00:00:03
Speaker 1: On March eighth, nineteen ninety eight, seventeen year old Oscar Eagle was shot in the leg in Los Angeles' Peico Union neighborhood. Six days later, sixteen year old Benjamin Eureus was also shot, a non fatal wound that police believed was in retaliation for Oscar's shooting. Soon police arrested Oscar Eagle, but the charges were dropped when Eureus failed to appear in court. Then something changed. Eureas suddenly became confident that Oscar was the shooter, even though he'd always said the gunman had run to and from the car. But with Oscar's debilitating leg injury, could he really have done that? This is wrongful conviction. The Fox Foundation is proud to support this episode of wrongful conviction and the work of After Innocence, a nonprofit that helps hundreds of people nationwide rebuild their lives after wrongful incarceration. Each year, innocent people are released after spending years behind bars for crimes they didn't commit. Nearly all of them leave prison with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, with no help or compensation from the state, as they face the steep challenges of rebuilding their lives after wrongful imprisonment. After Innocence is changing that After Innocence helps exoneries get and make good use of essential services like health care, dental care, mental health support, legal aid, financial counseling, and more. Since twenty sixteen, they've brought that help to more than eight hundred exoneries across forty six states, working tirelessly to ensure that no one released after wrongful incarceration is left behind. Learn more at After Dash Innocence Ditte and join After Innocence to support exoneries as they rebuild their lives. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. I'm your host, Lauren Bright Pacheco, and I'm so glad to be back for another season. And we're starting off in Los Angeles in the late nineteen nineties, a time to find by gang hysteria and the sweeping mass incarceration that followed. Joining me today is someone who lived through it as a kid, Oscar Eagle. Oscar welcome, thank you, and to help tell the story. His attorney from California Innocence Advocates, Megan Bacha welcome, thank you. So Oscar grew up in the eighties and the nineties in the Peico Union area of Los Angeles.

00:02:53
Speaker 2: I had two loving parents, had a sister that lived with me, and I had a brother that was in and out of juvenile hall camp. And she was a lot older than me. It was about ten years older than me. Yeah, so the family life was comfortable. My dad after work, he came straight home and we wait at the dinner table in the living room. It was a good time growing up in the house. But outside of my house was the projects in the Pickle Union.

00:03:17
Speaker 1: Which was the main hangout for a gang called the Burlington Locos.

00:03:22
Speaker 2: So I wouldn't stand growing up looking out my window watching them, you know, riding on the walls. And I love art, you know, I love drawing, and probably like ten years old, I got into graffiti that had to continued when I got involved with gangs.

00:03:37
Speaker 1: Oscar's graffiti tag was clown and graffiti really was the extent of his criminal activity.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: I believe that drew a lot of attention to me. Growing up in Pickle Union, I was always getting haarressed by these cops. At one time when I was younger, the LPD pulled probably about five of us on in front of my house and after the cops left. All my friends they started to leave. I went back to my house, but in front of how some other kids that lived in the neighborhood that were not gang members, they gather up like about four or five Christmas trees and they put it on fire, and the police showed up. They took a guest and said, oh, well, Oscar was just hanging out in front of the house right here. They arrested me and were saying that they watched me from across the street burning the Christmas trees.

00:04:18
Speaker 1: So this was the first time that Oscar's alleged gang affiliation led to false charges against him. In Los Angeles, at the time, there was a specialized unit called CRASH, short for Community Resources against Street Hoodlums. But as we've seen in other cities with heavy gang policing, when a neighborhood is associated with a gang, an alleged member of the area's gang will usually be targeted for any crime that occurs in the area, innocent or not. And most gang members aren't involved in violent crime at all, like graffiti artists, but they are painted with the same bra criminal brush.

00:05:02
Speaker 3: That's absolutely right.

00:05:03
Speaker 2: You know, if every game member was violent, man, it would be super chaotic out there, but it's only a small percentage of every gang that has these type of individuals that are violent, like social paths or whatever you know.

