In a System Stretched Thin, Wrongful Arrests Happen

Los Angeles police homicide detectives were looking for a ruthless drug dealer for the 1991 slaying of another drug dealer near MacArthur Park.

The suspect was described as balding with a facial scar.

Police settled for Juan Jose Landaverde, a shy dishwasher with a pockmarked face and a full head of hair.

The terrified dishwasher recounted telling police, “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m a decent person, a hard-working person. I’ve never done a crime in my life.”

But the detectives did not believe him.

For four months, he sat in jail, unable to get anyone to examine the time card that established his innocence.

The story of this falsely accused dishwasher, like dozens of similar cases that were reviewed, illustrates a sad truth of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles:

With inadequate resources to fully investigate many homicides, police and prosecutors at times make perilous accommodations, settling too quickly for too little evidence.

In the vast majority of cases the police arrest the right person, even the harshest critics acknowledge. But, faced with workloads that make their jobs next to impossible, detectives sometimes do inadequate investigations, overlooking or ignoring evidence that tends to prove innocence. They rely on eyewitnesses who err or lie. Sometimes they help create those lies by pressuring witnesses, who respond by saying whatever they think the police want to hear.

Although the district attorney’s office has not changed its formal standards for filing cases, past and present prosecutors say that murder cases are not as thoroughly investigated as they were in the past.

The result is a system that is more likely to make mistakes--arresting and charging innocent people with murder, and jailing them without bail.

While studying how homicides were investigated and prosecuted in Los Angeles County, The Times conducted examinations of more than 30 cases where innocent people were charged with murder. Determinations of innocence were made in most of the cases by judges, prosecutors or police.

The vast majority of the cases were investigated by the county’s busiest law enforcement agency, the Los Angeles Police Department.

“The system is not perfect. We make mistakes,” said LAPD Deputy Chief John D. White. “The bottom line is I’ve never known a detective who would purposely railroad a guy.”

The cases ended with the system taking steps to free the suspects once the mistakes were discovered. Sometimes the mistakes were uncovered within days; sometimes months.

One man who was charged was miles away from the murder scene, at work; another was at church surrounded by fellow congregants. Nine had iron-bar alibis: They were in jail when the slayings were committed.

In more than a dozen other cases that were reviewed, prosecutors dismissed charges when they discovered they had no credible evidence of guilt--though no one established that the defendant was innocent.

For example, one man had been charged after a prostitute said she saw him commit a drive-by shooting. But the woman was lying; she was in jail when the slaying occurred.

Another man had been charged with murder based on the word of a witness who had been hospitalized just three weeks earlier for hallucinations and delusions.

In a third case, charges were filed on the word of a woman who later admitted she falsely implicated the man because she feared her cousin had actually committed the crime.

It is rare for the criminal justice system to affirmatively declare a defendant’s innocence. Normally, police, prosecutors and even defense lawyers do not judge whether the facts prove that an accused person is innocent. Instead they focus only on whether the evidence meets the legal standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Nonetheless, defense attorneys say that wrongful charging in homicide cases is a significant problem. Los Angeles Public Defender Michael Judge said his office is conducting a study of how often his investigators help exonerate innocent suspects. One of his ranking deputies estimated that people are wrongly charged with murder as much as 5% or even 10% of the time.

Most police and prosecutors acknowledge that, in rare instances, innocent people may be charged with murder. But they say such instances are an infinitesimal number of the thousands of cases that are prosecuted.

“As far as we’re concerned, one person is too many,” said Michael Genelin, a district attorney’s supervisor.

Cases of wrongful arrests create injustice for more than the person who was arrested. The actual killers usually remain free.

There is a simple reason that cases usually remain unsolved following a wrongful arrest. Jurors may have trouble accepting the testimony of witnesses who already have proved themselves unreliable. “Once you make a mistake, it’s through,” said Sergio Robleto, the retired head of LAPD’s South Bureau Homicide, the city’s busiest homicide division.

The Quality Issue

Although police devote significant resources to solving homicide cases, some prosecutors express dismay with the quality of cases they get, especially those from the LAPD.

