California

San Quentin death row inmate dies

March 17, 2021

Another condemned inmate at San Quentin has died, according to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

64-year-old Johnny Mungia passed away at a hospital on Tuesday, March 16th.

This Aug. 24, 2018, photo released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shows Johnny Mungia, a 64-year-old death row inmate who died on March 16, 2021, at a hospital. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)

Mungia’s cause of death is under investigation, but foul play is not suspected.

An official cause of death is pending the results of an autopsy by the Marin County Coroner.

On April 7, 1997, Mungia was found guilty of the first-degree murder of 73-year-old Alma Franklin by a Riverside County jury and sentenced to death on April 14, 1997.

There are currently 705 people on California’s death row.

Sex offender found dead in suspected homicide at San Quentin State Prison

A 66-year-old inmate was found unresponsive in his cell at San Quentin State Prison early Wednesday, and state corrections officials said they are treating his death as a homicide.

John Sullivan had served half of his 10-year sentence from Placer County for failing to register as a sex offender, a second-strike.

John Sullivan is seen in this Oct. 8, 2019, photo released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

He was found during a head count shortly after midnight and pronounced dead less than 40 minutes later.

Officials said they suspect his 28-year-old cellmate in the death. He has not been charged, but was serving a seven-year sentence from Los Angeles County for first-degree burglary and injury to a dependent adult causing death or great bodily injury.

The Marin County coroner did not immediately provide a cause of death, and corrections officials wouldn’t give more details, citing the investigation.

The Associated Press found in a 2015 analysis that male sex offenders were being killed at a rate double their percentage in the prison population.

San Quentin, north of San Fransico, is California’s oldest prison. It houses the state’s death row, but also general population inmates.

Autopsy: California serial killer known as ‘I-5 Strangler’ was strangled himself in prison

March, 2021 A California serial killer who authorities say strangled and raped at least seven women was fatally choked himself in a state prison, officials said Wednesday.

Roger Reece Kibbe, 81, known as the “I-5 Strangler” in the 1970s and 1980s, was spotted unresponsive Sunday in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison southeast of Sacramento — his 40-year-old cellmate standing nearby.

This Aug. 1, 2013, photo provided by the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation shows inmate Roger Reece Kibbe.

An autopsy showed Kibbe had been manually strangled, the Amador County Sheriff’s Office said, calling the death a homicide.

No charges have been filed in the death of Kibbe, a former suburban Sacramento furniture maker whose brother was a law enforcement officer.

He was initially convicted in 1991 of strangling Darcine Frackenpohl, a 17-year-old who had run away from her home in Seattle. Her nearly nude body was found west of South Lake Tahoe below Echo Summit in September 1987.

Investigators said then that they suspected him in other similar slayings.

But it wasn’t until 2009 that a San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office investigator used new developments in evidence to connect him to six additional slayings in multiple Northern California counties, with several victims found alongside Interstate 5 or other highways in 1986. Kibbe was serving multiple life terms for the slayings when he was killed.

Authorities said they never stopped trying to prove that he was responsible for even more deaths. Investigators secretly took him on multiple field trips from prison with the hope that he would reveal the whereabouts of more victims.

They would buy him an egg McMuffin and a Coke for breakfast, another Coke and a hamburger and fries for lunch, Vito Bertocchini, a retired San Joaquin County sheriff’s detective and district attorney’s investigator, told The Sacramento Bee.

Bertocchini spent nearly two decades pursuing Kibbe and thinks he must have killed others during the 10-year gap between his first and last known slayings. Investigators have said they found other women who had been killed and dumped with Kibbe’s trademark of cutting his victims’ clothing in odd patterns.

He was finally captured after Sacramento police said a would-be victim escaped and they recovered a garrote made from a pair of dowels and parachute cord along with scissors and other items.

Investigators said they matched the cord to rope found with Frackenpohl’s body and at Kibbe’s house, all with microscopic dots of red paint. DNA eventually linked him to two other victims, and he agreed to cooperate in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table.

Kibbe never admitted to other killings beyond those with which he was charged, but Bertocchini said he never stopped trying to elicit another confession.

Even after he retired in 2012, each year he sent Kibbe birthday and Christmas cards, asking him to speak up if he recalled anything about other victims. He and his old partner last visited Kibbe in prison in 2019, but still he wouldn’t admit to any more victims.

Now it’s too late, but Bertocchini called Kibbe’s death by strangulation “some fitting justice.”

“I don’t wish ill on anyone,” Bertocchini said. “But I hope he remembered every one of his victims while he was being killed.”

How evidence once thought destroyed helped free a man after 39 years behind bars for murder he didn’t commit

Decades into a life prison sentence without the possibility of parole, Craig Coley continued to insist he was innocent.

The former restaurant night manager had fought unsuccessfully for years to overturn a conviction for a grisly double murder that had shocked Simi Valley in 1978.

But when police recently reopened the case, they faced a daunting obstacle. After Coley lost his final appeal years ago, a judge had issued an order permitting the destruction of the crime scene evidence.

