By: Chris Smith – The Press Democrat

Who would think that a business-suits banquet for a retired judge and a criminal defense attorney could be so touching and so much fun?

The occasion was Friday’s celebration of ex-office mates Gayle Guynup and L. Stephen Turer as the recipients of the Sonoma County Bar Association’s 2011 “Careers of Distinction” honors.

When Guynup rented space in Turer’s Mendocino Avenue offices in 1979 she was 28 and a former Humboldt County farm girl who’d overcome being “profoundly shy” by becoming the first female allowed into Folsom Prison to teach inmates about the law.

She’d banished the shyness when she wrote to Gov. Jerry Brown in 1982 to tell him why he should appoint her to a vacancy on the Municipal Court bench. He did, and Guynup became not only the county’s first female judge but, at 31, its youngest ever.

On display Friday was the letter of congrats she received back then from fellow lawyer, former Assemblyman and greenhorn Congressman Doug Bosco. Both knew he’d pulled for county Public Defender Marteen Miller to get the judgeship.

But they got over that. They’ve been a fine team since they married in 1988.

Guynup recalled that when their kids, Cassie and John, were small she told them bedtime stories derived from her court cases. John protested at age 4, “Oh, no, not murder again tonight!”

Becoming a judge caused Guynup to vacate the offices owned by Turer, a displaced New Yorker once so serious about ditching his law plans and opening a pastrami-and-brisket deli that he picked out a Railroad Square storefront.

He let go of the deli dream — he’d have called it Lamont’s, after his given name — upon discovering that by working 18 hours most days and making sure he knew more about a case than anyone else in court, he could trust himself to take even those cases in which his client’s life rested in his hands.

Attorney Pat Emery told the banquet about the day the ex-office mates met in court and Guynup made her ruling, against Turer, then become flummoxed that he wouldn’t stop pressing his point.

Unable to quiet the notoriously persistent lawyer, the history-making judge stood up, walked into her chambers, removed her robe and drove home.

Emery posed that were it not for Friday evening’s festivities, Turer might have continued with his argument to that very moment.

RADIO STARS: SSU archeologist Michael Newland and Doug Roberts, SRJC’s VP of business services, were just on KQED’S Sunday Edition.

Newland offered a reverent perspective on the mystery of cremated bones he found at Joshua Tree National Park. And Roberts got to play Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz after correctly answering this challenge:

“Think of a familiar two-word rhyming phrase that starts with the letter F, like “fat cat.” Change the F to a G and you’ll get another familiar two-word rhyming phrase.” Take your time.

It is “fender bender.” Change the F to a G and it becomes “gender bender.”

Source: The Press Democrat

By: Paul Payne – The Press Democrat

A jury has acquitted a Santa Rosa man who kicked another man in the head during a fight and causing brain damage, concluding he acted in self-defense, his lawyer said Thursday.

Robert Upshall, 24, was on trial on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and battery in the 2009 fight with Cory Debari, 26, outside a downtown Santa Rosa gas station.

Prosecutors alleged that after Upshall knocked Debari to the ground with his fists, he kicked him in the head, causing internal bleeding.

But Upshall’s lawyer, Stephen Turer, argued Upshall acted in self-defense to ensure Debari, who he said provoked the fight, would not get up and attack him again.

Jurors agreed. After a week of testimony, they deliberated about seven hours before clearing Upshall Wednesday of all charges.

“If you’re going to start a fight you got to be prepared to be hurt,” Turer said.

The fight happened Nov. 25, 2009, at the Chevron station at the intersection of College and Mendocino avenues.

Upshall and a friend had been drinking in a nightclub and walked to the station to buy microwave hamburgers, Turer said.

As they were leaving the store, an intoxicated Debari and another man apparently mistook the men for being gay and yelled a slur at them, Turer said.

A fight broke out and Upshall knocked Debari to the ground. He was allegedly down for several seconds before Upshall, who was wearing tennis shoes, kicked him,Turer said.

Upshall had previously agreed to plead guilty to charges of assault with a deadly weapon and battery with great bodily injuries enhancements in exchange for a no-prison deal with prosecutors.

His first lawyer told him he would never convince a jury he was innocent because of the seriousness of Bebari’s injury. But a judge wouldn’t accept the plea deal, forcing a trial. Turer took over the case.

“The law is clear,” Turer said. “If you are defending yourself and use appropriate force . . . it doesn’t matter if they other guy gets hurt. It’s self-defense. He had a right to kick the guy to make sure he stayed down.”

