Articles

A Death Row Inmate Pushes His Claim That L.A. Prosecutors Suppressed Crucial Information

By Jeffrey Anderson, Daily Journal Staff Writer, July 25, 2002

LOS ANGELES - Armed with a referee's recent finding that his lawyers did not receive potentially exculpatory evidence from prosecutors during his 1982 murder trial, death row inmate Adam Miranda now is trying to convince the California Supreme Court to set aside his death sentence.

Miranda, who has spent 20 years on death row, alleges that Los Angeles prosecutors suppressed crucial evidence that could have been used to persuade a jury to vote against his execution.

On June 4, a San Diego judge, appointed as a referee to take evidence on Miranda's claim, concluded defense lawyers never got the evidence but stopped short of finding that it was deliberately withheld. In re Miranda, S058528.

The referee's report to the state Supreme Court comes on the heels of an appeals court ruling earlier this month that set aside the 20-year-old murder conviction of another man, Anthony Stacy, on similar grounds - that Los Angeles prosecutors suppressed evidence helpful to Stacy's defense. In re Stacy, B143115.

Stacy and Miranda are two recent embarrassments for the Los Angeles district attorney's office.

Besides the common issue they raise - violations of defendants' constitutional rights under the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963) - the two cases share other similarities.

Both cases arise out of a scandal in the late 1980s involving the misuse of jailhouse informant testimony, which resulted an expose on "60 Minutes" and a grand jury investigation in 1989. The district attorney's office later estimated that 153 convictions from 1979 to 1988 involved testimony by informants housed at the Los Angeles County Jail. Defense attorneys estimate that half of those were capital cases, a large number of which have not exhausted their post-conviction appeals.

In Miranda, defense attorneys claim prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that would have completely undermined the testimony of the sole prosecution witness used to persuade Miranda's jury to return a verdict of death.

In Stacy, the 2nd District Court of Appeals found that prosecutors failed to disclose exculpatory information to the defendant about an informant, an inmate with an extensive criminal record and a history of getting his sentences reduced and receiving money in exchange for sometimes unreliable testimony.

According to veteran defense attorneys, both cases are emblematic of the district attorney's conduct in failing to disclose exculpatory material as required under Brady - and its approach to handling appeals that arise from the jailhouse-informant controversy.

"You couldn't argue a murder case in those days without someone saying they'd witnessed a confession," said Santa Monica defender Gigi Gordon. "And despite the fact that everyone agreed reform was needed, to this day nobody has ever admitted that misconduct occurred in any single case. Cases like Miranda and Stacy represent the great diligence of their defense attorneys and nothing else."

Defenders point to a 1988 directive from the district attorney's office following revelations that county inmate Leslie Vernon White was fabricating jailhouse confessions by posing as a law enforcer and obtaining information over the phone about pending cases.

The directive said, "We must address those cases where jailhouse informants have been used in the past; the most objective way to do this is on a case-by-case basis before the Court.

"This will insure independent review of each case in which informant testimony was used. [Defense] attorneys will be advised of information we have received and encouraged to make a motion before the Court."

Deputy District Attorney George Palmer, the head of the office's appellate division, said that the district attorney's response to the jailhouse informant scandal was swift and unprecedented for a jurisdiction of its size.

"We assembled information about all of those cases [in which informant testimony was used] and created a library and made it available to defendants and inmates if they could provide proof of a legitimate interest."

"We didn't even require a discovery motion in those cases. The objective was to clear the air if anyone wanted to challenge the verdict."

Ordinarily, Palmer said, inmates petitioning for a writ of habeas corpus must make a prima facie case that information exists that could have affected the outcome of their trial before they may have access to prosecutors' files.

"We went beyond that," he said. "We felt obliged to do more."

But Gordon and other defenders claim the only reasons the district attorney's office budged in its response to the scandal were the threat of a grand jury investigation and bad press.

In the 1990s, as a number of petitions for habeas corpus were working their way through the system, the district attorney's office also threatened to destroy files relating to misdemeanors and felonies 15 years old or older, which could potentially contain evidence of previously undisclosed Brady material, according to Robert Berke, the attorney who handled Stacy's appeals.

In June 2001, after a five-year court battle over a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, the district attorney's office finally agreed to permanent storage of felony records involving sentences of life in prison without possibility of parole or death. California Attorneys for Criminal Justice v. County of Los Angeles, BC161572.

Since then, Berke said, prosecutors have continued to stonewall motions for discovery and petitions for writs of habeas corpus in cases where a defendant claimed a denial of the right to a fair trial.

"I've been citing U.S. Supreme Court cases on Brady and making motions for years on these cases, and I have to fight for every scrap of paper I get," he said. "This goes beyond prosecutors' pride or bullheadedness."

In addition to the discovery of information that defendants might use to help prove their innocence, the district attorney also continues to fight cases that appear tainted at the appellate level, he said.

Berke pointed to an appeals court ruling in March in Stacy, in which the justices clearly signaled they had reversal on their minds.

"But there was the district attorney's office, arguing on appeal that an obviously tainted conviction should stand,"he said.

Prosecutors contend that cases arising from the jailhouse informant scandal, such as Stacy, are distinguishable from cases such as Miranda, in which an alleged accomplice or eyewitness to a crime becomes a witness for the state.