A cold-case detective began what some expected to be a fruitless search. He tried to contact the two laboratories that had performed rudimentary tests on the crime scene evidence in the 1970s and found that both had gone out of business. A Northern California lab had acquired their contents.

That’s when the detective discovered that the evidence boxes had not been destroyed but were sitting forgotten, intact and in storage.

New tests found that a key piece of evidence used to convict Coley did not carry any of his DNA, investigators said.

“We had thought it was destroyed,” Michael Schwartz, Ventura County special assistant district attorney, said in an interview Thursday. “Whether we’d reached the same conclusion without that, I don’t know.”

Gov. Jerry Brown pardoned Coley on Wednesday, writing that the DNA evidence and a painstaking re-investigation of the case proved his innocence.

Coley was 31 when he was arrested, and 70 when he was released Wednesday. A former Simi Valley police officer who was convinced of Coley’s innocence plans to help him “get acclimated to freedom” in San Diego, the officer wrote on a GoFundMe page.

It was a relative who came across the bodies of Rhonda Wicht and her son on Nov. 11, 1978. Suspicions had been raised when Wicht, 24, had not arrived for a family get-together.

Police said she had been beaten, raped and strangled with a macrame rope. Her 4-year-old son, Donald, had been smothered in his bed, presumably because he might have identified his mother’s killer.

Wicht had dated Coley for two years, but they were “in the process of breaking up,” officials said this week. Coley was held for questioning the same day.

He was ultimately charged with the two murders.

Defense attorneys criticized Simi Valley police for failing to investigate three other possible suspects, according to news accounts at the time. And the Simi Valley Mirror, a weekly tabloid, published reports asserting that investigators had focused on an innocent man.

At Coley’s first trial, jurors spent four weeks deliberating before announcing they were hopelessly deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of guilt.

A second jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder in 1980, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But last fall, Simi Valley Police Chief David Livingstone was going through old news clippings about his department and came across some from the Wicht murders. He reached out to a retired detective who had expressed concerns in the past about whether Coley was guilty. With his interest piqued, Livingstone decided to reopen the case.

Schwartz, the Ventura County prosecutor, said the recent investigation determined that the original detectives decided too quickly that Coley was their man and did not fully investigate other possible suspects — a phenomenon known in wrongful conviction cases as “tunnel vision.”

Three current and former police officers told Brown’s office that the detective at the time had “mishandled the investigation or framed Mr. Coley,” the pardon said. The district attorney’s office has not decided if the detective committed misconduct, Schwartz said, but the investigation is continuing.

“ ‘Framed’ is a strong word,” Schwartz said. “That implies that someone knowingly blamed the wrong person. I doubt that occurred.”

Still, the re-investigation of the case turned up several inconsistencies.

An upstairs neighbor had reported seeing Coley’s truck parked outside Wicht’s apartment around the time of the murder, and saw it drive away shortly afterward. The witness noted the driver’s medium-length hair and the pinstripes along the side of the truck, which matched the description of Coley’s.

That testimony was key to Coley’s conviction, The Times reported at the time.

Exactly 39 years later, on the anniversary of Wicht’s murder, Simi Valley police returned to the apartment complex in the early morning hours and stared out the same window.

“They could see very little,” Schwartz said. “They could see vehicles, but the idea that someone could identify markings on the side of a vehicle is very unlikely. They couldn’t see inside it at all.”

Another neighbor initially told police the murder had been committed at 4:30 a.m. At that same time, Coley was carpooling home with a coworker from his restaurant job, which Schwartz described as “an airtight alibi.”

The second neighbor later testified that the murder had taken place at 5:30 a.m. and denied saying he thought it had happened an hour earlier. Years later, he began to vacillate again.

“That was an indication that the timing may not have been as firm as we thought,” Schwartz said.

Coley was a model prisoner during his 38 years and 10 months of incarceration, Brown wrote. He avoided gangs and drugs, and earned his bachelor’s degree.

“I understand that he’s not bitter, that he has a positive attitude, which I think is quite remarkable,” Schwartz said. “This whole case is tragic. The murder was tragic, and this is a waste of a person’s life.”

An L.A. court mistakenly destroyed evidence a death row inmate says would free him. Now what?

December 17, 2017

From his small cell on California’s death row, Scott Pinholster swore he could prove his innocence. The proof, he said, was in the dried blood on a work boot and a pink towel recovered from his home years ago.

The condemned inmate insisted that modern DNA testing — nonexistent when he was convicted of a double murder in 1984 — would show the blood belonged to him, not the victims, as the prosecution argued at his trial.

But a recent search for the items has led to a disturbing discovery that could throw the case into jeopardy: The Los Angeles County courts mistakenly destroyed the evidence.

A judge must now determine what, if anything, should be done to remedy the high-stakes error.

Pinholster’s attorney has asked for a hearing on how the destruction happened and says he will eventually ask for a new trial. Prosecutors, however, argue that a killer’s life shouldn’t be spared simply because of an innocent mistake by court staff.

One of the jurors who voted to send Pinholster to death row more than three decades ago was shocked to hear that the man convicted of fatally stabbing and beating two men might get a second chance.

