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Store owners boarded up windows and residents gathered in front of City Hall as news of a sentence in the Johannes Mehserle trial began to spread across Oakland Friday afternoon. The two-year sentence handed-down by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry is the lightest possible prison term for Mehserle’s conviction of involuntary manslaughter. Many Oakland residents were hoping for the maximum 14-year term while others wonder how Oakland will react as the day develops.
From a ninth-floor courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, Johannes Mehserle, the former BART police officer convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Oscar Grant III, was sentenced this afternoon to two years in prison. The sentence, from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry, will include credit for the time Mehserle has already spent in jail.
As Oakland awaits news from the Los Angeles sentencing of former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle, downtown businesses are preparing today for the possibility of violence. Storefronts around Frank Ogawa Plaza are boarded up including the Oakland police Internal Affairs office, the offices of Youth Radio and the Men’s Wearhouse and Foot Locker stores nearby.
At 4 p.m. Friday afternoon, the vote for Oakland’s mayor will head to a runoff vote count, determining whether front-runner Don Perata will maintain his lead, or if trailing contenders Jean Quan, Rebecca Kaplan or Joe Tuman will be able to catch up.
Amid a wave of Democratic victories in California that defied major gains for Republicans in the rest of the nation, the race to become the state’s next attorney general is so evenly split—between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican Steve Cooley—that its winner may not be known for weeks.
Gabriel Rodriguez sat in the student center cafeteria at Laney College the day after the legalization of marijuana in California went down in defeat. Rodriguez, who voted in favor of the initiative, sounded resigned saying that Proposition 19 probably wouldn’t have benefited everyone anyway.
Probation or prison? On Friday morning, the sentence of Johannes Mehserle, the former BART police officer convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Oscar Grant III, will rest in the hands of one man, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry.
In the same downtown court building that housed the O.J. Simpson trial, Perry is expected to juggle a wide range of sentencing options ranging from parole to 14 years in California state prison.
As Oakland awaits this Friday’s sentencing of Johannes Mehserle, civic leaders and residents alike are working together to keep the city’s reaction peaceful. The former BART police officer was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter in the January, 2009, shooting death of Oscar Grant. In the wake of Grant’s death, as well as of Mehserle’s conviction this summer, protests in downtown Oakland turned violent.
“The move to end marijuana prohibition is far stronger this morning than it ever has been,” said Stephen Gutwillig, the California director of the Drug Policy Alliance, as members of the Yes on 19 campaign gathered at their headquarters in downtown Oakland early Wednesday following the initiative’s defeat, garnering only 46.1 percent of the vote.