Prosecutors further express frustration that defenders doggedly adhere to constitutional principles when the interests of people whom they believe to be cold-blooded killers are at stake.

"I don't have any doubt that Stacy is one of the murderers in the case, if not the shooter," Palmer said.

Added a veteran prosecutor who asked to remain anonymous, "I can understand defense attorneys' need to assign sinister motives to prosecutors, considering they're forced to get up every day and defend people they know are probably lying, if not guilty as charged."

"What gives the district attorney's office the right to play God?" replied George Hedges, Miranda's appellate attorney. He contends that, in Miranda's case, prosecutors buried evidence that discredited their own witness that was not uncovered for 14 years - until a federal judge ordered prosecutors to open their case file.

For Miranda, 42, a hearing on his claim is long overdue, according to his lawyers. Convicted in 1982 of murdering a store clerk during a robbery, Miranda was also charged with the special circumstance that he had committed a second murder, the stabbing of a drug dealer over a $10 dispute in 1980.

The special circumstance made Miranda eligible for the death penalty. The only witness for the prosecution regarding the second murder was Miranda's alleged accomplice, Joseph Saucedo, who told the jury that Miranda did the stabbing.

Court documents indicate that, in exchange for testimony against Miranda, Saucedo was released from custody, cleared of all charges and given moving expenses.

What Miranda's trial attorneys didn't' now was that prosecutors had a letter in their file from another inmate of the Los Angeles County Jail that totally undercut Saucedo's testimony.

According to inmate Larry Montez, Saucedo admitted that he, not Miranda, had stabbed the drug dealer to death.

That letter, Miranda's attorney say, is Brady material that would have discredited Saucedo and given the jury the requisite doubt needed to sentence Miranda to life without parole instead of death - if only his trial attorneys known of it. "If there was ever Brady material, this is it," Los Angeles attorney George Hedges told the state Supreme Court in his habeas petition.

"It doesn't get any worse than this. The prosecution got the death penalty, but buried the truth."

Miranda's lawyers charge that prosecutors - including Lance Ito, now a Los Angeles Superior Court judge - suppressed the letter that could have led the jury to spare Miranda's life. They also blame the other prosecutors who handled Miranda's case in the pretrial stages, former deputy district attorney Fred Horn, now an Orange County superior court judge and who also prosecuted Stacy, and Deputy District Attorney Curt Hazell.

In July 2001, the state Supreme Court appointed San Diego Superior Court Judge Roger Krauel as referee to determine whether the Montez letter was ever disclosed to Miranda's lawyers.

On May 29, after two evidentiary hearings, Krauel concluded that Miranda's lawyers did not receive the written statement when he was tried and sentenced to death in 1982.

Even if the court sets aside his death sentence, Miranda will serve out a life sentence without parole, according to Hedges, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges who was appointed to represent him in 1988.

However, Hedges believes an even greater question of justice is at stake.

"It's outrageous that [two now-sitting judges] would have buried a [written statement] in a file and never turned it over to the defense, knowing that it impeached their star witness," he said.

The letter was discovered only after Miranda filed a habeas petition in federal court and U.S. District Judge Marianna Pfaelzer of Los Angeles ordered the prosecutors to open their files for inspection. Miranda v. Calderon, CV89-7130.

Once the handwritten letter was found in a sealed manila envelope, Pfaelzer directed Miranda's attorneys to present the Brady issue to the state Supreme Court so it could rule on it first.

At the evidentiary hearing before Krauel, Ito testified that he recalled the Montez letter, but that he cannot recall disclosing it.

In his testimony, he said he had an "open file policy" that would have allowed Miranda's lawyers to retrieve any information to which they were entitled, simply by asking for it. (In a recent interview, Ito declined to comment on the pending case.)

Horn and Hazell both testified they cannot recall disclosing the Montez letter, and that they assumed the previous prosecutor, Ito, would have done so.

Among the issues before the state Supreme Court in coming months is whether the Montez letter is admissible as Brady material and whether it would have created a reasonable doubt among jurors in weighing the death penalty for Miranda.

In court papers, the state attorney general's office, which represents the district attorney's office, has alleged that the written statement in question is double hearsay and therefore inadmissible anyway.

"A judge has found that a slip of paper was not received by the defense in a murder case that took place 20 years ago," said Deputy State Attorney General David Glassman. "[Miranda's] lawyers have not proved [who] wrote the letter or whether it would even constitute admissible, impeaching evidence."

Glassman said a handwriting expert will testify that the Montez letter was not really written by Montez, and that Montez has denied making any statement implicating Saucedo as the man who killed Hosey.

According to Hedges, the Montez letter is genuine, and in any event, there is additional evidence of misconduct by the prosecutors to warrant a reversal of Miranda's death sentence.

"They also paid an informant to testify against my client and then allowed him to lie on the stand when asked if he had been compensated," he said. "We have a receipt showing that Saucedo was paid for his testimony and, when asked on cross-examination whether he was paid, he said no, which is a lie.

"[Hazell] just stood there and said nothing."

Hedges said he expects the state Supreme Court to set oral arguments on Miranda's habeas petition for this fall.