00:05:18
Speaker 1: All So, while on probation, Oscar was targeted again while at his friend Victor's house. There was a party going on outside. When LAPD raided the.

00:05:27
Speaker 2: Location, an officer put the flash light on me and I heard him say to another officer that clown is right here. That's what they used to call me, clown. And they cut me up and they told me that I was being arrested for violating my probation for hanging around with Victor, who is a bursting game member. So they cut me up. They threw me in that cop car. As soon as we left eighteen and Union. We headed down towards Venice and Union, and a guy named one Carlos and Martha Torres acrossing the street, and one Carlos was a game member from Drifters them up. They opened up the truck of the car and they pulled something out of the car, but there was a bag of something. I don't know if it was marijuana or what, but they say you're gonna get arrested. For this, you know, you said that shit in minds and they're like, get.

00:06:13
Speaker 3: In the car.

00:06:13
Speaker 2: And there was two eighty street Game members crossing the street. They pulled up on them, chased them on foot. They grabbed a hold of a guy named Weto and another guy out of what the other guy's name was, and they threw them in the car. Car with us went to the police station. There was a lot of activity going on that day. It was a lot of cops everywhere. There was a lot of people in there. They were interested on the guy from at street, the guy named Wetto, and they started talking to him and they were bragging about they killed somebody that looked just like him.

00:06:42
Speaker 1: And then Crash Unit Officer Nino Durden threatened Oscar with firearm charges.

00:06:49
Speaker 2: Officer Durden, he threw the mem in a room and started to tell me that I was gonna go down for some guns and that IU. I guess he wanted me to admit the guns or something like that. And I was like, I'm gonna do that. Man like man, you me for violation probation, Just take me in and ready, and I went to juvenile hall. Actually got convicted for the gut charge. I got out of camp around October of nineteen ninety seven. I believe I was trying to be more mature at that time. I kept my routine up, exercising, going to school, going to my community service. And on March eighth, it was my niece's birthday. We celebrated her birthday at my house. After that party, Bortom said it and I said, you know.

00:07:26
Speaker 3: What I'm gonna. I'm gonna go to Peak Co Union.

00:07:28
Speaker 2: I took the bus to Pickle Union and I started walking looking for the guys, and I couldn't find nobody from the neighborhood. So I started walking towards the bus stop on Pickle and Union to go home in Easter Day. And so when I was walking over there, a car pulled up and started shooting at me and immediately hit me in my calf.

00:07:47
Speaker 1: Oscar turned eighteen two days after he was shot, and the wound made it very difficult for him to walk, let alone run, which became a very important fact on March fourteenth, when a sixteen year old kid named Benjamin Urius was also shot.

00:08:04
Speaker 4: So Arias was a sixteen year old kid who was just walking in the Pico Union neighborhood of Los Angeles and a car pulled up. He says that somebody jumped out of the back seat yelled Burlington Locals, which is the name of the local gang and one that Oscar was associated with. He said that the shooter took off running, which is important, chased after Arias. Arias went to hide under a nearby vehicle. Ultimately, several shots went off and one grazed Arisa's chest, in another his leg, and then the shooter ran back to the car. Again important considering that Oscar was incapable of running.

00:08:43
Speaker 1: Because you're on crutches, right it went into your calf. The bullet was still lodged there.

00:08:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was still lodge right there.

00:08:50
Speaker 4: And Arias originally told responding officers that the shooter was wearing shorts. Oscar also had a drain on his legs where the blood was draining out from the bullet wound, and Rhea said that he didn't notice anything on the shooter's leg on the strain would have been very visible.

00:09:07
Speaker 1: But despite these disqualifying elements, they contacted Oscar under the auspices of his own debilitating shooting.