“Oh my God!” said the juror, who spoke on condition of anonymity, when recently contacted by The Times. “He’s liable to get off then?”

Pinholster is one of 744 people awaiting execution in California — the largest death row population in the country. Although the state hasn’t put anyone to death since 2006, that could soon change, as voters passed a measure last year to speed up the process. Of the state’s condemned inmates, about 20 have exhausted their appeals, putting them at the front of the line. Among them is Pinholster.

California law requires that courts keep evidence until after a death row inmate is executed or dies behind bars — a safeguard put in place to preserve evidence for future testing. Mary Hearn, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Superior Court, said the court’s procedure for destroying evidence, which was updated last year, now requires that staff first contact California’s Supreme Court to confirm a death row inmate has died. The court, Hearn said, began a review of its procedure before learning of Pinholster’s case.

Hearn said Pinholster, 58, is the only known example of evidence destruction in a case of a living death row inmate convicted in L.A. County. But a small number of cases around the country have raised similar legal problems.

On the eve of an execution in 2005, Virginia’s governor reduced a condemned death row inmate’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole after learning that a court clerk had destroyed evidence in his murder case despite being warned by subordinates not to do so. Two years later, a man on death row in Oklahoma was released from prison after a judge ruled that a police lab analyst had intentionally destroyed hair evidence that could have pointed to the inmate’s innocence.

Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor who directs the school’s clinic that defends condemned inmates facing execution, said destruction of physical evidence cripples the ability to examine an inmate’s innocence claim.

“If the very evidence you need is gone … how do you make justice happen for these individuals?” she said, describing the scenario as “terribly, terribly devastating.”

The importance of such tests was highlighted last month when Gov. Jerry Brown pardoned a prisoner who spent 39 years behind bars for the 1978 killing of a young woman and her 4-year-old son in Simi Valley. After the prisoner, Craig Coley, exhausted his appeals years ago, a judge authorized the destruction of the crime-scene evidence. But a cold-case detective recently found the evidence and when tested, it helped clear Coley of the murders.

For Pinholster, prosecutors point to a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision that makes it difficult for prisoners to reverse convictions or reduce sentences unless they can show that evidence was destroyed in “bad faith.” In Pinholster’s case, prosecutors argue, the destruction was the result of “at most negligence, incompetency, recklessness,” but not “bad faith.”

At his trial, a prosecutor argued that the blood on the boot and towel found in the defendant’s Van Nuys apartment belonged to at least one of the two victims — Thomas Johnson, 25, and Robert Beckett, 29. The men were stabbed and beaten to death at the Tarzana home of a marijuana dealer on Jan. 9, 1982.

The state’s key witness, Art Corona, told police that he, Pinholster and a third man, Paul Brown, were all armed with buck knives when they barreled into the home looking to steal drugs and cash. Minutes later, Corona said, the two victims showed up. Pinholster attacked the men with a knife, his fists and his feet, Corona said, adding that Brown also stabbed one of the men.

Their loot: $23 and a quarter-ounce of pot.

Pinholster said he had stolen drugs from the home a few hours before the killings but never harmed anyone. When he took the stand, he seemed to revel in his criminal record. Asked for his occupation, he smirked and responded, “a crook,” according to court documents. He also boasted to jurors of having committed hundreds of robberies, but insisted he’d always carried guns, not knives.

A Sheriff’s Department criminalist told jurors that he’d tested the right work boot and towel collected from Pinholster’s home and found they came back positive for human blood, but technology at the time couldn’t narrow down whose blood it was. The prosecutor suggested that Pinholster had stepped in a pool of blood at the Tarzana home and used the towel to wipe off the murder weapon.

Neither Pinholster nor his attorney argued at trial that the blood was from him — an omission the district attorney’s office said undercuts his current claim. His new attorney said Pinholster was never asked during the trial who the blood belonged to.

Contacted recently, another juror who asked to be identified only as a 76-year-old woman said she was confident in the verdict.

“He was absolutely guilty,” she said. “No question.”

Even after three decades, she said, she can conjure a haunting memory of an image painted at trial by the prosecutor — Pinholster, wearing boots, kicking in the skull of one of the victims.

After his conviction, state courts rejected appeals from Pinholster, but a federal judge overturned the death sentence in 2003, ruling that his trial counsel had failed to tell jurors about the extent of Pinholster’s mental health problems. In 2011, however, the U.S. Supreme Court restored Pinholster’s death sentence.

“He’s been very discouraged,” said Sean Kennedy, Pinholster’s current lawyer.

But months after having his death penalty restored, the inmate got good news. A judge had finally approved his request to have DNA testing done on the towel and boot. Pinholster contends that the bloodstains came from his repeated intravenous use of heroin.

A Los Angeles police officer was assigned to scour an LAPD storage room for the items in case the court had returned them after the trial. The search came up empty, so officers checked inside another police storage facility. Still nothing. As the hunt stretched into a fourth year, Kennedy grew suspicious. Finally, a prosecutor stepped in to help speed up the process.

“And that,” Kennedy said, with a shake of his head, “is when they finally fessed up.”