Source: The Press Democrat

While no specific reason was given for rescheduling the trial date, Edwards said that Nehmens had filed to change his attorney.

Nehmens’ new attorney is L. Stephen Turer. Turer’s firm is widely known as an experienced defense firm that takes on — and often wins — difficult cases. Turer wasn’t available to comment on the case, but his associate attorney, Orchid Vaghti, said that Turer is one of the only lawyers to get an acquittal from a case stemming from NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” show. Turer defended Joseph Roisman, who was caught in a sex sting in Petaluma and accused of attempting to have sex with someone posing as a 13-year-old girl.

According to Vaghti, Turer is aiming to take the case to trial and get an acquittal. “This has dragged on for two years, and (Nehmens) hasn’t done anything inappropriate, illegal or against the legal code,” she said.

Source: Petaluma Argus-Courier

Joseph Roisman was prosecuted for lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor, after allegedly arranging a meeting with someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl.

Judge Arthur Wick in Sonoma County, California, threw the case out after the prosecution presented its case, ruling prosecutors failed to prove Roisman had an intent to have sex with the decoy.

Roisman’s lawyer, L. Stephen Turer, lashed out at the tactics of the people responsible for “To Catch a Predator,” saying “They took everything away from this kid just to make a TV show.”

Turer added, “This case is the poster child for the abuse in this program.”

There were 29 arrests as a result of the Dateline sting. 28 of the defendants pled guilty without going to trial. This is the only case of the 29 that went to trial, and Dateline’s tactics were squarely repudiated.

NBC could not be reached for comment.

Source: TMZ

He was kicked out of the Navy and spent time in jail.

Tuesday, five years after appearing on NBC Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator,” 26-year-old Joseph Roisman of Watsonville was acquitted of charges of attempting to have sex with an online decoy posing as a 13-year-old girl from Petaluma.

He is the only one of 29 men prosecuted in the 2006 sting to beat the rap.

“I’m ready to move on with my life,” Roisman said outside the courtroom following proceedings. “Hopefully the service will take me back,” he said of his desire to continue his military career.

His mother, Deborah Roisman of Watsonville, shouted, “Woo woo!” as Judge Arthur Wick ordered the case thrown out after six days of trial testimony, and later had harsh words for those involved in the TV show that implicated her son.

She said she and her pediatrician husband spent more than $100,000 defending their son. She vowed to sue NBC producers and called the sting a “huge waste” of tax money.

“They made my son’s life a living hell for five years,” she said.

A Dateline spokeswoman, Amy Lynn, did not return a call seeking comment.

In reaching his decision, Wick found prosecutors had not proven Roisman had “specific intent” to commit the crime – attempting lewd acts with a child under age 14.

He also criticized the tactics used by Dateline’s partner, online watchdog Perverted Justice, whom he suggested lacked credibility and engaged in entrapment.

“The axiom, ‘Actions speak louder than words,’ clearly does not apply in this case,” Wick said from the bench.

Wick stopped the trial and issued the verdict without the defense team presenting its case and before consideration by the jury.

Roisman’s attorney, Stephen Turer, argued his client’s online chats were innocuous and that he intended nothing other than “cuddling and watching movies” when he rode a bus 110 miles to meet the girl.

Turer argued it was Perverted Justice officials who steered the conversation toward sex. Although Roisman was told the girl’s age, he was doubtful because of her mature-sounding voice and sophisticated talk, Turer said.

“This case is the poster child for the abuse in this program,” Turer said after the acquittal. “They took everything away from this kid just to make a TV show.”

Prosecutors said there was enough evidence to bring Roisman to trial.

“We were disappointed the jury didn’t have the opportunity to review all the facts of the case,” District Attorney Jill Ravitch said.

Roisman was on leave from the Navy when he was arrested in a three-day sex sting in Petaluma in August 2006.

Like the other defendants, which included a doctor from the East Bay Area, Perverted Justice volunteers contacted him in an Internet chat room.

Roisman talked to a “Tori_Rox_2006,” who identified herself as a 13-year-old girl living in Petaluma.

He questioned her about the oldest person she had sex with and suggested they “cut up some fruit and eat it off each other,” according to court documents.

Roisman eventually agreed to a rendezvous at the Castle Drive house, where he stripped off his shirt upon entering the backyard after arriving by bus from the Watsonville area.

