A.C. Thompson

Crime Bomb

Zelda Bronstein
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1

Editors note: This story was originally published May 31,  2001.


They found Virginia Lowery lying in the garage of her Excelsior home, an electrical cord around her throat, an ice pick jammed through her skull — in one ear and out the other. For the next 11 years San Francisco homicide detectives made no progress on the case. Promising leads turned into dead ends. Theories collapsed. The cops assigned to the case retired. It looked like Lowery’s 1987 slaying would never be solved.


Then in April 1998, by pure chance, police found Robert C. Nawi. Or rather, they found his fingertips.


When Nawi, a 57-year-old carpenter, got in a shouting match in a North Beach watering hole, he was picked up by the cops on misdemeanor charges and shuttled to county jail, where he was fingerprinted and booked. The computer spat out some interesting news: Nawi’s digits, according to the database, resembled a fingerprint found at the scene of Lowery’s slaying.


Soon thereafter, police evidence analyst Wendy Chong made a positive print match, and the new suspect found himself facing murder charges and life in a cage.


Nawi’s fate, to be decided at trial next year, rests largely on police readings of his fingerprints, as well as some DNA gathered by the coroner. Which raises some questions: How, exactly, did the cops and their computers analyze the evidence? Did they get it right? Is anybody checking their work?


 


Making a match between the distinguishing ridges and whorls, often microscopic, of two fresh fingerprints is a relatively simple task for a print expert. However, cases like Nawi’s aren’t so clear-cut: the print collected in Lowery’s garage is faint, smudged, and missing in patches.


Michael Burt, the resident forensicscience guru at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, shows me an 8-by-10-inch enlargement of the print discovered at the murder scene; it’s blurry, grainy, and only about 60 percent complete. To my layperson’s eye, it bears little resemblance to the clear, fresh mark left by Nawi at his booking. “The one print is so washed out you can’t see anything,” says Burt, who is representing Nawi. “This is not science at all; it’s subjective and shouldn’t be allowed.”


Burt, a 22-year veteran defense lawyer known around the Hall of Justice for his trademark cart full of documents, has plenty of cause to doubt the cops’ evidence. Despite what you may have seen on Law and Order, fingerprint examiners can — and often do — get it wrong. Last year 141 of America’s top forensic labs were tested to see if they could accurately match two fingerprints: 39 percent failed; 11 labs made false IDs. San Francisco analysts are rarely, if ever, graded for accuracy.


Jim Norris, head of the San Francisco Police Department’s forensics division, argues that new computer imaging tools are making it possible to match even sketchy, partial prints. “When somebody shows a print that was originally collected at the crime scene, and it looks very difficult to deal with, what they’re not looking at is the image that has been [digitally] enhanced,” Norris explains. “It’s a lot easier to deal with.” Norris admits that the department has seldom tested its print examiners for accuracy, but he says their work is constantly checked by superiors.


According to Burt, in this particular instance analysts didn’t turn to computers but simply enlarged the prints before making the call. The district attorney’s DNA evidence against Nawi is equally flawed, he says. When coroner Boyd Stephens autopsied the corpse, he — per routine — snipped the woman’s fingernails with a household nail clipper and stuck them in an envelope. Unrefrigerated, the clippings slowly rotted for more than a decade, until, in the wake of Nawi’s arrest, prosecutor John Farrell had them tested for DNA.


When the crime lab got the evidence, in 1998, DNA analyst Alan Keel scraped all 10 nails with a single cotton swab, combined the scrapings into one tiny pile, and dropped them into a genetic-typing device. According to standard forensic procedure, each nail should’ve been swabbed and tested separately.


Now, Burt contends, the sample has deteriorated because of a lack of refrigeration and has been contaminated with the DNA of more than one person. “[Keel] says there are three, possibly four different individuals underneath her fingernails,” the lawyer says. “He’s trying to grab my client out of that mixture. There’s no scientific way to do that.”


Norris disagrees: “There are ways to deal with [DNA] mixtures; it’s not a common problem luckily, but it’s something that comes up — for example, in rape cases where there are multiple assailants. There are ways to deal with it.”


I run down the scenario for Dr. Simon Ford, a Ph.D. biochemist and DNA expert who heads up San Francisco–based Lexigen Science and Law Consultants. “That’s not good,” Ford tells me. “You should deal with each hand separately, at least, and probably each nail separately. I don’t think combining all the nails together is a good idea.”


 


The dispassionate examination of crime scene evidence — narcotics, fingerprints, hair and fibers, genetic material, firearms, and everything else — is a cornerstone of the American justice system. The work, which can mean the difference between life and death for a suspect, is carried out by more than 500 labs nationwide, most of them run by law enforcement agencies.


In the public imagination — as shaped by endless cops-and-lawyers TV shows — forensic science is a perfectly impartial arbiter of justice. Eyewitnesses get confused. Police may be corrupt. Lawyers can corkscrew facts. Juries, not always composed of the brightest lights, can be swayed by mob dynamics. But science doesn’t lie. If the analyst says the bullet came from the suspect’s gun, then it must have.


It’s a comforting thought.


There’s just one problem: All forensic science is performed by humans, and all people make blunders. They mislabel samples. They use malfunctioning equipment. They inadvertently drop a flake of skin in a vial of blood, thus adding their own DNA to the sample.


Subjectivity, too, plays a starring role in forensic science, much of which depends on human-made comparisons. In one case heard last year by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Robert Dondero, two DNA experts couldn’t agree on the meaning of a genetic sample.


In addition to honest mistakes born of incompetence and overwork, there are continuously uncovered examples of fraud: the lab analyst, believing that the verdict justifies the means, willing to lie on the stand or fake test results. While the scientific question of DNA accuracy has been hashed out extensively in court rooms and the media, the issue of police crime lab accuracy has gone ignored, both by press and government regulators.


Each year California cops make 1.5 million arrests. Each of the state’s 19 local crime labs — run by sheriffs, prosecutors, and cops — performs thousands of analyses annually. Each of those tests, if faulty, could put an innocent person behind bars, or set a guilty soul free.


And in the wild world of forensics there are precious few safeguards against human bias and error: Crime labs are almost entirely unregulated. There are virtually no federal laws governing their operation; no law that says, “Bullet comparisons must be done using the best, most accurate techniques”; no law that says, “DNA examiners must meet these basic educational criteria”; no requirement that crime labs be audited and inspected. In California only DUI-<\h>testing procedures are regulated by state law.


“There’s more regulation in whether some clinical lab can give a test for strep throat than there is on whether you can use a test to put somebody in the gas chamber,” public defender Burt says. “That to me seems backwards. The stakes are the highest in the criminal justice system. These people are deciding who lives or dies.”


The ramifications spread beyond individual cases. While billions of dollars have been poured into police departments and prisons over the past two decades, pols and badge wearers have shown little interest in adequately funding or regulating crime labs. California’s facilities need hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and equipment upgrades. The idea of public oversight is off the radar entirely.


The nonprofit American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD) is the closest thing forensics has to a regulatory agency. Created in the early 1970s to “improve the quality of laboratory services provided to the criminal justice system,” the group runs a voluntary accreditation program for forensic facilities. To get the society’s stamp of approval, a facility must pass a 149-point inspection. (Sample question: “Are the procedures used generally accepted in the field or supported by data gathered in a scientific manner?”) To maintain the certification, a lab must be tested annually and be reinspected every five years.


Of the approximately 500 labs in the United States, a mere 187 are accredited by the ASCLD. Only 11 of California’s 19 local crime labs have the group’s seal of approval. The San Francisco police facility isn’t one of them. Neither is the Contra Costa sheriff’s lab. Nor the San Mateo sheriff’s forensic unit.


 


“Got dope?” asks the white-coated woman who opens the locked door to the SFPD crime lab. She’s expecting cops bearing drug-filled baggies, to be weighed and tested and filed away until the courtroom beckons. Crime lab chief Martha “Marty” Blake steps out of her windowless office to greet me.


A few months back, Blake and her 18-person team traded overstuffed quarters in the city’s central cop shop at Eighth Street and Bryant for expansive new $1.5 million digs out in the asphalt wastes of the Hunters Point shipyard. “I’m getting ready to apply for accreditation, hopefully by next spring,” she says, pointing to a file cabinet emblazoned with the ASCLD seal. “We couldn’t get accredited in that facility when we were downtown at the Hall of Justice. It was too cramped. There was no way we could guarantee there would never be any chance for any contamination of the evidence when we had four people crammed into a little room trying to look at clothing, for example.”


Blake’s operation has taken its lumps over the years. In 1994 analyst Allison Lancaster was canned after she was videotaped faking drug tests. Last year Superior Court Judge Dondero slammed the lab’s lead DNA expert for “engaging in shortcuts,” “performing missteps,” and harboring a questionable “degree of bias” against defendants. Defense lawyers like Burt continue to hammer the lab for its lack of credentials.


With her eyeglasses and graying hair Blake looks more like a schoolteacher than a cop. She pulls a xeroxed sheet of paper out of a drawer and eagerly places it in front of me. “We just switched to a new case review process. This is the sort of thing we have to implement for accreditation. Every case we produce has to go through a review by a supervisor,” she explains. “This wasn’t happening before; a review happened before, but you’d just glance over [the work] and say, ‘Hmm, looks good to me,’ and initial it. It was sort of lightweight.” Bolstered by an increased budget and a growing staff, the lab’s procedures are improving across the board, according to Blake.


Why should forensic labs, which can land someone on death row, go without government oversight? “I’d like to think we can do this ourselves,” Blake replies, noting that the state’s management of the DUI testing program has been less than stellar. “I’m a little nervous about other agencies getting involved in regulation,” she says, because they don’t “really know the science.”


Nationally, the accountability vacuum is producing a steady stream of scandals, raising unsettling questions about the way we administer justice in this locked-down nation. A small sampling:
• Let’s start with the trial of the century, wherein O.J.’s defense team put the forensic bunglings of the Los Angeles Police Department on display for “unacceptable sloppiness,” pointing out a dozen major instances of possible evidence contamination. After losing the Simpson trial, the lab promptly began a thorough overhaul.
• In 1993 the West Virginia Supreme Court found a police blood expert guilty of fabricating or misrepresenting evidence in a staggering 134 cases. The man, one Fred Zain — employed by the state cops during the 1980s — was put on trial for perjury, while the state freed several unjustly imprisoned death row inmates and paid out millions to people who had been wrongfully convicted. Bexar County, Texas, where Zain worked in the early ’90s, also prosecuted him for perjury.
• A few years later, in 1997, the reputation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation crime lab — at the time widely regarded as the pinnacle of forensic science — was shredded by the allegations of a whistle-blowing scientist. The bureau’s lab practiced shoddy science and regularly presented inaccurate, pro-prosecution testimony, charged Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, one of the agency’s top explosives experts. The FBI denied the allegations and tried to discredit Whitehurst, but a scathing 517-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general corroborated many of the scientist’s major claims and recommended disciplinary action against five agents.


• An April 1997 front-page story in the Wall Street Journal brought more unflattering publicity to the FBI lab, scrutinizing the track record of agent Michael Malone, a hair and fiber analyst. The paper quoted three well-known forensic scientists who challenged Malone’s analyses (one labeled him a “fraud”), illustrated numerous cases where the agent seemed to be fudging the evidence — and noted that courts were busy overturning convictions obtained with his testimony. “The guy’s a total liar,” one defense lawyer told the Wall Street Journal.
• In 1998 San Diego jurors convicted a top county police DNA expert of embezzling $8,100 in cash seized as evidence in murder cases. That same year the San Diego Police Department embarked on a 10-month internal investigation into charges of sloppy work and missing evidence at its crime lab, and it admitted that it had lost crucial evidence in an unsolved homicide case.
• Last year a crime lab chemist in Prince George’s County, Md., claimed that the police department was using improperly calibrated drug analysis equipment. Defense lawyers promptly challenged some 100 pending drug cases.



California is one of the few states that has actually scoped the inner workings of its local crime labs. The results of that onetime review, performed in 1998 by the state auditor’s office, are disturbing. Quality control was lacking at most of the facilities. Many of the labs were using “outdated and improperly working equipment.” As in San Francisco, many didn’t make their scientists undergo regular proficiency testing.


Without quality assurance measures — minimal at 13 of the 19 labs — the potential for error shoots through the roof. California auditor Elaine Howel says the study raised serious questions. “There are several issues,” she says. “Is the evidence being handled appropriately so there’s no potential for contamination?” Labs, according to Howel, should “make sure they are consistently applying the methodology so one forensic examiner isn’t using one technique and someone is using a different technique to conduct the same type of testing. That ties back to the credibility of the results.”


Ten of the outfits were relying on “outmoded” technology that needed replacement. At the Huntington Beach Police Department lab, staffers worked up a Rube Goldberg–<\d>esque scheme to revive a broken arson analysis gadget. Sort of. “Because the laboratory does not have the funds to replace this equipment, staff found a creative way to cool the [machine] using hoses rigged to a faucet,” auditors found. But, they noted, “this method could negatively affect the analysis of the evidence processed by this instrument.”


Then there was the question of whether the analysts themselves were up to par. “We think forensic examiners need to be tested every year to make sure they’re maintaining competence in their ability to perform the forensic examinations they’re doing,” Howel tells me. Eight of the labs had no proficiency testing for their staffers.


“It helped us put our operation in perspective to the rest of the state,” says S.F. lab chief Blake, who thinks the audit was fair. “We did look like we were swamped. It helped us get our additional staff.”


Whitehurst, the former top explosives expert at the FBI, doesn’t like the term ‘whistle-blower.’ “We’re simply scientists, and we disagree with the type of science that’s being practiced — because it’s not science,” he told me. “Our forensic labs are dictating truth; they’re not discovering it.” Whitehurst says he constantly hears from irate crime lab scientists claiming their operations are riddled with improprieties.