Court documents from January 1998 show that People vs. Pinholster was mistakenly listed among more than a dozen cases deemed eligible for evidence destruction. The trial exhibits, records show, were destroyed that summer. Two top Los Angeles County Superior Court officials signed the destruction order — Judge John Reid and Ty Colgrove, an administrator who helped run the court’s criminal operations. Both men have since retired.

Reached for comment, Colgrove said he didn’t recall the case, as he’d signed hundreds of destruction orders over the years, but added that he relied on lower-level employees to properly sort through the cases.

Hearn, the court spokeswoman, said Reid could not comment, as he still sometimes fills in on the bench. In a recently signed declaration, Reid wrote that if he’d known the evidence from a capital case was going to be destroyed, he “would not have signed the order.”

Kennedy, an associate clinical professor at Loyola Law School whose work on Pinholster’s case carried over from his days as the federal public defender for the Central District of California, bristled at the rationale.

“It’s almost like the judiciary is facilitating wrongful executions,” he said.

Life on death row has worn on Pinholster. Last year, as California voters weighed two options — speeding up executions or banning the death penalty — Pinholster was quoted in a Times article, expressing apathy.

“After 30 years,” he said, “you don’t care one way or the other.”

But there’s still some hope for his exoneration, Kennedy said, pointing to trial exhibit 29 — a pair of bloodstained jeans also recovered from Pinholster’s home years ago. While court employees have said they presume the jeans are lost or destroyed, they haven’t found any documents showing they were, in fact, discarded.

Kennedy has asked for a special hearing so he can question the court officials who approved the destruction. A judge is expected to rule on that request early next year.

For Michael Kumar, the former marijuana dealer who lived at the home where the killings took place, the mention of Pinholster brings a rush of memories. Although he’d been out of town the weekend of the murders, the pain is still raw over the loss of Johnson, his best friend — a gentle giant who loved to play classical piano. When asked about the possibility of a new trial, Kumar sighed.

“It’s preposterous to me…. It’s completely a joke if this guy says he’s innocent,” said Kumar, 58, who now sells parts for and restores classic cars. “I’m not going to say he doesn’t have the right, because I’m not sure what the technicalities are, but it’s just that — a technicality.”

 

Wrongly Imprisoned for Killing His Infant Daughter, a Father Could Go Free This Week

December 5,2017

The science on shaken baby syndrome, it turns out, was not actually sound and should not have been used for putting this father behind bars.

This story was originally published by The Chronicle of Social Change, a nonprofit news publication that covers issues affecting vulnerable children, youth and their families, and has been republished here with permission.

There was no doubt about the horror of the situation: A 4-month-old baby girl was dead.

The question facing the jurors was less clear-cut: Was the tiny girl’s death accidental, or had she been murdered by her own father?

On the afternoon of Nov. 24, 2001, in Sacramento, California, 18-year-old Zavion Johnson had called an ambulance. His baby daughter Nadia had been sleepy all day and then had stopped breathing.

Responding paramedics gave her CPR, pushed a breathing tube down her throat, and rushed her to the hospital. There, doctors discovered Nadia had terrible internal head injuries, including a fractured skull. Suspecting abuse, they called the police.

ohnson would later tell his family that earlier that morning, he had accidentally dropped Nadia while showering with her. The girl had hit her head on the back of the cast-iron bathtub but had seemed to recover. Questioned by police, the frightened teenager at first didn’t say anything about the accident. That impulse backfired horribly on him.

Nadia died two days later. On the day of her funeral, Johnson was arrested and charged with her murder.

At trial, Johnson’s lawyer told the court about the fall in the shower, and more than a dozen people testified that he was a gentle and loving father who had never mistreated the baby.

None of the prosecution’s witnesses said anything to the contrary. Instead, the deputy district attorney held up Johnson’s inconsistent statements as evidence of his guilt. The clincher, however, was the testimony of three medical experts, who all declared that the nature and pattern of Nadia’s injuries could not have been caused by a short fall, but only by violent shaking.

“This is a classic case of shaken baby syndrome,” Deputy District Attorney Chris Cosca told the jury. “We know that this little girl lost her life because of a brutally violent shaking, the violent acceleration-deceleration, the rotational injury, and the impact against a hard surface. That’s the only way it can be explained. And there is no way on earth that she suffered these injuries by virtue of a simple drop in the tub. No way.”

Johnson was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life. Sixteen years later, he is still in prison.

But it turns out Cosca was wrong.

In the past year, two of the key medical witnesses who supported the shaken baby diagnosis at Johnson’s trial have disavowed their testimony, and the district attorney’s office now supports Johnson’s attempt to have his conviction overturned. On Dec. 8, Johnson and his legal team are hoping to learn whether he’ll now be able to go home.

There used to something close to a medical consensus that certain patterns of injuries can only be caused by shaking. In particular, a “triad”—swelling of the brain, bleeding on the brain’s surface, and bleeding behind the retinas—was believed to be solid proof that a baby had been abused in this way. The theory was put forward in the early 1970s by doctors trying to explain the deaths of infants and children with no outward signs of abuse. The diagnosis soon became accepted as scientific fact and has since been used to convict hundreds of people of harming or killing children.

