Articles

COURT SETS ASIDE 20-YEAR-OLD MURDER CONVICTION

By Jeffrey Anderson, Daily Journal Staff Writer
Friday, July 12, 2002

Memo from the appeals court to lower courts and the district attorney's office: Under Brady v. Maryland, a defendant does not have to prove that evidence suppressed by prosecutors would have changed the jury's mind had it been disclosed.

Instead, the 2nd District Court of Appeal held in an unpublished opinion Wednesday, the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision simply requires a showing that the suppression of exculpatory evidence -- such as information about the shadowy past of an informant paid to turn state's witness -- undermined confidence in the verdict.

The appeals court ruled that prosecutors suppressed exculpatory evidence concerning a jailhouse informant who was their key witness, undermining confidence in the guilty verdict against Anthony Stacy. Stacy was convicted of murder in 1983, and the court set aside his conviction. In re Anthony Stacy, B143115 (Cal.App.2nd Dist., filed July 10, 2002).

Stacy was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder committed during the course of a drug robbery on the night of Oct. 15, 1981.

At trial, Deputy District Attorney Lonnie Felker and former prosecutor Fred Horn, now a Superior Court judge in Orange County, argued for a special circumstance finding that Stacy used a firearm in committing a triple murder.

In presenting their case, Horn and Felker used the testimony of jailhouse informant Michael Hayes, who testified that Stacy confessed to committing three murders during the course of the 1981 robbery.

Court records indicate that the prosecutors were assisted by Detective Woodrow Parks of the Los Angeles Police Department, an investigator who had put Hayes in jail for two counts of murder in a separate case and who arranged for him to speak with the prosecutors about Stacy's alleged confession.

The other witness against Stacy was an accomplice named James Dean, who received immunity for his testimony and later failed a polygraph test, according to court documents.

A jury sentenced Stacy to life without the possibility of parole in 1983.

In 1996, however, information came to light that Hayes might have been an unreliable informant when he testified against Stacy at his trial.

Through a petition of writ of habeas corpus, Stacy's appellate attorney, Santa Monica lawyer Robert Berke, was able to establish that Hayes - a recidivist felon - had a history of testifying in exchange for cash and favors from law enforcers, prosecutors and corrections officials, dating from 1970s in Kentucky to the 1980s in Los Angeles.

After hiring a private investigator in 1996, Berke had located Hayes in a minimum-security prison in Marion, Ky., living under the name Charles Jones.

In documents filed with the court, Berke later established that Parks had assisted Hayes in obtaining reduced sentences in Los Angeles by testifying against inmates such as Stacy.

Abuse of jailhouse informant testimony by prosecutors and law enforcers in Los Angeles during the late 1970s and early 1980s erupted into scandal in 1988 after one such informant, Leslie Vernon White, demonstrated how he could fabricate confessions from fellow inmates by posing as a law enforcement official and gathering information over the phone.

The scandal led to a grand jury investigation in 1989 and the subsequent appointment of Berke and dozens of other attorneys to defend inmates who claimed to have been convicted based on unreliable jailhouse informant testimony.

In 1999, Superior Court Judge Patricia Collins held an evidentiary hearing and ruled the prosecutors suppressed evidence that Hayes had 30 prior arrests and five felony convictions before allowing him to testify against Stacy.

Stacy's trial attorney, Mark Overland, testified at his writ hearing in 1999 that he never received evidence of Hayes' complete criminal record before cross-examining him in 1983.

Although Collins struck the special circumstances allegations against Stacy - reducing his sentence to an indeterminate life term - she upheld the conviction.

The Los Angeles district attorney's office appealed the special circumstances ruling. But earlier this year, the 2nd District rejected prosecutors' appeal while ordering the district attorney to show cause why the entire conviction should not be voided as a result of Felker and Horn's failure to disclose Hayes' criminal record to Stacy's trial attorney.

Deputy District Attorney Fred Klink of the appellate division appeared before the appeals court in May and argued that the state had enough evidence to convict Stacy without Hayes' testimony.

Specifically, Klink pointed to Stacy's accomplice, Dean, who testified that Stacy was the shooter in the triple murder.

However, relying on the same reasoning the U.S. Supreme Court applied to interpret Brady in the case of Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419 (1995), the appeals court rejected Klink's argument that Stacy could have been convicted without Hayes' testimony.

"This suggests a harmless error or preponderance of evidence approach," Judge Gary Hastings, who was joined by Judge Norman Epstein and Judge Daniel Curry, wrote. "But that is not the approach sanctioned in connection with a Brady violation.

"The approach is to focus on the suppressed evidence, not the evidence remaining after discounting the tainted testimony, to determine whether in absence of the suppressed evidence the accused received a fair trial."

Overland said the ruling should send a message to the district attorney's office, which cites Kyles in its current Brady protocol.

"There's no new law being made here," Overland said. "They were wrong and they knew it. It's disturbing that they're still defending their actions."

Of Wednesday's ruling, Berke said, "The worst thing is that this was a capital case. You expect the greatest vigilance to due process in such cases, but unfortunately prosecutors cut corners at both the trial and the appellate level in their zeal to win."

Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, declined comment.