The Ph.D. chemist spent eight years at the bureau combing the rubble of bomb blasts for clues. And complaining. During his tenure with the bureau, he made 237 written complaints concerning what he saw as a pattern of bunk science and bogus testimony on the part of his colleagues. The charges spurred an 18-month probe by the Justice Department, the phone-book-size results of which were made public in 1997, undoubtedly marking one of the FBI’s worst public embarrassments.


The special-inspection team, an international panel of renowned forensic scientists, had few kind words for the lab, finding “significant instances of testimonial errors, substandard analytical work, and deficient practices” in numerous investigations, including the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, and World Trade Center bombings. Among the skeletons in the bureau’s closet: “scientifically flawed reports”; examiners devoid of the “requisite scientific qualifications”; and five agents who couldn’t be trusted.


Whitehurst’s experiences have led him to believe that crime labs should be overseen by federal or state authorities, rather than by ASCLD and its voluntary certification program. “It’s a foregone conclusion; there’s no question in my mind in five years forensic labs will be regulated, and they will be audited,” said Whitehurst, who now lives in Bethel, N.C., and acts as an expert witness in criminal trials. “There’s too much discovery happening.”


Lab directors argue that their work is constantly reviewed by the courts — juries don’t have to believe a forensic expert; judges can overturn verdicts based on forensic evidence — making their profession among the most scrutinized.
Whitehurst disagrees, saying juries, defense lawyers, and judges are often baffled by the science presented to them. “Listen to this phrase: pyrolisis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry,” he says. “Do you know what that is? Let’s try this one: fourier transform infrared spectrometry. I’ve got a doctorate in chemistry and a jurisdoctorate also. What I’m saying to you are completely foreign concepts. When I try to explain how a ultraviolet spectraphatometer works, or how a micro spectraphatometer works, just saying the words begins the glass-over of the eyes.”


The Alameda County Sheriff’s crime lab is housed in a two-story building in the foothills just off 150th Avenue in San Leandro. On the second floor, in a series of linoleum-tiled rooms connected by a cluttered hallway, the lab’s technicians scope the physical remnants of crime, putting bullets beneath microscopes, lifting latent fingerprints from knife handles, culling DNA strands from splattered blood.


Each year the operation, which analyzes evidence for most of the county’s police forces, handles some 200 “major” investigations, most of them murders and rapes. But drug cases (1,800 to 2,000) and DUIs (more than 4,700) make up the bulk of the work. There are only eight lab technicians to handle the massive load.


“Every analytical report has to be right on the mark,” said lab director Tony Sprague, who has worked at the facility for 30 years. “We have a huge responsibility to make sure all the results are accurate.”


Sprague guides me through the building, showing me a single lead particle, as magnified 10,000 times by a monstrous, $270,000 scanning electron microscope. Next door a white-<\h>coated technician sits glued to a conventional microscope, studying a handgun cartridge. Across the hall are the analysts’ personal workstations: on one of the wide-topped tables sit the innards of an auto; on another lie sheets of paper covered with boot prints.


Sprague is an amiable gearhead and explains in detail how each of the machines works. The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, an ovenlike slab of a machine, can detect the presence of gasoline or kerosene in air samples collected at the scene of a suspected arson fire. Another device uses infrared light to determine the chemical composition of a given substance — a bag of white powder for instance.


The lab’s ASCLD accreditation in June 1999 was a huge undertaking, according to Sprague. “It took us about two years [to get certified],” he says. “It was costly from the standpoint that you have to take dedicated staff time away from analytical work to get the paperwork done for the accreditation process. In our case we really didn’t change our ways of doing forensic science to meet accreditation standards. There was really no issue about doing things differently — the thing we had to do, we had to document all the policies, the procedures, all of our quality assurance records had to be brought up to a little bit higher level.”


Voluntary reviews by the nonprofit ASCLD are enough regulation for Sprague, who views government oversight as a losing proposition. “Some mandated federal program? I don’t know that that’s really the answer,” he says. “That would involve a huge bureaucracy. It would be a very difficult situation.”


Ralph Keaton, executive director of ASCLD’s accrediting board, agrees. “I think crime laboratories should have some kind of program to review the quality of the work being produced by the laboratory — and that’s the reason we came into existence,” he tells me via telephone from the organization’s headquarters in Garner, N.C. “It’s my opinion that no one can evaluate the type of work being done better than the actual practitioners of that discipline. Just like the oversight of the medical profession is best done by the doctors themselves.”


Speaking to me in his office library, Sprague tells me he is proud of the work his team does, proud to be acknowledged by his peers. But he admits to a certain frustration, saying that his lab is seriously short-staffed: “We’re about one-third the strength we should be at for what we’re doing.”

Crime Bomb

Zelda Bronstein
-
0

Editors note: This story was originally published in 2001.


 


They found Virginia Lowery lying in the garage of her Excelsior home, an electrical cord around her throat, an ice pick jammed through her skull — in one ear and out the other. For the next 11 years San Francisco homicide detectives made no progress on the case. Promising leads turned into dead ends. Theories collapsed. The cops assigned to the case retired. It looked like Lowery’s 1987 slaying would never be solved.
Then in April 1998, by pure chance, police found Robert C. Nawi. Or rather, they found his fingertips.
When Nawi, a 57-year-old carpenter, got in a shouting match in a North Beach watering hole, he was picked up by the cops on misdemeanor charges and shuttled to county jail, where he was fingerprinted and booked. The computer spat out some interesting news: Nawi’s digits, according to the database, resembled a fingerprint found at the scene of Lowery’s slaying.
Soon thereafter, police evidence analyst Wendy Chong made a positive print match, and the new suspect found himself facing murder charges and life in a cage.
Nawi’s fate, to be decided at trial next year, rests largely on police readings of his fingerprints, as well as some DNA gathered by the coroner. Which raises some questions: How, exactly, did the cops and their computers analyze the evidence? Did they get it right? Is anybody checking their work?