But over the past 20 years, a body of new research has shown how diseases, genetic conditions and accidents—including short falls—can produce the same constellation of injuries. As a result, faith in shaken baby syndrome is unraveling.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in 2009 that doctors stop using the term. A 2015 investigation by the Washington Post found at least 16 shaken baby syndrome murder convictions that have been overturned.

Scores of other cases that collapsed before trial because of the doubts around the “triad” as evidence. One of those cases was another Sacramento County father convicted of killing his 4-month-old son.

Dr. Norman Guthkelch, a pediatric neurosurgeon who was one of the first to advance the hypothesis behind shaken baby syndrome, recently stated that it is “high time every case of a parent in [prison] for this had his or her case reviewed” because “we went badly off the rails … on this matter.”

“Our decision … was not a difficult one,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Grippi wrote in an email. “Had the information currently available on the topic been available then, there is a reasonable probability that the outcome of the trial could have been different.”

That doesn’t mean Johnson goes free automatically; the DA could still ask for a retrial, though that seems unlikely. Johnson is now awaiting a judge’s order to let him go. After spending nearly half his life behind bars, he is hoping to be back with his family in time for Christmas.

There is no definitive accounting of how many people are prosecuted and incarcerated on the basis of this questionable science, but the number is certainly substantial.

A database maintained by the Northwestern University’s Medill Justice Project, last updated in 2015, includes more than 3,000 shaken baby syndrome criminal cases in the United States over the past 20 years, though not all of them are still current. The Washington Post’s investigation estimated hundreds of parents and caregivers were being prosecuted each year, and tallied 1,600 convictions since 2001. At least three such convictions have landed people on death row, according to a recent New Scientist article.

The Innocence Project, a national network of advocates for prisoners who are wrongfully convicted, is reviewing about 100 cases involving shaken baby syndrome.

Some medical experts still support the use of the diagnosis, now more commonly called “abusive head trauma,” as at least one form of evidence that can help determine whether a child’s death was accidental or the result of violence. Nobody disputes that violently shaking a baby can injure or kill; the tricky part is figuring out whether that actually happened. And once someone has been convicted of lethal child abuse, convincing a court to undertake that task again is not easy.

The collateral damage for mistaking an accident for maltreatment can extend beyond a jail term. Parents accused of contributing to a child’s death can face the removal of all children from the home.

A 2010 study published in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect notes that “little data are available about what happens to these siblings after the victim’s death.” Using records from Oklahoma’s child fatality review, the study concluded that the presence of young siblings, previous maltreatment reports and the nature of the fatal incident were predictors of removal after a death.

In an essay published in the in the American Academy of Pediatrics News, two physicians argued that the recent controversy over shaken baby syndrome should not take away from correctly diagnosing cases of child abuse.

“Like the back-and-forth over childhood immunizations, this is a false debate,” Howard Dubowitz and Errol Alden wrote in the 2015 piece. “The truth is that child abuse, including abusive head trauma, is a real problem that terribly injures and sometimes kills children.”

From his cell in a state prison in central California, Johnson struggled for years to get judges to take another look at his case, filing appeal after appeal, to no effect. Finally, in 2014, he got in touch with the Northern California Innocence Project, where attorney Paige Kaneb took the case.

“I’d been on another shaken baby case, so I’m a bit obsessed with the issue,” she said.

Over the next couple of years, she gathered materials and got in touch with the experts whose testimony had sent Johnson to prison. In early 2017, two of them came declared they could no longer stand behind that testimony.

“I was following my training and experience, in conjunction with the consensus opinions at the time, in classifying Nadia’s death as having resulted from abuse,” wrote Dr. Gregory Reiber, the forensic pathologist who performed Nadia’s autopsy, in a letter to the court. “However … because of the significant changes in the understanding of childhood head injury that have developed since trial, my opinion about the cause of Nadia’s injuries has also changed.”

Nadia’s injuries, he now concluded, “are consistent with the accidental fall in the bathtub described by Zavion Johnson.”

University of California–Davis neuropathologist Claudia Greco also walked back her testimony, writing that the damage she focused on “does not prove that Nadia Johnson was violently shaken or that her injuries were intentionally inflicted.” A third expert who didn’t testify at trial but reviewed the case later also stated that Nadia’s injuries could have been caused by the fall Johnson described.

Kaneb and her colleagues filed a petition to have his conviction struck down. On Oct. 31, the district attorney’s office threw their support behind it.

Johnson is still in occasional touch with Nadia’s mother, but she now has two other kids and a fiancée, Johnson told me via a letter from prison. He’s gotten training as an electrician while locked up and wants to do community advocacy when he gets out.

“I’m excited and nervous, but scared of failing,” Johnson writes. “All the people that have helped me, I don’t want to disappoint anyone.”

He still thinks often about Nadia, whose picture he has tattooed on his chest.

“I can’t wait to visit her grave,” he writes. “I haven’t been able to do that yet.”

