Mean Justice (49 page)

And nowhere did the problem seem more pronounced than in Kern County, where problem prosecutions surfaced repeatedly in the 1990s. A double murderer named Floyd Gore, for example, was granted a new trial in 1992 because Kern County prosecutors had stacked the jury by excluding minorities—a constitutional violation that
warranted overturning Gore’s life sentences, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt. And though he was tried and convicted again, this time with a properly constructed jury, the possibility that a murderer could go free because the government broke the rules created a stir. (Many Hispanics and African Americans charged with crimes in Kern County who were not so obviously guilty as Gore had complained for years about racial problems in jury selection, Offord Rollins among them.)

In another Kern County case, Sergio Venegas saw his 1992 conviction and sixty-five-year prison sentence for a brutal rape and assault overturned because the prosecution used erroneous evidence against him. In a precedent-setting decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that Kern County Deputy District Attorney Lisa Green (who also prosecuted Offord Rollins) had won the conviction only because the DNA test she relied upon—the only hard evidence against Venegas—vastly overstated the likelihood of his guilt. (In fairness to Green, prosecutors and law-enforcement agencies throughout the nation—from the Justice Department and the FBI on down—were taken to task throughout most of the nineties for using inaccurate and overstated DNA evidence to win convictions.)
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As in the past, District Attorney Ed Jagels responded to such rulings not by examining his own office’s practices, but by criticizing appellate justices for favoring criminals’ rights over public safety. But the tumult in the Kern County courts seemed to touch on every sort of criminal case: The district attorney’s office found itself facing reversals in drug cases, murder cases, rape cases and car-theft cases because of official misconduct. Sheriff’s deputies had made illegal searches in some
cases, in others coercive interrogations, in which they forced adults to confess much as the children were forced to make molestation accusations in the ring cases. Deputies tried to bolster two drug investigations by targeting defense lawyers through their own clients, leading to more reversals because the deputies violated one of the most elementary of legal principles—that the government may not interrogate a defendant (much less negotiate plea bargains with him, as occurred in one of these cases) once that defendant has been formally charged and is represented by an attorney. Meanwhile, a clearly guilty killer almost went free when an investigator for the DA improperly contacted a juror during the trial, another form of prosecutorial misconduct.

One particularly troubling Kern County case came to light within a year of Pat Dunn’s trial—the investigation of a double murder. Two men were found shot to death in an alfalfa field outside the farm town of Delano, an apparent drug deal gone sour. Detective John Soliz, fresh off his victory in the Dunn case, was assigned to find the killers. Early on, witnesses identified three suspects for Soliz, one of them a man named Rosales Meza.

Six months passed with no sign of Meza anywhere in Kern County. Then, while searching a house in Shafter, a police officer found a snapshot of a man who resembled the suspect. When Soliz saw the photo, he agreed it was Rosales Meza, the man wanted for the alfalfa-field murders. Soliz and a group of deputies later returned to the house, burst through the door, and arrested the man in the photo, who they found inside.

The man Soliz booked into the county jail identified himself as a recent Mexican immigrant named Jose Meza Fernandez. Meza Fernandez told the detective he had no
connection to the alfalfa-field killings, and that he had not even come to the United States until two months after the murders occurred. He swore he had been home on his parents’ ranch in Mexico, milking cows at the time. And he insisted he had never gone by the name “Rosales Meza.”

Detective Soliz did not believe him. During their interview, Soliz repeatedly told the man he was the prime suspect, that he had been identified as a murderer, that the authorities knew he was guilty—just as he had done with Pat Dunn. Later, Soliz made a point of writing down every inconsistency in the man’s statements, knowing this could be used as evidence of a guilty state of mind—a lesson from the Pat Dunn case playbook—and he set about gathering any evidence or statements he could find to support his case against the suspected killer. What Soliz didn’t do was thoroughly investigate the man’s claim that the detective had arrested the wrong man—much as his department never attempted to investigate the Dunn case as a legitimate missing-persons case. “A lot of these people lie to us,” Detective Soliz told a news reporter by way of explanation. “We don’t take their word at face value.”

