Monday, April 9, 2018
Page 1
Court of Appeal:
Case Properly Tried in Yolo County Though Defendant Committed No Acts There
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The Third District Court of Appeal held Friday that a man was properly tried in a county where none of his criminal acts took place.
Justice William J. Murray Jr. wrote the opinion affirming the trafficking convictions of Roosevelt Beatty, who was tried in Yolo County—a county he had never visited.
Detective Ryan Bellamy works for the police department in the City of Davis, in Yolo County, and during the relevant period was an undercover agent for the Yolo County Narcotic Enforcement Team. From Yolo, he twice placed telephone calls to one Marc Costa in the adjacent county of Sacramento to set up a purchase of drugs.
Defendant supplied the drugs to Costa.
“But for Bellamy’s call to Costa,” Murray wrote, “there would have been no sale to Bellamy for defendant to supply.”
The two phone calls, he said, were sufficient to establish territorial jurisdiction in Yolo County. A finding of jurisdiction need only be supported by “some evidence,” the jurist declared.
“The record discloses some evidence that defendant aided and abetted a drug dealer by supplying drugs to the dealer for the purpose of selling the drugs to a third party who had contacted the dealer from Yolo County,” Murray said. “The calls from Yolo County initiating the transactions provided the requisite preparatory acts or preparatory effects to establish venue.”
The case is People v. Beatty, 2018 S.O.S. 1639.
Copyright 2018, Metropolitan News Company