The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 3

2 CO0 Alleles 3IimC8 Son, June 22, 1980-Pirt I 3 Dogged Doctor Refuses to Give Up Case Against Big Farmers Court Loss Ignored in Fight Over Large Holdings By JOHN HURST Tbnw Staff Writer BRAWLEY The big farmers are planning a victory celebration, but the little doctor who has been trying to break up their land holdings for the last two decades or so refuses to admit defeat. "I've got a lot of fighting to do before I turn up my toes," Dr. Ben Yellen says, despite a unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court last week that almost all of the farms in the Imperial Valley receiving cheap federal water are exempt from the 160-acre size limit of the Reclamation Act of 1902. But the diminutive physician, whose campaign against the big farms is something of an avocation, maintains that the court had not dealt with the issue of residency, another Reclamation Act regulation.

Yellen argues that many farms in the Imperial Valley are held by absentee speculators or large corporations in violation of Reclamation Act regulations requiring local residency by farm owners who receive federal water. Absentee owners drain money from the local economy, says Yellen. "If you're an absentee landlord," he asks, "what are you going to do, run down here to buy shoes?" Although the court did not, as Yellen argues, deal with the residency requirement, Congress is consider ing legislation that would exempt the Imperial Valley farms from any application of the Reclamation Act So the big farmers here are planning a celebration. Stephen H. Elmore is not only one of the big farmers of the Imperial Valley, at 6 feet, bV inches, he may also be the tallest.

Elmore was born in Brawley 51 years ago, the son of one of the original farmers who came out West from Missouri. He owns about 2,300 acres of farmland and leases another 1,700. In addition, he is the managing partner of the Elmore which leases 5,300 acres from his father's estate. "If you put all the nieces and nephews, together, we are one or two (in ownership of land in the county)," Elmore says of his family. He points casually to the eastside of a road and says, "I farm in this direction for a mile." Elmore's relatives helped to build the water distribution system with which the federal All American Canal was linked when it was completed in 1942.

The creation of that distribution system, which was built before the All American Canal and was connected to a channel that brought Colorado River water through Mexico and into California, was a main argument for exempting the Imperial Valley from the Reclamation Act regulations on farm size. Please Turn to Page 26, Col. 1 Dr. Ben Yellen Imperial Valley water fight. Tlmef photo by Kn Hively continue his Disavow will '4 I $55 WILL GET YOU HIGH -AND YOU GET THE $55 By CARL INGRAM TlmH Staff Writer SACRAMENTO The government is paying volunteers up to $55 a session to smoke free marijuana, drink liquor and get behind the wheel of official state cars for driving tests that are just getting under way.

It's part of an experiment aimed at determining a legally acceptable level of impairment for someone driving under the influence of marijuana. Unlike limits for driving under the influence of alcohol, an impairment level for driving under the influence of marijuana has eluded scientists, law enforcement agencies and the courts. Law enforcement officials long have maintained that smoking marijuana impairs driving ability. But proving it in court is another matter. Financed by an $860,000 grant from the National Highway Traffic Safety Council, the California test, to be started in earnest in the next couple of weeks, is aimed at establishing an impairment level 1 I I 1 PORT 0' CALL Long Beach for manjuana-smoking drivers.

1 Please Turn to Page 24, Col. 3 I 15,000 Push for Solar Energy, Protest A -Plant By GART JARLSON Timti Staff Writer First China Ship to Visit State Calls at Long Beach mil kf1 4 Despite Supreme Court ruling, Democrats Candidacy Termed 'Not Suitable or Desirable' by Party By CATHLEEN DECKER TlmM Staff Writer With the strongest condemnation it could legally muster, the state Democratic Party Saturday disavowed the nomination of Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger as the party's candidate in Southern California's 43rd Congressional District In a sometimes heated one-hour meeting at the University Hilton in Los Angeles, the Democratic Central Committee's executive board also lifted a requirement that party members support the elected nominee, freeing district voters to support any other 43rd district candidate in the November election. Both actions were approved on unanimous voice votes by more than 100 executive committee members, who held a special meeting on the Metzger controversy after a scheduled daylong nomination of delegates to the party convention this summer. Metzger, a 43-year-old television repairman and self-appointed grand dragon of the California Ku Klux Klan, stirred outrage among party officials by posting a 392-vote victory over two other Democrats in the district's primary election. During the spring campaign, Metzger, a Fallbrook resident, campaigned openly as a klansman.

