Mean Justice (60 page)

Pat’s
habeas
petition, in which he was permitted to present new evidence, fared no better. His plea for a new trial relied primarily upon the new information Laura Lawhon had turned up from the state Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV computer printout showed Jerry Lee Coble’s license plate had been queried by local authorities right around the time Pat and Rex Martin had seen him skulking around the house—and when Pat’s friend Jerry Mitchell recalled passing on the number to Detective Soliz to check out. Laura and Pat’s lawyers had hoped they could use this information to prove that Jerry Coble and Kern County authorities had framed Pat Dunn.

In the end, though, the motor vehicle information turned out to be a tantalizing clue that seemed to prove nothing definitively. The request for information on Coble’s car did not originate from computers at the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, where Sandy’s murder was being investigated, but from the Bakersfield Police Department, which at that time had nothing to do with Coble or the murder investigation. The defense team could find no way to connect it up, no way to identify what police officer made the request or why. Prosecutors wrote it off as a meaningless coincidence, probably a mere traffic stop. Laura felt the timing was too suspicious to be mere coincidence, but she had no proof. The argument was shot down by the appeals courts.

Meanwhile, the hidden information on Jerry Coble, Kate Rosenlieb and other witnesses remained hidden, even as the government fought to have Pat’s conviction upheld by claiming there was no new evidence to consider. Had the information been revealed, Pat’s bid for an overturned
conviction and new trial would have been a strong one, far stronger even than Offord Rollins’ already successful appeal. But without this information, the court of appeal had no choice but to reject Pat’s last, anemic bid for freedom. The state supreme court declined to review the case as well. Eighteen months after a jury pronounced him guilty, Pat’s appeals died.

After that, nothing happened in Pat’s case for years. His lawyers moved on to other cases. He had no money to finance any further legal efforts, anyway. As a convicted murderer, he could inherit nothing from Sandy—everything went to Sandy’s sister, Nanette, except for some small trust funds that passed on to Pat Paola’s relatives. Pat’s brother Mike, who had financed the trial defense, became mired in his own financial problems and declared bankruptcy. Several bills from the defense attorneys and investigators remained unpaid.

Only Laura Lawhon stayed in contact with Pat, though she had little time to devote to him or his case. She had parted company with her employer not long after the Dunn trial, and with several other colleagues formed her own firm, which quickly became one of the preeminent private investigation firms in Orange County. Later, she began splitting her time between California and her old hometown in Connecticut, where she had inherited a profitable gravel quarry after her father passed away. Yet with all that going on in her life, and despite no longer officially working on Pat’s case, she still kept in touch with him, certain of his innocence, still angry and disappointed at herself for not winning his freedom. The same woman who penned postcards to her convicted former clients while vacationing in Hong Kong still accepted Pat’s regular collect phone calls, and she still read his
voluminous letters scrawled on yellow legal tablets filled with outrage and pain, piling up quickly enough to fill an entire file drawer in less than a year. In her spare time, she tried to chase down some new leads Pat had developed through fellow inmates—tips about Jerry Coble, mostly, which never panned out. Laura suspected the other inmates were using Pat, conning him for one reason or another—profit or sport, she figured. In any case, the pattern became depressing: Pat would get his hopes up, then Laura would have to crush him with bad news. A year passed in this way before it suddenly hit Pat—as if it hadn’t occurred to him before—that he might never get out of prison. “I’m going to die here, aren’t I, Laura?” he asked her one day.

“I don’t know, Pat,” she said quietly. “I hope not.” The lack of conviction in her voice scared both of them.

It was around then, in early 1995, that Laura mentioned the case of
The People of the County of Kern vs. Patrick O. Dunn
to this author. In short order, she produced three boxes of files—everything she had on the case—and handed them over with this comment “Judge for yourself.”

