Sacramento prison psychologist’s friend also charged in rape hoax

From The Sacramento Bee:

    The woman accused of helping her friend fake a home-invasion robbery and a sexual assault has been arrested.

    Nicole Snyder, 33, was booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail on Dec. 12 and released later that day on $5,000 bail. She was arraigned Monday on two counts of felony criminal conspiracy.

    Snyder is accused of assisting Laurie Martinez, a supervising psychologist with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, stage a crime in Martinez’s Norgard Court home in April so Martinez could persuade her husband to move to another neighborhood, authorities allege.

    According to court documents, authorities say Snyder bought boxing gloves and then hit Martinez in the face, and helped Martinez hide some of her belongings in Snyder’s home so it would appear as though Martinez had been robbed.

    Martinez split her own lip, ripped open her shirt, scuffed her knuckles with sandpaper and then urinated on herself to make officers believe she had lost consciousness, according to allegations laid out in the court documents.

   

Sacramento County Child Protective Services sued by "Girl with a hundred scars"

From the SacBee:

Since the moment she was born 10 weeks premature, with cocaine rippling through her 21/2-pound body, Lilly Manning has been the recipient of other people’s poor choices, bad judgment and terrible timing.

Now, the 19-year-old woman who escaped torture in a south Sacramento home is seeking retribution.

Last week, lawyers for Manning filed a claim for damages against Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services and the Sacramento City Unified School District.

The claim, a precursor to any lawsuit, alleges child welfare workers and school employees failed to protect her from the violent household into which she was adopted.

Sacramento prison psychologist charged with false report of rape

From the Associated Press:

    Authorities allege a woman was so determined to convince her husband of a need to move to a safer neighborhood that she faked being raped. She split her own lip with a pin, scraped her knuckles with sandpaper, had her friend punch her in the face, and even wet her pants to give the appearance she had been knocked unconscious, authorities said Friday.

    Charges filed by the Sacramento County district attorney allege Laurie Ann Martinez, a prison psychologist, conspired with the friend to create the appearance that she was beaten, robbed and raped by a stranger in April in her Sacramento home.

    Police detectives and crime scene investigators spent hundreds of hours on the case, until one of Martinez’s prison co-workers came forward to say Martinez had been talking at work about faking a crime at her home to persuade her husband to move, Sacramento police Sgt. Andrew Pettit said Friday.

    Martinez, her friend and two co-workers eventually told police the whole thing was a setup to convince Martinez’s husband that they needed to move from a blighted, high-crime area three miles north of the state Capitol…..

   

Sacramento Police Officer Brian Laird shoots, kills mentally-ill man "armed" with child’s baseball bat

Ever since Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully announced that her office would no longer investigate officer-involved shootings or in-custody deaths, officers have taken her at her word. The numbers, and bodies, are quickly mounting.

Jan Scully saves money by letting cops kill people

Sacramento County District Attorney saves money by ceasing investigations of police shootings

Allegedly "wrestling with budget cuts," DA Jan Scully has ceased monitoring police shootings to determine whether the officers’ kills were justified and whether the investigations into them were conducted thoroughly, or at all.

Not that it really matters. After all, in the past 10 years, the Sacramento County DA’s office has investigated 93 officer-involved shootings and in-custody deaths, and not one has resulted in a criminal prosecution, even though many of those killed were unarmed.

Policy director for the Northern California ACLU, Allen Hopper, says he is "not aware of other DA’s offices dropping their officer-involved shooting units."

Sacramento Police Officer Brandon Mullock charged with 34 counts of perjury, falsifying police reports

 Mullock’s troubles began in January 2010, when he was accused of brandishing a gun during an off-duty fracas and put on administrative leave from the department. Eventually, he pleaded to a misdemeanor charge in that case.
While he was on paid leave, a deputy district attorney reviewing a DUI case noticed discrepancies between Mullock’s police report and footage from his patrol cruiser’s in-car camera.
That launched an extensive review by police officials and prosecutors into cases in which Mullock was the primary officer or a key witness.
Mullock resigned from the department in late August. In September, Scully announced her office had to dismiss 79 cases – most of them involving DUIs and some of them already adjudicated – because of questions about Mullock’s credibility. The dismissals resulted in the wiping of criminal records, repayment of court fees and the reinstatement of suspended driver’s licenses....

Sacramento social worker defrauds elderly, blind, disabled of $278K

From the SacBee:

    A former Sacramento County social worker has been sentenced to state prison after pleading no contest to felony grand theft from the In-Home Supportive Services Program.

    Julie Mee Vue, 40, entered the plea today and admitted to an additional enhancement that the aggregate loss to the program exceeded $200,000, according to a Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office news release. Vue was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $278,777.52 in restitution.

    Vue was extradited to Sacramento from Arkansas in September as part of a major fraud investigation into claims the she allegedly filed on behalf of people she had falsely enrolled as home health-care workers. As a Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Services social worker, Vue handled cases for the state In-Home Supportive Services Program, which pays people to care for aged, blind and disabled individuals who live in their homes.