Murder, race and unusual legal tactic combine in small town trial

• Juliana Barbassa
• The Examiner
• Nov 14, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (Map, News) - Three young black men break into a white man's home in rural Northern California.

The homeowner admits to fatally shooting two of them - but it's the surviving black man who's facing murder charges in a trial that begins Thursday in Lake County Superior Court.

With an explosive mixture of race, death and a rarely used legal doctrine, the case of Renato Hughes Jr. has brought unprecedented attention to remote Lake County, where wine country aspirations overlay a long farming tradition. The case has taken on racial overtones in part because of the sparsely populated county's racial makeup, which defies state trends by remaining 91 percent white and 2 percent black.

The prosecutor has argued race played no part in the charges stemming from the Dec. 7 shootings, in which Clearlake homeowner Shannon Edmonds shot San Franciscans Rashad Williams and Christian Foster in the back.

Hughes Jr., also of San Francisco, escaped, only to face first degree murder charges in connection with the deaths of his childhood friends.

Lake County's District Attorney Jon Hopkins is not charging the white homeowner but is instead invoking the Provocative Act doctrine, which allows him to charge Hughes with murder for taking actions that spurred Edmonds to kill. Hopkins is not pursuing the death penalty.

Whether the shooting stemmed from a botched drug deal at the home of a known dealer or a home invasion by out-of-town youth looking for marijuana depends on whether the prosecution or the defense is telling the story.

The case has energized the San Francisco civil rights community, and the California NAACP has thrown its weight behind Hughes. Charging the churchgoing young man with murder with special circumstances, robbery, burglary, attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon defies common sense and smacks of the disparity young black men face within the legal system, the civil rights advocates say.

"The charges they're giving this young man do not fit the crime," said the Reverend Amos Brown, head of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, and pastor at Hughes' church.

Brown and other NAACP officials point instead to the homeowner, Edmonds, the man who acknowledged pulling the trigger, and ask why he is walking free. Tests showed Edmonds had marijuana and prescription medication in his system the night of the shooting. Edmonds had a prescription for the drugs to treat depression.

"This man had no business killing these boys," Brown said. "They were shot in the back. They had fled."

Prosecutors said Edmonds wasn't charged because they couldn't prove before a jury that he didn't act reasonably in defense of himself, his property and his family members, who were asleep during the 4 a.m. incident.

Edmond's family was terrified by the events, in which the young men rampaged through the house, yelling, cursing, and asking for marijuana, Hopkins said.

Edmond's stepson, then-high school junior Dale Lafferty, became brain damaged as a result of the baseball bat beating he took during the melee, and now lives in a rehabilitation center, the prosecutor said.

"It was pandemonium in there," said Hopkins. "He (Hughes) had a responsibility for setting the whole thing in motion by his actions and the actions of his accomplices."

Hopkins said he'd outline those actions during opening statements on Thursday.

The Provocative Act doctrine is exceptional because it doesn't require prosecutors to prove the accused showed intent to kill, said Tony Serra, a criminal defense attorney who gained prominence in the 1960s defending Black Panthers.

"It's one of the harsher aberrations in murder law," Serra said.