In a stinging assessment, the prosecutor who oversaw many of the LAPD’s felony case filings from 1990 to 1993 said overworked and demoralized detectives have not thoroughly investigated hundreds of violent crimes, including murders.

“Homicide investigations we do review are handled in perfunctory ways and are often pitifully poor cases,” Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald Eastman wrote in a 1993 memo to his boss, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti.

As he wrote that sentence, Eastman recalled in an interview, he had a specific case in mind: a bar fight that led to a fatal stabbing. Police did not bother to find and interview a woman who had seen the fight and might have been able to tell them if the killer had acted in self-defense. Eastman said detectives felt they did not have the time. “This is what I describe as a pathetic case,” he said.

The study’s findings, too, suggest problems with the quality of LAPD investigations. Although the LAPD handles half of the county’s homicide cases, the agency accounts for two-thirds of the cases rejected for prosecution and three-quarters of the cases later dismissed.

Veteran LAPD officers generally defend their work in solving murders under the most difficult circumstances. But they acknowledge that some investigations are mishandled by officers, who may slip up through inexperience or overwork. “I’m not going to tell you that everything I see is a work of art,” said Lt. John Dunkin, South Bureau’s homicide commander.

Charges against some defendants were filed when a stranger identified a mug shot weeks or even months after glimpsing the killer under traumatic circumstances.

The perils of such stranger identifications have long been recognized. “The identification of strangers is proverbially untrustworthy,” wrote Harvard University Law School professor Felix Frankfurter in 1927, before he became a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Last year, a jury acquitted one defendant after the eyewitness against him, when asked to identify the suspect in court, pointed instead to the bailiff.

Because even a prompt photo identification by a single stranger is considered unreliable, district attorney’s office policy requires an in-person lineup unless other evidence corroborates the identification. But Genelin, the district attorney’s office spokesman, said corroboration can consist of as little as the defendant’s membership in a gang that is feuding with the victim’s gang.

In one case, the district attorney filed charges against a gang member after a 12-year-old selected his photograph from a photo album of suspected gang members nine months after the crime.

“There is evidence that the chances of identifying the face of a stranger that you’ve seen very briefly is very, very poor after so long a time,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a University of Washington psychologist who is an expert in eyewitness identification. “I wouldn’t want to convict someone based on [this]. No way.”

One veteran prosecutor assigned to file cases said he was not even aware of the district attorney’s office lineup policy.

Police tend to dislike live lineups because they are time-consuming and carry a risk that more investigation will be required. “I try to tell these guys a live lineup is essential,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. P. Philip Halpin, who supervises filings in San Fernando, “and they say, ‘Yeah, but what if the witness doesn’t pick the guy?’ ”

The LAPD’s White said the department uses lineups in many murder cases, but was unsure of the number.

In the review of more than 30 wrongful arrest cases, suspect after suspect had a prior criminal record.

Charles Curry, a 29-year-old gang member, was charged with two drive-by murders after witnesses picked out his photograph.

Curry told police detectives that he could not have committed the crime: He was in jail for drunk driving at the time. The police investigator, Ernie Rodriguez, said he checked a law enforcement computer. But it had not been updated, and police had not checked the court records that Curry’s attorney used to prove his client’s innocence.

Curry believes that getting jailed for drunk driving saved his life. “If I couldn’t prove I was in jail when those two murders took place, ain’t no might to it, I would . . . have been going to the pen for the rest of my life, or I’d have been sitting on death row.”

The following accounts of other cases are drawn from interviews with participants, court transcripts, police reports and files of the district attorney and defense attorneys:

A Soldier’s Nightmare

After seeing a gunman fleeing a murder scene on Western Avenue in 1992, a passerby guided a police artist in creating a composite sketch of the suspect’s face.

Detectives noticed that the sketch bore a marked resemblance to a photograph they obtained of Carlis Calvin IV, a soldier then stationed near Monterey. Calvin’s family home was around the corner from the murder scene.

Although detectives obtained the photograph of Calvin a few months into their investigation, it took them more than three years to show it to their eyewitness.

Why did it take so long? “The case got lost” in the wake of a surge of homicides during the 1992 riots, said an officer who inherited it.