The district, which stretches through San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties, is considered a safe Republican district and incumbent Rep. Clair Burgener, a Republican, is expected to win in November. During the executive committee meeting Saturday, the carefully worded policy statement drafted by party attorneys initially was criticized by several members, who wanted a stronger denouncement of Metzger. But the draft eventually won the committee's approval, largely because harsher statements violated the state Elections Code, which forbids a political party from openly supporting a candidate from another party. The approved statement said Metz-Please Turn to Page 25, Col.

2 new car it's got a bug," Emerson said. "This is a major bug, but one that can very easily be remedied." Emerson said that in his small, five-judge court, at least one person appears every week on a warrant that has been issued for someone else. "Sometimes the arrest and identification are gross," the judge said. At a recent conference of a score of presiding judges of the Municipal Court, Emerson said, the judges expressed delight that a suit had been filed challenging AWWS as it is now used. Emerson attributed the wrong arrest problem to "absolute stubbornness" on the part of those who run AWWS "to change the programming to the level where it will function correctly." "I could never find anybody (among AWWS operators) who had ever studied the probabilities of how many people were arrested and illegally detained because of bad programming," he said.

There have been few false arrest suits in the past, he said, because the average victim does not have the money for financing litigation or the time to wait for a judgment that could take years and be only nominal. Deputy Public Defender Frank Gomez, who worked as a computer programmer at CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before he became a lawyer, described the programming and resultant warrant retrieval of AWWS this way: "Garbage in, garbage out." By GERALD FABIS TintM Staff Writer The huge bulk freighter, its gray hull battered and its white superstructure marred by rust, slowly approached Pier A at the Post of Long Beach early Saturday, dwarfing the tugs that had it under tow. Some morning mist still clung to the calm waters of the harbor, and as the ship moved closer, Chinese characters became visible on its prow. The name, in English letters, was Mei Gui Hai, which means "Rose of the Sea." For 10 days, the Mei Gui Hai had been riding at anchor in the outer harbor, and now she was making maritime history by becoming the first vessel registered to the People's Republic of China to dock at a California port The ship, empty and high off the Metzger I 1 i I I And the festival resembled the anti-draft and anti-Vietnam gatherings of the 1970s, including free entertainment by veteran rock musician Country Joe McDonald, who altered the lyrics of many of his anti-war songs to fit the occasion. John Trudell, former director of the American Indian Movement, told the gathering, "We've got to stop this whole madness.

They are killing our people at the beginning of the fuel cycle and they're going to be killing yours at the end." Trudell was referring to energy mining projects under way throughout the United States on current and former Indian lands. "If we're going to stop this, you people will have to get more serious about it than you were about Vietnam Please Turn to Page 21, Col. 3 The estimates of 2,000 or more wrong arrests and jailings each year because of asserted AWWS mishandling were made by Flynn and Guttentag. They said they arrived at the figures by spot checks of courts and interviews with law enforcement officers and then "extrapolating." Santweir said that, based on his observations, the estimates of Flynn and Guttentag are conservative. Gomez, too, said he does not think the estimates are high enough.

"There are probably more," he said. Capt Rick Batson, head of the Los Angeles Police Department's Records and Identification Division, said he had no idea whether the lawyers estimates of wrong arrests were reasonable. "I just flat don't know," he said. But he added that there is "always the potential for error," and that the Police Department is as much concerned about such incidents as anyone else. "We are not in the business of putting innocent people in jail," he said.

Batson said no complaints about the system had ever come to him "from the judiciary." He explained that he was hindered from discussing some aspects of the controversy because of the lawsuit against the police chief and the city over AWWS. In the past 10 years, Batson said, AWWS "has proved its efficiency" and has saved taxpayers' money and there are no plans to make major Please Turn to Page 32, Col. 1 WARRANTS FOR ARREST-THE ERRORS OF HUMILIATION ship to visit California port. Times photo by Rick Meyer 900,000 Greet Summer at Beach By CLAIRE SPIEGEL Tim! Staff Writer The first day of summer brought more than 900,000 people to the beach in Los Angeles and Orange counties Saturday. Lifeguards reported temperatures in the 70s and the water about 64 degrees.

A quiet surf and no riptides minimized trouble for both swimmers and lifeguards. The "red tide" that has discouraged swimmers recently was gone Saturday, except in a few places in Malibu. "Red tide," caused by plankton floating ashore, is sometimes accompanied by a bad odor. "It's been just a very pleasant day, with a lot of people in the water," said lifeguard Lt. Steve Voorhees in Re-dondo Beach.

