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From the Los Angeles Times

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Patient tells police she was raped at hospital emergency room in Orange County

A female patient has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a hospital worker while seeking treatment in the emergency room at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, according to police.

Orange police received a report from the hospital about the alleged assault by a patient care technician on March 9, a day after the woman was treated, but had not yet talked to the alleged assailant as of Tuesday afternoon -- five days later, according to a department spokesman.

Sgt. Dan Adams said that a patrol officer took reports from the hospital and that the victim filed the paperwork by Thursday. But the detective bureau is generally closed Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays unless there is a pressing case like a murder, he said, and on Monday all of the department's detectives were tied up investigating a homicide.

“The timeline is very normal for an investigation like this,” Adams said.

Adams said the patient first reported the incident to the hospital, which in turn contacted the Police Department.

Hospital officials refused to provide details about the alleged attack, saying that they needed to “respect the rights and privacy of everyone involved in this situation.”

“St. Joseph Hospital is committed to providing the highest quality of care, safety and support to our patients,” the hospital said in a statement, adding that officials are “fully cooperating” with the police investigation.

An official with the state Department of Public Health said that office also has opened an investigation but declined to provide further details.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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Murder conviction voided after 20 years

Five witnesses who identified Francisco Carrillo as the gunman in a Lynwood drive-by shooting recant. A mock staging of the crime raises doubts about whether they could ever have reliably identified the shooter.

by Jack Leonard, Los Angeles Times

March 16, 2011

Superior Court Judge Paul A. Bacigalupo posed a question to the slim man wearing blue jailhouse scrubs. Which is worse, the judge asked, an innocent man wrongfully convicted or the real perpetrator remaining free?

"The wrong guy going to prison," Francisco "Franky" Carrillo replied without hesitation. "For the past 20 years, I've lived that experience. And I think it's the worst predicament any human being can be under."

Days after the courtroom exchange, Carrillo, 37, was expected to be freed late Tuesday or Wednesday from Los Angeles County Jail, having spent two decades behind bars for a fatal drive-by shooting he insists he did not commit.

Bacigalupo overturned Carrillo's 1992 murder conviction Monday after witnesses recanted their identification of him as the gunman and a dramatic reconstruction of the shooting raised doubts about whether they could have ever reliably identified the shooter.

The murder case against Carrillo hinged solely on the word of six teenage boys who had been standing with the victim on a Lynwood street when the gunman drove by. One jury deadlocked 7 to 5 in favor of acquitting Carrillo, but a second jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to two life terms in prison.

Last week, five of the six witnesses testified at the Compton Courthouse that they had not clearly seen the gunman. Among them was the victim's son, who said he made his identification because one of his friends at the scene said he recognized Carrillo as the shooter. That friend also recanted.

The case underscores what legal experts say is the danger of eyewitness testimony. Studies have shown that faulty identifications are the biggest factor in wrongful convictions and that witnesses are particularly unreliable when identifying someone of a different race. The witnesses who identified Carrillo are black, while he is Latino.

Bacigalupo did not address whether Carrillo is innocent but concluded that the recantations and other evidence undermined confidence in the jury's verdict.

Carrillo's supporters, however, said they have no doubts about his innocence and have named three other men as suspects in the shooting.

"He's 100% innocent…. I would stake my soul on it," said Ellen J. Eggers, a deputy state public defender who worked on Carrillo's case on her own time and helped assemble his legal team. "I can't wait for Franky to start his life."

Carrillo's 20-year quest for freedom won the support of a large legal team, including the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University and the law firm Morrison & Foerster, which provided lawyers and investigators free of charge.

The team examined the case, interviewing witnesses, who recanted. The attorneys then filed legal papers challenging the validity of the conviction based on the recantations and the identification of the other possible suspects.

The witnesses were standing near the curb on Lugo Avenue well after sunset Jan. 18, 1991, when Donald Sarpy walked out of his home to talk to his son. A car cruised down the residential street and then made a second pass. A passenger leaned out the window and fired several shots. Sarpy, 41, was struck in the chest.

The victim had no connection to any gang, but the area had seen tit-for-tat shootings between a predominantly African American gang, the Neighborhood Crips, and a mostly Latino gang, Young Crowd. That night, Scott Turner, a Neighborhood Crips member and one of the boys standing on the sidewalk, identified a photograph of Carrillo as that of the shooter.

After his arrest, Carrillo, then 16, denied any involvement in the shooting, telling detectives he was home watching television the night of the killing. He had grown up in Lynwood but moved to Maywood more than a year earlier to live with his father. Carrillo admitted he was a Young Crowd member but said he had not recently associated with the gang.

The other boys were not asked to review a photo lineup of Carrillo until six months after the shooting. Deputy Dist. Atty. Mary Ann Escalante, who prosecuted Carrillo, described the sheriff's investigation as "shoddy at best" when she testified Monday.

