The Poodle Explains the Magna Carta to King Donald

Plus, History Repeats Itself at the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors

Way back in 1215, England's King John was forced by threat of rebellion to sign the Magna Carta which decreed that not even the king could seize his subjects and make them disappear based on royal whim or caprice. Even kings, it asserted, are bound by the rule of law. As pedantic and high brow as this might sound, the Magna Carta remains the foundational bedrock for the U.S. Constitution, which — for all its flaws — is really what made America great in the first place. | Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Adobestock

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UNDUE PROCESS: In the miasma of my megalomania, April Fools’ Day qualifies as a holy day of obligation.

Naturally.

It’s on that day, after all, that I first rolled into Santa Barbara.

But I must confess, the date now much more on my mind is June 15, in the year 1215. That’s when a gaggle of English noblemen conducted a mass intervention with King John of England, putting him on notice that if he didn’t back the hell off, they’d put him in the ground — one way or another. He got the point and accordingly signed a document called the Magna Carta, the precursor for our own Constitution.

In it, the King agreed he could no longer seize people off the street simply because he didn’t care for the cut of their jib and make them mysteriously disappear into the ether. If, henceforth, the king were to seize people upon point of drawn sword, they had to be charged with specific crimes. And he had to prove they did what he claimed.

And — here’s the whopper — he had to be able to produce that person in the flesh. For those who like to use Latin phrases nobody understands, this is what’s called “habeas corpus.” It’s one of the things that’s made America great in the first place and — at least for the time being — still does. Kind of. It’s also the basis of what we call “due process.”

I dredge this up because we elected a wannabe Vlad the Impaler who seems to think he was sworn in as king, not president. I try not to get too hysterical about such things; it’s bad for my nerves.

But then I found the video of Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Tufts grad student from Turkey, in this country with all her proper papers, getting hijacked on a suburban Massachusetts street corner by six government agents dressed in what looked like black pajamas with their faces covered by balaclavas. It was chilling in the extreme.

Six DHS agents detaining 30-year old Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk | Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Of course, that is precisely the intent. She committed no crime. The White House isn’t even pretending she did. Her offense — if that were a crime, we’d all be in a jail — was to have co-written an op-ed likening what Israel has done to the Palestinians to genocide. She has not been implicated in any campus violence. Or any violence at all. Or even being actively engaged in the protest movement.

I get how the G-word rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But eliminating so many Palestinians in Gaza — 50,000 killed, 113,000 wounded, and 1.9 million displaced since October 7, 2023 — also rubs a lot of other people the wrong way, too. Free speech — like habeas corpus and due process — is another one of those quaint ideas that made America great. Maybe it’s time we make America great again?

But with Trump, every day is April Fools’ Day. Last I heard, he and his minions dispatched Ozturk to a prison in Louisiana as a precursor to shipping her off to the no-questions-asked-torture-pit-of-no-return in El Salvador, so favored by the Trump administration these days.

She is hardly the first. To be fair, federal officials acknowledged they made a mistake in sending a 29-year-old Venezuelan sheet-metal worker now from Baltimore there. They thought he was a Venezuelan gang member. He was not. He, in fact, had been admitted to the United States and granted a protective order — meaning if he went back home, he had a reasonable expectation of being killed. But even though the mistake was admitted, the feds said they have no intention of bringing him back. The mistake, they explained, was made in “good faith.”

April Fool?

Although the jail has been averaging about 750 inmates a day, Sheriff Bill Brown insisted the county needs a capacity of 1,004 jail beds to meet anticipated needs. Although two supervisors agreed — Steve Lavagnino and Bob Nelson — the other three balked at the plan’s high price tag: $20 million a year. | Credit: Daniel Dreifuss file

I observed April Fools’ Day this year watching the supervisors wrestle themselves into a state of near exhaustion for about six hours over how many hundreds of millions of dollars we don’t have, but will have to spend, for who knows how many additional jail beds. Theirs was a choice between the bad and worse. Good was not on the menu.

At the last minute Supervisor Joan Hartmann proposed using the northwest wing of the existing county jail rather than building as much brand new housing at the new North County jail. This plan, she said, would be considerably cheaper, shaving $3.4 million off the annual debt service of the overall proposal. That money, she argued, could provide revenues for programs to divert mentally ill low-level offenders from county jail into other programs. For reasons still not entirely clear, the details of this plan were not poked, prodded, and otherwise explored by the board as a whole. | Credit: Paul Wellman file
Steve Lavagnino sided with Sheriff Brown on the need for 1,004 units. Diversion programs sound good, he said, but their effectiveness and reliability remain unproven. The costs, he noted, are astronomical. To keep just 800 people in jail — less than one percent of the county population — he said, will consume 27 percent of the county’s general fund. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

Roy Lee, the most recent arrival to the board, led the charge to cut the proverbial baby in half. With two supervisors favoring the 1,004-bed solution and another two — Hartmann and Laura Capps, favoring a 748-bed approach, Lee pushed for an 876-bed solution. Mental health advocates argued the cost for even that many beds was still too high to allow much left over for diversion. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

Packing the house was the largest and most energized crowd of mental-health advocates I’ve ever seen. More than once, I confess, they made me weep. We’ve all been there.

Every dollar spent on the jail, the advocates objected, is a dollar not available for people behind bars for the crime of being crazy. Or drunk. If the county were to spend a similar amount desperately and obviously needed on new treatment facilities for people suffering these afflictions, they argued, maybe the jail wouldn’t need so many beds. “Treatment beds, not jail cells” was the slogan.

All slogans over time begin to sound trite. But for the families struggling to keep a loved one from jumping off a bridge — and that’s all of us — there’s nothing trite about it. They’ve been making the same case now probably since the April Fools’ Day I first rolled into town. They are, of course, right.

Everyone knows it. It’s just not so simple. Since the murder of George Floyd, the county supes — and the county CEO — have made genuine efforts to reform the criminal justice system. One of their most sustained efforts has been to keep crazy people out of jail.

But our jail system is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. It needs immediate and expensive attention. The supes did what they could. And when the dust settled, that’s exactly how I felt — damned.

April Fools’ Day, indeed.