Making a match between the distinguishing ridges and whorls, often microscopic, of two fresh fingerprints is a relatively simple task for a print expert. However, cases like Nawi’s aren’t so clear-cut: the print collected in Lowery’s garage is faint, smudged, and missing in patches.
Michael Burt, the resident forensic-<\h>science guru at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, shows me an 8-by-10-inch enlargement of the print discovered at the murder scene; it’s blurry, grainy, and only about 60 percent complete. To my layperson’s eye, it bears little resemblance to the clear, fresh mark left by Nawi at his booking. “The one print is so washed out you can’t see anything,” says Burt, who is representing Nawi. “This is not science at all; it’s subjective and shouldn’t be allowed.”
Burt, a 22-year veteran defense lawyer known around the Hall of Justice for his trademark cart full of documents, has plenty of cause to doubt the cops’ evidence. Despite what you may have seen on Law and Order, fingerprint examiners can — and often do — get it wrong. Last year 141 of America’s top forensic labs were tested to see if they could accurately match two fingerprints: 39 percent failed; 11 labs made false IDs. San Francisco analysts are rarely, if ever, graded for accuracy.
Jim Norris, head of the San Francisco Police Department’s forensics division, argues that new computer imaging tools are making it possible to match even sketchy, partial prints. “When somebody shows a print that was originally collected at the crime scene, and it looks very difficult to deal with, what they’re not looking at is the image that has been [digitally] enhanced,” Norris explains. “It’s a lot easier to deal with.” Norris admits that the department has seldom tested its print examiners for accuracy, but he says their work is constantly checked by superiors.
According to Burt, in this particular instance analysts didn’t turn to computers but simply enlarged the prints before making the call. The district attorney’s DNA evidence against Nawi is equally flawed, he says. When coroner Boyd Stephens autopsied the corpse, he — per routine — snipped the woman’s fingernails with a household nail clipper and stuck them in an envelope. Unrefrigerated, the clippings slowly rotted for more than a decade, until, in the wake of Nawi’s arrest, prosecutor John Farrell had them tested for DNA.
When the crime lab got the evidence, in 1998, DNA analyst Alan Keel scraped all 10 nails with a single cotton swab, combined the scrapings into one tiny pile, and dropped them into a genetic-<\h>typing device. According to standard forensic procedure, each nail should’ve been swabbed and tested separately.
Now, Burt contends, the sample has deteriorated because of a lack of refrigeration and has been contaminated with the DNA of more than one person. “[Keel] says there are three, possibly four different individuals underneath her fingernails,” the lawyer says. “He’s trying to grab my client out of that mixture. There’s no scientific way to do that.”
Norris disagrees: “There are ways to deal with [DNA] mixtures; it’s not a common problem luckily, but it’s something that comes up — for example, in rape cases where there are multiple assailants. There are ways to deal with it.”
I run down the scenario for Dr. Simon Ford, a Ph.D. biochemist and DNA expert who heads up San Francisco–<\d>based Lexigen Science and Law Consultants. “That’s not good,” Ford tells me. “You should deal with each hand separately, at least, and probably each nail separately. I don’t think combining all the nails together is a good idea.”
Blinding them with science
The dispassionate examination of crime scene evidence — narcotics, fingerprints, hair and fibers, genetic material, firearms, and everything else — is a cornerstone of the American justice system. The work, which can mean the difference between life and death for a suspect, is carried out by more than 500 labs nationwide, most of them run by law enforcement agencies.
In the public imagination — as shaped by endless cops-and-<\h>lawyers TV shows — forensic science is a perfectly impartial arbiter of justice. Eyewitnesses get confused. Police may be corrupt. Lawyers can corkscrew facts. Juries, not always composed of the brightest lights, can be swayed by mob dynamics. But science doesn’t lie. If the analyst says the bullet came from the suspect’s gun, then it must have.
It’s a comforting thought.
There’s just one problem: All forensic science is performed by humans, and all people make blunders. They mislabel samples. They use malfunctioning equipment. They inadvertently drop a flake of skin in a vial of blood, thus adding their own DNA to the sample.
Subjectivity, too, plays a starring role in forensic science, much of which depends on human-<\h>made comparisons. In one case heard last year by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Robert Dondero, two DNA experts couldn’t agree on the meaning of a genetic sample.
In addition to honest mistakes born of incompetence and overwork, there are continuously uncovered examples of fraud: the lab analyst, believing that the verdict justifies the means, willing to lie on the stand or fake test results.
While the scientific question of DNA accuracy has been hashed out extensively in court rooms and the media, the issue of police crime lab accuracy has gone ignored, both by press and government regulators.
Each year California cops make 1.5 million arrests. Each of the state’s 19 local crime labs — run by sheriffs, prosecutors, and cops — performs thousands of analyses annually. Each of those tests, if faulty, could put an innocent person behind bars, or set a guilty soul free.
And in the wild world of forensics there are precious few safeguards against human bias and error: Crime labs are almost entirely unregulated. There are virtually no federal laws governing their operation; no law that says, “Bullet comparisons must be done using the best, most accurate techniques”; no law that says, “DNA examiners must meet these basic educational criteria”; no requirement that crime labs be audited and inspected. In California only DUI-<\h>testing procedures are regulated by state law.
“There’s more regulation in whether some clinical lab can give a test for strep throat than there is on whether you can use a test to put somebody in the gas chamber,” public defender Burt says. “That to me seems backwards. The stakes are the highest in the criminal justice system. These people are deciding who lives or dies.”
The ramifications spread beyond individual cases. While billions of dollars have been poured into police departments and prisons over the past two decades, pols and badge wearers have shown little interest in adequately funding or regulating crime labs. California’s facilities need hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and equipment upgrades. The idea of public oversight is off the radar entirely.
The nonprofit American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD) is the closest thing forensics has to a regulatory agency. Created in the early 1970s to “improve the quality of laboratory services provided to the criminal justice system,” the group runs a voluntary accreditation program for forensic facilities. To get the society’s stamp of approval, a facility must pass a 149-point inspection. (Sample question: “Are the procedures used generally accepted in the field or supported by data gathered in a scientific manner?”) To maintain the certification, a lab must be tested annually and be reinspected every five years.
Of the approximately 500 labs in the United States, a mere 187 are accredited by the ASCLD. Only 11 of California’s 19 local crime labs have the group’s seal of approval. The San Francisco police facility isn’t one of them. Neither is the Contra Costa sheriff’s lab. Nor the San Mateo sheriff’s forensic unit.
Renewing the review process
“Got dope?” asks the white-<\h>coated woman who opens the locked door to the SFPD crime lab. She’s expecting cops bearing drug-filled baggies, to be weighed and tested and filed away until the courtroom beckons. Crime lab chief Martha “Marty” Blake steps out of her windowless office to greet me.
A few months back, Blake and her 18-person team traded overstuffed quarters in the city’s central cop shop at Eighth Street and Bryant for expansive new $1.5 million digs out in the asphalt wastes of the Hunters Point shipyard. “I’m getting ready to apply for accreditation, hopefully by next spring,” she says, pointing to a file cabinet emblazoned with the ASCLD seal. “We couldn’t get accredited in that facility when we were downtown at the Hall of Justice. It was too cramped. There was no way we could guarantee there would never be any chance for any contamination of the evidence when we had four people crammed into a little room trying to look at clothing, for example.”
Blake’s operation has taken its lumps over the years. In 1994 analyst Allison Lancaster was canned after she was videotaped faking drug tests. Last year Superior Court Judge Dondero slammed the lab’s lead DNA expert for “engaging in shortcuts,” “performing missteps,” and harboring a questionable “degree of bias” against defendants. Defense lawyers like Burt continue to hammer the lab for its lack of credentials.
With her eyeglasses and graying hair Blake looks more like a schoolteacher than a cop. She pulls a xeroxed sheet of paper out of a drawer and eagerly places it in front of me. “We just switched to a new case review process. This is the sort of thing we have to implement for accreditation. Every case we produce has to go through a review by a supervisor,” she explains. “This wasn’t happening before; a review happened before, but you’d just glance over [the work] and say, ‘Hmm, looks good to me,’ and initial it. It was sort of lightweight.” Bolstered by an increased budget and a growing staff, the lab’s procedures are improving across the board, according to Blake.
Why should forensic labs, which can land someone on death row, go without government oversight? “I’d like to think we can do this ourselves,” Blake replies, noting that the state’s management of the DUI testing program has been less than stellar. “I’m a little nervous about other agencies getting involved in regulation,” she says, because they don’t “really know the science.”
Beyond O.J.
Nationally, the accountability vacuum is producing a steady stream of scandals, raising unsettling questions about the way we administer justice in this locked-down nation. A small sampling:
• Let’s start with the trial of the century, wherein O.J.’s defense team put the forensic bunglings of the Los Angeles Police Department on display for “unacceptable sloppiness,” pointing out a dozen major instances of possible evidence contamination. After losing the Simpson trial, the lab promptly began a thorough overhaul.
• In 1993 the West Virginia Supreme Court found a police blood expert guilty of fabricating or misrepresenting evidence in a staggering 134 cases. The man, one Fred Zain — employed by the state cops during the 1980s — was put on trial for perjury, while the state freed several unjustly imprisoned death row inmates and paid out millions to people who had been wrongfully convicted. Bexar County, Texas, where Zain worked in the early ’90s, also prosecuted him for perjury.
• A few years later, in 1997, the reputation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation crime lab — at the time widely regarded as the pinnacle of forensic science — was shredded by the allegations of a whistle-<\h>blowing scientist. The bureau’s lab practiced shoddy science and regularly presented inaccurate, pro-<\h>prosecution testimony, charged Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, one of the agency’s top explosives experts. The FBI denied the allegations and tried to discredit Whitehurst, but a scathing 517-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general corroborated many of the scientist’s major claims and recommended disciplinary action against five agents.
• An April 1997 front-page story in the Wall Street Journal brought more unflattering publicity to the FBI lab, scrutinizing the track record of agent Michael Malone, a hair and fiber analyst. The paper quoted three well-known forensic scientists who challenged Malone’s analyses (one labeled him a “fraud”), illustrated numerous cases where the agent seemed to be fudging the evidence — and noted that courts were busy overturning convictions obtained with his testimony. “The guy’s a total liar,” one defense lawyer told the Wall Street Journal.
• In 1998 San Diego jurors convicted a top county police DNA expert of embezzling $8,100 in cash seized as evidence in murder cases. That same year the San Diego Police Department embarked on a 10-month internal investigation into charges of sloppy work and missing evidence at its crime lab, and it admitted that it had lost crucial evidence in an unsolved homicide case.
• Last year a crime lab chemist in Prince George’s County, Md., claimed that the police department was using improperly calibrated drug analysis equipment. Defense lawyers promptly challenged some 100 pending drug cases.
Under the microscope
California is one of the few states that has actually scoped the inner workings of its local crime labs. The results of that onetime review, performed in 1998 by the state auditor’s office, are disturbing. Quality control was lacking at most of the facilities. Many of the labs were using “outdated and improperly working equipment.” As in San Francisco, many didn’t make their scientists undergo regular proficiency testing.
Without quality assurance measures — minimal at 13 of the 19 labs — the potential for error shoots through the roof. California auditor Elaine Howel says the study raised serious questions. “There are several issues,” she says. “Is the evidence being handled appropriately so there’s no potential for contamination?” Labs, according to Howel, should “make sure they are consistently applying the methodology so one forensic examiner isn’t using one technique and someone is using a different technique to conduct the same type of testing. That ties back to the credibility of the results.”
Ten of the outfits were relying on “outmoded” technology that needed replacement. At the Huntington Beach Police Department lab, staffers worked up a Rube Goldberg–<\d>esque scheme to revive a broken arson analysis gadget. Sort of. “Because the laboratory does not have the funds to replace this equipment, staff found a creative way to cool the [machine] using hoses rigged to a faucet,” auditors found. But, they noted, “this method could negatively affect the analysis of the evidence processed by this instrument.”
Then there was the question of whether the analysts themselves were up to par. “We think forensic examiners need to be tested every year to make sure they’re maintaining competence in their ability to perform the forensic examinations they’re doing,” Howel tells me. Eight of the labs had no proficiency testing for their staffers.
“It helped us put our operation in perspective to the rest of the state,” says S.F. lab chief Blake, who thinks the audit was fair. “We did look like we were swamped. It helped us get our additional staff.”
Busting the FBI
Whitehurst, the former top explosives expert at the FBI, doesn’t like the term ‘whistle-blower.’ “We’re simply scientists, and we disagree with the type of science that’s being practiced — because it’s not science,” he told me. “Our forensic labs are dictating truth; they’re not discovering it.” Whitehurst says he constantly hears from irate crime lab scientists claiming their operations are riddled with improprieties.
The Ph.D. chemist spent eight years at the bureau combing the rubble of bomb blasts for clues. And complaining. During his tenure with the bureau, he made 237 written complaints concerning what he saw as a pattern of bunk science and bogus testimony on the part of his colleagues. The charges spurred an 18-month probe by the Justice Department, the phone-book-<\h>size results of which were made public in 1997, undoubtedly marking one of the FBI’s worst public embarrassments.
The special-inspection team, an international panel of renowned forensic scientists, had few kind words for the lab, finding “significant instances of testimonial errors, substandard analytical work, and deficient practices” in numerous investigations, including the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, and World Trade Center bombings. Among the skeletons in the bureau’s closet: “scientifically flawed reports”; examiners devoid of the “requisite scientific qualifications”; and five agents who couldn’t be trusted.
Whitehurst’s experiences have led him to believe that crime labs should be overseen by federal or state authorities, rather than by ASCLD and its voluntary certification program. “It’s a foregone conclusion; there’s no question in my mind in five years forensic labs will be regulated, and they will be audited,” said Whitehurst, who now lives in Bethel, N.C., and acts as an expert witness in criminal trials. “There’s too much discovery happening.”
Lab directors argue that their work is constantly reviewed by the courts — juries don’t have to believe a forensic expert; judges can overturn verdicts based on forensic evidence — making their profession among the most scrutinized.
Whitehurst disagrees, saying juries, defense lawyers, and judges are often baffled by the science presented to them. “Listen to this phrase: pyrolisis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry,” he says. “Do you know what that is? Let’s try this one: fourier transform infrared spectrometry. I’ve got a doctorate in chemistry and a jurisdoctorate also. What I’m saying to you are completely foreign concepts. When I try to explain how a ultraviolet spectraphatometer works, or how a micro spectraphatometer works, just saying the words begins the glass-over of the eyes.”
Understaffed in Alameda
The Alameda County Sheriff’s crime lab is housed in a two-<\h>story building in the foothills just off 150th Avenue in San Leandro. On the second floor, in a series of linoleum-<\h>tiled rooms connected by a cluttered hallway, the lab’s technicians scope the physical remnants of crime, putting bullets beneath microscopes, lifting latent fingerprints from knife handles, culling DNA strands from splattered blood.
Each year the operation, which analyzes evidence for most of the county’s police forces, handles some 200 “major” investigations, most of them murders and rapes. But drug cases (1,800 to 2,000) and DUIs (more than 4,700) make up the bulk of the work. There are only eight lab technicians to handle the massive load.
“Every analytical report has to be right on the mark,” said lab director Tony Sprague, who has worked at the facility for 30 years. “We have a huge responsibility to make sure all the results are accurate.”
Sprague guides me through the building, showing me a single lead particle, as magnified 10,000 times by a monstrous, $270,000 scanning electron microscope. Next door a white-<\h>coated technician sits glued to a conventional microscope, studying a handgun cartridge. Across the hall are the analysts’ personal workstations: on one of the wide-<\h>topped tables sit the innards of an auto; on another lie sheets of paper covered with boot prints.
Sprague is an amiable gearhead and explains in detail how each of the machines works. The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, an ovenlike slab of a machine, can detect the presence of gasoline or kerosene in air samples collected at the scene of a suspected arson fire. Another device uses infrared light to determine the chemical composition of a given substance — a bag of white powder for instance.
The lab’s ASCLD accreditation in June 1999 was a huge undertaking, according to Sprague. “It took us about two years [to get certified],” he says. “It was costly from the standpoint that you have to take dedicated staff time away from analytical work to get the paperwork done for the accreditation process. In our case we really didn’t change our ways of doing forensic science to meet accreditation standards. There was really no issue about doing things differently — the thing we had to do, we had to document all the policies, the procedures, all of our quality assurance records had to be brought up to a little bit higher level.”
Voluntary reviews by the nonprofit ASCLD are enough regulation for Sprague, who views government oversight as a losing proposition. “Some mandated federal program? I don’t know that that’s really the answer,” he says. “That would involve a huge bureaucracy. It would be a very difficult situation.”
Ralph Keaton, executive director of ASCLD’s accrediting board, agrees. “I think crime laboratories should have some kind of program to review the quality of the work being produced by the laboratory — and that’s the reason we came into existence,” he tells me via telephone from the organization’s headquarters in Garner, N.C. “It’s my opinion that no one can evaluate the type of work being done better than the actual practitioners of that discipline. Just like the oversight of the medical profession is best done by the doctors themselves.”
Speaking to me in his office library, Sprague tells me he is proud of the work his team does, proud to be acknowledged by his peers. But he admits to a certain frustration, saying that his lab is seriously short-staffed: “We’re about one-third the strength we should be at for what we’re doing.”<\!s>v

The hardest time

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Here are the few undisputed facts in the slaying of Roderick “Cooly” Shannon: in the quiet early-morning hours of Aug. 19, 1989, Shannon piloted his mother’s green sedan past the modest, boxy houses of their Visitacion Valley neighborhood. As Shannon coasted along, a posse of young men piled into four cars and gave chase, careening after him through the darkened streets. At the intersection of Delta Street and Visitacion Avenue, the hunted 18-year-old plowed up on the sidewalk, crashed into a chain-link fence, and fled on foot. He ran a couple of blocks, pounding into the parking lot of Super Fair, a graffiti- covered liquor- and- groceries joint. The mob – about 12 deep – grabbed him as he tried to scale the fence between the store and the house next door.

They pummeled Shannon. Then one of the thugs executed him with shotgun blasts to the shoulder and head.

Police linked Shannon’s murder to a raging war between hood-sters from Vis Valley and Hunters Point. Young people – mostly African American – in the two housing project-heavy districts were waging a bloody battle for control of the drug trade, a battle that had escalated into a string of life-for-life revenge killings.

Homicide cops figured Shannon’s execution was a retaliatory hit for the “Cheap Charlie” slayings six months earlier. “Cheap” Charlie Hughes was a player in the Hunters Point drug business who’d been gunned down on his home turf at the intersection of Newcomb Avenue and Mendell Street in a massive firefight. The attack, thought at the time to be the handiwork of gangsters from Sunnydale public housing, also took the life of Roshawn Johnson and sent nine others to the hospital with gunshot wounds. Shannon’s killers, the San Francisco Police Department contended, either thought he had a role in the Cheap Charlie shoot-up or simply wanted to take a Sunnydale homeboy out of the game.

In the fall of 1990 two young men were locked up for Shannon’s murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in the state penitentiary.

Both men had alibis, and 10 years later both maintain their innocence. There are a lot of reasons to believe them.

The prosecution’s case relied almost completely on the shaky, ever changing testimony of a pair of adolescent car thieves. A new eyewitness says the convicted men had no part in the killing. And in a plot twist straight out of Hollywood, another person has confessed to the crime.

Despite a pile of exonerating evidence, the prisoners remain caged. But one of them – a spiritual, soft- spoken man named John J. Tennison – has an unusually passionate, stubborn lawyer on his side. Jeff Adachi, a sharp-dressed idealist known for winning tough cases, has spent 11 long years fighting for Tennison’s freedom – and isn’t about to give up. This is the story of the lifer and the lawyer who wouldn’t quit.

The 12-gauge shotgun that took Shannon’s life was never found. Immediately after his death, homicide detectives Napoleon Hendrix and Prentice “Earl” Sanders spent three fruitless days scouring the city for clues. The killers left little meaningful evidence at the murder scene – no fingerprints, no footprints, no blood, no DNA.

Then a 12-year-old Samoan girl named Masina Fauolo called, offering eyewitness information. She said nothing about anybody named Tennison. But after months of talking to the inspectors, Fauolo, a pal of the victim who lived a few blocks from the crime scene in subsidized housing, identified Tennison as a key player in the murder. “Fat J.J.,” she said, held Shannon, while a man named Anton Goff blew him away. A few months later Fauolo’s friend Pauline Maluina, then 14, chimed in with a corroborating narrative.

Besides Fauolo and Maluina, no one would admit to having seen the killing.

During the autumn of 1989, propelled by the testimony of the two girls, police rounded up Tennison and Goff and hit them with first- degree murder charges.

Enter Adachi, a tough- talking young public defender. Scoping the prosecution’s evidence against Tennison, he found a case riddled with inconsistencies. He figured his client would walk. “The girls’ stories never made any sense,” Adachi says today. “I really thought this case was a winner.”

The attorney also found a young man who regarded him with deep suspicion. “I’m sure he had a certain stereotype coming in of public defender,” Adachi says. “A lot of it comes from popular media: you always hear that line, ‘Why was he convicted? He had a public defender.’ Within popular culture in the African American community there’s that distrust of anything related to the Hall of Justice.”

“It wasn’t just [Adachi]; it was the whole predicament,” Tennison explains. “I’d never been in that situation – charged with murder.”