00:09:16
Speaker 2: March fifteen, I get a call from Detective Caserras. And I told you guys already that I didn't see who shot me. I don't have nothing else to say to you guys. He goes, well, we need to close that case up and we need you to pretty much like sign off on it or something like that. And then on March seventeen, he showed up right away. He looked at my leg and seeing that I was on crutches, and he's like, hey, you can't walk, and I go, nah, could you put your foot to the floor And I said nah, my calf locked and I wasn't able to stretch my leg or nothing. He told me, hey, you know Junior from at Street and I was like no, and he goes, well, he knows you.

00:09:48
Speaker 1: The guy he's calling Junior is Benjamin.

00:09:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, yes, And I was like, maybe I do know him. I don't know.

00:09:55
Speaker 2: I grew up right there in people in Union. Maybe I don't know him personally. Maybe we see each other around. So he's like, well, he's saying that you shot up. I go, don't know what it's talking about. So he was like, I don't think he did, because I'm looking at your leg and I don't think you're capable of doing this crime.

00:10:09
Speaker 1: It later became clear that neither did the victim, Benjamin Urias, but Oscar was affiliated with the Burlington Locos, so they brought him in anyway, and he told them exactly where he was during the shooting at the hospital with his friend Becky Chavez, whose friend Susie had gone into an early and false labor.

00:10:30
Speaker 2: I went to the hospital like all day. I remember going back and forth to drink water. I remember the camera being right above the water, found it and then the security I remember him being a short black officer, So I was like, go talk to that security guard, go get the camera right there, and didn't do none of that. They called Becky Chavis, who I was with that night, so she got down there. They put Becky in a room, they questioned her, and she just verified the same thing that I told him, and they came out and they put me in front of her and they asked me, you better say you did it, because if not, Becky, job is going to go down for this tool. And I was like, man, why are you doing this to us? She told me like, don't listen to these cops, you know. So I told Becky, Becky, sorry, you're gonna have to get arrested too, because you know I didn't I didn't do this crime.

00:11:17
Speaker 3: And then I've seen her walk out, and then.

00:11:19
Speaker 2: It took me a week or two to get a public defender to come visit me at the Ali County. It's one of the first things I told him, Man, go get the footage from the hospital. And my first two courts, I was going in crutches. And then on the third court day the case got.

00:11:33
Speaker 1: Dismissed because Junior didn't show up.

00:11:36
Speaker 3: He didn't show up.

00:11:53
Speaker 1: In order to indict Oscar again, they were gonna need the victims cooperation. But there's a record of this new interaction with ben Urius which appears to shed light on why he hadn't shown up to the prior court proceedings and also why he was now open to suggestion.

00:12:12
Speaker 4: So we don't have a recording of the first lineup, and we don't know precisely what happened there, but it's really clear from the recording of the second lineup that police definitely pushed Areas into selecting Oscar.

00:12:25
Speaker 1: Ureus also repeatedly asked if they were going to help him on his other case, and six times the new detectives, Muriel and Wiseman, assured him they'd get him on home confinement instead of juvenile camp. Interestingly, these new detectives were from the homicide unit, even though this wasn't a homicide. They asked Ureus if he knew his shooter's name, and Urreus said, quote, they said, Oscar Eagle. Then he's shown a lineup with Oscar in position four. Urreus denied recognizing his shooter. Detective Muriel urged him, quote, take a closer look at it there. Again, Urius didn't make an identification silence. Then Uria says, quote looks sort of looks. Murl cut him off, quote like number four.

00:13:18
Speaker 4: And then Oria says the number that they had pointed to that the police pointed to in the lineup. I don't know why they were so focused on Oscar or why police didn't bother investigating other alternative suspects, but it seems that once they had their eyes set on Oscar, they just weren't going to take anything else other than Oscar.

00:13:40
Speaker 1: So, you know, just to show how crazy this was at the time of your trial, forget about Becky, They've pulled in another woman randomly a young woman named Martha Torres who's twenty years old, just happened to be from the neighborhood. And now they're claiming that she was driving the car that you were in the night Junior was shot. And now they twisted so that the motive is that you're shooting Junior in retaliation for you being shot, and that Torres is motivated by the fact that her brother was murdered by a member of the same rival gang, and none of it's true.

