An Unfair Case Dismissal and a Tough Journalistic Decision; Flu Season Is Officially Over–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: April 29, 2024

Indy Digest: April 29, 2024

A news story we published today led to one of the more troubling journalistic moral dilemmas I’ve faced in quite some time.

Kevin Fitzgerald chronicled the saga of Amanda Sanders, who was 16 in 2018, when, she says, a neighbor of hers in Palm Desert began exposing himself in front of her.

“We were coming back home, around 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.; I was a sophomore in high school,” Sanders said. “We were walking back, and we see that his blinds are open vertically, so you can see somebody’s right there … and we just see him masturbating. I can see his arm moving. Basically, I started freaking out. I started just going off.”

After at least one more incident with the man, Sanders decided to go to law enforcement. The neighbor was charged with several misdemeanor counts of indecent exposure, and the case then went into the Riverside County Superior Court system.

I won’t go into all of the details here—you can find those in the story, which you really should read—but after 5 1/2 years and dozens of continuances, the case was dismissed in March. The reason? There was not a courtroom available for a trial. The charges against the man were dropped, and can’t be refiled barring some appeals-court action that almost certainly never come to be.

As for that moral dilemma: After a lot of back and forth, we made the difficult decision not to name the defendant.

In our story, Sanders expresses concern about what else this man could do. “It scares me that he’s out (there),” Sanders said, “and he could do this to somebody else … and it just continues. He feels so comfortable doing it.”

I share Sanders’ concern. However, the man in question has no local priors, at least that we could find. Our country’s criminal system is built, at least technically, on a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and because he will not be found guilty for the alleged crimes covered in our story, and is no longer even charged with a crime, it didn’t seem right to name him.

I am pretty sure we made the right decision. But I am still bothered by it.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• The wave pool at the Palm Springs Surf Club is again on the fritz. Surfing-news website The Inertia reported last Thursday: “At the beginning of this month, the PSSC was able to get the pool working again, just in time for a Coachella event, but it appears the beast of technical difficulties has reared its head once more. The first rumblings of an issue were heard yesterday, when several Reddit users reported their sessions had been canceled. One particularly unlucky commenter wrote that they found out the wave was closed only after they had already made it to the PSSC parking lot for a 9 a.m. Tuesday slot. ‘First, we want to apologize to the people who wanted to come out and surf,’ read the press release emailed to the PSSC mailing list. ‘… Please know we are trying our hardest to bring the magic of surfing to the desert of Palm Springs.’”

• ProPublica shines a light on the pressure health-insurance company Cigna puts on doctors who are reviewing cases to work fast: “‘Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,’ said (Dr. Debby) Day, who worked for Cigna until the late spring of 2022. ‘If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.’ … During (Dr. Debby) Day’s final years at Cigna, the company meticulously tracked the output of its medical directors on a monthly dashboard. Cigna shared this spreadsheet with more than 70 of its doctors, allowing them to compare their tally of cases with those of their peers. Day and two other former medical directors said the dashboard sent a message loud and clear: Cigna valued speed. … The early 2022 dashboards listed a handle time of four minutes for a prior authorization. The bulk of drug requests were to be decided in two to five minutes. Hospital discharge decisions were supposed to take four and a half minutes.”

• Hooray! Flu season is officially over … but that does not mean there are no more flu cases. The Associated Press says: “The U.S. flu season appears to be over. It was long, but it wasn’t unusually severe. Last week, for the third straight week, medical visits for flu-like illnesses dipped below the threshold for what’s counted as an active flu season, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. Other indicators, like hospitalizations and patient testing, also show low and declining activity. No state is reporting a high amount of flu activity. Only New England is seeing the kind of patient traffic associated with an active flu season right now, but even there flu impact is considered modest. Since the beginning of October, there have been at least 34 million illnesses, 380,000 hospitalizations and 24,000 deaths from flu, according to CDC estimates. The agency said 148 children have died of flu.”

• Very tangentially related: Time magazine reports that scientists are exploring the possibility that over-the-counter antibiotic ointments like Neosporin could, if used properly, help decrease COVID-19 cases: “The study builds upon some of (Yale immunologist Akiko) Iwasaki’s prior research—which has shown that similar antibiotics can trigger potentially protective immune changes in the body—but it’s still preliminary, she cautions. For the new study, her team had 12 people apply Neosporin inside their nostrils twice a day for a week, while another seven people used Vaseline for comparison. … They found that Neosporin—and specifically one of its active ingredients, the antibiotic neomycin sulfate—seems to stimulate receptors in the nose that ‘are fooled into thinking there’s a viral infection’ and in turn create ‘a barrier that’s put up against any virus,’ Iwasaki explains.“

• Protests against the war in Israel and Gaza continue at college campuses across the nation—and things at USC remain messy following the cancellation of the main commencement ceremonies. The Los Angeles Times says: “When USC President Carol Folt called off the 65,000-attendee ‘main stage’ commencement amid pro-Palestinian protests and anger over the cancellation of pro-Palestinian student Asna Tabassum’s speaking slot, USC promised that more than two dozen satellite graduation ceremonies for individual colleges would continue as planned. But on Sunday, two high-profile speakers scheduled to address graduates of the USC Rossier School of Education said they were dropping out in dismay at the university’s actions, including calling in the Los Angeles Police Department to arrest 93 pro-Palestinian protesters—many of them undergraduate students—last week. ‘To speak at USC in this moment would betray not only our own values, but USC’s too,’ novelist C Pam Zhang and UCLA professor and author Safiya U. Noble wrote to Folt, Provost Andrew T. Guzman and university leaders. ‘We are withdrawing as commencement speakers.’”

• Could Southwest Airlines change its long-standing open-seating policy? The Washington Post reports on the very real possibility: “A puzzle to some and an invigorating challenge to others, Southwest’s unique boarding process and one-class cabin are now under the microscope as the airline looks for ways to prop up its financial performance. In a call with investors Thursday, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said executives are ‘very seriously studying’ seating and the way passengers board the planes. ‘It’s been several years since we last studied this in-depth, and customer preference and expectations change over time,’ Jordan said. ‘We are also studying the operations and financial benefits of any potential change.’ … The current open-seating system was put in place when airliners were generally less full, the company said, noting that preferences change as planes fill up.”

• And finally … SFGate published a surprisingly revealing piece over the weekend about “tourons”—tourists, especially visitors to national parks who act like morons. It’s worth a read, and there’s a definite local angle, thanks to Joshua Tree National Park. A snippet: “Bad visitor behavior, even with the best of intentions, can ‘frustrate and scare the heck out of park employees,’ (retired park ranger Griff) Griffith said, particularly because it’s the rangers’ responsibility to prevent these incidents from occurring. The issue is more of an ignorance problem than an arrogance problem, he said. So unless rangers can reach visitors and educate them about how to behave and remain safe in parks, the problems will continue.” Don’t be tourons, folks!

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