Soliz did say that he had requested Rosales Meza’s fingerprints from the California Department of Motor Vehicles so that he could compare them to the man he had just arrested, a matter of routine. But the detective said he never received the prints from the state and, distracted by other cases, never followed up. It also appears that neither Soliz nor anyone else thought to put the suspect in a live lineup to see if any of the witnesses in the murder case could identify him. Jose Meza Fernandez, then, was booked and jailed on first-degree murder
charges, and the Kern County deputy DA on the case, John Somers, wanted the death penalty.

The defense attorney appointed to represent Meza Fernandez, former Kern County prosecutor Kyle Humphrey, took one look at the case and pronounced it “garbage.” He, too, told Somers that the DA had the wrong man. Then, after Meza Fernandez had been in jail more than a month and at Humphrey’s insistence, Somers agreed to send for the fingerprints that Soliz had never obtained. After another week passed, the prints arrived and the sheriff’s fingerprint expert told Soliz he had, indeed, arrested an innocent man.

Meza Fernandez, set free later that day, announced that he feared staying in Kern County and would return to Mexico. Kern County officials, meanwhile, maintained that nothing untoward had occurred: In the end, they said, the truth had come out, and the justice system had worked.
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And they were right, to a degree. But if a less-capable defense attorney had failed to insist on a fingerprint check, an innocent man arrested by John Soliz, who was just as convinced of this suspect’s guilt as he had been of Pat Dunn’s, could have been sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit.

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In another, very different case that also took place in Kern County shortly after Pat Dunn’s trial, police misconduct freed four men who seemed very much to deserve prison.

The men, convicted in one of the biggest drug busts in Kern County history, had been sentenced to fifteen to twenty years apiece in prison. But after a review, the California Court of Appeal found itself with no choice but to throw the whole case out, thanks to an illegal
search and attempts to cover it up by Kern County officials. Misconduct, in effect, set the guilty free, for the four men were caught red-handed driving vans filled with drums of a dangerous drug—$4 million worth of the potentially deadly hallucinogen PCP.

The problem was, Kern County Sheriff’s investigators found the drugs in a warrantless and therefore unlawful search of a rural ranch in an isolated area of the county called Stallion Springs. The authorities suspected that PCP was being manufactured at the ranch, but couldn’t prove it. Frustrated after a long and ineffective surveillance, the investigators started nosing around—without first obtaining a warrant, a basic constitutional requirement for such searches of private property that all cops are schooled in. Then, the Court of Appeal found, the officers concealed the existence of this illegal search during their sworn testimony. The district attorney’s office, meanwhile, never passed on to the defense a deputy’s written report that would have exposed the flaw in the case. This was said to be “inadvertent.”

The Kern County judge who oversaw the trial of the four men harshly criticized the two sheriff’s deputies involved, but at the strong urging of the prosecutor—who said she had not known of the illegal search until the trial commenced—he stopped short of throwing the case out of court, as the law required. He chose instead to dish out the long prison sentences to the drug dealers, and to criticize the sheriff’s deputies for testimony that was “obfuscatory at best, and bordered on absolute lying.” The judge also suggested that contempt proceedings against the officers might be considered. Representatives of the district attorney and the sheriff’s department publicly praised the offending lawmen instead.

