Fruitvale case against 40 men accused of being members of the Norteños street gang will see the close of "phase one" after some final arguments

Fruitvale case against 40 men accused of being members of the Norteños street gang will see the close of "phase one" after some final arguments before Judge Robert Friedman on May 6.
Shortly after, Friedman is expected to weigh in, deciding whether the city has proved that the gang is a criminal "unincorporated association" active in the area and whether a handful of the defendants are members of the group.
Javier Quintero, 27, and Abel Manzo, 25, the only defendants who have testified, were called as witnesses by a small group of volunteer lawyers who have taken up the case, representing more than 20 of the accused men.
It's unclear whether their testifying will have helped Quintero and Manzo or put them in peril. Both have criminal histories, and if they convinced Friedman they've given up crime, they could be dismissed from the case and would be free while the court case goes on. Both men have held productive jobs, and neither has recent criminal convictions.
But Quintero was arrested in the courtroom several weeks ago, a few days after being stopped by police in a car with gang insignia and marijuana in it. Manzo may have perjured himself, claiming on the stand that he didn't know the Norteños existed.
Theirlawyers, including Oakland attorney Michael Siegel, filed arguments with the court last week.
Of Manzo, they wrote, "His feelings, his loyalties, his values, his beliefs about what he knows and what he has done and not done and been through, are not at issue here. "... The sole question is whether the People have shown by clear and convincing evidence that Manzo is actively a part of a criminal street gang in the Fruitvale."
Of Quintero, they wrote that he had been in trouble before but tried to go straight: "Eventually he got a real job -- with "... benefits and a chance for advancement; a true rarity -- but after eighteen months good, and regardless of them, he was fingered by (police) and suddenly snatched out of his groove and put in the GPS (global positioning system) program, under the hard-nose (parole officer) Moreno, and then put into this scandalous case."
Documents filed by the city's attorneys argued the opposite. They wrote that Manzo and Quintero are both chronic offenders with ties to crime in the area.
"Unlike injunctions obtained in the previous two decades against gangs," the document argues, "the People have taken the additional extraordinary step of naming individual gang members, so that they are assured their due process rights are respected."
City Attorney John Russo followed the same format in the North Oakland injunction Friedman approved in June.
Though the Fruitvale case has taken longer than Russo hoped -- when he announced the injunction in October, his office wanted to have it decided by the end of 2010 -- his office is still pursuing a third injunction.
Russo first mentioned the third case in October, but documents released this week show his office has paid about $20,000 to an outside law firm to explore the case in East Oakland, a region known for even more gang violence than the Fruitvale district.
The firm has agreed to a $40,000 cap in that case, Russo spokesman Alex Katz said Tuesday. "That's an extremely low cost to taxpayers for a complex case like this," he added.
As to the details of the new injunction, he said, "We've just had really preliminary discussions with OPD about it. We don't have another injunction queued up right now."