When the investigation resumed in late 1995, detectives tracked down the eyewitness and she identified Calvin’s photograph as that of the gunman.

Police had additional reasons to believe they had their killer.

The witness said she had given chase to the gunman but he seemed to disappear around the corner, suggesting to authorities that the killer lived nearby.

Calvin’s half-brother was with the victim during the slaying, yet his life was spared.

And the victim had been dating Calvin’s sister.

Police believed the sister gave them Calvin’s motive to kill: The victim had been beating her.

She also told police that she recalled seeing Calvin’s duffel bag in the family house at the time of the crime.

That was plenty of evidence to get Calvin charged with capital murder and extradited from Saudi Arabia, where he was on active duty.

“I was freaking out,” Calvin recalled recently. “They kept saying, ‘You’re going to get death for this.’ ”

To top things off, police gave Calvin a lie detector test and told him he flunked.

But there were some problems with the prosecution’s case.

It turned out that police had not talked with Calvin’s sister. The woman who had provided police with Calvin’s alleged motive and told them he was in town was an impostor.

Nor had police fully checked Calvin’s alibi. “I told them, ‘If you check my military record, you’ll see I wasn’t here,’ ” he said.

Calvin’s lawyer quickly tracked down his Army supervisor, who told him that the soldier had been part of a high alert Army unit outside Monterey, ready to jet to any crisis on as little as one hour’s notice.

During Calvin’s preliminary hearing, the supervisor testified that there were no absences when he counted his troops on the morning, afternoon and evening of the slaying.

Asked if it was conceivable that Calvin had been in Los Angeles at the time of the slaying, Cmdr. Sgt. Major Stanley L. Davis testified, “No way.” Although he did not specifically recall Calvin being present that day, testified Davis, “it was my personal responsibility to account for all soldiers . . . three times a day.”

Prosecutors and police remained unconvinced. But Los Angeles Municipal Judge Glenette Blackwell, who calls herself a strong LAPD supporter, had no problem dismissing the charges, saying Calvin was not “Casper the friendly ghost.”

“I am convinced that factually he is innocent,” she said.

Addressing Calvin, the judge added: “I just desperately apologize to you, sir, that you were flown in from Saudi Arabia. Please accept my profound apologies.”

The Wrong Pookie

If there was ever an open-and-shut case, the 1993 slaying of Darnell Nelson looked like one.

Nelson was shot to death in the Crips-controlled Imperial Courts housing project in Watts after someone accused him of being a rival Blood gang member. Witnesses told police the assailant went by the nickname “Pookie.”

Detectives showed mug shots of alleged gang members and associates to the victim’s relatives who had witnessed the shooting. And they identified the killer as Damien Burris.

Burris’ nickname was Pookie. Trouble was, he was the wrong Pookie.

As soon as detectives arrested Burris, he told them so. He had never been arrested before and, on the day of the shooting, he had been in church.

Although his mother and grandmother backed up Burris, detectives did not check out his church alibi for months.

“I’ve often wondered why they never followed up on his story,” said Gene Brisco, a retired Los Angeles County deputy sheriff who worked as an investigator for the defense on the case. “But then . . . it’s very rare that they do.”

Brisco is not alone in that assessment. Veteran Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Montagna said detectives frequently do not check out suspects’ alibis or do so incompletely and only to overcome a prosecutor’s objections to filing a case. “They have to be told, ‘Check it out,’ ” he said.

In this case, it took the personal intervention of Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams--who had been petitioned by Burris’ grandmother, a former Police Department janitor--and the persistence of a beat cop who also believed in Burris’ innocence. Then a new set of detectives substantiated Burris’ claim in interviews with the pastor and other church members.

Burris spent more than five months in jail before the new detectives concluded: “There is no doubt that Damien Burris was not involved.”

Misled by a Fingerprint

Grocer Nam Sok Ko was shot to death in his store in 1993, and Long Beach police had a description of the suspects from store employees: a heavyset Samoan and a taller black man.

Police found a Coke can on the video game in the back of the store and were able to lift a fingerprint from it.

A week later, the analysis came back: The print belonged to Eric Lelea.

The detectives went back to ask the store employee if one of the suspects had been standing by the video game drinking a Coke.