However, instead of the girl, he was met by cameras and Dateline host Chris Hansen, who made a name and reputation for himself from his confrontations in the show. After a brief conversation, which was recorded for TV, Roisman was arrested by Petaluma police, also recorded for the show.

Sonoma County jurors leaving the courthouse Tuesday said they were not impressed by the Southern California-based group’s methods. Windsor bank teller Kathleen Kerckhoff said they obviously induced Roisman to act the way he did. She said she would have found him not guilty if the case had come to the jury.

“I don’t have any respect for Perverted Justice after this trial,” she said. “I think they do have quotas. They have an agenda. It was the right resolution.”

In all, prosecutors obtained convictions on 27 defendants. Sentences ranged from probation to nine months in jail.

Among the most notorious cases was that of Piedmont cancer doctor Maurice Wolin, 53, who last year got two months in jail and lifetime sex offender registration after a protracted legal battle.

Southern California-based Perverted Justice claims 546 convictions nationwide since 2004. Perverted Justice officials did not respond to an email Tuesday seeking comment.

Source: The Press Democrat

By Paul Payne, The Press Democrat

A former Watsonville sailor caught in a nationally televised Petaluma child-sex sting five years ago was acquitted Tuesday by a Sonoma County judge who said there was insufficient evidence of lewd intent in online chats the man had with a decoy posing as a 13-year-old girl.

By Chris Smith, The Press Democrat

When Orchid Vaghti was 16 she needed work and through her mom landed a summer internship in the law office of L. Stephen Turer, the highly regarded Sonoma County criminal defense lawyer.

Orchid, who despite her tender age had just graduated from high school, was beyond thrilled to get the job because she couldn’t remember a time that she didn’t yearn to earn a law degree and become an advocate for the accused.

She relished working with Turer and was pleased that he hired her into the practice at age 17 when a receptionist moved on. Orchid was 19 when Turer’s legal assistant retired and she got that job.

After working all day, she attended SRJC and then enrolled at Empire College School of Law. She graduated last June and passed the bar exam on her first try.

Last week, Orchid received the paperwork she needs to take her oath as an attorney, and she couldn’t wait to do it. But her boss and mentor, Turer, is recovering from surgery in San Francisco. He told her as firmly and proudly as if she were his own child that he could not be absent at her swearing-in.

That’s why Orchid drove to San Francisco on Monday, along with Judge Elliot Daum and retired judge Bill Bettinelli. Turer wore a hospital gown and tubes, and he glowed as Judge Daum administered the oath to Orchid there in a room at Pacific Medical Center.

Orchid told me Wednesday, “I made my first court appearance this morning” as an associate attorney to Turer, who expects to be coming home today or Friday.

“I found my niche in the world,” Orchid said.

LING MURRAY WALKED the other day.

Source: The Press Democrat

By Sonoma Business

Belligerent. Aggressive. Makes judges and prosecutors mad as hell. Held in contempt of court for offending a judge. Doesn’t give a damn. That’s Stephen Turer, a criminal defense attorney ins Santa Rosa for 22 years. Few lawyers match Turer’s no-holds-barred style of litigating. Most attorneys in criminal defense work know that they have to go from a trial one week back to the D.A.’s office the next week to plea bargain. They don’t want enemies. Turer makes enemies and comes back again anyway.

When Steve Turer departed Brooklyn Law School 14 years ago, the various fields of specialty lay before him like a smorgasbord: Corporate law, personal injury, bankruptcy, probate. He selected criminal defense.

“At the time,” recalls the black-bearded and ample-bellied layer, “criminal law seemed to be the one that had the most personal contact,” the one that “most directly affected people’s lives.”

Turer’s gotten what he wanted. In the recent past, he has achieved personal contact with two men who were known to have shot and killed tow other men and with a third man who professed to having beaten to death an 18 month old baby.

All three men were accused of murder and faced the prospect of their lives being directly directly affected by the charges until Turer argued successfully in court that each should be set free.

He frequently is asked how he can morally defend criminals, much less defend them with derring-do.

In one murder trial Turer implored that his client was legally unconscious minutes before the bloodshed but was consciously defending himself when he fired the gun. In another, he called a suspect to the stand and asked him only a few innocuous questions about himself and his family, thereby effectively limiting the prosecutor to the same type of small talk during cross-examination.

“Nobody likes criminals,” Turer said. “I don’t like criminals.” But his job, he’ll argue, is to represent a suspect’s rights, regardless of whether or not he likes to person- or even whether the person likes him.

