Marin County Media's "Limited Hangout": Part 1

What role did local media's laggard reporting about the 2023 hanging deaths in Marin County's subterranean jail play in Felicia Wyatt's in-custody death on January 25, 2024?

You might think that after two inmates were found hanged in the subterranean Marin County Jail in less than sixty days last year, it might have merited coverage in the county's "award-winning" alternative weekly, The Pacific Sun. After all, Marin's jail has a tiny population compared to neighboring counties, and deputies are highly compensated for overseeing the safety of its proportionally tiny inmate population.

But The Pacific Sun's local news reporter, Nikki Silverstein, declined to mention either of the 2023 deaths until this past Monday, January 29, 2024 – only after a third inmate, 35-year-old Felicia Wyatt, had died at the Marin County jail on January 25. The Pacific Sun's lack of scrutiny is particularly glaring given that the three deaths occurred during roughly the first year of Marin County's controversial and opaque "involuntary psychiatric medication program". And yet that "rope 'em and dope 'em" program warranted no mention by Silverstein, not even in last week's article, when she finally conceded the jail deaths.

"Rope 'em and dope 'em" doesn't just affect those inmates who are victims of the County's "involuntary psychiatric medication program." It can also influence how jail staff perform their duties, creating the overall perception amongst deputies and healthcare staff that the situation is more under control than it is, and that at-risk inmates/patients are safer than they actually are. This can result in a decreased monitoring, which can lead to, yes, more inmate fatalities. As Sheriff Scardina told me outside the BoS chambers on October 10, 2023, "our deputies save lives all the time". No doubt he is right about that point. So as soon as the first hanging death occurred in August, 2023, there should have been more questions asked by everyone in the County, including local media.

And while the jail deaths had been reported in a timely fashion by The Marin Independent-Journal, the I-J typically provided little detail and no context. Necessary context would have included the fact that the Marin County Jail now has a higher per-inmate death rate than both the infamous Riker's Island facility in New York City, and the notorious Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County. That's a detail that, like the actual conditions of Marin's jail, has been willfully ignored by The Pacific Sun and the I-J.

Whose Investigation?

An equally glaring omission in Silverstein's Pacific Sun reporting is the omission of any reference to the Sonoma County Sheriff Office. The coroner's investigation for the most recent inmate death was assigned to the Sonoma County Sheriff Office, which has a close relationship with both the Marin County Sheriff and with principals within Marin's conflict- laden "Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group."

In fact, each of the last three coroner investigations for Marin County inmate deaths have been assigned to the Sonoma County Sheriff Office, which has its own deadly and abusive jail. There appears to be still no investigation of any of the Marin County jail deaths that is independent of law enforcement, yet that fact is completely obscured in the reporting by the Marin I-J and The Pacific Sun.

Given Silverstein's overall struggles as a reporter (a 2020 email from Silverstein stated: "I do not know what a PRA is" in response to my offering data that I had received from the Marin County District Attorney office via CPRA), it's entirely possible that Silverstein did not know that there were two law enforcement agencies involved in the larger investigation: Novato PD and Sonoma County Sheriff Office (SCSO). SCSO released the identity of the January 2024 inmate death prior to the publication of Silverstein's article, which erroneously stated that the identity of the deceased inmate had not yet been released.

Local Media Cannot Claim They Did Not Know About Inmate Deaths; Jail Conditions; SCOWG Conflicts of Interest

But Silverstein should have known that the Sonoma County Sheriff was handling the coroner investigation, if only because I had repeatedly emailed her and I-J reporters that fact, as well as other information in 2023 about the jail deaths; about conditions in the jail; and about severe conflicts of interest on the County's SCOWG. To date, none of the conflicts of interest on the SCOWG have been reported by either The Pacific Sun or the I-J, even as both publications routinely feature and/or otherwise promote multiple members of the County's SCOWG, often without disclosure of their participation on the SCOWG or other police-friendly "oversight" groups.

Such is the case with Heidi Merchen, a principal on Marin's SCOWG, whose background was held secret by the County and by The Pacific Sun and Marin I-J. Only via multiple CPRA requests did the County finally disclose to me that Merchen is a former Marin County and Sonoma County deputy who had worked in both counties' deadly and abusive jails over a period of many years, during which time both of the jails were engaged in numerous lawsuits related to inmate deaths and abuses.