It was in the course of researching this book that the errors, hidden evidence and new information about the murder of Sandy Dunn came to light. As often happens when a criminal case is prosecuted unfairly, the justice system of Kern County and the State of California simply failed to detect, or at least acknowledge, any problems on its own. No one had noticed that the DA had failed to disclose to Pat’s lawyers, as the law required, a wealth of evidence that could have helped prove his innocence. The defense remained in the dark about the lobbying efforts by Kate Rosenlieb and other city officials to have Pat prosecuted;
they never heard about statements made by the Dunns’ housecleaner that Sandy never wore her jewelry on her predawn walks, a critical point in the prosecution case. Most dramatically, the defense never knew that there were new charges against Jerry Lee Coble, or that the police and the DA neglected to pursue this new case against the star witness despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt. Pat and his lawyers never knew that, even as the DA vowed there was no new information in the Dunn case and urged the court to get on with Pat’s sentencing, Coble had been allowed to elude arrest despite a plea bargain requiring him to maintain a crime-free existence.

Nor did anyone seem to notice that Pat Dunn’s defense team never received a critical police report about Coble that detailed how the man who claimed to have accidentally witnessed Pat Dunn commit murder had previously begged to be allowed to make a deal, any kind of deal, vowing he’d do whatever it took to stay out of prison. Without that report, the defense had no way of knowing about Detective Eric Banducci, who arrested Coble but who was left out of the loop when Deputy DA John Somers and Sheriff’s Detective John Soliz cut their deal with the career criminal—though Banducci sits less than ten feet away from Soliz. The defense had no way of knowing that Banducci, along with several other fellow detectives, considered Coble a chronic liar and a completely unreliable witness, and would have said so under oath as witnesses in Pat Dunn’s defense. Locked within the files of the district attorney’s office was a police report that could have destroyed Jerry Coble as a witness and seriously eroded the credibility of the entire case against Pat Dunn—except for the fact that Dunn and his lawyers never saw that report.

At this writing, as the millennium draws to a close, the Kern County District Attorney has yet to provide an explanation for such oversights, though one had been promised by John Somers for more than a year. District Attorney Ed Jagels declined requests for an interview with the author, saying such matters either are or will be the subject of litigation, and that he was barred from discussing them by the county’s legal counsel.

Once the first edition of
Mean Justice
appeared in February 1999, however, Jagels broke his silence, launching a series of television and newspaper interviews in which he angrily denied any wrongdoing by his office in the Dunn case or any other. The legal reasons for his previous unwillingness to comment apparently forgotten, Jagels opined that the evidence of wrongful prosecution contained in
Mean Justice
was “fantasy” and “sheer, unadulterated bull.” He offered few specific rebuttals, preferring instead to make sweeping condemnations, such as his view that the book showed “contempt for the victims’ movement, contempt for . . . a law-enforcement-oriented community like ours . . . [and] a sneering L.A. view of Kern County.”
²⁹

The district attorney got specific in one interview, however, when he assured the citizens of Kern County that his office would never rely on an informant like Jerry Lee Coble unless prosecutors were certain he was being truthful. “We don’t use an informant or make a deal with him,” Jagels vowed, “unless he saw something, unless his statement is something that he could not have known unless he was actually there and is actually telling the truth.”
³⁰

If this is the practice of the Kern County District Attorney when dealing with informants, it would be a model policy, one that would greatly reduce instances of
propitious lying by informants anxious to barter testimony for freedom. But, notwithstanding Jagels’ assurances, no such policy was in evidence in the Dunn case. Sheriff’s reports and trial testimony show that Jerry Coble’s account of inadvertently witnessing Pat dispose of Sandy’s body contained no such corroborating information—there were none of the telling details Jagels promised, none of those “he had to have been there” hallmarks of a truthful witness, none of the proof the DA said he required before cutting a deal with a crook. Indeed, Coble’s account contained errors and omissions that should
not
have been there had he actually been present to see Pat hurling his wife’s body into the back of a pickup truck, yet Jagels’ office still bargained away a prison sentence in exchange for Coble’s testimony.

A few months later, Jagels hired a private polling firm, which reported that the DA remained very popular in Kern County despite the publication of
Mean Justice.
The poll purported to show that most voters did not believe wrongful prosecutions were a problem. One of the poll respondents later contacted the local newspaper to assert that the pollster’s questions were biased and slanted to produce results favorable to the district attorney.