With varying degrees of certainty, the boys selected Carrillo's photograph from the same six-pack of suspect photographs that Turner had been shown.

Dameon Sarpy, the victim's then-17-year-old son, told jurors in the first trial that he was "pretty sure" Carrillo was the shooter. After the jury deadlocked, the prosecutor asked him whether he was certain. Sarpy said he was, Escalante recalled in court, and she told him to make sure the jury knew that next time. Sarpy testified more confidently at the second trial.

But Sarpy, now an orthopedic technician, said last week that he identified Carrillo after Turner told him which photo Turner had selected in the six-pack.

Courts usually look skeptically at witness recantations. Some witnesses renounce their testimony out of fear of retaliation. But Escalante, who has prosecuted dozens of gang homicides, testified that Sarpy's recantation troubled her.

"I believed him with all my heart," she said, tearing up. "Why would somebody whose dad is dead now say that he didn't see it? He has a vested interest in seeing that the person who killed his father paid the price."

Turner apologized to Carrillo in court last week.

"I … hope God allows you to forgive me for what I did to you," he said as Carrillo's relatives in the courtroom wept.

Turner, who is serving a prison sentence for assault with a firearm and false imprisonment, alleged that a sheriff's deputy rejected photos of other suspects he initially selected until he chose Carrillo's. Sheriff's deputies dispute the claim, and prosecutors noted that over the years Turner has told several conflicting versions of what he saw and who was responsible for the killing.

Indeed, some of the recanting witnesses have given conflicting statements in recent months to district attorney's officials and sheriff's investigators.

And although Carrillo's attorneys argued that two other men had confessed to others and implicated a third person, prosecutors said that in interviews with sheriff's detectives all three denied any involvement. The men refused to testify last week.

On Friday evening, Bacigalupo visited the crime scene to see for himself what could have been seen the night of the shooting.

The judge stood with a group of attorneys and investigators in the driveway where the boys had been 20 years ago and squinted in the dark as a car drove by several times. Once the vehicle had traveled past the judge, the car's passenger leaned out and aimed a cellphone at the bystanders. His face was little more than a black silhouette.

Brentford Ferreira, a supervising prosecutor, told the judge Monday that doubts remained about the recantations. But he said he believed that the conviction should be overturned.

Carrillo smiled broadly as Bacigalupo ordered his release. A district attorney's spokeswoman said the office has 60 days to decide whether to retry the case.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-murder-conviction-overturned-20110316,0,2901001,print.story

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Convicted murderer pleads guilty to killing 10-year-old Riverside County boy

Striking a deal to spare his life, convicted killer Joseph Edward Duncan III entered a guilty plea Tuesday in a Riverside County Superior Court for the murder of a 10-year-old Beaumont boy.

Duncan, already convicted of killing an Idaho boy and members of his family, had faced the death penalty for the 1997 killing of Anthony Martinez, a 10-year-old abducted near his backyard.

In February, Duncan's defense team went to Riverside County prosecutors, offering to have their client plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County district attorney's office.

“The district attorney agreed to a sentence of life without the possibility of parole,” Hall said, adding that Duncan is scheduled to be formally sentenced next month. “The agreement is in place, it's just the formality of the sentencing that is going to happen in April.”

In 2008, a federal jury convicted Duncan of murdering 9-year-old Dylan Groene, his mother, Brenda Groene, her fiancé, and another of her sons in Idaho. Duncan was sentenced to death and also given nine life terms for those crimes.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/03/convicted-killer-pleads-guilty-to-killing-10-year-old-riverside-county-boy.html

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From the New York Times

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U.S. Drones Fight Mexican Drug Trade

WASHINGTON — Stepping up its involvement in Mexico 's drug war, the Obama administration has begun sending drones deep into Mexican territory to gather intelligence that helps locate major traffickers and follow their networks, according to American and Mexican officials.

The Pentagon began flying high-altitude, unarmed drones over Mexican skies last month, American military officials said, in hopes of collecting information to turn over to Mexican law enforcement agencies. Other administration officials said a Homeland Security drone helped Mexican authorities find several suspects linked to the Feb. 15 killing of Jaime Zapata, a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Immigration agent.

President Obama and his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderón, formally agreed to continue the surveillance flights during a White House meeting on March 3. The American assistance has been kept secret because of legal restrictions in Mexico and the heated political sensitivities there about sovereignty, the officials said.

Before the outbreak of drug violence in Mexico that has left more than 34,000 dead in the past four years, such an agreement would have been all but unthinkable, they said.

Pentagon, State Department, Homeland Security and Mexican officials declined to comment publicly about the introduction of drones in Mexico's counternarcotics efforts. But some officials, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said the move was evidence of the two countries' deepening cooperation in efforts to prevail over a common threat.

In addition to expanding the use of drones, the two leaders agreed to open a counternarcotics “fusion” center, the second such facility in Mexico, where Mexican and American agencies would work together, the officials said.

