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Even when they went camping, the mentality of the street prevailed. "Mobbin' in the wild," they called their nature trips.
So when a bunch of straight-world squares tried to kick them out of a suburban Sacramento party on Halloween night in 2008, the mindset of the Mobb took over and one of their members shot up the place, killing the host and wounding four guests.
Prosecutors focused hard on the power of the street-gang mentality to help win first-degree murder convictions for two Monk Mobb members in a Sacramento Superior Court trial that ended earlier this month – a tactic they say is crucial to helping juries understand the full story behind such cases, but one defense attorneys often condemn as "character assassination."
"The average citizen doesn't carry a gun in their waistband, thinking about who they're going to pop," Deputy District Attorney Andrew Soloman said in an interview a week after the verdict. "When they live that lifestyle and that's their focus, they're halfway there. It's kind of like a fill-in-the-blank with the victim's name. It's not so much that the gang mentality is on trial, but it gives a lot of insight into someone's intent when they commit an act."
Jurors deliberated less than two days before reaching guilty verdicts on charges against the gunman, Elijah Rasean Fields, and co-defendant Corey Andre Carmicle in the shooting death of party host Patrick Razaghzadeh.
Eight Monk Mobb members and associates were initially arrested and charged with murder or accessory to it. Only Fields and Carmicle were convicted of murder. One pleaded to manslaughter, and five others agreed to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for their charges being dropped.
Leaning heavily on the state's street gang statutes, prosecutors in California for more than 20 years have been able to zero in on the gang mentality to provide juries with a psychological context for the crime. While district attorneys love it, the practice has rankled some members of the defense bar. They think the evidence of a street gang's collective thought process – built largely on police expert testimony – convicts people for who they are rather than what they did.
"It's character assassination," said Barry Melton, the former public defender of Yolo County who is now in private practice in Davis. "Historically, if I had you on trial for a crime, I was pretty much limited to whatever the facts of the crime were and we couldn't bring in much more than that. There's always been a general holding in court that you can't go after somebody's character, but this is even worse. You can bring up the gang's past. And it's not just the gang's past generally, but what the police view of what the gang mentality is.
"I don't know if it's healthy," Melton said.
Flashes of gang mindset
Michael A. Ramos, the district attorney of San Bernardino County and president of the California District Attorneys Association, said the prosecutors' power to probe the collective gang mindset is critical to providing a true understanding of gang cases."You're trying to explain the intent, the way these people think," said Ramos, co-chairman of the gang subcommittee of the state prosecutors' association. "When I was a real trial lawyer, I used to start out my argument, 'This is a whole different world than you or I live in.' You explain the dynamics of that world, and when you paint that picture, it's just an easier way to present the information to the jury."
In the Monk Mobb case, prosecutors presented a former member of the gang and one-time associate, as well as a police expert, to give the jury an inside look into the gang's mental dynamic.
Clean-cut and polite, Charles Ferrell, now 23, explained the Monk Mobb. He described the gang as a loose collection of 20 to 25 teenagers and early 20-somethings who would gather occasionally to talk about how they made their money – dealing dope, running hookers, holding up people on the street.
Ferrell said the gang mostly was like "a close-knit family" that formed for the purpose of self-protection against "anybody who's not us." Whenever they ventured into the outside world from their North Highlands neighborhood, Ferrell said, somebody had a gun.
As soon as the Monk Mobb arrived at the Halloween party on Rogue River Drive in the Larchmont Park-La Riviera area, Ferrell said some members, especially Carmicle, sprang into a full-on public gang profile – "banging," the witness called it.
"He is banging 100 percent of the time," Ferrell said of Carmicle. "He doesn't know how to turn it off."
Trouble started at the Halloween party when a guest offered the Mobb a swig off his cognac bottle. Carmicle, 24, rudely rejected it, Ferrell said, with the comment, "Mobb brought its own bottle."
When tension ratcheted up and the party host told the gang members to get out, it was Carmicle, according to Ferrell, who responded, "We ain't going nowhere."
Razaghzadeh at one point tried to apologize to the Mobb for accusing them of stealing a camera at the party. But it was too late, according to Ferrell. He said the mere accusation, the simple order to leave, represented "hostility" toward the gang.
"They disrespected us in the first place," Ferrell testified, "so the apology doesn't mean anything."
Fields, the shooter, testifying under Soloman's cross-examination, also provided a glimpse into the gang psyche.
On his MySpace page, whenever he spelled a word such as "locked," it came out "l-o-c-c-e-d." To spell it right would have meant putting a "c" next to a "k," which in street gang land means "Crip killer." Soloman suggested in his questioning that Fields couldn't put those letters together because the Monk Mobb is a subset of the North Highlands Gangster Crips.
Also on the same MySpace page, Fields captioned a picture of himself and his friends on a camping trip, flashing gang hand signs, as "Mobbin' in the wild." It was strong evidence, the prosecutor said, that the gang mentality accompanied the Monk Mobbsters even on vacation.
Prior shootings detailed
Sacramento sheriff's Detective John Sydow served as the cleanup hitter to drive home the prosecution's point that when it comes to street gangs, mindset matters.He then told the jury about the group's involvement in two prior shootings, one fatal, around the time of the Halloween killing. Sydow testified that when the regular-world people at the party ordered the gang to leave, it was "almost unfathomable" for the interlopers to comprehend.
If word seeped out that they got run out of a party by a bunch of squares, they'd get laughed off the streets by their rivals, Sydow said. He called it "an affront to them that must be dealt with."
In the end, it was easy enough for the jury to convict Fields, whom witnesses identified as the shooter. Jurors also were convinced that Carmicle amped up the tension knowing his buddy had a gun in his pocket. They convicted him of first-degree murder, too.
On the sidelines, Melton, the former public defender from Davis, decried the ability of prosecutors to "get in all this extraneous stuff" in cases like the Monk Mobb's.
"I don't know if relaxing evidentiary standards and allowing in evidence that doesn't have anything to do with the person on trial is really helpful to our system of justice," Melton said.
Ramos, the San Bernardino prosecutor, thinks it is.
"It's part of the criminal mindset, the criminal element, criminal thinking," Ramos said. "This is what these people do. If we didn't have these laws to support us, then all these underground conspiracies and confidential gang conversations, intentions, we could never get out."
Sources: http://www.sacbee.com