Finally, in July 1999, five months after the initial publication of
Mean Justice
and more than two years after Jagels was first asked to respond to questions raised during the course of research for the book, the Kern County District Attorney issued a 154-page report titled “Junk Journalism.” The report purported to correct “factual errors and distortions” in
Mean Justice,
but it consisted primarily of a rehash of the prosecution’s original case in
People vs. Dunn
and failed to respond directly to most key issues raised in the book.

While the DA spoke out, Gary Pohlson, Pat Dunn’s former trial lawyer, found in the initial publication of
Mean Justice
the ammunition he needed to launch a last-ditch round of appeals. With the help of law clerk Mike Turrell, Pohlson—who was not being paid by his penniless client but who still believed in his innocence—filed a new writ of
habeas corpus
in March 1999. The writ demanded that the murder conviction be overturned, alleging that the trial had been infected by official misconduct, the hiding of evidence favorable to the defense and damaging to the prosecution, false testimony by Jerry Coble, and other problems that rendered the verdict unfair.

The case landed back on the desk of Judge Robert Baca, who had presided over the trial six years earlier, retired now but still hearing cases from time to time. Baca ordered both the DA and the Kern County Sheriff to respond to the allegations of misconduct, setting in motion a long and uncertain process that could lead to Pat Dunn’s freedom, or seal his fate for good—while leaving him to wonder just how much life might be left to him should he succeed in prying open his cell door.

There are no guarantees that day will ever come, he knows. As had been the case with so many others in his position, proof suggestive of innocence may not be enough to set him free. It is fairness, not innocence, that is at issue: He must prove that the authorities behaved so badly in his case that justice can be served only by wiping his conviction from the books. And this is something the Kern County DA simply cannot abide. Ed Jagels has fought such findings long and hard in all the other cases of wrongful prosecution and conviction that have emanated from his county. He has never admitted a serious
error in those cases, even when they were overturned or led to severe criticism of his office.

Such is the power of prosecutors that it would be a simple matter for the Kern County District Attorney to engineer Pat Dunn’s freedom, or at least grant him a new trial. With Jagels’ assent—and an admission of mistakes in the Dunn case—this could be accomplished in a matter of days, without the protracted litigation that otherwise would be required. But the district attorney has opposed overturning the Dunn case with the same trademark ferocity he has always relied upon, using all his considerable power, credibility, and ability to persuade the people of Bakersfield, who have so long trusted him as their guardian of public safety.

•   •   •

As Pat Dunn prepared to launch one last bid for freedom, police officers were called to investigate a disturbance at an apartment building in Bakersfield. They found a man, cut, bruised, and disoriented, standing in his underwear on his second-story porch. He was thirty-seven years old but he looked older to the officers, aged by a troubled life of minor crimes, mental illness, problem drinking, and drug abuse. “What’s your name?” one of the cops called out as the man swayed and shuffled at his porch rail.

“Danny,” he yelled back, his speech slurred. “Danny Dunn.”

Here was Pat Dunn’s long-estranged son, still spiraling downward, sick and in trouble again, seemingly drunk. The officers didn’t know he had been in a bicycle accident half a day earlier. They didn’t know he had suffered a concussion, confirmed by head scans, but that he had fled the hospital before he could be treated. With his wobbly gait, slurred words and confused behavior, Danny Dunn
appeared intoxicated to the officers (though blood tests would later disprove this—he apparently was disoriented from his head injury). Fearing for his safety as he stood unsteadily on his upstairs porch, the policemen decided to make a misdemeanor public intoxication arrest.

After letting him get dressed, the officers brought Danny Dunn to the county jail, which is run by the Kern County Sheriff, so that he could “sleep it off.” Because he was said to have both AIDS and hepatitis, the detention officers at the jail were wary of touching him, wearing gloves whenever they were forced to have contact with him. Jail records make it clear they viewed him with distaste; though the Bakersfield city police officers who made the arrest reported him to be quiet and cooperative, the sheriff’s department would report that he was combative and abusive, requiring physical restraints and imprisonment in an isolation cell. He was also observed to be delusional.