The employee answered, according to police reports, that he could not recall the suspect drinking anything. But he did recall that one suspect was near the video game and was the only person back there.

That very day, before Lelea had been questioned, prosecutors filed a murder charge against him. At 5 feet, 6 inches and 168 pounds, police believed he was the heavyset suspect they were seeking.

When Lelea was arrested days later, he told police that he was innocent--that he and three others had been at a shopping mall.

How did his print get on the Coke can? he was asked. Lelea said that before going to the mall, he had gone to the grocery to play the video game where the Coke can was found.

Detectives took Lelea’s picture and created a photographic lineup that they showed to the store employee.

He looked at the display and pointed to Lelea’s photograph. “I know this man,” he told detectives. “He comes to the store and he is not one of the suspects.”

Prosecutors dismissed the case as quickly as they had filed it.

A Question of Trust

When showing a photographic lineup to witnesses, police are trained to take special pains not to influence the witness’ choice.

They routinely instruct witnesses not to assume that the suspect’s photo is even included in the array.

They also instruct witnesses that it is as important to eliminate an innocent suspect as to implicate a guilty one.

This sensitive process can be thrown out of kilter if a police officer somehow suggests that a certain photograph is the one to pick.

According to a witness and a detective, that happened in the case of Nicholas Williams.

Williams had become a suspect in the 1989 robbery-slaying of Jerry Weber based largely on the shaky account of a crack-using informant.

Weber was gunned down in front of his wife, Sally, at an automated teller machine in West Los Angeles.

Sally Weber recalled that a Los Angeles police detective spread six photographs, including one of Williams, on a table at her house.

She recalled that every time she moved the photograph of Williams aside, Det. Neal May would move it back.

“I said, ‘I know you want me to identify this guy, but he’s not the one.’ ”

May, she said, responded: “I’m just going to pretend you never said that. We’re not forcing you to make any kind of identification. However, you need to trust that there are things I know that you don’t know. And the best witnesses don’t always recognize what people look like.

“Maybe if you took this into a dark room and held it up, held it down, it would look like him.”

Weber, distraught over her husband’s death and anxious to help police find his killer, said she agreed.

“I went to the service porch . . . I’d been beating myself up about this. Here, they might have found the right person and maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. So I said, ‘Look, there are some things that are similar but some things that are not.’ He said, ‘Tell me the things that are similar.’ ”

A week or two later, when she heard that Williams had been arrested, she said she telephoned May and told him that Williams really was not the killer.

“You need to trust me,” she quoted him as saying. “We’ve got lots of evidence. It’s open and shut.”

“I said, ‘I’m really uncomfortable with this,’ ” Weber recalled.

“He said, ‘You don’t have to worry. It’s in the system now.’ ”

Williams sat in jail for six months until then-Deputy Dist. Atty. Katherine Mader was assigned the case.

May’s partner, Det. Jim Witowski, went to see her. He told the prosecutor that the photographic lineup had been done suggestively and was tainted, Mader wrote in an internal report.

He also told Mader that information about the case had been improperly “fed” to the crack cocaine user who had originally implicated Williams.

Mader wrote in an internal memo that Witowski was “adamant that the wrong person was in custody and he will do anything in his power to make sure the defendant is not convicted.”

Witowski confirmed Mader’s account in an interview, saying: “I know he didn’t [do it]. Too many things occurred that convinced me we were on the totally wrong track.”

May declined to comment. But he said, and a supervisor confirmed, that he was cleared of wrongdoing in an internal inquiry. Witowski said he was never questioned in the inquiry and was “alienated out of the unit, basically.”

The district attorney’s office dropped the case.

Taking the Heat

Janice Cotledge and Gloria Williams were standing together on a South-Central corner early one foggy morning in November 1990 when a car pulled up and a man opened fire, killing Cotledge, who was pregnant.

Williams told police that she did not see the killers.

For more than two years, police pursued various leads that went nowhere until, in 1993, they questioned Williams again. They gave her a polygraph exam, asking her repeatedly if her former boyfriend, Ronald Gibson, was the killer.

In a tape-recorded interview, she denied that Gibson was involved. But later that day, in another recorded statement, Williams changed her story and said the killer had been Gibson.