Also undisclosed to the public was the fact that Ms. Merchen is the wife of the third most powerful law enforcement official in Sonoma County: Assistant Sheriff Mike Merchen, who oversees the abusive and deadly Sonoma County Jail. That sort of relationship, along with much else on the SCOWG, would be recognized in most counties as a conflict of interest that required disclosure at bare minimum. But not in Marin.

In fact, at no point in her 1/29/24 Pacific Sun article does Silverstein or any of the subjects she interviewed indicate that there might be any sort of a problem with jail deaths in Marin County being investigated only by other law enforcement agencies, not least an agency wherein a prominent leader, Mike Merchen is, by dint of marriage, quite literally "in bed with" a principal for Marin's Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group.

SCOWG's Shielding of the Marin County Jail, and Ongoing Links to Sonoma Sheriff

Will it surprise you to learn that the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group did not discuss conditions at the subterranean Marin County Jail during any of the 12 closed-to-the-public meetings they held from 2022 to mid-2023? The only reference the public heard about the jail from any of the SCOWG appointees was from Curtis Aikens, who attempted, during a meeting of the County's "Human Rights Commission", to claim that the isolation cell at the Marin County Jail was really just a "safety cell".

(Note that "safety cell" is exactly the term of art that Silverstein uses to describe the isolation cell in her latest article. It's almost as if the Sheriff offers a script to Silverstein, and for the most part, she appears happy to transcribe it.)

Aikens made that safety cell claim less than eight months before 2023's first hanging death at the Marin County Jail. At no point did he disclose that his son, Cole Aikens, was a $210,000-year Sonoma County Sheriff Deputy, or that there was a damning IOLERO report on Deputy Aikens for a use-of-force incident. In that use-of-force incident, Sheriff Deputy Cole Aikens made a running tackle at an inebriated suspect who was already stumbling around backward with his pants around his ankles. The running tackle resulted in the suspect predictably falling and injuring his head, which led to "cranial bleeding". That incident occurred prior to Curtis Aikens' appointment to the SCOWG, and it is difficult to imagine that County administrators were unaware of it when he was appointed.

Thus, not only did the County appoint to the SCOWG (undisclosed) County staff, County contractors, former County law enforcement, and many others who had close relationships with Marin County law enforcement, but it chose as its principals two individuals, Curtis Aikens and Heidi Merchen, who have family ties to the Sonoma County Sheriff.

The Sonoma County Sheriff does not only handle coroner investigations for Marin County jail deaths, it also participates in SWAT raids and trainings with Marin County law enforcement. In reality, the two Sheriff offices are so close that they might as well be twins. Of course, none of that closeness between the two law enforcement agencies suggests that Heidi Merchen or Curtis Aikens should remain on the SCOWG. And yet they remain. And Merchen, for her part, appears to have gone to some lengths last December in an unsuccessful effort to quiet me, who, for better or worse, is the only reporter in the North Bay who bothered to detail her many conflicts of interest as a SCOWG appointee, as well as the other considerable conflicts on the SCOWG.

Silverstein's Wealthy Interview Subjects:

Silverstein's 1/29/24 article includes only three interviews – one with Brenton Schneider, the MCSO's public information officer. The other two are with very wealthy white property owners in Marin County: Frank Shinneman and Tara Evans, described primarily as "community activists." This was an interesting choice, not only because neither Shinneman nor Evans appear to have spoken up publicly about the 2023 jail deaths, but because at least two non-white, workingclass activists who had immediately raised questions about the jail deaths were excluded from mention in Silverstein's very late reporting.

You might recognize Frank Shinneman not as a "community activist", but rather as the multimillionaire retired tech executive who moved to Marin County a few years ago and took the helm of the local ACLU chapter. An attractive older man with a kind of Redford-ian "Jeans-and- Keds-sneakers” appeal, Shinneman had distinguished himself by giving a coveted Marin ACLU award to a seated public official: hyperblonde Mill Valley Mayor Jessica Jackson, who was then working closely with the Trump administration. (Jackson's work with the Trump administration was supposedly on criminal justice reform, which is no doubt something that will prove helpful to the criminal Mr. Trump and his cronies.)