Throughout his most recent murder trial, Turer’s client wouldn’t talk to him. The client, a self-proclaimed child killer, didn’t like Turer from the start. He liked him even less when Turer won an acquittal.

Turer says he knew the man didn’t kill the baby. But what about the times when a defense attorney knows his client committed the crime of which he is accused?

Turer said his own opinion of his client’s guilt or innocence is “not necessarily a consideration.” Guilty or not guilty, he said, a defendant has rights. He’ll argue with verve against the notion that rights exist to protect criminals.

“That’s an assumption,” said Turer. “It’s wrong.”

“The criminal is a citizen like everybody else, he may not be one of our better citizens,” he said. He insisted it isn’t by mistake that the Constitution affords protections to every individual accused by the government of a crime.

Turer is 38 and vigorous. He opts for more casual attire than the jurisprudential gray-striped suit and below his sports coat and slacks loiter a pair of pointed boots.

Many a juror has seen his favorite blue tie, but none could actually see that the dots actually are the rear views of tiny fellows holding their trenchcoats open and the letters D.O.M. (Dirty Old Man) below each figure.

He currently is preparing a defense for the Santa Rosa man accused of murdering a Calistoga wine industry engineer whose hogtied body was found last October in a car abandoned under the redwoods near Monte Rio. Behind him as he enters the case is an unusual – perhaps in Sonoma County, unprecedented- string of homicide-defense victories.

The first two cases had a lot in common.

In March of 1979, janitor Frank Arthur Roberts, then 28, retained Turer to defend him against murder charges in the shooting death of Forestville garage owner George McKenzie Colen.

There was never any doubt that it was Roberts who had fired the shot that killed Colen, 29, nor that Roberts had gotten to Colen’s mobile home by putting the gun to a man’s head and ordering that he be driven there – an act of kidnap.

Roberts todl the jury he and his wife had gone to Colen’s mobile home for a party and that he’d fallen asleep after some drinking. Early the next morning, he said, Colen and a second man awakened him and ordered him to leave. He said he protested that first he wanted to find his wife, then was beaten by the two men, thrown out and shortly thereafter beaten again.

He didn’t know what to do next. The prosecution said he drove to his home a few miles away, grabbed his gun and strapped on a bandolier of bullets. A man testified that he was sitting in his car near Robert’s house when Roberts stuck a gun in his face, got into the car and ordered him to drive to Forestville.

Roberts said he didn’t remember commandeering the car, but did recall walking back into the trailer and confronting Colen, who he said became enraged at the sight of the gun and turned away, threatening to get his own gun.

Roberts said he became frightened and ran out. Once outside, he said, he fired three shots in the direction of the car parked near the trailer. He was “just trying to scare” Colen, he said.

Two bullets apparently struck the car. The third flew through the thin wall of the mobile home and hit a woman who had been in Colen’s room. It pierced her stomach, then hit Colen, who was reaching under a mattress where two pistols were kept.

The bullets struck him in his mouth, then was deflected down his throat and through his heart. He died instantly. The woman survived. Colen’s wife was asleep in another room.

Turer walked a delicate line in trying to defend Roberts against both a second-degree murder charge and a charge of kidnapping the driver, itself a serious felony. He asked the jury to accept a story he admits contained a “technical inconsistency.”

He contended, and called to the stand a psychiatrist who agreed that the booze and the beatings had left Roberts dazed at the time he abducted the driver. The suggestion was that Roberts didn’t know what he was doing and could not be held responsible.

But here was the catch: Roberts testified that he fired the gun to ward of Colen. So, by his own account, he was consciously aware that his life was in danger and he needed to defend himself.

Despite the consciousness pickle, Turer pleaded that Roberts was desperate over his missing wife and that he wouldn’t have done any of what he did had Colen not started the trouble.

The jury was swayed. It refused to convict Roberts of the killing, the kidnap or the injuring of Colen’s women friend.

Some people were angered that Roberts wasn’t convicted of anything. Turer conceded, “Without a doubt, he was technically guilty of a kidnap and he killed somebody.” But, he said jurors acted rightly.

“Looking at the totality of the event, what they said was, ‘We are not going to condemn this man for what he did.”

Turer responded firmly when asked if it were not true that defendants sometimes lie to save themselves and that it then becomes the role of defense attorneys to assist their clients by obscuring the facts.