After 22 years, Ernesto Martinez convicted of Blythe murder during deadly road trip

December 4, 2017

Twenty two years ago, a desperate man stepped into the Day & Nite Mini Mart in Blythe, pulled a gun, demanded money and shot the clerk behind the counter. Then he grabbed the cash and fled.

That killer, a jury said, was Ernesto Salgado Martinez.

Martinez, 42, was convicted Monday of murdering Randip Singh, a shopkeeper who was gunned down during a deadly road trip to Arizona and back in 1995. The verdict, which took three-and-a-half days to reach, brings closure to one of the longest and most convoluted prosecutions in the recent history of Riverside County. Martinez’s verdict was confirmed by John Hall, a spokesman for the District Attorney’s Office.

Martinez, who was only 19 at the time, drove from Indio to Arizona to visit his family members, then was pulled over by a highway patrol officer along the Beeline Highway. Martinez shot that officer, Bob Martin, then fled back to California, where he crossed the state line and ran out of gas in Blythe. Prosecutors say Martinez then robbed the mini-mart, shooting Singh when he refused to empty the register.

During closing arguments last week, Deputy District Attorney Chris Cook said there was “overwhelming” evidence that Martinez was fleeing from one murder and killed again to keep running.

“The thing standing between him and getting home to Indio – a place of safety, family and familiarity – was Randip,” Cook said. “He was out of options and out of gas. He had just killed a police officer, he had to get home.”

“And he had a gun.”

Martinez, who taught himself law during two decades behind bars, acted as his own attorney during a six-week trial. In his own closing arguments, he accused witnesses of changing their stories and implied that a key piece of the evidence – a bullet casing – had been planted. He told jurors the prosecution’s case had “insulted their intelligence.”

“They are not asking you to decide this case based on the evidence. They are asking you to decide this case based on prejudice,” Martinez said.Martinez was also on trial for attempted murder, accused of stabbing his cell mate, Leroy Gutierrez, 50 times in 2011. Martinez argued that the stabbing was self defense, and jury acquitted him of the attempted murder charge on Monday.

The murder case will now proceed to the sentencing phase, at which prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty. However, regardless of how Martinez is sentenced, once the decision is made he will be returned to Arizona, where he has already received the death penalty for killing Martin, the highway patrol officer. Even if Martinez is sentenced to death in California, Arizona will still get to kill him first.

After the Blythe shooting, police captured Martinez during a standoff in Indio. Martinez was prosecuted in Arizona first, where he was convicted of killing Martin in 1998. Twelve years later, in 2010, local prosecutors had Martinez pulled off of Arizona Death Row and brought to Riverside County to be tried for Singh’s death. Now back in California, Martinez fired his public defender and became his own attorney. His case then took seven years to get to trial, in part because of Martinez’s talent for filing and arguing pre-trial motions.

“He is incredibly dangerous because he is so bright,” District Attorney Mike Hestrin said of Martinez in 2015. “I would like to get him out of our system and out of our jail. And one of the ways to do that is to get this case to trial as quickly as possible.”

Thanksgiving on Death Row

                                                            “Free Me,” a painting by Kevin Cooper. (Kevin Cooper)

Kevin Cooper was convicted of a 1983 quadruple murder in a trial in which evidence that might have exonerated him was withheld from the defense. His case was scrutinized in a June 19 New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. Visit savekevincooper.org for more information.

DEATH ROW, SAN QUENTIN, Calif.—As I sit here in a 4½-by-11-foot cage on Thanksgiving Day, I first and foremost am thankful to be alive. On Feb. 10, 2004, I came within 3 hours and 42 minutes of being strapped down to a gurney, tortured with lethal poison and murdered by volunteer prison-guard executioners. So, yes, I am very thankful to be alive. I am also very thankful for all the people—my legal team, friends, family, supporters and activists working to end the death penalty—who have helped make my being alive possible.

I have been in a cage like this, with two feet of space between the side of the bed and the wall, for most of my adult life, for murders I did not commit. I eat prison slop for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the guards look up my butt at least once a day to make sure I don’t have contraband when I leave this cage.

I have been on death row in the state of California for more than 32 years, having come to this place in May 1985, and I have been fighting for my life ever since. This modern-day plantation in which I am forced to live is a very dirty and inhumane place for any human being.

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After my stay of execution in 2004, I went on to suffer from post-traumatic stress for years due to that sick ritual of death this prison put me through. No human being should ever have to endure what I have, not even if they are guilty of the crime they were convicted of committing.

I am innocent, and my fate now lies in the hands of Gov. Jerry Brown. On Feb. 17, 2016, Norman Hile, my pro bono attorney from the prestigious law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, filed my petition for clemency in the office of Gov. Brown. I have respectfully asked the governor and others to look at my case with an open mind, outside the legal box that has me close to being killed for murders of which I am innocent. Doing this is truly important, especially now that many Americans are learning from frequent news reports the truth about America’s criminal justice system and some of the people who work within it.

People have learned that this system is dishonest, and that some of its investigators, prosecutors and judges cannot be trusted and are more concerned with winning cases or with following their political ideology than with truth or justice. This is especially true in my case.

Start with the fact that for the first time in the history of the death penalty in California, as well as within the history of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 11 federal circuit court judges dissented in one death penalty case—mine.

