Shoshana Walter/The Bay Citizen

Gang injunction defendants gather in the courtroom after Feb. 23 hearing

In a crowded courtroom this week in Oakland, about half an hour into a hearing, a group of plainclothes officers walked over to a young man scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad and placed him in handcuffs.

That man was Javier Quintero, the star defendant in the Fruitvale gang injunction case. The men were parole officers who claimed Quintero had recently violated his parole by riding in a car with alleged gang members last Friday.

It was the latest dramatic twist in the drawn-out battle over a controversial proposed gang injunction in Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood that would be the city's second such order. The injunction would impose restrictions, including a 10 p.m. curfew, on alleged members of the Norteño gang within a 450-block "safety zone" in Fruitvale.

The hearing, now in its seventh week stretched over the course of three months, has seen defense lawyers trading allegations of dubious tactics with City Attorney John Russo, who filed the injunction. The courtroom arrest served to inflame that already-tense relationship.

Defense attorney Yolanda Huang called the arrest "humiliating" and "excessive," and said the city should have warned defense lawyers about what would occur, or at least help arrange a surrender. Russo said he did not know what was going to happen and had nothing to do with the decision to arrest Quintero.

The city’s attorneys, from the firm Meyers Nave, were notified of the impending arrest about 10 minutes before it occurred, Huang said. But she alleged they did not notify the defense because they thought the arrest, in the middle of court proceedings, would prove a point.

“They wanted to discredit him. They knew it was going to happen. For 10 minutes, prosecutors sat there and didn’t inform us,” Huang said, adding that parole agents could have called attorneys to arrange a surrender, or located him at any time by using a GPS device.

“They chose to arrest him in court," she said.

Russo's office denied any involvement in the arrest.

“That’s categorically false,” said Alex Katz, spokesman for the city attorney’s office. “I guarantee you, we didn’t know about it, John didn’t know about it. The bottom line is this is something parole decided to do without informing us or the defense.”

Quintero, who has testified he is not a gang member, has a nonviolent criminal record and gang-specific parole restrictions.

According to authorities, the arrest stemmed from a police stop Friday on Harrington Avenue, about a block from Quintero’s house.