An outraged California Court of Appeal did what the Bakersfield judge would not do, upholding basic constitutional principles by throwing out the convictions and going to the unusual length of reciting in its blistering opinion the famous Sir Walter Scott lines, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” After reviewing line by line a long list of falsehoods and misleading statements made by sheriff’s deputies during their sworn testimonies, the appeals court characterized one deputy as so “inconsistent, misleading and untruthful . . . it is difficult to determine what he really knew.” As for the other deputy involved—a sergeant in the sheriff’s narcotics unit—the appeals court stated, “There really isn’t very much left of his testimony that could be considered credible.”
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Such open criticism of lawmen—singled out by name by the appellate justices—is seldom seen in court opinions, even ones like this, which the court withheld from its published compendiums of case law. (Unpublished opinions are often issued in cases of government misconduct, and they cannot be cited in other cases, sparing law-enforcement officials from embarrassment.) This was not the first time this same sheriff’s sergeant had come to the attention of the appeals court. Previously, he had been chastised for illegally negotiating a deal with a defendant to set up the defendant’s own lawyer—a constitutional violation requiring a new trial and the reversal of an eight-year prison sentence. In another case, a grand-theft conviction and a three-year prison sentence had to be overturned because this sergeant conducted yet another illegal search. Nevertheless, even after the “tangled web” opinion was handed down, the prosecutor on the PCP case maintained that the appeals court was wrong, that she
knew the deputies didn’t lie, and that, “My confidence in this case and the two officers remains unshaken.”
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Even as officials defended the Stallion Springs embarrassment, they were besieged on another front when Charles Tomlin, who had been serving life in prison for a 1978 Bakersfield drug killing, also returned to haunt the Kern County courthouse. Tomlin had been in prison for fifteen years by the time Pat’s trial concluded, and his case was just coming before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, one rung below the Supreme Court. In all probability, this would be his final shot at freedom, as every other court at every level in the Kern County and California justice systems had rejected his claims.

The only problem was, Charles Tomlin was almost certainly innocent. Were he to be retried, everyone involved in the case agreed he would be acquitted with ease. Which is why the Kern County District Attorney adamantly opposed any new trial for Tomlin, and used every procedural and technical ploy at its disposal to keep Tomlin in prison. The case bore startling similarities to Pat Dunn’s—a man convicted of murder on the basis of one eyewitness’s testimony, with no physical evidence against him and considerable evidence in his favor, and a police investigation that seemed biased against him from the start.

Not that Charles Tomlin didn’t create some problems on his own. His nickname since his youth was “Treetop” because, his mother always said, he acted like money grew on trees. It was an attitude that got him into frequent scrapes with the law; early on, he accumulated a record for drugs and theft. His preference for dating
white girls brought him trouble as well, given that he was a tall, skinny young black man with long, straightened, shoulder-length hair in Bakersfield circa 1970—a time and place not known for its tolerance or diversity. Certain parts of Kern County—the east-side community of Oildale being particularly notorious at the time—were believed by many to be unsafe for blacks. Cars had been surrounded and stoned, crosses burned on lawns. Treetop was playing with fire—his friends told him so, and so did his enemies.

On December 7, 1978, a small-time white drug dealer from Oildale, twenty-five-year-old Daniel Stewart, was shot to death over nine pounds of marijuana. The dealer’s girlfriend, Leticia Mendez, was sitting next to him in his pickup truck when the killer opened the door, sat down and fired a single bullet into Stewart’s head. When the police arrived, Mendez described the killer as a short, stocky black man with a bushy Afro—nothing like the lanky, long-haired Treetop Tomlin. But a detective on the case who had had a number of run-ins with Tomlin in the past tracked down a teenager who had helped set up the fatal drug deal. The kid, the detective later testified, was too terrified to speak the killer’s name, but instead scrawled “Treetop” on a piece of paper. Bakersfield Police Detective Les Vincent then showed Leticia Mendez a photo lineup that included Tomlin; she picked out Treetop as the shooter. Following his arrest, Tomlin was placed in a live lineup, and, after some hesitation, Leticia identified him as the killer. Though Tomlin had by then retained an attorney who by law should have been present for this, Detective Vincent did not notify the lawyer about the lineup.

At trial, the police claimed that they had lost a central
piece of evidence—the “Treetop” note—and the teenager who supposedly wrote it, charged as an accomplice to murder, did not testify. (He later denied fingering Treetop and said he never wrote a note to detectives.) There were fingerprints in the dead man’s truck and on the passenger-side door, none of them Treetop’s. Meanwhile, Tomlin brought in multiple alibi witnesses, most of them family members and neighbors, who testified that he was home at the time of the killing. But the prosecution labeled the defense witnesses liars and argued that its own eyewitness had sat right next to the killer, all the proof anyone should need of Tomlin’s guilt. Tainted as that evidence was—the lineup had been illegal, and this could have been used to attack and even throw out of court Leticia Mendez’s identification of Tomlin as the killer—Tomlin’s defense attorney inexplicably failed to pursue this point.
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Treetop Tomlin was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to twenty-eight years to life in prison.