To show their concern as to why my case should be heard on its merits before I am executed, six of the 11 stated these words of dissent in my last appeal: “Public confidence in the proper administration of the death penalty depends on the integrity of the process followed by the state. … [Twenty-four] years of flawed proceedings are as good as no proceedings at all.”

The other five judges, showing their concern about the truth not being told in my case, stated: “The state of California may be about to execute an innocent man.” (One of them, Judge William Fletcher, later said in a speech at New York University Law School: “[Kevin Cooper] is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”)

A 12th judge wrote in a separate opinion: “Significant evidence bearing on Cooper’s culpability has been lost, destroyed or left unpursued, including, for example, blood-covered coveralls belonging to a potential suspect who was a convicted murderer, and a bloody t-shirt discovered alongside the road near the crime scene. … Countless other alleged problems with the handling and disclosure of evidence and the integrity of the forensic testing and investigation undermine confidence in the outcome.”

There have been many judges in other cases who have turned a blind eye to the truth and let a poor person get executed, even when there were serious doubts about that person’s guilt, but it is rare for judges to speak out against a possible execution. If these 12 judges are ignored, what will happen to me will not be my execution but my murder at the hands of the state of California.

The political ideology of many judges allows them to ignore truth and injustice. Politics—the politics of life and death—do play a very real part in this country’s criminal justice system. That is why Republicans in Washington, D.C., would not allow President Obama to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court [after his death]. This truth may never be admitted in words, but actions speak louder than words. Among these actions are the continuing oppression of people like me, who are poor and fighting for our lives from within this rotten criminal justice system.

So while finality, rather than justice, may be what certain judges are more concerned with, it is my hope that others in positions of authority—in particular the governor—will see the miscarriage of justice in my case and stand up and speak out to prevent this state from murdering me.

What makes my case unique in many ways is the fact that a dozen federal judges did just that—they stood up and spoke out against my questionable conviction—based on all the evidence and not just what the state claims after hiding, lying, destroying, tampering with, withholding and manipulating the evidence, all of which is exposed in my clemency petition to Gov. Brown.

Just because other judges in my case chose not to acknowledge the truth about it doesn’t mean I’m guilty. This can be said for all the people who have been exonerated for crimes, including murder, they did not commit. Certain judges in their cases upheld bogus convictions and then closed the cases.

I am respectfully asking you, no matter who you are, no matter your religion, your political party, your skin color or your sexual orientation, no matter what your job is, your economic class, or anything else that makes you the individual you are, to please get involved in this fight to save my life, as well as the fight for our collective humanity.

While I may indeed be murdered by the state of California in the not-too- distant future, this fight is not just about me. It is much bigger than me or any one person. It is about us as a people bringing to an end the historic and horrific crime against humanity that is only done against America’s poor people, especially its black people like me.

My legal team and I have petitioned the governor to grant me an innocence investigation so that he and everyone else can learn the truth about the law enforcement misconduct in my case, as well as DNA testing that we hope will reveal the real killer’s DNA and exonerate me.

We are asking the governor to grant me a reprieve so that if this state resumes executions, I will not be executed. The state has me marked for death and has me at the top of the execution list, in part because it did not torture and murder me in 2004, and subsequently because of the attention my case is now receiving, with many people, including several jurors who convicted me, believing in my innocence.

There is entirely too much sadness and pain and inhumanity inside these modern-day prison/plantations to go into any one essay. Just know that I am thankful on this Thanksgiving Day that my spirit has endured and is keeping me alive, when all around me is death.

Charles Manson, leader of murderous ’60s cult, dead at 83

November 20,2017

Charles Manson, the wild-eyed 1960s cult leader whose followers committed heinous murders that terrorized Los Angeles and shocked the nation, died Sunday of natural causes, according to the California Department of Corrections. He was 83.

Manson served nine life terms in California prisons and was denied parole 12 times. His notoriety, boosted by popular books and films, made him a cult figure to those fascinated by his dark apocalyptic visions.
“He was the dictatorial ruler of the (Manson) family, the king, the Maharaja. And the members of the family were slavishly obedient to him,” former prosecutor Victor Bugliosi told CNN in 2015.
To the point they would kill for him.
The brutal killings began on August 9, 1969, at the home of actress Sharon Tate and her husband, famed movie director Roman Polanski. He was out of the country at the time. The first set of victims were Tate, who was eight months’ pregnant; a celebrity hairstylist named Jay Sebring; coffee fortune heiress Abigail Folger; writer Wojciech Frykowski; and Steven Parent, a friend of the family’s caretaker.
The next evening, another set of murders took place. Supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were killed at their home.
Although Manson ordered the killings, he didn’t participate.
Over the course of two nights, the killers took the lives of seven people, inflicting 169 stab wounds and seven .22-caliber gunshot wounds. Both crime scenes revealed horrifying details. And a few details linked the two crime scenes.
The word pig was written in victim blood on the walls of one home and the front door of another. There was also another phrase apparently scrawled in blood: Helter Skelter (it was misspelled Healter). The reason for the disturbing writings, the prosecutor argued, was because Manson wanted to start a race war and had hoped the Black Panthers would be blamed for the killings.
On June 16, 1970, Manson and three of his followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — went on trial in Los Angeles.
All of those details came tumbling out in the trial that both mesmerized and horrified the nation. During the trial, Manson and his followers created a circus-like atmosphere in the court with singing, giggling, angry outbursts and even carving X’s in their foreheads.
The charges came after a major break in the case when Atkins, who was already in jail on another charge, bragged to a fellow inmate about the Tate murders. She said they did it “because we wanted to do a crime that would shock the world. …”
Manson was originally sentenced to death but the death penalty was briefly abolished in the state and his concurrent sentences were commuted to life in prison.
He also was convicted in the connection with the killings of Gary Hinman, a musician, and stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea in 1969.

