Oakland's gang injunction upheld

(06-23) 17:48 PDT OAKLAND --

A state appeals court on Monday upheld Oakland's gang injunction prohibiting nearly 40 alleged members of the Norteños from gathering in the city's Fruitvale neighborhood.

In 2012, Judge Robert Freedman of Alameda County Superior Court issued an order saying the city had met its threshold for proving that the named defendants were affiliated with the gang. He mandated that they stay away from a 2-square-mile "safety zone" in the Fruitvale.

The preliminary injunction named 38 individuals, who have at least 200 arrests and 106 convictions among them, city officials said.

In their appeal, the defendants challenged the injunction as being overbroad and maintained that "the evidence does not support the trial court's findings that the Norteños were a public nuisance or that defendants were active members of the gang."

In a 21-page ruling, Justice Maria Rivera of the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco disagreed, saying Freedman had cited ample evidence, including testimony by Oakland police gang experts, showing that residents of the area lived in fear of gang activity and that the defendants were responsible.

Rivera also blasted the alleged gang members' attorneys for their inappropriate tone in their legal filing.

As an example, the justice quoted from their brief that called the injunction "part of the city attorney's cynical scourging of 'Norteños,' and poverty and people of color; and its warning: we will reply on suppression, uber alles," German for "above all."

The brief at one point also stated that the court's order was based on its acceptance of "a mythology, framed around ... a deep, singular instinct for repression, broadly shared with the system ... which itself, surely, firmly tethered to the never-flagging, ravenous, flesh-eating demands of the prison-industrial complex."

Rivera wrote, "This argument goes beyond the bounds of acceptable advocacy and is unsupported by the record."