MUSHROOM MANAGEMENT: THE UNABASHED CONTEMPT FOR MARSY'S LAW

"Do you know what 'Mushroom Management' is? It's when you 'feed 'em shit and keep 'em in the dark.' That's how you grow mushrooms."

--John Bravman

In 2008, California became the first state in the nation to pass Marsy's Law — a sweeping set of constitutional protections designed to give crime victims and their families a genuine voice in the criminal justice process: the right to be notified of hearings, the right to be present, the right to be heard. California didn't just pass a law that year — it blazed a trail. In the years since, more than a dozen other states have followed California's lead, writing similar victims' rights protections into their own constitutions.

Excerpt of Marsy's Law, as written in California Constitution article I, § 28, section (b). And, yes, we as the victim's family did fulfill the "upon request" part.

The promise of Marsy's Law is simple: that victims and their families should never be an afterthought in a system built around the accused. That they should know when a hearing is happening. That they shouldn't have to find out after the fact.

Marsy's Law, also known as "The Victim's Bill of Rights", is considered so fundamental that every victim is to be issued a "Marsy's Card" by the police — a physical reminder that these rights exist.

So, the promise of Marsy's Law is supposed to mean something. As we'll see in Fresno County, however, it most certainly did not.

My attorney contacted the Fresno County District Attorney's office multiple times throughout the summer and fall of 2023 to ask about the progress of the case against Jenny's killer. Marsy's Law existed for exactly this reason, after all. We were told as late as September there was no progress and there was no timetable. Not even whether there would be a charge filed against the driver.

Then, on November 2, 2023, at 3:00 in the afternoon, I received a call from the DA's office. A plea hearing was scheduled for 8:30 the next morning — less than eighteen hours away by time, 162 miles away by distance.

It was only later that I learned this wasn't the first hearing. It wasn't even the second. It was the third.

Two hearings had already come and gone. Two opportunities for me to be present, to be heard, to exercise the rights California had written into its constitution for people exactly like me. Nobody at the DA's office told me — not when my attorney called asking, not before either hearing came and went.

This is what "blazing a trail" looks like when the trail runs out at the county level. The law can exist. The right can be written into the constitution with 54% of the vote. And still, an office can simply decide not to make the call. At the hearing the next day, the judge agreed with me. Eighteen hours' notice was not enough time to prepare a statement, and the record should reflect that.

So there was no plea. Not because of anything I did or didn't have ready — but because a judge who'd never met me could see plainly what Fresno County's DA's office apparently couldn't: being informed the afternoon before an 8:30 am hearing this important isn't notice at all.

That wasn't the only failure. The California Highway Patrol's own report recommended felony manslaughter. The DA's office knocked it down to a misdemeanor — on the theory that the truck was merely speeding. The driver wasn't intoxicated. His phone had been sent to two different labs for analysis to determine whether it had been in use at the time of the crash. Both labs came back with the same result: he hadn't been using it. In fairness to the DA's office, that finding was part of what they weighed before deciding on the misdemeanor charge.

Still, no one told me any of this was happening until it was already decided. I hadn't been consulted. I hadn't been warned. I found out the way I found out about everything in this case: after the fact. It was only after repeated phone calls with the Deputy DA's team that I discovered the office did not even conduct an investigation.

But, there was still time to act because the plea had not been entered. At my insistence, the DA did open an investigation into the accident. To their credit, they listened to me on that point. But the charge never changed. Misdemeanor manslaughter it stayed — even after CHP's own investigators had recommended otherwise.

I don't know what that DA investigation actually consisted of. The office interviewed both me and my son. But, they wouldn't disclose to me the details of their finding. I don't know how seriously it was conducted, or whether the outcome was ever really in question. I have no way of knowing whether it was a genuine second look or a formality run just thoroughly enough to say it happened in order to keep me from pushing further.

The DA simply told me they would only pursue a charge they knew that would stick. A misdemeanor in this case.

Around this time, I brought up Marsy's Law directly with the Deputy DA in a phone call — the missed hearings, the notice, all of it. His response was that he preferred "to look forward."

I've heard a lot of phrases used to sidestep bad behavior without actually addressing it. "Let's behave like adults" is one. "I prefer to look forward" belongs right up there with it. It's the kind of line that sounds reasonable until you notice it isn't an answer to anything. It's just a polite way of telling someone to fuck off.

But, alas, for all the DA's professed effort "to look forward," it was to no avail. The most grievous omission of all was still ahead of us. The DA's office knew a critical fact that I did not: that the man who killed my wife had killed someone before. A year earlier, in Kern County, he vaulted over a raised-curb median into oncoming traffic, slammed into a motorcyclist and was arrested for it. He was out on bail for that case, in fact, when he killed Jenny.

I note with astonishment that I didn't learn this from the DA's office even though they had this information before the driver's plea. I learned it in 2025, more than a year after the case closed, when a news reporter called to ask me about it. Yes, a news reporter. When I contacted the Fresno County DA's office to ask why I was never told, this was their response: "At the time of sentencing, Defendant did not have a prior conviction as that case was still pending out of county. That case resolved as a felony per records on or around May 13, 2024. Since the prior case was not a conviction at the time of resolution of our case on February 22, 2024, it would not have impacted sentencing."

But that doesn't answer the question I actually have. Whether or not it was a conviction at that point, they knew he had killed someone before — and killed Jenny while out on bail for it. That's not a legal technicality. That's a fact about the man who took my wife's life, and I had a right to know it. Had I known, I could have included it in my statement to the court. I could have told the judge what kind of danger this man had already shown himself to be. And, since the sentence handed down by the lenient judge was predicated on "having no priors", it's actually a leap in logic for the DA's office to say that "it would not have impacted sentencing." But, instead, that information sat in a file somewhere, known to the DA's office and unknown to me, until a reporter told me what my own case's prosecutors never did.

Add it up. They kept me in the dark about the first two hearings. They gave me less than eighteen hours' notice of the third. They never told me what charge they were pursuing, or what their "investigation" actually looked at. And most heinously of all, they never told me that the man who killed my wife had already killed someone else with his truck a year before.

Of course, the DA's office knew all along what I found out the hard way: I can't take any action against the Fresno County DA's office for any of it. Prosecutorial immunity, a federal doctrine, sees to that. The DA's office was my only window into justice for Jenny's killer, and they could not have done more to slam the blinds closed. They were also my only legal voice in the courtroom — I can't hire my own attorney to charge the driver with a crime. Instead of being my voice, they did quite the opposite — they muzzled me by keeping me ignorant. Quite simply, the DA's office faced no legal accountability whatsoever and they took advantage of it.

Which tells you what Marsy's "Law" actually is, when it comes down to it. Not a law — a law carries consequences when it's broken. Not even a guideline — a guideline at least earns some accountability when it's ignored. What I learned is that Marsy's Law, in the hands of an office that doesn't want to be bothered with it, is nothing at all. It was chewed up by the Fresno County DA's office and spit back in my face.

Feed 'em shit and keep 'em in the dark. That's not only how you grow mushrooms. That's how you grow contempt.