California Death Penalty, Struck Down Over Delays, Faces Next Test

August 29,2015 (NYT)

Whether California’s application of the death penalty is so drawn out and arbitrary that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment will be argued on Monday before a federal appeals court in Pasadena.

If the lawyers for a condemned man are victorious, the case could bring a reprieve to more than 740 prisoners now on death row at San Quentin State Prison and send legal ripples across the country. Either way, legal experts say, it raises issues about the administration of capital punishment that are likely to reach the Supreme Court over time.

In Monday’s hearing before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, California officials will seek to overturn a surprise ruling last year by a lower federal court, which declared the state’s “death penalty system” to be unconstitutional

Hailed by death penalty opponents as a breakthrough and attacked by others as unwise and legally out of line, the decision was issued on July 16, 2014, by Judge Cormac J. Carney of Federal District Court in Santa Ana. It focused not on disparities in the meting out of death sentences in the first place — the more familiar charge — but on the decades of tangled and prolonged reviews that follow and the rarity of actual executions.

In a scathing account of what he called a dysfunctional system, Judge Carney noted that of the more than 900 people who had been sentenced to death in California since 1978, when the current legal structure was established, only 13 had been executed.

Citing growing delays in a judicial review process that can take 25 years or more, far above the national norm, Judge Carney said death sentences had been transformed, in effect, into “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

The “random few” who are put to death, he said, “will have languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary.”

Judge Carney ruled on the appeal of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned to die in 1995 for a murder and rape and made a last-ditch plea to a federal court after his appeals to the California Supreme Court had been denied. The judge vacated Mr. Jones’s death sentence as he declared California’s capital-punishment process to be generally unconstitutional.

The decision was a stunning one, and California officials have sharply challenged it on both procedure and substance. They say it was illegitimate because Mr. Jones’s arguments about the arbitrariness of the review system — issues going beyond the long delays alone — had not first been considered in the California courts, as required.

Beyond that, according to the brief from the state’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, a Democrat, the delays and rarity of executions do not reflect random quirks. Rather, it says, they are a product of California’s effort to be scrupulously fair, ensuring that condemned prisoners have high-quality lawyers and every opportunity to question the legality of their sentences.

California legislators have required such exhaustive reviews and procedures as “an important safeguard against arbitrariness and caprice,” the state holds, quoting from a 1976 Supreme Court decision.

In a plebiscite in 2012, California voters affirmed the death penalty by a narrow margin, with 52 percent voting to keep it and 48 percent voting to replace it with life in prison without parole.

California inmates normally wait three to five years just for the appointment of a qualified defense lawyer, a delay that may be repeated as convicts pursue two successive state appeals and then a federal one. Beyond the prolonged process of reviewing death sentences, California has had a de facto moratorium on executions since 2006 because of disputes over the method of lethal injection.

The questions of arbitrariness and extreme delay that are raised by the Jones case are important and may well gain purchase in the courts, said Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law and death penalty expert at Hofstra University.

“But that does not necessarily mean that this particular litigation will be the vehicle by which the courts resolve these issues,” he added, noting that procedural or other questions could lead the appeals panel to overrule the Jones decision.

The arguments made by Mr. Jones’s lawyers — and echoed by Judge Carney — are similar in part to those made in June by Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court. In a sweeping dissent, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Breyer went beyond the lethal-injection issue at hand to ask whether the death penalty was so marred by unreliable decisions, arbitrary application and delays that it should be abolished.

But conservative justices responded that death penalty opponents, in their zeal to erect obstacles to executions, were responsible for inordinate delays and unpredictability.

If the Ninth Circuit and even the Supreme Court should uphold Judge Carney’s ruling, this would not necessarily cause the death penalty to unravel nationwide, said Douglas A. Berman, an expert on criminal law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

Judge Carney’s decision turned on details specific to California, and with its high number of condemned prisoners and very low pace of executions, the state is in a class by itself, Mr. Berman said. Still, he added, a similar critique might succeed in a few other states, including Pennsylvania and Florida.

Given the deep divisions within California over the death penalty, Mr. Berman added, the state may, in an odd way that has nothing to do with constitutional principles, be well served by the status quo.

“Voters, and perhaps the executive branch, too, are not that troubled with a system that has lots of death sentences and few executions,” Mr. Berman said.