“My job is not to conceal the truth,” he said. If someone lies, he said, the lie should be detected by the prosecutor during cross-examination.

However, staging what a judge called a “tactical ploy,” Turer short circuited the cross-examination process in the trial that followed the June 1980 shotgun death of Santa Rosa carpenter Louis Pelleriti. But he said he didn’t do it to hide anything.

The maneuver, he said, was intended only to assure that his client would not say or do anything to “put some jurors off.”

The client, Ronald Cohen, then 39, was arrested after Pelleriti, a former business partner, died at Cohen’s Sebastopol house from a pointblank blast fired from Cohen’s shotgun. Cohen told authorities Pelleriti had repeatedly threatened him over a disputed $744 debt and that he feared for his life when Pelleriti suddenly drove into his yard.

He said he got a shotgun and was headed for the door when Pelleriti walked in and surged at him. He said the carpenter grabbed the shotgun barrel, causing the weapon to fire.

Cohen was charged with first-degree murder. Early in the trial, the prosecutor said victim Pelleriti had told people he had an appointment to see Cohen and collect the debt. It appeared, the prosecutor suggested, that Cohen had armed himself, waited for Pelleriti to arrive, then killed him.

Turer brought to the stand several witnesses who described Pelleriti as a hot-head prone to violence.

Then he called Cohen to the stand. He recalls that he preferred not to have Cohen testify, but that juries want to hear from the accused.

He asked Cohen a few questions about his family, and community service. Then, to the astonishment of the courtroom, he told Judge Kenneth M. Eymann he had no further questions.

The prosecutor stood, ready to interrogate Cohen about what had happened prior to Pelleriti’s end. But Turer objected, reminding the judge that law requires that cross-examination be limited to the matters addressed in direct examination. Eymann agreed, advising the prosecutor that he could ask Cohen only about his family and his public service.

If Cohen were innocent, how could his case have been hurt by full cross-examination?

“You’re dealing with human nature.” Turer replied. “I frankly wanted to avoid as much pressure on him as I could.”

Besides, he said, Cohen’s taped statements to a detective were played for the jury, so his account of the shooting was already known.

Jurors deliberated just 90 minutes before acquitting Cohen.

Turer called the murder trial of George O’Brien “the clearest example of how the system should work, and does work.” It was also possibly the strangest trial ever held in Sonoma County.

O’Brien was a friend of Steven and Mary Lumsden and Neil Aldridge, the trio convicted of killing Lumsden’s 18-month-old son, Grant. The child died in Santa Rosa on July 1, 1978. He’d been beat to death.

Aldridge, a chiropractor, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Later the child’s father was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and his mother pleaded guilty to the same charge. Both were sentenced to four years in prison.

In February of 1980, nearly two years after the murder, O’Brien suddenly confessed that it was he who killed the child. He said the Lumsdens and Aldridge had been wrongly convicted. He said he was homosexual and referred to Aldridge as his “idol.”

Soon after the confession, a judge set aside the manslaughter convictions against the Lumsdens. A second judge refused to do the same with Aldridge’s murder conviction.

Turer was appointed by the court to represent O’Brien. “I think, quite frankly, that I got O’Brien because I had the experience with the other cases,” he said.

O’Brien immediately disliked Turer, as Turer had declared his intention to prove that O’Brien was for some reason lying. He refused to talk to Turer, even as they sat side by side in court.

The jury ultimately accepted Turer’s account over that of O’Brien and the prosecutor. Not guilty, it said. Even as he was set free, O’Brien continued to insist he was the murderer.

The case perfectly illustrated the role of the defense attorney, Turer said, because it involved a man who the lawyer didn’t particularly like and who didn’t even want to be defended. But because the man faced the prospect of a murder conviction, the legal system assured that his rights would be represented and the evidence fully disclosed.

“The role of the criminal defense attorney,” he said, “is to represent his client’s rights.”

Turer gets paid for filling that role. He drives a BMW and could afford to dress better than he does, and he’s not oblivious to the fact that some begrudge him for making a living by defending known and suspected criminals.

“I pay the price,” he contended. “I also have to deal with these guys, make them part of my consciousness.” Turer said defense attorneys are far from the only professionals whose bread and butter is the people who venture on the wrong side of the law. Police officers, prosecutors, judges, jailers, probation officers, newspaper reporters and others are in the same business, he said.

“We all live off criminals.”

Source: The Press Democrat