Meanwhile, deputy district attorney George Butterworth was building an indictment of Tennison on the words of Fauolo and Maluina. As he did, their stories mutated.

Fauolo’s account of the August 1989 murder, laid out in trial transcripts, went like this: She’d taken the bus from Sunnydale to the corner of 24th and Mission Streets, where she picked up a stolen two-door gray car from her cousin. Fauolo and Maluina took off, cruising through the Financial District, down Mission Street, and north to Fisherman’s Wharf, before heading back to Vis Valley. The kids parked in the lovers lane up above McLaren Park, smoking cigarettes and looking down on the city.

Four cars, full of people Fauolo referred to as “HP [Hunters Point] niggers” – Tennison among them, she said – slid into the lane. After 10 to 15 minutes a green car drove by, speeding along Visitacion Avenue. It was Shannon in his mother’s car, a vehicle usually driven by his cousin, Patrick Barnett. “There go that nigger Pat!” one of the young men shouted. “He going to pay the price now.”

The Hunters Point posse jumped in their cars and tore off after Shannon, apparently thinking they were pursuing Barnett, a suspect in the slaying of Cheap Charlie.

Fauolo and Maluina peeled out, tailing the chase. When Shannon crashed, Fauolo ditched her car by Visitacion Valley Middle School and followed her friend on foot. From the corner of the Super Fair blacktop, standing beneath a Marlboro sign, she watched as the pack, laughing, beat her friend. Goff, whom Fauolo had never seen before, emerged from the crowd, yanked a “long gun” from the trunk of a car, and boasted, “I’m going to blow this motherfucker out!”

“Don’t shoot him!” Fauolo screamed. “Don’t shoot him.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Goff yelled.

Then, according to Faoulo, Tennison held the victim like a sacrificial offering while Goff popped off four or five shots. As the mob slowly slipped away, Fauolo ran to Shannon’s aid. He was lying face up on the asphalt. “Go get Pat,” he croaked. “Go get Pat.” Wearing a T-shirt memorializing a Sunnydale homeboy who’d been murdered a few months earlier, Shannon died.

When Fauolo first contacted the homicide unit on Aug. 22, she made no mention of J.J. Tennison. Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour call with detective Hendrix, the girl said she’d watched the crime go down, but she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – ID any of the participants.

Only after months of talking to the inspectors on a near daily basis would the girl pin the murder on Tennison and Goff.

Yet at the time of the killing, Fauolo knew exactly who Tennison was. He lived on the same Hunters Point street as her cousins. She saw him nearly every Sunday when she visited her relatives. She knew what kind of car Tennison drove. She knew his name.

So why did the girl wait so long to cough up that name, Adachi wondered. “You wanted to bring the people who were responsible for Cooly’s death to justice…. And still you never mentioned J.J.’s name during this [initial] conversation?” he asked Fauolo.

“Because I – I didn’t – I wasn’t ready to talk to him about anything,” Fauolo responded.

Adachi wasn’t buying it. “We thought that the cops had either convinced or at least influenced the girls to identify Goff and Tennison,” he says.

During that first phone call the girl was, however, ready to describe the vehicles that chased down Shannon. One of them, she said, was a yellow-and-white Buick Skylark. The description set off bells for Hendrix and Sanders. Tennison, a known gangbanger who’d been popped a couple of times for selling weed, owned a car matching that description. They poked around for him.

“I heard from a few people the rumor that the homicide detectives were looking for me,” Tennison recounted in a recent Bay Guardian interview. He stopped by the central cop shop at 850 Bryant. “I asked them what was going on. They basically said, ‘Your car and you were involved in a homicide.’ I basically told ’em we can cut this interview short, that my car was in the impound already.”

Towing-company records proved Tennison’s impounded car wasn’t at the scene of the crime, and he was set free.

Still, on Oct. 31, 1989, after repeated in-depth conversations with the police, Fauolo picked out Tennison from a photo lineup. Now, however, she offered new information. Straining the bounds of credibility, Fauolo insisted that Tennison owned two nearly identical, yellow-and-white Buicks: one with a white vinyl top, the other with a white- painted metal roof.

Prosecutor Butterworth never produced any evidence that this second car truly existed. While the SFPD keeps a photo registry of the vehicles of suspected gangsters, it had no snapshots of this mystery car – let alone the actual auto.

At the trial, medical examiner Boyd Stephens told the court that Shannon’s body bore no bruises: the boy hadn’t been beaten with anything but fists. Though Fauolo had sworn in pretrial depositions that the victim had been attacked with bats and sticks, she now said that she hadn’t seen the mob actually striking Shannon with the weapons.

Other aspects of Fauolo’s testimony are troubling. For one thing, she was standing more than 100 feet away from the crime, on a moonless night. Could she really make out the assassins?

Her recollection of the car chase never jibed with that of another witness who took in the pursuit – though not the actual shooting – from his Cora Street window. Shannon and his assailants, this witness said, had been driving in reverse at high speed for at least part of the chase. The victim backed his car into the ballpark fence at high speed, pursued by a black pickup truck “doing about 35 miles an hour backwards.”

Fauolo, who supposedly had a front-row seat to the incident, never mentioned anything about the vehicles reversing rapidly.

Maluina’s testimony – also documented in court records – was even more suspect. In November 1989 the girl was called into her school principal’s office. Hendrix had some questions for her. Yes, Maluina told the detective, she’d seen Shannon get “mobbed” and killed. How had she happened onto the crime scene? She’d been “walking around.” In Maluina’s version of the night’s events, there was no stolen car.

When Hendrix presented the girl with an array of mug shots, Maluina picked out Tennison but failed to ID Goff as the triggerman. She also selected a third man as a possible perpetrator but later retracted that accusation.

Four months later, at a preliminary court hearing, Maluina wasn’t sure Tennison had been among the mob. “I’m not sure,” she said when asked if the boy was one of the killers.

“And that’s your honest answer?” Adachi asked.

“Yes,” the girl replied.

Goff wasn’t there, Maluina told the court at another early pretrial hearing.

In April 1989 Maluina recanted her testimony completely.

She now told Hendrix and prosecutor Butterworth that she hadn’t seen the crime. In fact, she said, she’d fabricated her whole story at the urging of Fauolo. “I wasn’t there when the incident happened,” Maluina told Butterworth. The other girl, Maluina said, had filled her in on the details of the crime, instructing her to single out the “biggest guy” in the mug shot lineup. (Tennison at that point carried about 200 pounds on his roughly five-foot-nine frame.) “The only reason I picked out J.J.’s picture is because Masina told me to,” she pleaded.

His case crumbling rapidly, Hendrix phoned Fauolo – who had moved to Samoa – and put Maluina on the line. By the time the two friends were finished talking, the girl’s story had morphed once again: Actually, she was there, Maluina informed the men.

When the jury heard the case in October 1990, Maluina was steadfast: she’d seen the crime and could pinpoint Goff as the gunman and Tennison as an accomplice. Fear had driven her testimony through its chameleonic changes, she told the court. She hadn’t wanted to be busted for the stolen car, so she’d left it out of her story. She’d recanted her testimony and denied witnessing the crime because she’d feared violent retribution.

Like Tennison’s supposed second car, Fauolo and Maluina’s boosted sedan was never found; either police had failed to track down the hot car, or perhaps it never existed.

The jury, which took three days to arrive at a guilty verdict, believed Maluina and Fauolo.

I pass through many locked steel doors to reach the home of J.J. Tennison.

At the gates of Mule Creek State Prison, two and a half hours northeast of San Francisco in Amador County, I empty my pockets and stand in my socks. A female prison guard, a middle-aged white woman with a gravity- defying shock of bottle blond hair, scopes the insides of my shoes for contraband. “Bleep-bleep-bleep,” shrieks the metal detector as a Latino mom, grade-school kids in tow, passes through. It’s her underwire bra. The guards have her take it off.

I walk through the metal detector without incident. Ahead of me a 12-foot-tall chain-link door slides open. The moment I step through, it shuts behind me, locking me inside of a claustrophobic six-by-eight-foot cage equipped with two security cameras. The cage door pops open, and I walk out into a small courtyard hemmed in by razor wire. I stride across a heat-scorched lawn into another squat cinder-block building.

Here a stoic correctional officer in a green jumpsuit checks me over before unbolting the thick door to the cafeteria- like visiting room.

Tennison, a bulky black man with a freshly shaved head and a bright smile that seems out of place in this drab universe, greets me warmly. He speaks quietly but forcefully, as if this rare face-to-face encounter with the outside world could end at any moment, a soft drawl rounding off the edges of his words. Now 29, he is hefty but not overweight, childhood fat shed for muscle, his complexion coffee- colored, eyes penetrating.

I’ve journeyed here with Adachi, and a palpable tension hangs in the air when the lawyer relates recent developments in the case. The two men lock eyes; sweat beads on Tennison’s tall forehead. Adachi has little good news. “I know it doesn’t seem like we’re doing shit, ’cause you’re still in here,” he says.

The prisoner responds in a near whisper: “It just gets harder and harder every day.”

The youngest of four boys, Tennison grew up “on the hill,” as they say in Hunters Point, on Northridge Street, splitting time between his divorced parents, Dolly Tennison, a shoe salesperson, and John Tennison Sr., a sheet- metal worker at the shipyard. The tough, largely African American neighborhood in southeastern San Francisco comprised his entire childhood world.

At Sir Francis Drake elementary, Tennison recalls, “I was pretty much like any other kid going there: did the work, didn’t like it, played sports.” Physically chunky from an early age, Tennison loved athletics – “any kind of sports” – but football was his game; that is, when he could keep out of trouble. In his teenage years, between two stints in San Francisco’s youth lockups for selling weed, he played linebacker for the MacAteer High School football squad. Tennison the ghetto entrepreneur cliqued up with the Harbor Road “set,” a loose-knit band of teen and twentysomething males who claimed the area around that street’s subsidized apartments as their exclusive drug- slanging fiefdom.

Some days Tennison figures his decade in prison has been a blessing: it beats being dead, and many of his old running mates are six feet under – a half dozen Harbor Road heads were slain in 2000 alone.

To former friends dwelling “on the outs,” he is forgotten: over his 10 years of incarceration their stream of letters has dwindled, their visits have tapered off entirely. Like most lifers, Tennison has gradually become a ghost, a specter of the man his preprison companions once knew.

He doesn’t keep in touch with Goff; he says he scarcely even knew him before they were arrested.

Survival, family, and faith define the con’s existence. Survival in Mule Creek – host to a preponderance of lifers – means keeping your mouth shut and your head down; avoiding the vagaries of “prison politics” by staying in the good graces of the turnkeys and off the shit lists of other inmates; maintaining your sanity in the face of unending repetition. Tennison does not indulge this journalist’s urge to gather stomach- turning details about penitentiary life; he will only hint at the horrors that transpire behind the walls. “Some thangs you just mentally try to block out. I’ve seen a guy get shot. I’ve seen guys get stabbed. It’s a violent place. One minute it’s nice … the next minute somebody’s being carried away on a stretcher.”

In another 14 years Tennison will be a candidate for parole – in theory, at least. The state, from Gov. Gray Davis on down, is allergic to paroling convicted killers, even those legally eligible for early release. And unless that changes, he will never escape the grip of the California Department of Corrections.

What happens to the person buried – along with some of the ugliest, most brutal people on earth – under an avalanche of concrete and steel, alive with only the faintest prospect of rescue?

The weight of long-term incarceration is famous for creating stony- faced sociopaths, but Tennison seems a flat- emotioned husk of a man who – simply, quietly – endures. If truly innocent, he is living out the mother of all nightmares. Yet when I speak to him, I see only the tiniest hints of rage: no fury at the hand fate has dealt him, no profanities for the cops and prosecutors who put him here, no ill will toward the girls who testified against him. He gripes little about his locked- down environs and must be pressed to complain about the conditions of his confinement. “I live very well compared to a lot of other less fortunate people,” he tells me without the slightest touch of irony.

Home is a six-by-eight-foot cell he shares with another man. Amenities include a 13-inch TV, a CD player, and a Walkman. Work is an 18¢-an-hour job in the prison print shop. Recreation is shooting hoops in the exercise yard after work. Nighttime is reserved for prayer. The joys in the inmate’s life are meager: a familiar song on the radio, warm sunlight pouring through his cell window on a chilly day, a phone call to kin.

Family consists largely of mother Dolly and older brother Bruce. John Tennison Sr. died of cancer in 1993; brother Julius doesn’t keep in close contact; brother Mike was shot in the back and killed a few years back. “I lost my brother, I lost my father, I lost my grandfather since I’ve been in prison. Your [cell] door opens, and you know it’s not time for it to open. You know immediately something’s not right. All three times it’s been like that. I pray and pray and pray that nothing happens to my mother while I’m gone.” From his neck hangs a gold cross, jewelry that once belonged to Mike.

Four or five times a week Tennison’s mind flashes back to the moment he heard the guilty verdict. “I was in total shock, disbelief,” he recounts softly. “My whole body went numb. I couldn’t hear for maybe 30 seconds. Couldn’t speak for maybe another 30 seconds. Out-of-body experience – I just couldn’t believe it.

“As long as it’s been, I can remember that day right now as we speak. At times when I’m just sitting back thinking to myself, I remember just hearing ‘guilty.’ And sometimes I think, what if it was the other way around?”

Every single day of the past decade has “basically been the same. Each step ain’t getting no easier. It’s basically the same routine. First thang when I wake: damn I’m still here. I put it in my mind how I’m gonna deal with this day without interrupting anybody’s program, keep anybody from interrupting my program. Physically it’s the same thang. But mentally it’s getting tougher and tougher.”