Based on her statement, he was arrested and charged with murder.

There were some doubts about the case.

Gibson had passed a polygraph examination that the police had given, asking if he was the murderer.

More significant, Gibson had an alibi witness--the victim’s brother--who told police from the start that Gibson was with him, up the street, when Williams came running up to report that Cotledge had been shot.

Before trial, Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan conducted a hearing focused on whether the statement police took from Williams was voluntary. Tynan expressed concern about why her “attitude” seemed to dramatically change from the first tape recording to the second.

The police, in their reports, said they had appealed to Williams’ conscience. But on the witness stand, she broke down and said she only implicated Gibson because police officers had threatened to send her to jail for life and told her she would never see her child again.

The prosecutor decided to proceed anyway--ready to argue that Williams had told the truth when she initially identified Gibson, but lied in court.

After listening to Williams’ taped statements, the judge concluded that her statement implicating Gibson was “not truthful, and was caused by her fear of being put in jail or being taken from her family.”

The judge told the prosecutor: “I’m sorry that the district attorney does not have the wherewithal to stand up and say, ‘We dismiss this case,’ but you have not.”

So, he said, “I’ll take the heat.”

The investigating officer said that, regardless of the judge’s finding, Williams’ statement was voluntary and true. The prosecutor said she had faith in the officer.

The Time Card

Juan Jose Landaverde, the wrongly arrested dishwasher, said detectives told him he could expect to spend the next 30 years behind bars.

But Landaverde had an alibi. He told them he had been at work, washing dishes for a concessionaire at Los Angeles International Airport at the time of the slaying near MacArthur Park. His job, he said, required him to punch in and out, even for meal breaks.

Rather than travel to the airport to check out his alibi, a detective picked up the telephone and spoke to someone at the firm that employed Landaverde.

This person, the detective said, pulled Landaverde’s time card and said it showed that he had indeed punched in for work five hours before the killing and clocked out four hours after it.

But the person also said--erroneously--that employees did not punch in and out for meals. This, the detective wrote, “directly conflicted with Landaverde’s statement” and was taken as evidence of his guilt.

Landaverde waited in jail for four months until he could get someone to turn over the card.

When his own attorney subpoenaed it, the prosecutor could see that the back of the card showed that Landaverde had punched in and out for meals, just as he had said.

On the night of the slaying, the card said, he had returned to work from his meal break at 9:54 p.m. The killing occurred a half hour later, about 13 miles away.

The only evidence linking Landaverde to the slaying was the claim of a thrice-convicted burglar who had selected the dishwasher’s photograph and identified him as the man he had seen at night, from a fifth-floor window, walking from the murder scene “with a jailhouse stroll.”

Another witness said Landaverde’s photograph resembled the killer.

Landaverde lived in the neighborhood where the killing occurred. But police had no evidence that he knew the victim, had a motive to kill him or owned a gun.

The victim was Miguel Sanchez, a low-level drug dealer known as Tigre.

Who killed Tigre was no mystery on the streets. Word was that another drug dealer known as Scarface and Pelon, which means “baldy,” had shot him to death outside the William Penn Hotel.

Police quickly plugged into the neighborhood accounts and tried to locate Pelon.

Their wrong turn in the case came after a local gang member told them Pelon had a girlfriend named Sonia Segura.

Detectives ran Segura’s name and address through their computer and turned up a police report in which she and Landaverde were listed as the reporting parties.

Never mind that Landaverde was not Segura’s boyfriend. He was her brother. Detectives were looking for a man connected to Segura and they had one.

In Landaverde, they also had a man who in some ways seemed to fit the local gang member’s description. He was from El Salvador, he was the same height and build, and his name even seemed to fit.

The gang member said Pelon’s name was something like Juan Reyes or Ramirez. Police found that Landaverde had also been known as Juan Rodriguez in his only previous brush with the law, when he was deported in 1985 for illegal entry into the United States.

Once two eyewitnesses identified Landaverde’s photograph, the case was closed as far as police were concerned.

But defense investigator Darryl Carlson and attorney James Rosenberg were insisting that the police had the wrong man in custody. Carlson even provided them with the name of the person he said was the real Pelon.

