Westside Current: As Mark Ridley-Thomas’ Fights for His Freedom, L.A. Remains Deeply Divided
More than 18 months after the veteran politician’s conviction, a key Appeals Court hearing takes place
You could have been forgiven last Thursday morning for mistaking the scene inside the Pasadena branch of California’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for a Hollywood nightclub at closing time. Just as security guards try to move patrons out the door so that the staff can start cleaning and shutting the place down, a cadre of bailiffs were kindly but sternly ushering people out of a packed hallway.
The hall was soon cleared, but the crowd was hardly done. One of the region’s most curious receiving lines had formed—Mark Ridley-Thomas, the three-decade politician who in March 2023 was convicted of seven federal counts of bribery and honest services fraud, was greeting a stream of supporters with handshakes, shoulder claps and hugs.
It was the latest, and perhaps the last display reflecting one of the most significant divides in modern Los Angeles. It was also a crossroads moment, the point where either Ridley-Thomas’ appeal succeeds, and the guilty verdict is overturned or a new trial ordered, or he loses and begins serving a 42-month prison sentence.
The gulf of perception is vast. One portion of the citizenry considers Ridley-Thomas just another politician who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Indeed, prosecutors convinced a largely young jury that, while a member of the County Board of Supervisors, he conspired with then-USC School of Social Work Dean Marilyn Flynn on a scheme to grant his son, former Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, graduate school admission, a scholarship and a teaching gig. In return, they argued, the supervisor would direct county contracts to Flynn’s fiscally troubled school. Key to the proceedings was $100,000 that moved from a Ridley-Thomas campaign account through USC and then on to a nonprofit that Sebastian Ridley-Thomas was starting. (Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of bribery and was sentenced to three years probation).
Another sector of Los Angeles continues to angrily question why the power and ample resources of the federal government were leveled on a Black elected official, with a long record of representing under-resourced neighborhoods, for events in which no one with the Ridley-Thomas surname made even a penny (the $100,000 was to pay a staffer at the nonprofit). The pol’s backers remain agog that the conviction stemmed from him voting in favor of extending a telehealth contract with USC—precisely the kind of community-benefitting work he had done throughout his career (at his trial he was acquitted of 12 of 19 counts).
U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer handed down the sentence in August 2023. Ridley-Thomas, who had won election to the City Council in 2020, had been formally stripped of that job after the conviction. Fischer allowed him to remain free while the case was being appealed.
All of which led to Thursday morning in the stately Pasadena edifice. I arrived at 8:30, an hour before start time, and found one of the last free seats in the courtroom. By the time the proceedings started, so many supporters had arrived that they had to watch the arguments in not one, but two overflow rooms.
If you want to know the prospects of the appeal after about 45 minutes of arguments by Ridley-Thomas attorney Alyssa Bell, and Lindsey Greer Dotson, the powerhouse Assistant U.S. Attorney who led the 2023 prosecution, then you need either a crystal ball, or an Elon Musk-type tool that allows you to penetrate the minds of the three judges who sat at the raised bench. The proceedings were dizzying.
Many people know or think they know what happens in a traditional courtroom, depending on if they have been in one or watched a TV procedural like “All Rise” or “The Good Wife.” But comparing a standard criminal trial to what transpires in a Ninth Circuit Appeals hearing is less apples and oranges, and more like looking at apples and orange chainsaws being juggled by three black-robed justices who would prefer you waste not even a nanosecond of their time.
Bell started off by saying, “at the heart of this case is an unprecedented bribery theory,” and would return again to the theme that there was no material enrichment. Dotson would seek to define the “thing of value” not specifically as the money, but rather the act of moving it through Flynn and on to Sebastian Ridley-Thomas.
Yet it seemed that neither attorney could get through more than 30 seconds without judges Johnnie Rawlinson, Morgan Christen or Anthony Johnstone—all appointed by Democratic presidents—interrupting with a pointed question or three. Queries would lead to references to precedent cases that made sense to the attorneys but baffled most of those in the gallery. There was a lot of talk about Flynn, about the $100,000, about optics and about jury instructions, but by the end it seemed that Bell and Dotson were delivering highlights, with the ultimate ruling to hang more heavily on documents and arguments previously filed by the legal teams.
About the Ridley-Thomas legal team: If you watched closely, then after the hearing you saw numerous courthouse staffers eagerly greet an attorney named Paul Watford. He seemed genuinely pleased at each interaction, grinning wide.
His presence is important, because before joining the L.A. branch of the law firm Wilson Sonsini in 2023, Watford spent 11 years as a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where, according to his website, he ruled on more than 2,000 appeals (he was also on the shortlist for a Supreme Court appointment during the Barack Obama administration). Bell did the talking before the judges, but if there’s such a thing as a ringer in the Appellate Court world, or at least someone with an idea of what the judges will unleash, it’s Watford.
This hardly guarantees a favorable outcome for Ridley-Thomas. The U.S. Department of Justice wins almost all of its cases, and people convicted of federal crimes rarely have a verdict overturned.
Is it possible that the army that showed up to support Ridley-Thomas has even a subtle impact on how the Appeals Court rules? That’s unlikely. Rawlinson, Christen and Johnstone will consider the case, the whole case and nothing but the case. Their ruling will likely take months.
Just don’t think that the showing of support on a Thursday morning in November is unimportant, because it points to the uniqueness of this case, and to the role that Ridley-Thomas has played in Los Angeles since the 1980s. This is completely unlike that of other politicians who wound up in the soup.
Many times in the past few months I’ve had discussions with people who follow this stuff, and we try to name a politician besides Ridley-Thomas who would engender this kind of community support, with the crowds showing up time and again, more than three years after the original indictment.
No one has yet come up with another name.