Like most of this town’s city-paid defense lawyers, Adachi, a Sacramento native, doesn’t conform to the popular, television- inspired conception of a public defender. He doesn’t show up for court in rumpled, coffee- stained suits; isn’t perpetually outgunned by sharp- witted prosecutors; hasn’t been ground down to a state of indifference.

The son of an auto mechanic and a medical lab technician, Adachi is a true nonbeliever, questioning whether a person of color can ever find justice in an American courtroom.

A handsome, slickly dressed man with greased-back hair and a sleek sable Mercedes, he possesses a genius for ripping apart prosecution testimony. Watching him at work – he’s a pit bull in the courtroom – I get the sense that there is nothing in the world Adachi likes more than practicing law.

These days he takes only the toughest cases. He recently represented Lam Choi, the man indicted for offing a Tenderloin mob boss in 1996 in a high- profile, Mafia- style rubout. He is the lawyer for Jehad Baqleh, the cabbie accused of raping and killing 24-year-old Julie Day. If a murder hits the front pages, chances are Adachi will work it, and much of the time his clients go free. Second in command in the office, he has already filed papers to run for the top slot when current chief Jeff Brown steps down in 2002, and many of his colleagues think he’s a natural choice for the job.

But back in 1989, Adachi was a relative newjack, with just three years under his belt as a city-paid defender. The Tennison- Goff trial was the first murder case he worked from start to finish.

Believing the prosecution had a flimsy case, the young attorney didn’t mount a major- league, call-up- every- witness-you-can-find defense. “That’s the only thing I regret: not putting on more of a case. We really didn’t think it was necessary because what the girls said made no sense. It was chock-full of contradictions.”

Goff’s trial attorney, Barry Melton agrees. “We never really believed they had enough of a case to convict these kids,” recounts Melton, now top public defender in Yolo County. “After all, they were trying to hang these guys on the words of a 14-year-old car thief.”

Both defendants had alibis, but both lawyers were loath to put the exonerating figures – black adolescent thugsters – on the stand, knowing they’d play badly to the jury. Tennison, for his part, contended that during the time in question he’d been picking up friends from the Broadmoor bowling alley. Adachi was scared to even admit to the jury that his client had left the house on the night of the killing.

“If they didn’t think these two kids were in a gang, when they saw all the alibi kids, they definitely would’ve,” Melton explains. “It’s been my experience that half the time people can’t remember what they were doing.”

The jury ruling struck the legal team like an industrial- strength electrical shock. “Oh … my … God,” Melton gasped as the verdict was announced; Adachi was speechless as his client wept openly.

Already tenuous, the bond between Adachi and Tennison crumbled. “I wanted to take the stand,” Tennison remembers. “I figured all [the prosecution] could do was say that I was a drug dealer. I felt that I should’ve testified on my own behalf and my witnesses should’ve testified for me. It would’ve eased the pain for me a little.

“After the trial we kind of pointed the finger at each other. When it was all said and done, I felt he didn’t give it his all. I figured I didn’t get off, so he didn’t do his job.”

Adachi, too, felt let down. “I was angry at him because I thought he didn’t help me. I thought he didn’t trust me because I was a public defender. I could’ve found out more about the case had I had more access to the community. If this had occurred in the Japanese community that I’ve been a part of for years, I could’ve gotten down there and found out everything I needed to know. I did all the regular investigation, talked to all the witnesses, talked to his family, all that. But there needed to be an extraordinary effort, not only to solve a murder but to untangle a web of deceit which had been woven by these two girls.”

Sitting in his Seventh Street office, Adachi holds his fingers a millimeter apart: “We had this much trust after the trial.”

Every defense lawyer has watched – sick in the gut – as a client he or she believes to be inculpable is sent to the pen. These are the trials that haunt; Tennison, his face shrouded in darkness, starred in Adachi’s nightmares for many years after the decision.

“The reason he wasn’t acquitted was because the jury was holding the defense to too high a standard,” contends Adachi, who argues that the town’s then- raging gang war “had the effect of really shifting the burden of proof. If I were to analyze it now, in a gang case where somebody’s dead, you’ve got to prove innocence” – rather than simply raising a reasonable doubt.

When a client is found guilty, the public defender nearly always washes his or her hands of the matter, leaving appeals to state-paid lawyers or private counsel. After all, there’s a steady stream of new clients and no funding for lost causes, which is what most appeals are. Adachi conferred with gumshoe Bob Stemi, the investigator who’d helped him craft Tennison’s failed defense. Both men were devastated. They decided to start over, to excavate fresh evidence and reconstruct the case as if they were headed back to trial.

Adachi began reaching out to Tennison, hoping to resurrect some sense of trust.

A month after the verdict came down, S.F. police officers Michael Lewis and Nevil Gittens picked up a man named Lovinsky “Lovinsta” Ricard Jr. on a routine drug warrant. Ricard had a surprise for them: it was he – not Goff and Tennison – who shot Shannon to death, he informed the cops.

According to police transcripts of that confession, Ricard had been cruising around with a bunch of friends in a convoy of three cars and a black pickup truck, looking to leave somebody from Sunnydale bleeding. The posse stopped to loiter in the parking lot of the 7-11 at Third and Newcomb Streets – just a few blocks from the spot where Shannon was killed. Ricard sat in the pickup swilling Old English malt liquor.

Shannon drove by, and Ricard and company lit out after him. When they got to the Visitacion Avenue ball field, Ricard told the cops, Shannon “ran up on the curb, and at the fence he jumped out. Then we started chasing him. I remember I got off the truck and … some people, they had already cornered him, OK…. And they, over there, they were beatin’ him up. They was beatin’ him up.”

Ricard pulled a 12-gauge from the truck and gunned down Shannon, “because we knew he was from Sunnydale.”

“Were any of two individuals, Antoine [sic] Goff or John Tinneson [sic], do you recall whether they were with you on the night this thing occurred?” one of the officers queried.

“No, they were not,” Ricard responded.

There were some flaws in the story. He was fuzzy on some details, like how many shells he’d put in the shotgun and what brand the gun was. He wouldn’t name any eyewitnesses to back up his claim. And he couldn’t provide the murder weapon.

Ricard’s confession was the kind of thing that happens all the time in the movies and almost never in real life – and despite the limits of his story, Adachi assumed Tennison and Goff could start planning their homecoming parties.

The confession turned out to be a bombshell … that never exploded. Judge Thomas Dandurand shot down a request for a fresh trial. Deeming Ricard’s confession unreliable, the police set him free. Legal documents indicate that Ricard now lives in St. Paul, Minn. (Our attempts to reach him through the mail and by phone were unsuccessful.)

On July 2, 1992, nearly three years after the murder, investigator Stemi convinced a witness to step forward. This person, whom we’ll refer to as Witness X for obvious security reasons, gave police, prosecutors, and the defense a detailed rundown of the slaying and the events that preceded it. The new account – which was taped and transcribed – corroborated Ricard’s confession and included the names of four alleged accomplices to the crime. Ricard was indeed the gunman, Witness X asserted. Tennison and Goff had no part in the crime.

Now, Adachi figured, Tennison and Goff would finally walk. Wrong again. Arlo Smith, district attorney at the time, didn’t feel the narrative was strong enough to reopen the case.

Stymied, Adachi kept probing and enlisted the help of private attorney Eric Multhaup in navigating the maze of court appeals.

Tennison and Goff “had nothing to do with it,” Witness X tells me in a recent interview. “Lovinsta even got up and told that he did it, and that neither J.J. nor [Goff] had anything to do with it. I do know what happened – I was there.”

Over the course of a two-hour conversation Witness X offers a convincing recounting of the crime. “Lovinsta went over there while they were beating him up,” shot Shannon, and “came back with his shirt and everything all bloody and said it felt good.

“Lovinsta asked us never to say nothing; everybody was to be quiet,” the informer tells me. Adachi hired an ex-FBI agent to run a polygraph test on X; according to the machine, the witness is telling the truth.

Witness X claims – as police had theorized – that Shannon was killed to avenge the deaths of Cheap Charlie Hughes and Roshawn Johnson. “It was just anybody at random, whoever it is from Sunnydale, you’re gonna die. Unfortunately, Roderick was right there, and he happened to be from Sunnydale.”

Anton (pronounced “Antoine”) Goff is among the 5,800 humans stuffed into the Corrections Department’s Solano County facility, a strip-mall McPrison built for just 2,100 inmates. It’s luxurious compared with his old digs: Goff spent his first five years on 22-hour-a-day lockdown at the infamous Pelican Bay state pen.

The detectives pegged Goff as a man with a clear motive to murder: he’d been wounded – allegedly by a Sunnydale head – in the Cheap Charlie shooting.

But Goff, now 31, claims he was hanging out with “four or five” buddies on the night of Aug. 29 and never even left Hunters Point. “All of ’em was ready to testify,” he says.

Ricard “was a friend we knew growing up in the neighborhood. He wasn’t nobody I hung around with all the time,” Goff relates, saying he’s positive of the man’s guilt. “He told me everything what happened. He told me personally before I was arrested.”

Tennison was a friend, but not a close comrade, Goff says.

He works out three, four hours a day, playing basketball, sometimes handball. There are no weights in the exercise yard, so Goff builds muscle by lifting other inmates. He studies business, planning for a career that may never come. “You have to be tough to get through the situation, ’cause it’s not easy up in here. You have to have your mind right, or you’ll go crazy.”

Constantly, he asks himself, “Why am I here? Why am I being punished?”

Inspectors Hendrix and Sanders spent better than two decades trying to staunch the city’s bleeding. Both African American, the men staffed the homicide unit throughout San Francisco’s goriest years – the crack- fueled murder binge that ran from 1985 to 1993 – digging into some 500 slayings and solving 85 percent of them. As a team they were the kind of hard-boiled, damn near inescapable cops dreamed up by TV scriptwriters.

These days, 63-year-old Sanders, now assistant chief, seems more grandpa than hard-ass. His mind, however, is anything but soft: talking about Shannon’s execution, he effortlessly calls up minute details from the decade- old incident.

Sanders is indignant at Adachi’s allegation that he and Hendrix might have somehow shaped the statements of Maluina and Fauolo. “That is absolutely untrue. It’s speculation on his part,” the veteran officer tells me. “At no time in my career did I intentionally or unintentionally influence a witness.”

Maluina and Fauolo, the ex- detective insists, “had no axe to grind. They were reluctant to come forward because they had families in the community,” but through many hours of dialogue the cops convinced the girls to take the stand.

“Eyewitnesses all the time have inconsistencies,” he says. “And those inconsistencies were pointed out by the defense counsel, very thoroughly. But those inconsistencies were not enough to shake the judgment of the jury as to the guilt of the two young men.”

Maluina’s flip-flop signified an instinct to protect herself, not dishonesty, Sanders argues. “She was afraid. Witnesses get killed. She was frightened, and rightfully so.”

For Sanders the testimony simply made sense – agreeing with the few clues discovered at the scene. He remains adamant about the girls’ integrity.

I ask about Tennison’s supposed second car, the one that never materialized. Irrelevant, according to Sanders. “I looked at the evidence carefully. We didn’t investigate this overnight. As far as I’m concerned, we laid out the evidence, gave it to the prosecution, which presented it to the jury – and the jury agreed that these two young men were guilty.”

So why would Ricard cop to an assassination he didn’t do? Would an innocent guy really volunteer for a permanent stay in the joint? “I have no idea what his motivation would be – except for pressure from some of his gang members. I don’t doubt that he may have been there, but the information he gave doesn’t fit the scenario.

“I initially thought [the confession] was just to confuse the issue, because he did not have the details of what happened. We know exactly the route of the chase. We know what corners – we know where the car was crashed. He didn’t know all that. I don’t know why he came forward. I have no idea.”

Tennison and Goff deserve the purgatory they now dwell in, the cop assures me.

(Hendrix, who retired in 1999 after 34 years on the force, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Silence governs the urban underworld. Rule one is: you do not snitch. Rule two: Breaking rule one is a transgression punishable by death. Case in point: two witnesses in San Francisco murder cases were slain just in the last two months.

Witness X named three other supposed witnesses, and Adachi’s archaeology has focused on unearthing these characters. Scouring credit data, Department of Motor Vehicles info, court records, and prison rolls, Adachi, along with investigator Stemi, hunted up two of these people, only to run head-on into the code of the streets. Bringing along a tape of Ricard’s confession, Adachi and Stemi paid a visit to one of the alleged witnesses, a convicted dope dealer doing time in the San Quentin state pen. See, they said, your buddy turned himself in; he’s trying to take responsibility for his actions. No dice, the man replied. I don’t got shit to say to you.

Contacting another alleged witness (this one a small-time rapper) via a trusted intermediary, they again came up empty. It didn’t matter that Ricard had already incriminated himself: nobody wanted to talk. Besides, Shannon had been besieged by a mob, and flapping lips could conceivably lead to more arrests. There is no statute of limitations on murder.

“All of them are scared that they’ll go to jail,” Witness X figures.

Since the trial, Maluina and Fauolo have made themselves scarce – both have moved in and out of San Francisco on several occasions – eluding attempts by Adachi and Stemi to reach them. (The Bay Guardian was unable to contact either woman.)

Despite all of the dead ends, Adachi and Tennison have, if anything, grown closer, writing letters and speaking on the phone every couple of weeks.

Adachi keeps the Tennison- Goff trial transcripts next to his paper- covered desk. His notes on the case are jammed into a dozen overstuffed binders lining an office bookshelf. The trial exhibits are stacked in a corner. He and Stemi still discuss the case two or three times a week.

Adachi is amazed at Tennison’s resilience. “I’ve seen him mature into a very spiritual man. For him to be as strong as he’s been – that’s what hits home to me now. How could he stand up to that?”