It was the giving-an-award-to-a-seated-public-official part that won Mr. Shinneman a reprimand from the NorCal ACLU Interim Director, as that violated chapter rules; the Trumpian stain on Jackson was something that was likely harder for longtime Marin ACLU members to swallow. Still, for those in Marin City who saw Mr. Shinneman accompany the controversial charter-school-proponent Jeff Knowles to at least one Sausalito Marin City School District Board meeting, it probably wasn't surprising. The ACLU had repeatedly refused to assist Marin City in their complaint about the charter school, a complaint that eventually resulted in a historic desegregation order issued to the school district by then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

Shinneman's professed concern about the jail deaths in Silverstein's 1/29/24 article was surprising, given that he had appeared to remain silent in public about this matter even at BoS meetings when he did attend. He had said nothing about the first or the second inmate deaths at any of those meetings, nor had he attended any of the Human Rights Commission meetings to even raise the issue.

Similarly, the wealthy Tara Evans, who serves on the County's SCOWG, had apparently not only said nothing about any the inmate deaths until Silverstein's 1/29/24 article, but there is no evidence that her work on the SCOWG itself addressed jail conditions. Evans' sole participation at any of the County's Human Rights Commission meetings has involved unmuting herself on Zoom to laugh at this reporter who had patiently reported the multiple conflicts of interest on the SCOWG, and the severe 32-year racial arrest disparity in the County, which the SCOWG had willfully ignored in its deliberations. Evans' bullying behavior is unfortunate, but it is telling that Evans was permitted to do this in full view of the County's Legal Counsel, Brian Washington, without any apparent reprimand from the County, or removal from the SCOWG. Evans has previously boasted of her family's prodigious property holdings in the County; I can only imagine that wealth has its privileges.

One of the documents retrieved from Marin County through CPRA indicates that Evans was aware that the SCOWG composition was deeply dysfunctional. But rather than demand that the process become more genuinely transparent, Evans instead insisted that the opaque process simply be provided more time. This ended up being "more time" for the County insiders within SCOWG to better "curate" input from what Evans calls "BIPOC" communities. (If I hear one more white lady in Marin say “BIPOC”, I’m gonna cry.) Evans' stated wish was granted, with ever more resources and time devoted to the posh insiders on SCOWG, who produced a set of remarkably weak proposals.

Civilian Oversight Is An Industry, Not a Solution:

This brings us to the most curious point of Silverstein's article. Silverstein posits that the problem in the jail is that AB 1185 Civilian Oversight proposals put forward by the SCOWG have not been implemented. But Silverstein's premise would require ignoring two essential points:

1. There is no data or history to indicate that "civilian oversight" of law enforcement actually produces beneficial results for impacted communities, or even meaningful reform. What it does seem to produce is a money-making opportunity for those who are already working closely enough with law enforcement and county governments to claim themselves as essential to the oversight process.

2. Even if you were the kind of true-believing liberal who thinks civilian oversight could work, the actual proposals of Marin County's SCOWG were so weak that, on the day the proposals were accepted, Sheriff Scardina stood up in front of the Board of Supervisors and declared how happy he was with the results.

And why shouldn't Sheriff Scardina have been happy with the weak proposals submitted "with love" (actual quote from Heidi Merchen during the presentation) by the SCOWG? Just a week later, Scardina was handed an additional $2.8 million, and not a single SCOWG member even showed up to protest that hand-off.

Unanswered Questions About Local Media's Coverage of Portje Case

Why didn't the SCOWG members show up to protest any of the Sheriff items, such as the additional $2.8 million? Possibly because SCOWG members themselves know their role is little more than a resumé builder. "Civilian oversight" is nothing that the SCOWG members themselves sought out when they experienced issues with law enforcement. Case in point: When SCOWG member Jeremy Portje, who also chaired the County's now-suspended "Human Rights Commission", was the victim of police abuse in November 2021, he did not attempt to bring the problem to the attention of any County or municipal oversight groups. He did what was in the best interest of any victim: he pro-actively distributed video of the event, then went straight to the most powerful and connected attorney in Marin County, Charlie Dresow. (Dresow was also appointed to the SCOWG, and I have written about Dresow's own conflicts previously here.) Mr. Portje subsequently brought a $21 million lawsuit against the City of Sausalito, and all of this was breathlessly reported in multiple articles by Nikki Silverstein in The Pacific Sun.

The Sausalito PD/Portje case is an interesting one, but not exclusively for the reasons that have been reported in Marin County's local media. More on that in Part 2.

©️2024 Eva Chrysanthe