Black Marine Is Convicted of Rights Violation

A 20-year-old black Marine was convicted Monday of violating the civil rights of a white Marine by hitting him in the face when he tried to enter an Oceanside liquor store that caters primarily to blacks.

But the all-white Vista Municipal Court jury that returned the verdict said its decision had nothing to do with a racial hate crime.

“We didn’t care about the race,” said jury foreman Nick Stanger, 48, an Escondido airline pilot. “None of us considered it a black or white race case.”

Instead, he said, the jurors decided that it was clear that the victim, Cory Williams, was deprived of his “constitutional rights” to buy a pack of cigarettes, and that fact alone--not any racial slur that might have been uttered that night in August--was sufficient for the guilty verdict.

Derick Branch was convicted of both battery on Williams and a seldom-invoked section of the penal code making reference to civil rights violations. Both are misdemeanors.

Branch faces a maximum 12-month jail sentence--six months for hitting Williams in the face, and six months for the civil rights violation.

The other co-defendant, Kevin Smith, 27, was convicted of one misdemeanor count of battery for throwing blows at Brady Wimmer, who was driving a car carrying four white Marines when they pulled into the parking lot of Bell’s liquor store in downtown Oceanside. The jury acquitted Smith of the alleged civil rights violation.

Wimmer had testified that he heard someone in the parking lot shout at him: “This store is a black store, a blood store, and white boys aren’t allowed here.”

Prosecutors had said before the trial that it would be hard to win a conviction for the violation of the civil rights code that addresses “use of force, threats, or destruction of property to interfere with another’s exercise of civil rights.”

That code section specifically states that such force or intimidation cannot be used against a person because of that person’s “race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin or sexual orientation.”

The challenge, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Browder Willis, was in linking an assault on the victims with verbal threats with racial overtones--and he relied on the reference to “a black store, a blood store” as the necessary element to win a conviction.

Yet the jury foreman said that the alleged statement didn’t enter the deliberations, which lasted all Monday.

“That testimony was never very well-defined, if any one individual said that. No two witnesses ever said that same phrase. It was not determined if it was actually said,” Stanger said.

“The jury was extremely well-versed,” Stanger said of the jurors’ discussion of the law. “We never brought up that phrase racial hate crime . We didn’t think of race or hate as an element. It was that one individual person’s stated purpose was to buy a pack of cigarettes, and he was not allowed to do that.”

Even so, Stanger said, “Part of that (violation of civil rights) has to be for a reason--by race--and we felt that those elements were there.”

Asked why one co-defendant was convicted and the other acquitted, Stanger said, “The test was whether or not a person was interfered with. And only one person (Williams) was.”

An alternate juror who is black and who did not participate in the deliberations said afterward she would have voted to acquit both men.

Branch’s attorney, Bob James, said he and his client were “both terribly distressed” by the verdict.

Branch had testified on his own behalf, saying that he simply approached the car filled with white Marines to warn them that there had been racial tension earlier in the evening, and that they should reconsider going into the store for their own sake.

Branch said he never struck Williams and was the victim of mistaken identity.

James said his worst fears were realized--that Branch’s well-intentioned warnings to the Marines to stay clear of the store were misinterpreted by the jury as a direct threat.

“He told them, ‘You don’t want to be here.’ And I was afraid that this would happen--that the jury would take that as the basis for their verdict. They defined his trying to warn them, as a good guy, as basis for conviction.”

Browder said he was “very happy” with the verdict--the first time that such a guilty verdict based on the civil rights section of the penal code had been returned in a Vista courtroom. (Last month, a Vista jury acquitted a man who was accused of beating two gay men because, he said, he was repulsed by their public behavior of affection toward one another.)

But Browder admitted he was surprised by the jury’s reasoning.

“I thought the evidence pointed clearly that there was a (racial) statement. For the jury to discount that is a surprise. But their job is to interpret the facts. They were fair.”

Browder, himself black, said he wasn’t bothered by the composition of the jury, all white.

“You’re guaranteed a jury of your peers, and they are peers in the human race,” he said. “That is sufficient.”

The two men will be sentenced Dec. 17.

The case was tried before Judge Harley Earwicker.