In recent years, the United States has steadily stepped up its role in fighting Mexican drug trafficking, though officials offer few details of the cooperation. The greatest growth involves intelligence gathering, with Homeland Security and the American military flying manned aircraft and drones along the United States' southern border — and now over Mexican territory — that are capable of peering deep into Mexico and tracking criminals' communications and movements, officials said.

In addition, the United States trains thousands of Mexican troops and police officers, collaborates with specially vetted Mexican security units, conducts eavesdropping in Mexico and upgrades Mexican security equipment and intelligence technology, according to American law enforcement and intelligence officials.

“It wasn't that long ago when there was no way the D.E.A. could conduct the kinds of activities they are doing now,” said Mike Vigil, a retired chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “And the only way they're going to be able to keep doing them is by allowing Mexico to have plausible deniability.”

In addition to wariness by Mr. Calderón's government about how the American intervention might be perceived at home, the Mexican Constitution prohibits foreign military and law enforcement agents from operating in Mexico except under extremely limited conditions, Mexican officials said, so the legal foundation for such activity may be shaky. In the United States, lawmakers have expressed doubts that Mexico, whose security agencies are rife with corruption, is a reliable partner.

Before Mr. Obama met with Mr. Calderón at the White House, diplomatic tensions threatened to weaken the cooperation between their governments. State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks had reported criticism of the Mexican government by American diplomats, setting off a firestorm of resentment in Mexico. Then in February, outrage in Washington over Mr. Zapata's murder prompted Mexican officials to complain that the United States government paid attention to drug violence only when it took the life of an American citizen.

In the end, however, mutual interests prevailed in the March 3 meeting after a frank exchange of grievances, Mexican and American officials said.

Mr. Calderón told Mr. Obama that his country had borne the brunt of a scourge driven by American guns and drug consumption, and urged the United States to do more to help. Mr. Obama, worried about Mexico falling into chaos and about violence spilling over the border, said his administration was eager to play a more central role, the officials said.

The leaders emphasized “the value of information sharing,” a senior Mexican official said, adding that they recognized “the responsibilities shared by both governments in the fight against criminal organizations on both sides of the border.”

A senior American administration official noted that all “counternarcotics activities were conducted at the request and direction of the Mexican government.”

Mr. Calderón is “intensely nationalistic, but he's also very pragmatic,” said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “He's not really a fan of the United States, but he knows he needs their help, so he's willing to push the political boundaries.”

Mexican and American officials said that their cooperative efforts had been crucial to helping Mexico capture and kill at least 20 high-profile drug traffickers, including 12 in the last year alone. All those traffickers, Mexican officials said, had been apprehended thanks to intelligence provided by the United States.

Still, much of the cooperation is shrouded in secrecy. Mexican and American authorities, for example, initially denied that the first fusion center, established over a year ago in Mexico City, shared and analyzed intelligence. Some officials now say that Mexican and American law enforcement agencies work together around the clock, while others characterize it more as an operational outpost staffed almost entirely by Americans.

Mexican and American officials say Mexico turns a blind eye to American wiretapping of the telephone lines of drug-trafficking suspects, and similarly to American law enforcement officials carrying weapons in violation of longstanding Mexican restrictions.

Officials on both sides of the border also said that Mexico asked the United States to use its drones to help track suspects' movements. The officials said that while Mexico had its own unmanned aerial vehicles, they did not have the range or high-resolution capabilities necessary for certain surveillance activities.

One American military official said the Pentagon had flown a number of flights over the past month using the Global Hawk drones — a spy plane that can fly higher than 60,000 feet and survey about 40,000 square miles of territory in a day. They cannot be readily seen by drug traffickers — or ordinary Mexicans — on the ground.

But no one would say exactly how many drone flights had been conducted by the United States, or how many were anticipated under the new agreement. The officials cited the secrecy of drug investigations, and concerns that airing such details might endanger American and Mexican officials on the ground.

Lt. Col. Robert L. Ditchey, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that “the Department of Defense, in coordination with the State Department, is working closely with the Mexican military and supports their efforts to counter transnational criminal organizations,” but did not comment specifically on the American drone flights.

Similarly, Matt Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman, said it would be “inappropriate to comment” on the use of drones in the Zapata case, citing the continuing investigation.

Though cooperation with Mexico had significantly improved, the officials said, it was still far from perfect. And American officials acknowledged there were still internal lapses of coordination, with the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration at times unaware of one another's operations.

More than anything, though, officials expressed concern about reigniting longstanding Mexican concerns about the United States' usurping Mexico's authority.

“I think most Mexicans, especially in areas of conflict, would be fine about how much the United States is involved in the drug war, because things have gotten so scary they just want to see the bad guys get caught,” said Mr. Selee of the Wilson Center. “But the Mexican government is afraid of the more nationalistic elements in the political elite, so they tend to hide it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/americas/16drug.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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