Mendocino County Sheriff blames the bench for Benjamin Miller’s release

MENDOCINO CO., 8/21/26 — It took the Mendo-Lake Regional SWAT Team to bring in Benjamin Miller the first time. A deputy had tried to contact him near Redwood Valley on the last day of July, and he fled in an SUV, according to Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office releases. Miller was wanted in several burglary investigations and on a misdemeanor warrant for destroying evidence

At about 4 a.m. the next morning, the SWAT team served a search warrant at a home on East San Francisco Avenue in Willits, and after a brief standoff Miller, 48, was in custody. Deputies said they found multiple firearms and ammunition that prior convictions barred him from having. Bail was set at $37,500.

Six days later, a judge released him on his own recognizance — no bail money required — with orders not to possess guns or ammunition and to obey all laws. Ten days after that, at 3:12 a.m. on Aug. 17, multiple callers reported Miller trying to get into a Laytonville home where a restraining order barred him from being, carrying a .22-caliber rifle, the sheriff’s office said. He went inside, armed, but left before deputies arrived.

The second arrest didn’t take a SWAT team. Deputies and citizen tips tracked Miller down around Laytonville Tuesday evening, when deputies found him lying in a wooded area near a creek south of Lucas Lane, a loaded .22 within reach, and arrested him after what the office called a brief struggle. Now he is held without bail.

Sheriff Matt Kendall has been dealing with Miller for 27 years, he said in an interview Wednesday. “We’ve got two kinds of criminals out there,” he said. “You get the guys that do life, and you’ve got guys that do life on the installment plan. And he’s definitely been working over the installment plan.”

David Eyster’s office opposed releasing Miller

How did a man arrested by a SWAT team walk out of jail six days later? The sheriff and the district attorney agree on what happened in a Mendocino County courtroom on Aug. 7: the prosecution asked a judge to keep Miller in jail, and the judge released him without bail instead. They disagree about whose fault that is.

“The DA did not cut him loose,” Kendall said. “The DA argued to keep him in.”

Eyster, in an interview Thursday, backed him up on that point. Asked whether his office clearly opposed the release, he said: “Yeah, I can confirm that.”

Kendall said the county probation department, which assesses everyone booked into the jail, had rated Miller “a level three, likely to offend, and a dangerous offender.” He said he telephoned the presiding judge, Carly Dolan, after the release. “If you guys are going to make releases that [cause] public safety issues, including putting my deputies at risk to go out and grab this guy again and again and again, then we’re going to lock horns,” he said he told Dolan.

Her answer, as Kendall recalled it: “We’re up against some bad case law.”

Eyster agrees that the case law is the whole story. “It’s not pressure on the judges,” he said. “It’s that the California Supreme Court has issued opinions.”

He named two. In re Humphrey, decided in 2021, holds that a court can’t jail someone before trial solely because they can’t afford bail. In re Kowalczyk, decided unanimously April 30 — 14 weeks before Miller’s release — holds that a judge may refuse bail in a noncapital case only in the narrow situations the state Constitution lists: a felony involving violence or sexual assault, with a substantial likelihood of great bodily harm, or a felony where the defendant has threatened someone with great bodily harm and is likely to carry out the threat. A judge may not set bail at a number a defendant can’t pay as a workaround. Where the Constitution doesn’t allow detention, what remains is release on conditions.

In Miller’s case, he could not afford the bail set, thus the two named cases required the judge to release him with no bail but the conditions mentioned above — obey all laws, no possession of guns or ammunition.

“The judges are under great pressure by the Supreme Court, their head boss, that whenever possible, unless it’s a huge public safety — and public safety is very limited in its definition — they’re supposed to try and release them,” Eyster said. Asked whether Miller’s release was that circumstance exactly, he said: “Absolutely.”

Reading from his office’s files, Eyster described the case Miller was released on as charging second-degree burglary, theft of a firearm, felon-in-possession counts and an attempted first-degree burglary — a longer list than the four counts on the sheriff’s office booking log.

Miller also has a prior strike conviction, Eyster said. “All those charges right there, under the Humphrey or the Kowalczyk analysis, are not considered public safety issues,” Eyster said. “Now, I beg to differ with that, but the judges have to decide how to comply with the Supreme Court, and it is a problem for all of us.”

“I don’t think you can lay this at the feet of the local judges,” he continued “I think the local judges are trying to navigate a sticky wicket that has been imposed on all judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys in the state by the Supreme Court.”

Eyster wasn’t in court for the Aug. 7 hearing and referred questions about what was argued there to Luke Oakley, the deputy district attorney on the case. Oakley is now reviewing five cases involving Miller, Eyster said — the earliest from July, the others from Aug. 13, 15, 17 and 18. At some point, he said, his office will argue that Miller “cannot follow non-monetary terms of release, and that’s been proven by where we are.”

R. Justin Petersen, a Ukiah criminal defense lawyer with no involvement in Miller’s cases, sided with the district attorney on where the decision came from. “The judge doesn’t invent the law,” Petersen said in an interview Thursday evening. 

Petersen said the bail rulings are one piece of a state effort, running five or 10 years by his estimate, to shrink jail and prison populations and what they cost taxpayers — “a work in progress,” and a one-size-fits-all system because it has to be. “There’s going to be outlier situations that everybody’s going to look at and say, well, this really doesn’t work,” he said. “People are going to be really unsatisfied with how it worked in that one individual case — like, apparently, this Miller case. But that’s just the reality of living in a world where you have one law that has to apply to everyone.”

“People are going to be really unsatisfied with how it worked in that one individual case — like, apparently, this Miller case. But that’s just the reality of living in a world where you have one law that has to apply to everyone.”

R. Justin Petersen, Ukiah criminal defense lawyer

There was a bail number in Miller’s case once — the $37,500 set after the first arrest — until the Aug. 7 release replaced it with no bail at all. Petersen said posting it wouldn’t have changed anything. “Let’s just say he posted bail. Wouldn’t it still be the same?” Petersen said. “We would have gotten some bail money that would have lined the bail bondsman’s pockets, but he could still be out and could have still gotten the same gun.” The only difference, he said, would be whether a bondsman made money. He said he would do away with cash bail altogether: “I don’t think it makes anyone safer to have a cash bail system.”

The morning Miller entered the Laytonville home, two warrants for his arrest were entered after he missed a court date on an earlier case, the sheriff’s office said. Among the 12 counts he was booked on Tuesday night is committing a felony while released on his own recognizance — the enhancement that exists for exactly this sort of situation.

Kendall said there was no cooperation agreement or informant arrangement behind the release. Nor was the jail full: on Sunday, Aug. 16, he said, it held 199 people, about two-thirds of capacity. “We do not have an overcrowding problem,” he said.

The judges themselves aren’t likely to weigh in. “They won’t talk,” Eyster said.

Kendall wants the judges to take the heat. “Sometimes you got to dig your heels in and say, you know what, take me to task on it, because I’m doing the right thing for the public,” he said.

Eyster wants Sacramento to act. “I think what’s going to have to happen here is the legislature is going to have to step in and fix some of these things,” he said. Petersen expects the fine-tuning to come from the legislature and the courts both, the way it has with mental health diversion. “Is it perfect? No, and it’s not going to be perfect,” he said. “But I think as time goes on, it’ll be better.”

Miller, meanwhile, is back in the jail Kendall runs — brought there, this time, not by a SWAT team but by a citizen’s tip and the deputies who followed it.

Correction: The original story incorrectly called Miller by a different name in the fourth paragraph, referring him to Williams. The story has been corrected.