“I not only think of him as my attorney,” Tennison says, “but I consider him a good friend who’s giving his all to get me out. I think of him as a damn good friend.”

Adachi tells me he “will never, ever give up” on his client. “I don’t care what it takes. I could be 80 years old. I’ll never give up.”

It’s a commitment that has won him praise from his peers. “You’re not going to find too many lawyers with the heart Jeff Adachi has,” ventures Scott Kauffman, a private defense lawyer who specializes in gang cases and death penalty appeals. “I definitely think he’s doing it for J.J., but at another level it’s personal. This case has caused him a lot of pain. I’ve seen him talk about the case – he’s almost in tears.”

Goff’s attorney, Melton, lauds his former cocounsel: “He’s been steadfast. Given the information about the case, you have to remain committed.”

But what if Adachi’s instincts are wrong, and Tennison did murder Shannon? If so, Adachi has wasted 11 years attempting to unchain an assassin.

To keep from obsessing over her son’s fate, Dolly Tennison works herself to exhaustion. Mornings, she clerks at a department store; nights, till 4 a.m., she attends to an ailing 83-year-old woman. Seven years back Dolly fled to a small, solitary apartment on the peninsula. Hunters Point was tainted with “too many damn memories.”

Dignified, her clothes and medium-length hair immaculate, Dolly looks like she’s working very hard to keep her chin up, to keep darkness from closing in. Given the age of her children, she must be approaching senior citizen-<\d>hood, but she looks trim and healthy.

“It hurt like hell for them to say 25 to life for my child,” she tells me, her words rushing out all at once, only to trail off just as quickly. Portraits blanket the walls of her home: chubby Buddha babies; a granddaughter in prep-school togs; son Bruce on his wedding day; J.J. in prison blues; murdered son Mike looking hard.

Dolly beckons me to take in the snapshots from her vantage point on the couch. “I think I’ve been glued to this spot since Mike died. I can sit here and see all my family. I’ll sit here all day long waiting for [J.J.] to call as long as I can hear his voice,” she tells me, pointing to the photo of her dead son, “<\!s>’cause there’s one over there I can’t touch.”

Like the parent of a long- disappeared child, she holds out an almost irrational hope that her son will one day emerge from exile. “My best day is when I go visit my kid. It’s hard knowing my child may not be coming home soon, but he’s gon’ come home.” Dolly is her son’s rock; prayer, she tells me, is her anchor.

Slowly shaking his head, 34-year-old Bruce, a San Francisco parking lot attendant, raises his voice. “I understand that it’s been 10 years outta his life, but it’s been 10 years outta my life, too, 10 years outta my momma’s life. Gone. Can never get back.” Enraged, he blames the legal system for his brother’s lot.

Bruce daydreams about the day his younger sibling is liberated: “He’d just call me and tell me what he’d wanna ride home in. Budget’ll rent anything – a limo, an R.V., whatever. I want just to ride and talk with him – free. No doors closing behind us. The wind blowing on our little bald heads. Seeing the sun rise and the sun set.”

On a mid- November morning, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the highest- ranking federal court in the western United States, will hear Tennison’s plea. The judiciary hasn’t smiled on Tennison’s appeals: four courts have vetoed his bid for a new trial. The last rejection – by a federal district judge – came in March, leaving Adachi “gutted” and Tennison dejected.

The 9th Circuit’s Mission Street courtrooms are housed in a stately $91 million granite edifice – the interior all marble and polished wood. Inside courtroom three, a pristine chamber worthy of a Tennessee Williams drama, hangs a tile mosaic depicting a freed slave, shackles snapped, approaching a white Lady Justice on bended knee. Beneath the image, on a walnut pew, sit Dolly and Bruce Tennison.

Dolly, dressed for business in a black pantsuit, clutches a form letter from the court: Adachi’s ally, attorney Multhaup, will have 10 minutes to argue before the bench. Bruce throws an arm around his mother’s shoulders. Eleven years in prison, and J.J. Tennison’s fate – whether he will spend the rest of his days behind bars – rests on a 10-minute conversation and a legal brief. Multhaup’s argument today is simple: the lower federal court has abandoned its constitutional duty by refusing to review new evidence in the case.

“We have a claim here that the petitioner is presenting new evidence of factual innocence,” Multhaup tells the panel somewhat nervously.

“But the state courts reviewed this evidence,” one judge replies.

“We had a preemptive strike by the [federal] District Court. The [S.F.] Superior Court that dismissed the case was in no way reasonable, in my opinion. And how many times does this happen in the criminal justice system? We have a person who’s come forward and confessed to the crime.”

The judges launch a fusillade of questions at Multhaup, at one point rattling him a bit. In 10 minutes the hearing is history.

Outside the courtroom the Tennisons, solemn faced, huddle with Multhaup. The attorney plays the optimist, while Diana Samuelson, the lawyer handling Goff’s appeals, is less sanguine, telling me she thinks the circuit will kill the petition.

Prosecutor Butterworth would not speak to the Bay Guardian for this piece. He did, however, fax a one-page rebuttal to Tennison’s charges, which reads in part: “This matter has been reviewed several times by the office of the District Attorney and the San Francisco Police Department based upon the allegations raised [in Tennison’s ongoing appeal]. Nothing has been presented to date that would justify ‘re-opening’ the investigation.”

Grilling Tennison, I look for cracks in his story, telling slipups that might point to his guilt. His account of the night in question – that he was sleeping at a friend’s house, then picking up pals from the bowling alley – corresponds to what he told detectives 11 years ago as they ran the good cop-<\d>bad cop routine.

Why would Fauolo and Maluina lie and put away an innocent man, I ask.

“Over the years I’ve asked myself the same question and still haven’t come up with an answer,” he tells me. But “right out the gate it was no doubt in my mind that the homicide inspectors, the D.A., or somebody put ’em up to this, because I knew they were pointing out the wrong person. As for [Goff], at the time I wasn’t sure, but I was definitely sure that they had the wrong person when they pointed out me.

“I’ve said it from day one: I’m not a murderer. I was a drug dealer at the time. It wasn’t nothing to be proud of, or ashamed of. I was locked up for it twice. I did my time.

“In a time when you want people to believe in the justice system and that the system works, I’m a perfect example that the system is screwed up – from the top to the bottom. And as of right now I can’t see it no other way. Everything is in black and white.”

Tennison is relaxed, coming off like a man who can’t be bothered to front, as I put him on trial all over again. Maybe he’s guilty as hell; maybe he snuffed out Shannon’s young life. But if so, his body language and speech patterns offer no subtle indications of that. When Tennison was picked up by the SFPD, Hendrix and Sanders interrogated him for hours, without a lawyer, and his explanation of the crucial hours never wavered. I wonder if something in his 17-year-old demeanor spelled out “executioner” to the homicide detectives.

I put the question to Sanders. “I worked over 500 murder cases,” the veteran lawman responds. “I’ve talked to a lot of killers in my day, and if I had any indication that he was innocent, I would’ve let him go.”

Uncomfortable playing Solomon, I run Tennison’s story by an old ex-con who spent 25 years in some of the state’s most notorious lockups. “Every guy inside will tell you he’s innocent,” I tell him. “And every bleeding-heart journo wants to believe him.”

“Yeah, but you know, after 10 years or so inside, it becomes really hard to lie,” the former prisoner responds. “You just get so tired, so worn down, it’s impossible to keep up a lie.”

Never mind the fact that Tennison passed a polygraph test.

The 9th Circuit’s ruling arrives in Adachi’s mailbox Dec. 15. He reads through the five-page decision with his heart in his throat. The key information comes in the last two paragraphs: “Tennison’s conviction appears to rest largely on the testimony [of two little girls]. Tennison’s new evidence, taken together, calls into question the reliability of these eyewitness identifications.”

And then, two sentences later: victory. The judges are overturning the ruling of the lower court, instructing federal judge Claudia Wilken to mount a “thorough review” of Tennison’s situation.

It doesn’t mean the inmate is going home tomorrow, nor even that he’ll necessarily get a new trial, but the decision does require Wilken to examine the sworn statements of Ricard and Witness X and to determine whether a retrial should be ordered.

Adachi is elated. Dolly Tennison seems relieved, as if she can finally start breathing again. Bruce Tennison feels like “Christmas came early.”

An upbeat John J. Tennison phones me. “I finally had three judges look over the case and see what should’ve been saw a long time ago.”

Grinning today, the prisoner has already begun steeling himself for rejection at the next round. “I play a lot of basketball to take my mind off it. The [courts] are playing God. My life is in other people’s hands, and there’s nothing I can physically do. Nothing.”

Gun crazy

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Editors note: This story ran Oct. 17, 2001

Bruce Seward imploded while riding an AC Transit bus.

It was 4 a.m. on May 28, 2001, and Seward was rolling through the darkness on the 82 line, headed south from Oakland toward Hayward. Hands clapped over his ears, Seward, a 42-year-old car salesman, rocked back and forth, vacilutf8g between sobbing and shouting. He was barefoot, according to witnesses.

Bus driver Anthony Ramsey heard Seward ranting, “They trying to kill me, they trying to kill me.”

“Shut up!” one passenger screamed. Another rider threatened to toss Seward off the bus.

Seward morphed, gaining some inner – momentary – calm. “Thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God,” he chanted.

A few weeks earlier Seward had jetted to Danville, Ill., for his mother’s 67th birthday; his mom and eight siblings didn’t notice any behavioral peculiarities. But now, quite publicly, the Oakland man’s synapses were misfiring.

At the end of the line, the Hayward BART station, Seward got off the bus. An hour later a veteran BART cop named David Betancourt found the rangy African American man outside the station, lying next to a Dumpster, naked and semi<\h>coherent. Betancourt, according to confidential police reports obtained by the Bay Guardian, grabbed Seward and shook him. “Are you OK?” the cop yelled.

“No,” Seward shouted, standing up. “No, it’s not OK.”

Betancourt, police reports indicate, says Seward then charged him. Yanking a can of pepper spray off his belt, the cop blasted the naked man in the face. The chemical spray did nothing.

Then, according to witnesses, Seward grabbed Betancourt’s 26-inch-long wooden nightstick. The officer – as he would later tell his superiors – began to fear for his life. Betancourt said he thought Seward would “beat [him] to death” with his own baton or attempt to disarm him and shoot him.

The cop drew his blued steel Glock and squeezed the trigger, dropping Seward with a single .40-caliber slug through the heart.

Seward’s demons are buried with him. Family members have few clues about why his mind melted down. They know he survived a similar psychotic episode in the early 1990s. And they know he went to see a psychologist two days before he died. It seems his relationship with an Oakland woman was collapsing; maybe the emotional turmoil had shattered him.

Betancourt, who has 20 years of law-enforcement experience, 8 of them with BART, emerged unharmed from the fatal skirmish; police records show the officer suffered no injuries. His career seems undamaged as well: Betancourt returned to active duty last week after probes by the BART police and the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office cleared him of any wrongdoing. The cop had been on paid administrative leave since the incident.

“It’s unfortunate that somebody died, but the officer was justified in using deadly force that morning,” Betancourt’s attorney, Leo Tamisiea, said.

BART police chief Gary Gee concurs. “I think he acted appropriately,” Gee told us. “The tussle that took place, the back-and-forth exchange – when it had no effect on [Seward] and the officer feared that he himself was going to suffer serious injury or death, he took the action he felt necessary.”

Regardless of BART’s official line, a key question remains: did Betancourt really have to kill Seward? It’s a question neither asked nor answered in the 90 pages of BART police reports leaked to this paper.

“My brother would still be alive today if the officer was doing his job correctly,” Michael Seward, 45, an Illinois state prison guard, told us. “I can’t see any justification for shooting an unarmed civilian.”

According to almost every major U.S. police department’s official guidelines – including those of the BART police – a cop can use deadly force only if the cop reasonably believes his or her life (or the life of another person) is in immediate jeopardy.

Did Betancourt truly think Seward was going to bludgeon him to death? And if so, was the cop making a realistic assessment of the situation? These questions, too, are unresolved by the investigations of BART and the D.A.’s Office.

The subway system has offered Seward’s family only fragmentary information about case number 01-22334. “The hardest part is that we’re not getting any help from the police department,” Michael Seward said. “I have not received an autopsy report on my brother. We’re trying to find out what actually happened, and the police have not been forthcoming in terms of giving us an accurate, detailed explanation of what happened.” The family is contemputf8g a lawsuit.

Lurking in the police documents leaked to this paper is one fairly startling fact: “Officer Betancourt’s duty weapon left the scene with him,” one chronology of the incident reads. Two hours after the killing, Betancourt turned the Glock over to investigators. “That’s totally against protocol,” said former Santa Monica cop Frank Saunders, a consultant on police practices. “In these cases, you’re supposed to take the officer’s weapon immediately.”

“I don’t know why there are time gaps in the reports,” BART spokesperson Mike Healy admitted.

For Samantha Liapes, director of Bay Area PoliceWatch, Seward’s death is symptomatic of a broader problem. “We’re very troubled by this: yet another example of unwarranted deadly force being used in a situation where someone was obviously in mental distress,” Liapes said. “The fact that the man was naked and clearly not carrying a life-threatening weapon makes the use of deadly force by the officer even more troubling.”

Two weeks after Seward was killed, San Francisco cops put 20-some bullets in another mentally ill man, Idriss Stelley, in a movie theater at Sony Metreon. Stelley, according to his mother, was brandishing a less-than-lethal, two-inch-long knife.

Beyond the specifics of the two cases, there’s a larger policy issue: are local cops getting the proper training in how to handle mentally ill people?

As required by state law, BART – along with most other Bay Area departments – gives new recruits six hours of schooling on the subject. “We are sensitive to the fact that there may be a need for additional training and are receptive to looking into it,” BART chief Gee said. “But I’m not so sure that even if Betancourt had gotten supplemental training on dealing with persons who are mentally ill, that it would have changed the outcome in this case.”

