Mean Justice (55 page)

Only when she reached the top of the Grapevine, and she began speeding down the other side of that treeless wall of granite separating Bakersfield from the rest of Southern California, did she begin to feel a palpable sense of relief. The oppressive heat and dust and injustice that she had grappled with in Kern County shrank like a pinpoint in her rearview mirror. She rolled down the window and felt cool air rush in, washing over her, carrying with it the scent of things growing. And despite herself, before she even realized what she was doing, Laura found herself thinking of new ways to reopen the case and pry Pat Dunn’s cell door open. Maybe she could take another run at Marie Gates. Or Kate Rosenlieb. Maybe she could find out more about Jerry Coble and his family. There had to be something else she could do.

As a blood-red sun dipped below a hillside and the distant galaxy of lights that marked Los Angeles sparked into view before her with the suddenness of a match, Laura found herself speaking these thoughts aloud into
the rushing wind:
Maybe,
she said,
just maybe, it’s not over yet.

A few days later, Laura arrived at her office to find an express delivery from the California Department of Motor Vehicles awaiting her. The envelope contained records that she had requested long before but which had never arrived. In her preparation for Pat Dunn’s petition for a new trial, she had asked for a computer search for any law-enforcement agencies in Kern County that might have inquired about the license plate number Rex Martin had written down on the day he followed Jerry Coble from Pat’s house. Jerry Mitchell, the retired deputy sheriff, had sworn that he passed this number on to Detective Soliz within a day of receiving it from Pat, though Soliz claimed he could recall no such thing. Laura had harbored doubts about the detective’s assurances and wondered whether there might be a computer record somewhere showing that Soliz had indeed checked the plates. Only after the trial did Laura learn such a computer check was possible, and she initiated one in the hope that it would reveal something in time for the new-trial motion. But the results had not arrived in time.

Inside the envelope Laura found a printout. It showed the state motor vehicles database had indeed received an inquiry from a Kern County law-enforcement officer about that same license plate—a Pontiac Sunbird owned by Jerry Coble’s long-suffering mother. The official police request for information on this car, according to the record, had been made on July 27, 1992—exactly in the time frame Rex Martin claimed to have followed the suspicious car, and when Jerry Mitchell would have communicated the number to John Soliz. Someone in Bakersfield law enforcement—the printout didn’t say
who—had run Coble’s plate. Just as the defense had claimed.

It had potential, this new information, but Laura’s excitement at the discovery quickly gave way to frustration. Had it arrived just a few days earlier, it might have made a difference in the case—perhaps enough to win Pat a new trial. Now, though, with Pat Dunn’s best chance for acquittal and freedom already behind him, Laura knew that this document would be little more than a starting point, a place to start digging for answers that had continued to elude her.

She put the computer printout down and picked up the telephone. She had a new trip up the Grapevine to plan.

PART IV

Epilogue

Justice delayed is not only justice denied—it is also justice circumvented, justice mocked, and the system of justice undermined.

—R
ICHARD
N
IXON

Like the Hydra slain by Hercules, prosecutorial misconduct has many heads.

—J
USTICE
J
OHN
P
AUL
S
TEVENS

1

W
INTER
1998

I
N THE FIVE YEARS SINCE
P
AT
D
UNN’S CONVICTION AND
sentence to life in prison, controversy has continued to shake the justice system of Kern County. The war on crime, fought harder here than most anywhere else, continues to claim innocent casualties.

Few can attest to this more convincingly than Offord Rollins. In August 1995, the California Court of Appeal declared Rollins’ trial fundamentally unfair, overturned his conviction, and ordered a new trial. In its opinion, the court lambasted a juror and the prosecutor for misconduct, as well as the defense attorney and judge for numerous errors.
¹
Taken alone, any one of these problems might be overlooked. Together, however, these problems made granting Rollins a new trial inevitable.

The clincher for the Court of Appeal was the matter of jury misconduct. The justices could not abide the juror who shared with his colleagues his own inside (and incorrect) knowledge of flies, supposed pesticide spraying near the crime scene, and why there might have been no flies, fly eggs or maggots on the murder victim’s body. This brought before the jury improper evidence on a critical issue in the case. Maria Rodriguez, of course, had been found dead and bloody in a patch of desert teeming with insects, yet her corpse showed no sign of fly eggs or
maggots. Experts testifying for the defense insisted this meant that Maria had died after dark, since flies cannot see or navigate in darkness, and therefore do not feed and lay eggs once the sun goes down. And Rollins had an alibi beginning five hours
before
sunset that day and continuing through the evening, something even prosecutor Lisa Green conceded.

However, this one juror’s “knowledge” gave the rest of the jury an excuse to disregard the expert testimony, clearing the way for conviction. When challenged on the issue during hearings in Kern County, the prosecutor called this and any other such transgressions harmless error, and the trial judge agreed. But the Court of Appeal felt otherwise: In a case already troubled by prosecutorial misconduct and judicial errors, and in which the question of guilt or innocence was so close, the only just outcome would be to declare the trial unfair, erase the conviction, and start over again.
²

District Attorney Ed Jagels called the appellate court’s reasoning “silly.” He was already seething over another embarrassing opinion handed down earlier that month from the same court, setting molestation-ring defendant Donna Sue Hubbard free because of coerced child witnesses. As he had done in the Hubbard case, Jagels asked the California Supreme Court to intervene to restore Rollins’ conviction. And, as in the Hubbard case, the Supreme Court declined to do so. Offord Rollins, once again presumed innocent, walked out of custody, hoping to salvage what he could of a promising college and athletic career shattered by three years in prison.