The detectives then tried to make sure Landaverde was the right man by showing his photograph to someone who had said he knew Pelon. The man did not identify Landaverde.

Saying the case needed further investigation, the district attorney’s office dismissed the charges. The LAPD lists the killing as unsolved.

“They kept me in jail for four months,” Landaverde said recently in Spanish, through tears. “They tortured my mind.”

Supervising prosecutor Genelin said that as police are expected to do more work without more resources, “mistakes are more likely.” But, he added, as soon as officials are convinced a mistake has been made, it is corrected and charges are dropped. “The system has worked,” he said.

But another supervisor said he was concerned that some cases of innocence would go undetected. Stephen L. Cooley, head of the district attorney’s San Fernando branch office, said many suspects do not keep the kinds of records, such as time cards, credit card receipts and datebooks, that would help them establish a credible alibi.

The prospect of an innocent person being charged, Cooley said, “just scares the dickens out of you.”

Times staff writer John Johnson contributed to this story.

About This Series

Sunday: A System Overwhelmed

With almost 2,000 homicides a year in Los Angeles County, the criminal justice system is overwhelmed. Charges are filed in only one in two cases, and someone is convicted in one in three.

Monday: Police Battle Odds

Homicide detectives face mounting obstacles, including scant physical evidence and deteriorating support services. From crime scenes to crime labs, they struggle with limited resources.

Tuesday: The Role of Race

Justice is not always even-handed: Harshest punishments go to killers of whites and Asians, and in publicized cases. Police agency and courthouse make a difference, too.

Today: Wrongly Accused

Innocent people are wrongly arrested and charged with murder. Some are jailed for weeks and months, often because of shoddy police work.

THURSDAY: Toughest Cases of All

Gangster killers roam the streets because intimidation and witness killings make gang slayings toughest to solve. Terrorism forces adjustments, from station houses to courthouses.

Friday: A Question of Truth

When cases are haunted by allegations of police misconduct, questions often linger about whether the actions were intentional or were innocent mistakes.

Saturday: A Week of Tragedy

In a typical week, 32 people were slain in the county. Who were they? How and why were they killed? Where and when were the killings? And what has happened since?

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Spotting a Troubling Trend

Investigations by the Los Angeles Police Department were criticized in a 1993 memo from Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald Eastman. The prosecutor, who oversaw many felony filings, warned the district attorney that overworked LAPD detectives were failing to thoroughly investigate hundreds of crimes, including murders, resulting in weak cases.

REJECTIONS AND DISMISSALS

The LAPD investigated slightly more than half of the county’s homicides from 1990 through 1994, but the LAPD was responsible for two-thirds of the cases rejected by the district attorney and three-quarters of the cases dismissed in the courts.

Percentage of county homicides

LAPD: 54%

L.A. County Sheriff: 26%

Other law enforcement agencies: 20%

*

Percentage of all cases rejected

LAPD: 67%

L.A. County Sheriff: 14%

Other law enforcement agencies: 18%

*

Percentage of all cases dismissed

LAPD: 74%

L.A. County Sheriff: 11%

Other law enforcement agencies: 15%

Note: Rejected cases may be dropped or refiled. Some cases are rejected more than once. Percentages based on total number of victims, case rejections and case dismissals countywide.

Note: Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding.

Source: Los Angeles Times Homicide Study

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Case Outcome by Victim

A higher percentage of killings of whites and Asians resulted in murder convictions. A smaller percentage of Asian killings resulted in manslaughter or lesser charges.

Group Victims

Asian: 363

Black: 3,143

Latino: 4,526

White: 1,216

Note: 194 victims of undetermined race are not included

****

*--*

Asian Black Latino White Murder 19% 16% 14% 23% Manslaughter/lesser crime 13% 18% 15% 17% Dismissed/not guilty 5% 10% 7% 6% Pending 8% 5% 8% 6% Unsolved, etc.* 55% 52% 56% 47%

*--*

* Includes 2% juvenile arrests, 3% district attorney case rejects and 5% cleared, where suspect was dead or beyond reach of the law

Source: L.A. Times Homicide Study