Please Turn to Page 24, Col. 1 ney who filed the suit with attorney Lucas Guttentag, said the action "in no way challenges the need of a police agency to use a computer as a legitimate aid." The suit, he said, is directed at the mishandling of AWWS to such an extent that it results in "arresting innocent people for the crime of having a common name." Guttentag said the suit does not seek more identifying information on warrants, but only the correct use of those identifiers already available to officers in the field. AWWS is a computer index of warrants and wants used by nearly 30 subscribing law enforcement agencies throughout the county. The two biggest are the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department At present it contains 822,617 warrants 791,426 for misdemeanors, mostly traffic, and 31,191 for felonies. Also in it are 377,000 or so "wants" for persons sought for questioning in crimes or as witnesses.

Presiding Judge Leon Emerson of the Downey Municipal Court has been Watching AWWS in action for years, both in his court and as head of Municipal Court judges' data processing committees. Emerson said that it is not the computer that is making the errors which result in wrong arrests but the people who program it and the officers who act on the irregular information that it provides. "It is a beautiful system, but like a longshoremen tie up first Chinese water, tied up at the Koppel Inc. bulk grain pier and by 5 p.m. today it is to be loaded with 15,000 tons of feed grain for China.

The Mei Gui Hai will then go back out to anchor and return to the pier Friday for its official welcome to the United States and to finish loading the remainder of its cargo. According to the port, other vessels have carried cargo to China from California ports, but the Mei Gui Hai is the first ship bearing the red and gold-starred flag of the People's Republic of China to visit the state. Chinese ships have called at Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, according to Kerr Steamship Co. U.S. agents for the China Overseas Ocean Shipping which operates the Please Turn to Page 24, Col.

1 Plaintiff Michael Smith Tlm photo from law enforcement files. The suit contends that persons who undergo the degrading experience of being booked and jailed suffer severe traumas. Ramirez, for instance, the suit says, "has grown fearful of going out in public, has been unable to work and has been unable to pursue her education." Defendants in the suit are Police Chief Daryl Gates, Sheriff Peter Pitchess and the City and County of Los Angeles. Timothy B. Flynn, a former Los Angeles County deputy district attor LAGUNA NIGUEL The sun provided the energy Saturday, the first day of summer, for about 15,000 supporters of solar and other alternative fuel sources, who gathered here in opposition to nuclear power.

The occasion was the Summer Solstice Festival to Stop San Onofre, the nuclear power plant just four miles south of here near San Clemente. The festival at Laguna Niguel Regional Park was organized by the Alliance for Survival, a group opposed to nuclear energy in any use "zero nuclear weapons, ban nuclear power, stop the arms race, meet human needs" is printed on Alliance stationery. Organizers said the festival launches a campaign to stop operations at the nuclear plant Capt. Rick Batson Times photo Gomez said that in the East Los Angeles Municipal Court, where he is assigned, he sees one, two or three cases of persons being brought in on wrong warrants every week. Sometimes, he said, there are as many as three in a day.

Rich Santwier, head of the Deputy Public Defenders at the traffic court in downtown Los Angeles until his recent transfer to Pasadena Municipal Court, said he saw a similar number of such cases "public humiliation" cases, he called them in the Los Angeles court Continued from First Page times in the last three years so often that he is unable to keep an exact count of the incidents. Courts have taken to issuing to victims letters they can show to officers explaining that they are not the persons wanted on particular warrants. Judges and lawyers say they have been complaining about the wrong arrests for years, to no avail. But police officials who run AWWS say it is a good and efficient system and that there are no plans to make major changes in its operation. When a wrong arrest or detention does occur, they say, it is usually the court's fault for not putting adequate identifying information on the warrant when it is sent to the police for filing in AWWS.

A class-action suit asking that alleged deficiencies in the handling of AWWS be corrected was filed in Superior Court May 29 by the Center for Law in the Public Interest The suit, based on the experiences of Ramirez and four other persons, asks for a "centralized means for consolidating all warrants thus allowing all warrants to be cleared simultaneously and within a reasonable period of time after the detained person enters Sheriffs Department custody." It also seeks for each of the five plaintiffs $10,000 for each day spent in jail, up to $15,000 in special damages and $100,000 punitive damages, along with expunging of the records of their wrong arrests and jailings I.