By TERRY VAU DELL - Staff Writer
Posted: 02/21/2009 12:00:00 AM PST
OROVILLE -- While it may have taken months to get a state budget passed, a court arraignment for a former Butte County grand juror charged with leaking confidential documents was done Friday before the court calendar was even called.
The attorney for Georgie Szendrey said a prosecutor from the California Attorney General's Office agreed to delay a plea in the case until April to allow the defense time to fully examine some 150 pages of investigative documents.
State prosecutors have declined to comment on the case, which is believed to stem from information Szendrey allegedly provided to a defense attorney and the Enterprise-Record surrounding a Grand Jury investigation she conducted in 2007 into an excessive force complaint against two Paradise police officers.
Szendrey was charged by the state attorney general earlier this month with a misdemeanor count of improper disclosure of Grand Jury information, which could carry up to one year in jail.
On Friday, attorneys in the case appeared at a "clerk's arraignment" — an informal proceeding outside the presence of a judge, 15 minutes before the scheduled 8:30 a.m. hearing.
Szendrey's attorney, Michael Harvey of Oroville, said that because she is charged with only a misdemeanor, he appeared in her absence.
Harvey said Deputy Attorney General Barton Bowers had also arrived early at the court Friday morning and agreed to continue the arraignment until April 9.
According to Harvey, the criminal complaint alleges improper disclosure of Grand Jury information between Feb. 7 and March 6 of 2008.
However, he said he won't know the basis for the allegations until he examines the inch-thick sheaf of investigative reports the prosecutor turned over to him Friday.
The case came to light in the spring of 2008, when a Chico attorney included a copy of confidential Grand Jury documents in a motion seeking to unseal the personnel file of veteran Paradise police officer Robert Pickering on behalf of Max Justin Schumacher, 30, who at the time was accused of threatening the officer and resisting arrest on a public intoxication charge.
At his trial, Schumacher claimed the officer stopped his vehicle on a dark road near the county jail, pulled him from the back seat and threw him to the pavement while he was still handcuffed.
Pickering testified that after threatening to kill him and members of his family, the intoxicated man had tried to shoulder past him when he stopped the patrol car to see if Schumacher had injured himself banging his head inside the patrol car.
In the pretrial motion seeking the names of people who had filed excessive force complaints against the arresting officer, Schumacher's attorney, Kevin Sears, included written findings by the ex-grand juror and transcripts from a videotape of a violent arrest of an underage drunken driving suspect, Justin Baltierra, by Pickering and a second ridge officer, Timothy Cooper, in December 2006.
In her unpublished written opinion, which Szendrey said she turned over to Baltierra's attorney Denny Forland after her term on the grand jury ended, she determined that the two ridge officers had failed to inform the drunken driver he was under arrest before tackling him to the pavement, as a neighbor videotaped the arrest.
After reviewing the officer's personnel file in chambers, Butte County Superior Court Judge Sandra McLean ordered the names of three people who had brought excessive force complaints against Pickering in the last two years to be turned over to Schumacher's lawyer, over objections by the town's attorney.
Schumacher's jury was shown the Baltierra arrest tape prior to acquitting him of all charges.
Last year, the FBI in Sacramento reportedly cleared both Pickering and Cooper of excessive force complaints lodged against them by Baltierra, Schumacher and a third man, Harold Funk, 51, also of Paradise.
Funk, who claimed his elbow was dislocated by the same two officers after they pursued him into a public lavatory in February 2007, was acquitted last month by a separate jury of a misdemeanor resisting arrest charge.
The case against the former grand juror was referred to the state Attorney General's Office because Szendrey's husband, Ed Szendrey, is a retired chief investigator for the Butte County District Attorney's Office.
Outside of court Friday, he said that given the recent acquittals in the resisting arrest cases, "my own confusion is why all this effort is being made to prosecute my wife, when nothing has been done about the officers and their conduct."
http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_11754015
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