The chief could take a cue from San Jose, which has put 130 of its officers through a 40-hour training on mental health crisis calls.

Lt. Brenda Herbert, head of the San Jose Police Department’s Crisis Management Unit, runs the training program, which was launched in 1998. “What we’re trying to do is teach officers to talk someone down, rather than take them down physically,” Herbert says. “It’s a matter of teaching these officers what it means to be hearing voices, how to talk to someone who’s hearing voices, how to find out what the voices are saying so that you can take the necessary precautions.”

Seward is not the first person to bleed to death in the parking lot of the Hayward BART station. It was there, in 1992, that BART cop Fred Crabtree confronted Jerrold Hall, a 19-year-old African American. Hall, who was getting off a train with a pal, fit the description of a robbery suspect. Crabtree – armed with a baton, a can of pepper spray, a handgun, a shotgun, and an attack-<\h>trained German shepherd – told Hall to halt.

After a quick discussion Hall turned and walked off, his hands clearly visible. Crabtree ordered him to stop. When Hall failed to heed the command, the cop loosed the 12-gauge shotgun, blasting the young man in the back of the head.

As it turned out, no evidence was ever found connecting Hall to any robbery – and he was unarmed (see “BART Cops, 41-0,” 1/14/98).

BART came under public pressure to fire – or at least discipline – the officer. Politicians made noises about putting the subway system’s largely unaccountable 182-<\h>officer force under the supervision of a civilian review board.

Apparently unswayed by reason, BART officials did absolutely nothing, and eventually the public discontent tapered off. Crabtree remained on active duty until his own inglorious demise a few years later: the officer was found hanging from a noose in his home as porno tapes played on the TV.

Interviewed last week, Tom Radulovich, a member of the BART Board of Directors, said he’s pushing for more police oversight but at this point doesn’t have the votes on the nine-member board to pass any new rules. It may prove especially hard to muster those votes in the fear-<\h>laden post-Sept. 11 climate.

“The concern the [Seward killing] triggers for me is whether we’re doing enough to make sure things like this don’t happen,” Radulovich said.

It could be that David Betancourt really had no choice but to gun down Bruce Seward. Maybe it really was a kill-or-be-killed situation.

There is, however, another, more grim possibility: that the police culture at BART has changed very little in the last nine years. And the majority of the BART board doesn’t seem to care.

Bakery driver still on the lam?

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CLICK HERE FOR MORE UPDATES FROM THE CHAUNCEY BAILEY PROJECT

Since a trio of shotgun blasts killed Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey on Aug. 2, police and prosecutors have charged only one man with the crime: 20-year-old Devaunghndre Broussard, a handyman at Your Black Muslim Bakery, who is expected to be arraigned this morning.

But Oakland police records raise questions whether a second man, a 21-year-old former San Francisco resident with an extensive and violent criminal history, may have played a role in the journalist’s slaying.
That man, Antoine Mackey, who lived with Broussard and worked at the bakery, remains free. It’s unclear whether police are actively seeking to question him about possible connections to the crime.
Reached on a cell phone with an Atlanta area code earlier this week, Mackey denied any involvement in Bailey’s death.

But a bakery associate, Rigoberto Magana, told detectives that on the morning of theslaying, Mackey drove away from the bakery in a white Dodge Caravan belonging to Magana, according to handwritten police interview notes.

The vehicle in question figures prominently in the crime: Broussard later told homicide detectives he’d used the van to get to and from the scene of Bailey’s killing near 14th and Alice streets in downtown Oakland, and witnesses reported seeing a white van in the vicinity.

One witness said the gunman got in on the passenger side of an older Dodge Caravan shortly before shooting; another saw the assailant flee the crime scene in a waiting white van, police incident reports state.

When homicide detectives questioned Magana, he told them Mackey drove the van away from the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue headquarters at between 5:30 and 6 a.m., returning it to the bakery between 7:30 and 7:35 a.m. with a damaged rearview mirror. Bailey was shot at 7:25 a.m., according to police reports.

Magana, who was living at the bakery, identified Antoine Mackey immediately when shown Mackey’s photograph as the person who drove away in his van and later returned it, the police notes state.

Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV and Broussard gave police accounts of driving around the night before the killing with Mackey and also met him at the bakery immediately after the shooting and drove to the scene together, according to interview transcripts obtained by the Chauncey Bailey Project.

Broussard, who, like Mackey was raised in San Francisco, told police he shot Bailey three times because the journalist was working on stories about the bakery’s financial woes. He later recanted.

Days after Broussard’s Aug. 3 confession, Oakland police told the media their probe was ongoing and suggested Broussard likely had help. “We don’t believe he acted on his own,” Assistant Chief Howard Jordan said days after Bailey died.

Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker did not return telephone calls Wednesday and Thursday to answer questions about Mackey. In earlier interviews, Tucker and other officers refused to discuss him.
Officer Roland Holgren, a department spokesman, said Thursday he couldn’t answer any questions about the Bailey case.

Broussard’s defense attorney said he believes Mackey was involved in Bailey’s killing, and police may have detained him when they raided the bakery compound Aug. 3 but allowed him to go free.

Soon after, Mackey became a fugitive.

He failed to appear for a criminal hearing in San Francisco on Aug. 17, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
He disappeared, attorney LaRue Grim said this week. “We are hoping he will be picked up sometime in the future.”
Grim said he believes Mackey was involved. “He drove the van. Broussard is very reluctant to point the finger at anyone but I think he will be willing to do so at trial. If he does, he can implicate Mackey and Yusef Bey and couple of others.”

Bey, who is jailed for unrelated offenses, has denied any involvement in the slaying.
In addition to the revelations about the van, a review of police investigative documents by the Chauncey Bailey Project shows:

* In a taped jailhouse telephone conversation with a man identified only as “unc,” the man asked Broussard “what they do with Mackey?” “Mackey got out,” Broussard replied, an apparent reference to police possibly detaining Mackey and releasing him.

* Broussard told police he smoked a cigar laced with cocaine “when we were driving over there” to the corner where Bailey was ambushed. According to the transcript of the recorded portion of the interview, the homicide detective interviewing him, Sgt. Derwin Longmire, didn’t ask Broussard who he meant by “we.”

* Under questioning by Longmire, Broussard said he, Mackey and Bey IV drove past Bailey’s apartment near Lake Merritt the night before the slaying.

* Bey IV told police Mackey and Broussard drove with him to the scene of Bailey’s shooting shortly after it happened, and then went to Lake Merritt, where Bey IV claimed Broussard confessed to him he was the gunman.

* In interviews with detectives, Bey IV identified Mackey as a member of his security team.
Contacted Tuesday night, Mackey said he had nothing to do with Bailey’s shooting.

“I don’t know anything about that. I’d never even consider talking about anything like that,” he said, adding he knew Broussard, whom he described as “the dude from the Muslim bakery.”

Oakland Tribune staff writer Josh Richman and reporter Kenneth Kim of New America Media contributed to this report.

Behind the Bey empire

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Editor’s Note: The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration of local media outlets including the Guardian, is investigating the circumstances surrounding the Aug. 2 murder of Bailey, an Oakland journalist who was reporting on the financial dealings of the Bey family’s Your Black Muslim Bakery at the time he was killed. For more information, including audio, video, and updates on the case, click here.

Since 2003, Esperanza Johnson, a former key figure within Oakland’s Bey organization, and her husband, Antron Thurman, have acquired nearly $2 million worth of East Bay real estate through a string of controversial deals tainted with allegations of deceit.

In five cases those deals led to litigation. Johnson, of Antioch, who also goes by the name Noor Jehan Bey, has twice been accused of fraud. Court records indicate that one of those transactions involved falsified documents.

One sale involving Johnson, a licensed real estate broker, led to criminal charges: Alameda County prosecutors in 2006 convicted a Johnson associate on fraud charges stemming from a deal that cost an East Oakland couple their home.

A broad array of characters have tangled with Johnson and Thurman in court, including a disabled Berkeley bus porter forced from his family home, an Antioch couple now facing foreclosure, and East Bay Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that builds homes for the poor and struggling. Combined, they claim to have lost at least $1.77 million in property, cash and equity in the deals.

The revelations about Johnson and Thurman come as authorities scrutinize the extensive real estate dealings of the Bey family and their bankrupt business, Your Black Muslim Bakery, including Johnson’s role as the broker for an Oakland woman named Paulette Arbuckle who is attempting to buy the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue headquarters. Johnson bore four of the Bey family patriarch’s dozens of children.

Bakery CEO Yusuf Ali Bey IV, 21, jailed without bail on kidnapping and torture charges, also is charged with real estate fraud: prosecutors say he bought an Oakland property under a false identity.

And bankruptcy trustee Tevis Thompson, who is overseeing the liquidation of Your Black Muslim Bakery’s assets, has claimed in court papers that Bey IV transferred $2.28 million in bakery properties to his mother, Daulet Bey, in a bid to “defraud creditors.” The trustee has sued for those properties’ return.

Devaughndre Broussard, a 20-year-old bakery associate, is charged with the Aug. 2 shotgun slaying of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey as he walked to work in downtown Oakland. Police say Broussard made a confession – later recanted – that he killed Bailey because the journalist was working on a story about the bakery’s finances and bankruptcy case.

Johnson, whose state business registration was suspended more than a year ago for failure to pay taxes and who with Thurman has more than $1 million in state and federal tax liens recorded against them, didn’t return numerous telephone calls and emails, and didn’t answer the gate at her Antioch home on two recent occasions.

Thurman refused to speak to reporters who approached him recently in Oakland.

A Los Angeles real estate consultant who reviewed Johnson’s transactions for the Chauncey Bailey Project said the trustee and judge handling the bakery’s bankruptcy should examine Johnson’s record.

They “should be made aware that a realtor on a transaction which requires the trustee’s approval has a murky… background,” said Eric Forster.

The attorney for the court appointed bankruptcy trustee charged with liquidating the bakery said Johnson’s transaction history would be probed.

“Obviously it is of some concern to us and we’re looking into it,” Eric Nyberg, attorney for trustee Tevis Thompson, said when informed of the cases.

He also noted that Arbuckle may not, in the end, be the highest bidder for the bakery. A hearing on her offer is scheduled for Nov. 29. If the $899,999 bid of Johnson’s client, Arbuckle, is successful and Johnson is “entitled to receive the commission, then we really don’t have an issue with it,” Nyberg said.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Real Estate, Tom Pool, wouldn’t discuss the Johnson and Thurman transactions.

Machado

Markus Machado and Gail Mateo said that when they wanted to buy a newer and bigger home in 2005, they went to a real estate broker they thought they could trust: Esperanza Johnson.

A Compton native, Johnson became involved with the Bey organization, a spin-off of the Nation of Islam, at the age of 12, taking the name Noor Jehan Bey.

She’s returned to using the name Esperanza Johnson, though she’s been listed in judgments against her by banks and credit-card companies as Nellie Bey, Nuri Bey, Noojean Bey and Noor Jehan Esperanza, a review of records by the Chauncey Bailey Project shows. And, in 2005 testimony, she said she still occasionally uses the name Noor Jehan Bey.

Johnson had hired Machado, a graphic artist, to create flyers for her Signature One Mortgage and Real Estate.

In a recent interview at his lawyer’s office, Machado described her as warm and gregarious – at first, anyway. Machado said Johnson arranged what seemed like an incredible deal: the couple could sell their 50-year-old Pittsburg house and move into a spacious four-bedroom home in a verdant Antioch subdivision, an ideal place to raise their three children and grow old together.

Johnson promised they’d pay about $1,600 a month for the new home, only a little more than their mortgage at the time. Machado said Johnson even agreed to forgo her usual commissions “because we were like family.”

They said Johnson had told them their credit was poor, and talked them into selling their Pittsburg house to one of her employees, Araceli Moreno, for $350,000 while putting the new home and mortgage in Moreno’s name as well. They expected to refinance the loan in about a year, when Moreno would sign the house over to them.

It seemed perfect – until the bills arrived.

The payments were $2,700 a month and soon ballooned higher, they now say in court records. And then Johnson – who in sealing the deal had diverted almost $58,000 of equity from their old home to others, and had won large commissions for herself by getting them an unfavorable mortgage – stopped taking their calls, Machado said as his wife sat next to him weeping.

The couple had trouble making the payments almost immediately and Moreno began receiving calls from the mortgage company. She sued Machado and Mateo last year.

“The point of (Moreno’s) lawsuit was to get them to refinance to get my client’s name off the loan and for her to go ahead and salvage what of her credit picture she could,” said Moreno’s attorney, Richard G. Hyppa of Tracy.

The couple counter-sued in November 2006, naming Moreno and Johnson as defendants, claiming that Johnson defrauded them. They are now months behind on the payments and stressed to exhaustion.

“I don’t sleep. Gail doesn’t sleep,” Machado said. “I was very naive. We were led down this primrose path because I trusted (Johnson) implicitly.”

After paying off what they owed on the Pittsburg house, about $190,000 was left over that should have been used for the down payment on the Antioch house. But the suit alleges that Moreno used only $77,973 toward the down payment.

Meanwhile, court records say Johnson arranged for another $10,000 to be paid out to Moreno, and for someone named Harry Hawkins to get $45,830 as “repayment of loans.” Machado’s lawyer, Ken Koenen, said attempts to locate Hawkins have been fruitless.

The suit also claims Johnson structured the Antioch mortgage so monthly payments would increase dramatically after a year, and so Machado and Mateo would have to pay an $18,000 penalty in order to refinance – thereby earning her a much larger commission.

Machado and Mateo now are several months in arrears on the mortgage in Moreno’s name. Default notices have arrived at the house.

