LeBaron: 165 years of looking for a better way

Just last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the new sheriff of New Sublette County, Wyo., has outlawed cowboy hats on deputies.

This is not only an indication that the Wild West may be dead and gone; it is a metaphor for change.

It happened here in Sonoma County more than 50 years ago when a new sheriff, former Sebastopol Police Chief John Ellis, not only decided to get rid of the Stetsons and business suits deputies had worn forever, but to put his officers in uniforms. Uniforms!

One might suggest that it was the beginning of the end for our cow county image.

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What we are really talking about is not hats, but change. It can come in small increments, like losing the sombreros. Other times it comes in big gulps, like what is happening here and now with the community task force charged with finding the best way to achieve a safe and peaceful citizenry.

Oversight is the issue. It has always been the issue.

So the question debated by this citizens group is: What kind of checks and balances will work best to assure everyone is treated equally under the law?

The current proposal is to create a citizens review body to be known as the Office of the Independent Auditor. Committee members see it as a way to assure the public that justice is always done. A tall order, and a problem that people have wrestled with as long as there have been governments.

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We obviously are in for a change. And this news seems to warrant a look into Sonoma County’s yesterday - to see how it used to be and to think about how and why it has changed from the paternalism that ruled in the 19th and 20th centuries to the current social and political climate.

Obviously, the system wasn’t perfect. But it seemed to work for as long as the county and its towns were run by community leaders who were, in general, well respected and well educated by the standard of the times.

This is one more of those barometers by which we measure change - change in procedures, change in laws, change in attitudes.

Take the grand jury. We still have a grand jury. It still hears citizens’ concerns and watches over local government. But it has changed from the days when the Superior Court judges - there were no more than two in the early years, expanded to three in the 1960s - nominated all prospective grand jurors. It was considered a great honor to be asked.

The names were placed in a bowl, and there was a ceremonious drawing in the presiding judge’s courtroom. Friends and family attended. The public was invited. The press was on hand, pencils ready. The names of the lucky citizens selected constituted big news and enormous responsibility.

The selection process changed sometime in the 1970s or early ’80s when the Supreme Court ruled that the selection process had to be inclusive and citizens were encouraged to apply for the jury lottery. Change was welcomed by an increasingly activist population that was discarding the very notion of paternalism at every turn.

In our first 100 years, the grand juries were the primary guardians of governance and citizen well-being and, yes, even politics.

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In the first quarter of county history, according to Dee Blackman’s research for “Santa Rosa, a 19th Century Town,” the grand juries told the supervisors and city councils what needed to be done.

When an inspection of the hospital revealed maggots, when the roads were “mud holes,” when the courthouse was “miserable, dilapidated and a disgrace,” when it was just too easy to escape from the jail, grand jury reports brought it all to the attention of the public.

As a result of these widely discussed reports, with few exceptions, buildings were replaced, streets were graveled, the infrastructure improved. The grand jury said, “Fix it!” It was done.

While the system seems to have been effective, it was far from perfect. Politics was ever-present. Republican leaders once asked that the entire grand jury be “impeached” for “covering up for Rebel sympathizers” - 10 years after the Civil War ended. While that charge went nowhere, it didn’t stop irate readers from asking another year’s grand jury to investigate the editor of The Sonoma Democrat for “maladministration” because of his Democratic views.

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There were instances when the grand jury was called upon to act as a criminal grand jury, something that happened relatively often in the frontier days. There were indictments, resultant punishments. Or not.

An 1867 case, described (erroneously) as the “first murder in Santa Rosa,” indicted one Byrd Brumfield for killing John Strong in a saloon fight. It was chronicled with dramatic illustrations in the California Police Gazette, published in San Francisco. But a trial jury found Brumfield not guilty. He lived to be killed several years later in a gunfight in Healdsburg.

There is also the oft-told tale of the first lynching in the county, which occurred in 1854.

A man named Ritchie, accused of rustling mules from two Santa Rosa-area settlers, was arrested in Shasta City and brought back to the Carrillo Adobe, where a posse, including James Bennett (whose name is on a peak and valley), was assigned to take the mule thief safely to the jail in Sonoma City, which was still the county seat.

Ritchie made it only as far as Joe Hooker’s property at Agua Caliente. His body was found there next morning, hanging from an oak tree.

When the grand jury convened in Sonoma City, the appointed escorts showed up for the inquest wearing sprigs of oak leaves in their buttonholes. They all refused to testify. Case closed.

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There’s another chunk of history the citizens committee would have us chew on. It is exploring the option of separating the positions of sheriff and coroner.

The charge of acting as county coroner was added to the sheriff’s duties in 1974. The committee is now studying the possibility of making the coroner a separate, elected position. This would not be the first time.

From 1852 or thereabouts - when Elisha Ely, a young bachelor physician who lived in Sonoma city, took the job - until Andrew Johansen resigned in 1974 and the reorganization was effected, a succession of county coroners were elected to the office. Some were physicians, others not. Johansen, the last, came to the job after a career as a sheriff’s deputy and undersheriff.

His predecessor, Vern Silvershield, who was coroner from 1942 to his death in 1958, was remarkable in that he held two other jobs at the same time. He was not only The Press Democrat’s first press photographer, but also the publicity director for the Sonoma County Fair.

Dr. Frank Phillips was coroner in 1920 when the three men deemed responsible for the killings of Sheriff Jim Petray and two San Francisco police detectives were taken from the county jail and hanged from a locust tree in the Rural Cemetery on Franklin Avenue. The next day a coroner’s jury, a hastily assembled panel of community leaders, with little or no deliberation, found that the lynching had been perpetrated by “persons unknown.”

The dispatch with which this landmark event was concluded may be surprising in an era when legal matters take months, even years, to resolve. It did not, of course, go away. A photo of the men hanging from the tree became an object of curiosity all over California and earned Santa Rosa a reputation as a rough frontier town.

Much more is known about the event since the last survivor of the group talked with a reporter more than 60 years later about the circumstances that brought 30 men from Healdsburg to avenge the death of their friend, Petray.

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Coroner’s juries have convened, although not recently, since the job became part of the sheriff’s domain.

Retired bailiff John Schubert, long interested in the history of law enforcement in the county, believes that the last coroner’s jury to convene here was in the 1990s when a Santa Rosa policeman fired an errant shot that ricocheted off the pavement of a parking lot and killed a Santa Rosa teenager. The verdict was that it was not a criminal act.

A few stories, none of them intended to offer advice, or least of all, have a moral. If there is any conclusion, it is only that it isn’t just the present problems or the current deliberations. It’s all of us, fumbling around, trying to figure out a better way to do things.

We’ve been doing that, with limited success at best, for 165 years.