Rollins was, however, not quite free. In the spring and summer of 1996, despite pleas from the Bakersfield black community that he be spared a second trial, the district
attorney’s office pressed forward with Offord Rollins’ case before a new judge and jury, with a new and pugnacious defense attorney, and a new prosecutor on board as well—Ed Jagels’ second-in-command, Stephen Tauzer. The new judge scrupulously went about policing the second trial for any signs of the misconduct and error that undermined the first. The case now turned squarely on the scientific evidence—blood, fibers, plants and the quality of work performed by the county’s aged, contamination-prone crime laboratory—and on Offord’s own credibility and inconsistencies. At the heart of the case remained the question of why there were no flies on Maria’s body, and what this implied about Offord’s guilt or innocence.
³

Despite the judge’s best efforts, the trial became an angry, rancorous affair, marked by ugly confrontations between the defense attorney and the prosecutor. All the anger, resentment and distrust that had festered for years within the Kern County justice system seemed to boil to the surface in the second Rollins trial. There was no room for compromise, no walking in the other man’s shoes. This was a war, as cases often are in Kern County, though this one seemed stripped of even the veneer of civility. Shouting, petty bickering and name-calling on both sides constantly mired the proceedings.
⁴

At one point, prosecutor Tauzer grew so angry at private investigator Susan Penninger that when the judge and jury cleared the courtroom for a recess, he charged the witness stand, growled an insult, slammed a heavy chart down in front of her, and appeared to physically menace the five-foot-three private investigator. As Penninger, whom Tauzer had known for twenty years, recoiled in shock, thinking she was about to be struck, H. A. Sala, Rollins’ dapper defense attorney, interposed himself
between the two. Assuming something close to a boxer’s stance, he forced Tauzer to take a step back. “You think you’re such a big man,” Sala hissed, pacing nervously, his face red above his pointed goatee. “Try someone who can defend himself.”

Tauzer stalked off, and the strange scene ended as abruptly as it began. The prosecutor later apologized.

Such incidents aside, in the end, the misconduct and error that infected the first trial—including the racial overtones, improper evidence, irrelevant rap poems and sexual innuendo—were generally avoided in the second go-round, in the courtroom and jury room alike. And the result showed just how close the case, on its own merits, was: After four days of exhausting deliberations, the jurors declared themselves hopelessly deadlocked.

Six were certain that Offord was innocent. Six voted guilty. The scientific evidence about flies—and the possibility that crime-lab technicians accidentally planted incriminating evidence from the murder scene in Offord’s car—had convinced those jurors voting to acquit. The fibers consistent with Offord’s car seat that were found on Maria Rodriguez’s body—coupled with Offord’s inconsistent statements—convinced those who wanted to convict.

The second trial’s hung jury opened the door for a third, but the following month, the DA threw in the towel. A cost-benefits analysis won out in the end: Offord Rollins was fast approaching age twenty-five, and since he had been sentenced as a juvenile, he would have to be released at that age, anyway, even if the DA managed to convict in a third trial. “It would be pointless,” District Attorney Jagels explained. “But that does not imply we have any doubts about the evidence against Mr. Rollins.”

Rollins’ attorney, H. A. Sala, disputed the DA’s comments, certain that Jagels would have prosecuted again if he thought conviction possible—if only to make sure that Offord wore the label of murderer for the rest of his life. But the defense would have been even stronger a third time around, Sala believed, because he might have been able to introduce evidence that someone else could have killed Maria—an option that the defense had been denied in the past.
⁵
Sala had learned that Rodriguez family friend Victor Perez—an alternative potential suspect long favored by the defense—did not have the alibi prosecutors had always claimed he had.

“They didn’t want a new trial because they knew they couldn’t win,” Sala told Offord in a phone call as soon as he learned of the DA’s decision. “You’re free. That’s it. It’s over.”

Offord hung up the phone, speechless. Five years had passed since his arrest. The teenager had become a man, though he had been robbed of those final years of childhood—of proms, of track meets, of leaving for college, of birthdays with friends and family. He had borne the weight of being the accused murderer, then the convicted murderer, then the appealing murderer for so long that, like a bad back or a broken limb, he no longer knew what it felt like to be without it. Too nervous to eat some days, he had lost ten pounds during the two months of his second trial. He was a quiet and withdrawn man now, unwilling to show any emotion, always fearing that it might be used against him in some future courtroom proceeding. But with exoneration, he was not sure what to do. He was unaccustomed to this feeling of complete freedom, the notion that he could get on a plane and fly anywhere and not be called a fugitive, that he could make
plans for the future and not have to worry about whether his room would have bars on it, that he was now officially and legally
innocent.