“It’s an extremely painful thing,” Machado said. “We have been robbed of our peace of mind. We have to make decisions about whether to put food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. We’ve not even sure we’re going to have a place to live.”

Johnson hasn’t responded to the couple’s lawsuit and will likely be subject to a default judgment, Koenen said.

Chicago D&P
Johnson and Thurman in 2004 acquired a Hercules home after a federal judge had ordered it frozen as an asset of an investment company, Chicago D&P, that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had accused of fraud.
The property was supposed to be sold to help pay back investors – reportedly including at least 30 active-duty Marines and several churches – which had been cheated out of millions through Chicago D&P’s pyramid schemes.
The daughter of the company’s president had bought the property years earlier using a straw purchaser – a friend with better credit – as a front, according to court records.
That friend had been trying to get her name off the title for some time, and the daughter’s attorney – Githaiga Ramsey, who also worked for Thurman and Johnson on another case – persuaded her to sign the house over to them. Records shows Ramsey offered the friend $20,500 to complete the transaction but that the payment was never made.
The transfer of the house occurred after U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ordered the property frozen. Thurman then turned around and sold it a month later to one of the employees of his bail bond business, Jamie Bonilla, for $460,000. Johnson filed Bonilla’s loan application.
Most of that money appears to have eventually gone to pay mortgages against the property when Thurman and Johnson acquired it for free. But first, Thurman received $60,213 from the deal’s escrow; and Ramsey got $31,000.
It remains unclear who lived in the house after Bonilla bought it.
Stephen Anderson, the receiver representing Chicago D&P’s bilked investors, wrote in April 2005 that he believed Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, had lived there.
Other documents show Madeeah Bey – another mother to several of patriarch Yusuf Bey’s children – used it as her mailing address in two December 2004 real estate deals.
It’s also unclear whether Thurman and Johnson knew of the court order freezing the house when they took possession of it. But in February 2005 Breyer held Ramsey in contempt of court for defying his order.
Ramsey and Thurman both repaid the money they received from the escrow when Thurman sold the house to Bonilla.
Bonilla, within a few months, then sold the house for $625,000 – a profit of $211,690 from a property that the receiver had originally wanted to sell to help repay the defrauded investors.
Anderson said a long legal battle to regain title to the house would’ve been too costly.
“We made an economic decision,” he said. “The objective of the receiver is to return as much money as possible back to the investors, and it was not difficult to determine we were going to get more money” by taking the $91,000 from Thurman and Ramsey than by “trying to unscramble that whole mess.”
Ramsey, who surrendered his law license while facing disciplinary charges from an unrelated case, wouldn’t discuss this case or others in which he was involved with Johnson and Thurman.
“My God, am I never going to get away from this?” he said. “I’m not involved and I don’t want to be. I’m not in contact with these people anymore.”
Bonilla could not be located.
Habitat for Humanity house
Antron Thurman married a woman named Sharon Clements in December 1987. Records show they separated seven months later and eventually filed for a divorce that was never made final.

In early 2000, Clements, as a single mother, moved into a home on 105th Avenue in Oakland built by the low-income housing nonprofit East Bay Habitat for Humanity. It gave Clements a no-interest $112,000 loan with no down payment.

Clements died in April 2003, leaving no will. Usually either there’s a clear legal inheritance, or else the nonprofit passes the deed to someone qualified for low-income aid, executive director Janice Jensen said. But Clements’ son was still a minor.

Clements’ home stood vacant for three years while her estate was sorted out in Alameda County Probate Court.

Then, in mid-2006, Thurman argued he was entitled to the low-income property as Clements’ surviving spouse, records show – even as he listed his address as Johnson’s Antioch home, and other records showed that in the previous few years he had bought and sold in excess of $1 million in East Bay real estate.

“Frankly, I didn’t even know about Mr. Thurman,” Habitat’s Jensen said. “I had no idea who he was or that he even existed until the attorneys got involved. When we looked at the deed, she was the only signature, so she bought that home herself.”

Still, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Marshall L. Whitley awarded Thurman the house, which had restrictions in place to preserve its affordability for low income people.

Thurman then sold it back to Habitat for Humanity for the $13,500 in equity that had accrued during the three years Clements owned it.

Alana Conner, an attorney for Thurman at the time, said she couldn’t independently recall details of the case and declined to discuss it.

Stewart

Mitzie Peters befriended Brandy Stewart in 2001, studying the Bible with her eventual victim, court records say.

Peters persuaded the cash-strapped AC Transit bus driver to deed the home at 1565 77th Ave. – which Stewart had inherited from her mother, and in which she, her husband and her three children lived – into Peters name and use Peters’ credit to get an equity loan. Peters promised to return the deed after a few days, keeping $12,000 from the loan as a fee.

“She said that because she loved me so much, she would never, ever think about doing this for anyone else, but she would help me to get the house refinanced,” Stewart would later testify.

Stewart deeded the house to Peters on March 11, 2003. But rather than sticking to the deal, Peters drained the property of all equity and gave nothing to Stewart, court records show.

Peters couldn’t have conducted the transaction without Johnson and her family.

As Peters’ broker, Johnson submitted a series of loan applications reporting Peters’ income as increasingly higher until the bank accepted the deal; she also allegedly coached Stewart in writing to the title company and falsely claiming Peters was her cousin.

Johnson’s sister, Ruquayya Jasmine Pennix, prepared Peters’ tax returns to send to the loan company, showing self-employment income that Peters later admitted was bogus; it’s unclear if Pennix knew that at the time.

Another of Johnson’s sisters – Fatima Ismail, who worked in Johnson’s office – drew up a phony lease showing Peters had derived rental income from Stewart’s house, according to court records.

Three months after she took title to Stewart’s house, Peters sold it to one of Johnson’s sons, Amir Bey. Under oath, Amir Bey later admitted he was just a straw buyer for his mother.

When arrested and charged with unrelated public benefits fraud, perjury and grand theft in July 2004, Peters made bail with Thurman’s Sinbad’s Bail Bonds.

As investigators also began probing her real estate activities, Peters gifted her Hayward condo to Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, who sold it a month later for about $400,000.

Peters then lived with Nisa Bey in Pittsburg until going to prison. Because her bail had been secured with the condo, Thurman later asked a judge to exonerate the bail and return more than $50,000 – to Nisa Bey.

The Alameda County District Attorney’s office interviewed Johnson, Thurman, and their attorney, Githaiga Ramsey – who had represented Peters until just two months earlier, and who had just arranged the Chicago D&P deal for them – in September 2004.

“Johnson seemed evasive when questioned about irregularities in the loan and application process,” inspector Paul Wallace wrote in court papers.

But Johnson wasn’t charged.

“We didn’t think we could prove the case against her beyond a reasonable doubt,” Deputy District Attorney Alyce Sandbach said. “We didn’t have enough to make her on a case of fraud… of having made knowing misrepresentations.”

Among additional charges filed against Peters in November 2004 was a felony grand-theft count for equity and title to the Stewarts’ home; she pleaded no contest to that and 15 other, unrelated counts a year later, and was sentenced in February 2006.

The Stewarts got the $50,374.10 bail money Thurman had tried to direct to Nisa Bey. A judge in January ordered Peters to pay $486,083.90 in the Stewarts’ civil lawsuit, but they haven’t seen a dime, their lawyers say.

Amir Bey and Johnson tried to evict the Stewarts, court documents show, but backed off when the couple obtained free legal help.

The Stewarts then sued Johnson, Peters and Amir Bey; Johnson eventually offered to deed the house back to Stewart, but with the equity drained, the Stewarts couldn’t afford the higher mortgage payments.

A judge in September 2006 ordered Johnson and Amir Bey to pay the Stewarts $100,000 – $20,000 up front and $1,667 per month for 48 months.

Rebecca Saelao, the Stewarts’ attorney, said this civil judgment became a lien on the house, and was subordinated to massive mortgages Johnson and Amir Bey had taken on the property and eventually defaulted on. The house was sold at auction last year for $80,900, public records show.

The Stewarts got only about $5,000 from the sale of the home they’d lost. They no longer live in the Bay Area, and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Taylor

Wrapped in a thin, sea-green blanket, Donald Taylor lay in a narrow bed at a Stockton nursing home recently, his frail 61-year-old body ravaged by diabetes and hypertension. His wheelchair was parked at his bedside, a walker he wants to learn to use, a few feet away.

Taylor is broke and relies on Medi-Cal, the state insurance program for the indigent, to bankroll his care and board at the Elm Haven Care Center.

His room is dingy and, fluorescent-lit with peeling blue wallpaper and a television, foil wrapped around its rabbit-ear antennae, issuing forth static-filled sound. He spends his days “just doing nothing.”

He said he wonders what his life might be like now if he never encountered Antron Thurman. “I think about it quite often, but there’s nothing I can do… I think about how they took the house from me,” Taylor said haltingly in a soft, gravelly voice that contained little emotion.

In the 1950s Taylor’s parents bought a cozy two-bedroom home on a tree-shaded street in north Berkeley. He grew up there and lived there still as an adult, while working as a bus-station porter. When his parents died, he and his sister, Loretta Alexander, inherited the house; the mortgage was paid off.

In early 2001, according to interviews and court documents, stepbrother Frederick Myers Jr., approached the siblings with a plan: He would help them form a company to manage the house and another property they had inherited, an undeveloped Lake County parcel.

Myers asked them to transfer the two deeds to the new corporation, which he would helm for them. Taylor said he agreed at his sister’s urging, believing the three of them could profit from development of the Lake County parcel.

But Myers suddenly sold the Berkeley house to Thurman, pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars and disappeared, court documents say, catching Taylor and Alexander completely off guard.

“I felt I had been cheated,” Taylor said, adding that he believes Thurman and Myers worked in concert. “Fred Jr. took the house and sold it to (Thurman) and it’s been downhill ever since. He sold it out from underneath us.”

Myers could not be located. Thurman, asked if he remembered Taylor, refused to answer as he climbed into a Cadillac Escalade outside a home in the Oakland hills.

Alexander’s son, Tony Cole, expressed disgust at the way his mother and uncle were played. “That property slipped right out from underneath them,” he said in a phone interview. “They didn’t have the business sense to know what was going on.”

Taylor and Alexander in 2004 sued to reclaim the house. Myers never appeared in court, but Thurman – represented by Githaiga Ramsey – responded by filing his own suit, claiming he had legitimately bought the property for $374,388 and demanding that Taylor pay $1,500 in monthly rent or get out.

Taylor and Alexander eventually settled the case for $55,000; it took Thurman 10 months to pay them, court records indicate. Taylor’s attorney, Frederic Harvey, refused to discuss the case.

The two-story, beige stucco house with a large garage has steadily appreciated in value. Public records show Thurman sold it in 2004 to Madeeah Bey – the same relative who used the Chicago D&P house in Hercules as her address – for $520,000; she sold it for $850,000 less than a year later. The house is now assessed at $867,000.

Alexander died last year. Taylor lost most of his possessions including photos of his mother when he left the property.

“I’d like to tell him to go (screw) himself,” Taylor said of Thurman, his legs twitching quietly under the blanket.

University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students Lisa Pickoff-White, Robert Lewis, Nick Kusnetz, Vianna Risa Davila, Marnette Federis and Lucie Schwartz contributed to this story.

Thomas Peele and Josh Richman are staff writers for the Bay Area News Group; A.C. Thompson is a free-lance reporter working for New America Media and Bay Area News Group-East Bay; Bob Butler is a freelance reporter and president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association.

Behind and beyond bars

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Perhaps the best book written about a wrongly convicted man is Jack Olsen’s Last Man Standing, a chronicle of the 27 years Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt spent caged in a California prison thanks to crooked FBI agents and Los Angeles cops. The narrative starts with Pratt’s childhood in Louisiana, tracks his involvement in the Black Panther party and the decades he spent dwelling in the American gulag, and concludes with his triumphant release from prison thanks to the tireless lawyering of Stuart Hanlon and the late Johnnie Cochran. It’s a fucking amazing read – meticulously researched yet hyper-engrossing, torturous and ultimately uplifting.

But I’ve always had the nagging sensation that Olsen terminated his book at the perfect moment: before the homecoming euphoria wore off and the challenges and mundanity of day-to-day life set in. Can a person truly get on with his or her life when the authorities have stolen the vast bulk of it?

It’s the sort of question the makers of the documentary After Innocence put to eight men who were wrongfully sent to prison. The answers are, as a whole, tear-inducing – most of the men are grappling only semi-successfully with a callous world that’s done little to make them whole. Prison, as one man says, "breaks down your soul. It breaks down everything about you. It takes your manhood. It takes your pride. It takes your decency."

They find themselves struggling with the basics. They have trouble building lasting relationships with lovers. They have trouble finding jobs – how do you explain a 10- or 20-year blank spot on your résumé?

And at times they have trouble simply experiencing emotions. In what you’d expect to be an emotional highpoint, the film documents the release of Wilton Dedge, who is freed from a Florida prison after wrongly serving 22 years for sexual battery and burglary. But on his big day, Dedge looks uneasy and half-zombiefied, as if his decades in the joint have simply siphoned the life from him. It’s perhaps the most telling scene in a film filled with potent vignettes.

While tremendously powerful, After Innocence isn’t flawless. At times the movie is a little talking head-ish, telling viewers what they should think rather than letting them witness the stumblings and successes of the exonerated men. Overall, though, it’s a remarkable work – and one that deserves the widest audience possible. (A.C. Thompson)

AFTER INNOCENCE  Opens Fri/20  Lumiere Theatre  (415) 267-4893  Act 1 & 2  (510) 464-5980  Showtimes at www.sfbg.com  www.landmarktheatres.com  www.afterinnocence.com

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