Man Fingered by Informant to Be Freed

In the first case of its kind to grow out of the jailhouse informant scandal, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office agreed Thursday to free a man convicted of murder in 1988 on the testimony of an informant.

Citing the “best interest of the public” and the “best interest of justice,” the district attorney’s office asked in court papers that the case against Arthur Grajeda be dismissed because information had come to light that the informant was not credible.

Long Beach Superior Court Judge Richard F. Charvat granted the district attorney’s request.

Grajeda, 24, who had been sentenced to life in prison, is expected to be freed soon, said his lawyer, Robert Berke.

“His life would have been over,” Berke said. “It’s scary when you think of it that way. He was very gratified. He had faith that some relief would come through the courts.”

Grajeda was convicted after a jury trial, along with his brother, Senon, of the 1987 murder of Ralph Morales in a Wilmington housing project, and sentenced to prison for 32 years to life.

Senon Grajeda was sentenced to 45 years to life. Another lawyer is preparing a separate challenge to his conviction, which, a district attorney’s spokeswoman said, prosecutors would oppose.

“It’s a different case entirely,” said spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons. She said there was more evidence against Senon than against his brother.

Gibbons disputed a characterization of the case against the Grajedas as involving a jailhouse informant.

In this case, a man who had been a jailhouse informant claimed to have been an eyewitness to the murder. “The testimony was not as a result of something he was told in jail,” Gibbons said.

However, the informant, an acknowledged drug dealer and convicted rapist, did not tell authorities that he had seen the Grajedas commit the murder until three weeks after the killing, when he himself had been arrested on PCP charges.

Berke won an initial concession from the district attorney last summer that a new trial was warranted. The defense lawyer had put together a three-volume brief in which he had argued that, in return for testimony, the informant received official favors that were not disclosed to the defense or the jury.

The favors, Berke said, included furloughs from jail and dismissal of some criminal charges. The lawyer also found that the informant had escaped from custody but was not prosecuted.

In urging a new trial at the time, the district attorney’s office did not concede any of Berke’s arguments that it had deliberately withheld evidence. But it said it had inadvertently violated its duty to disclose a deputy district attorney’s charge that the informant had lied about an alleged jailhouse confession in another murder case the year before.

Prosecution of Arthur Grajeda’s retrial was assigned to Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeff Giordano, who said Thursday in a written motion to dismiss that his office had decided it “could not use” the witness’s testimony.

Berke said Grajeda prosecutors Thursday were to have presented for private review by Judge Charvat county grand jury testimony that Berke had asked to see that was given by the informant and the trial prosecutor in the case.

The jailhouse informant scandal broke in late 1988, when a longtime informant demonstrated that he could easily gather enough information to fabricate the confession of a jailed murder suspect he had never met.

The grand jury concluded that the district attorney’s office “failed to fulfill the ethical responsibilities required of a public prosecutor” by refusing to curtail misuse of informant testimony. One other murder case involving testimony by a jailhouse informant who claimed to have heard a confession outside of jail has been reversed and the defendant is awaiting retrial.