strength began to shine through, and she stood up for herself with solid righteousness. “I can see and hear at the same time,” she said pointedly. “I said I could hear a thud as I was watching him get taken to the ground.”
The prosecutor next poked at Laura’s assertion that she and Galen were not read their Miranda rights until their interrogation at the police station. Since she had been briefly separated from her husband during the search of the house, she couldn’t be absolutely sure he hadn’t been read his rights. “But that’s what you’d like to think, isn’t it?” Kauffman asked, trying to lead the witness.
“I didn’t say that,” Laura shot back at him, indignant. “You’re putting words into my mouth!”
Kauffman kept the cross-examination short, letting the witness be dismissed from the stand and then turning his energy to the final arguments against the motion to suppress. This required him to defend the reasonableness of the arrest, which he did in a few quick sentences. “I think the arrest is justified by the evidence that was found,” he declared. “The arrest of either or both of the defendants for cultivation would be proper. For the marijuana that was found, arrest for possession would be proper. Given the indicia, arrest for sale would be proper… The officers are allowed to detain subjects at the scene, and they did. They’re allowed to do that. There’s no reason to suppress.”
The defense had relied upon a 9th Circuit ruling that pointing guns at unarmed suspects is excessive force, but Kauffman merely laughed off the attempt to use federal case law in a local court. “9th Circuit precedent is not binding on this court – that’s federal court, not state court,” he said, chiding the defense attorneys.
The prosecutor then concluded with a sentence that sounded ominously like an assumption of the defendants’ guilt. “Once you cross the line of committing crimes, you open yourself up to police investigation,” he said coldly.
Clark disagreed, asking the judge to look at the totality of the governmental bad acts, rather than just dismissing them individually. And, conveniently, he provided a combined summary of the complaints – making a violent entry, using force in absence of resistance, keeping compliant suspects at gunpoint, threatening to shoot the dog, threatening to frame Galen with murder, holding the suspects without phone access, failing to read Miranda rights, withholding Galen’s clothes, trashing the home, flooding the bathroom, placing a hold on their bail so they would spend the holidays behind bars, and, falsely telling Laura that she was not pregnant.
To Clark, this last example was one of the worst of the deeds. “Pregnant women are a protected category – there’s no reason to mess with her like that,” he told the judge. “This is officers at every twist and turn trying to hurt Mr. and Mrs. Lawton, and there’s no reason for that.”
Figueroa, for his part, maintained the claim that officers arrested the defendants directly after entry. If true, this meant that the arrests occurred before the officers found the evidence that would be used as probable cause for the arrest. Thereby, the defense attorney argued, the arrests would be unlawful after all.
In addition, Figueroa continued, there was ample evidence of outrageous governmental misconduct. He gave yet another run-down of the defendants’ claims against the officers, emphasizing the force of being subdued and held at gunpoint, as well as the vindictive nature of acts like overflowing the Lawtons’ toilet. He then began his final plea, declaring, “The court is the guardian of rights—”
“Thank you, Mr. Figueroa,” Judge Carter interrupted, then added. “Let’s keep it brief.”
“This was a prolonged detention after an arrest at gunpoint,” the defense attorney said, condensing his speech. “The court decides whether or not it’s okay to do this to people. I would ask the court to stand up and be a check on the power of the executive.”
The matter was now fully in the judge’s hands, and he looked down at it quizzically, shaking his head. “This whole case sounds like Monday morning quarterbacking to me,” he said, his humor coming out harshly bright.
“These things are not always clean – crime often isn’t,” he mused before ruling that the arrest had occurred after the discovery of evidence. He then went on to deny the motions on unlawful arrest and outrageous governmental misconduct. “I don’t think the conduct was outrageous. Maybe a bit excessive, in hindsight – a bit unnecessary, but not unreasonable. Police were commanded to search this residence and they discovered reasonable evidence of a crime. I think the officers’ conduct was reasonable. Maybe you could characterize it as brutish, but it was not unreasonable.”
With that, Judge Carter placed the case solidly back on a straight track to trial. He then set a management conference on December 21st and scheduled the jury trial for March 3rd, 2008.
All in all, it was a lost opportunity for the Lawtons. Not only would it have been a personal triumph to have the case thrown out, but winning at Friday’s hearing would have been perfect timing for Galen’s campaign. His criminal charges would have been dismissed just days before the election, and the publicity from the vindication would have most likely raised his visibility to many voters. For a new candidate whose campaign contributions have lagged noticeably behind most of his competitors, such a boost in the public eye could have made an enormous difference.
But the legal victory was not to be, and losing Friday’s motions instead served as a whisper of caution to local voters. Fairfield citizens were undoubtedly reminded that, if elected, Galen would begin his term in office with the distraction of an impending criminal trial. And it could hardly go without speculation that a guilty verdict could bring a prison sentence, thereby disrupting his service on the council entirely.
Even with these challenges, Galen has kept a positive, forward-looking attitude. True, he is mired in a prosecution that would have killed the careers of most politicians, but the crucial difference is that Galen is not a politician. He is Fairfield’s amiable ‘everyman,’ a concerned citizen who knows how to listen to his neighbors, discern the problems at the root of their concerns, and push for solutions. He shines as a citizen advocate, specifically championing the interests of youth and business development in his campaign. “I do not want to be known as a politician,” Galen has said many times during his campaign. “I am an activist for the people.”
Courtroom battles inevitably come with disappointments, and Galen takes them in stride. As a former high school football coach, he is an expert at maintaining morale, and knows that a lost point does not necessarily cost a player the entire game. In the end, he believes, truth and justice will prevail in his legal fight. In the meantime, it will be up to Fairfield voters to determine whether or not the man making that fight is an elected city councilmember.
But even if he loses the election, his campaign has been successful at moving crucial topics to the forefront of the city’s political debates, and in Galen’s eyes, this is undeniably a victory of its own. “I hope that it ignites more interest in local politics,” he told the press, speaking of his participation in framing key issues of concern to the voters. In this sense, it seems the old adage holds true: it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. And Galen’s playing has certainly been as honest and well-intentioned as it comes.
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