San Jose mayor expresses outrage after two homicide suspects released without bail
SAN JOSE — Three weeks after two men charged in a deadly Halloween shooting were granted supervised release by a judge, San Jose police, its officers union, and the mayor have launched a full-scale rhetorical assault on that ruling.
The police department tweeted Tuesday night that “the system has failed.” Mayor Sam Liccardo, also in a tweet, sharply criticized the decision the same night.
“I appreciate the purpose of bail reform, but releasing a homicide suspect without bail is outrageous,” Liccardo tweeted Tuesday night. “The pendulum has swung too far, and it’s our neighborhoods that endure the most crime that suffer as a result.”
Efrain Xavier Anzures, 27, and Alfred Richard Castillo II, 26, were charged with the fatal shooting the afternoon of Oct. 31 on Great Oaks Parkway. That’s when police found 27-year-old Isaiah Gonzalez gravely wounded. He later died at a local hospital.
So why are officials weighing in now when the releases — home detention for Anzures and electronic monitoring for Castillo — were ordered Nov. 10? It appears to be tied to an NBC Bay Area news story broadcast Tuesday evening.
Renee Hessling, Anzures’ attorney, characterized the outcry as a “temper tantrum” over legislature- and voterapproved criminal-justice reform laws, as well as a landmark state Supreme Court ruling earlier this year ordering trial-court judges to thoroughly evaluate someone’s ability to pay when setting bail, and also employ a higher standard for jailing someone pretrial for public-safety reasons.
“I am floored that this has become a story. The judge did exactly what the law says,” Hessling said. “Law enforcement can’t stand people not being thrown in jail and getting locked away every time they arrest someone. Mr. Anzures is still innocent, he hasn’t been convicted of a single crime.”
According to police, on Oct. 31 Gonzalez was driving a car and collided with several vehicles about a mile north of the crime scene. Two men in one of the damaged cars followed him to Great Oaks Parkway, where the shooting happened. Anzures was charged with murder and an enhancement for allegedly using a gun while Castillo was charged with assault with a deadly weapon for using his car in the alleged crime and allegedly being an accessory to murder after the fact.
Hessling said Anzures’ lack of criminal history, his steady employment and education, and family and community letters of support factored into Judge
Philip Pennypacker’s decision to grant him pretrial release.
“Mr. Anzures hasn’t posed a threat to public safety since his release, and has been 100 percent compliant with everything expected of him,” she said. “Mr. Anzures was a law-abiding citizen that saw an individual driving recklessly in a neighborhood where children were trick or treating, and he wanted to stop that person from hurting people.”
The county Superior Court declined to comment specifically on the case, but said in a statement that “every judge reviewing a case for release is required to give individualized consideration to the person appearing before them, and to consider whether non-monetary or other conditions of release are sufficient to protect both the alleged victim and the public, and to ensure the defendant’s appearance in court. Supervised release with conditions, including but not limited to electronic monitoring, is a significant tool in that regard.”
Still, even with the new bail and jailing standards in place, a person charged with murder and getting pretrial release is still relatively rare. But it happened recently in another San Jose homicide, when Margarita Santillan was granted lowered bail and supervised release in August after she was charged in a shootout that ended in the death of a 13-year-old boy. A major factor in that decision by Judge Shelyna Brown was video surveillance that Santillan’s attorney cited to mount a selfdefense argument.
Legal analyst Steven Clark, a criminaldefense attorney and former county prosecutor, said the evaluations in these two cases are examples of people charged with serious crimes being “entitled to a particularized review of their case” rather than a “cookie cutter” approach to jailing people based primarily on the severity of their charges.
“People point to a situation where people are on pretrial release and commit other crimes. That’s a legitimate public concern,” he said. “Should it not be a public concern that people who spend significant time in custody are (later) found of much lesser charges or not guilty?”