00:14:25
Speaker 2: And her brother was not even a Births and Game member. Her brother was from another different gang called Drifters, but they made it seem like he was from a neighborhood too, and I was like, oh man, this guy's not even from my neighborhood.

00:14:36
Speaker 1: And then the saddest part is she, like you, is completely innocent, but they talk her into taking a plea deal for five years.

00:14:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, Miss Torres, I think made the right decision. Unfortunately, even though she was innocent, because she was facing life as well, I mean, she could have ended up doing more than twenty six years like Oscar as well. So she began trial with Oscar. Part Way through the beginning of trial, she separately took a plea deal, and the judge had to instruct the jury that they weren't supposed to draw any conclusions. By Miss Torres no longer being part of Oscar's trial. You know, Miss Torres still maintains her innocence and there was no evidence against her. She had never driven, she didn't have a driver's license, she didn't know how to drive. Her friend's father happened to own a vehicle that looked similar to the one Areas described. That's it.

00:15:30
Speaker 1: So Martha Torres did the math and did not like her odds. But Oscar's appointed attorney, Patrick Lake, gave him confidence.

00:15:38
Speaker 2: He started to tell me that he talked to my alibis, he talked to my doctor. He said that they all confirm and verify my story and that we're good and we got a strong case right here. And also the joys that we're going to be in front of is a band from school or something like that.

00:15:52
Speaker 1: But it seems like Patrick Lake had given Oscar false confidence.

00:15:57
Speaker 4: So a trial against Oscar. There was the test money of Benjamin Arias, and by the time of trial he was much more confident that it was Oscar. He wasn't cross examined thoroughly. It seems that maybe Oscar's defense council hadn't listened to the audio recorded police interview, because if he had, then it's inexplicable why he wouldn't have cross examined him on the inconsistencies that Rias didn't originally pick out Oscar, that the police directed him to pick out Oscar. In fact, they said, how about this one.

00:16:32
Speaker 2: He's the quiet, he's the quiet, and I was like, the hell, Like, you're not going to speak for me. And then I told him he is the doctor going to show up and he goes, oh, he'll be here tomorrow.

00:16:39
Speaker 4: There was that there was testimony from police officers, including you know, gang investigators, which is scary for the jury to hear about gang members in their community.

00:16:50
Speaker 3: And I had all two tattoos.

00:16:51
Speaker 2: So when I was in trout, they had like poster size pictures and that's deftly part of the stand and starts saying, oh, these are old English type letters, and you know, she's start telling professional opinion. I was like, oh, this is they're just trying to just any little things, just to.

00:17:05
Speaker 1: Just anything they could do to make you look.

00:17:07
Speaker 2: Bad, just look like an animal. And Patrick Lake, he doesn't talk again, and I'm like, hey, man, what's going on?

00:17:13
Speaker 4: Man?

00:17:13
Speaker 3: Go I'm preparing. I'm preparing. So I told me what's up with the doctors? He's showing up?

00:17:18
Speaker 2: And he said, yeah, he'll be here tomorrow and said, you told me that yesterday. Every day he kept telling me that, and the next thing know, the cases almost over with and and I'm like, hey, where's the doctor at Oh, he's not going to show up.

00:17:27
Speaker 1: It sounds like your representation didn't prepare at all. You only had one witness called in your defense, and that was Becky. I'm gonna throw it to you, Megan. When you looked into the witnesses that Patrick Lake claimed to have contacted for his defense, what did you find.

00:17:51
Speaker 4: Well, we spoke to the friend that had false labor that day that Oscar went to go see in the hospital, and she absolutely remembered this day she was in the hospital for false flabor, So that's documented. She said Patrick Lake had never interviewed her or her mother, and when Patrick Lake said that he left a message on their answering machine, she says they didn't even have an answering machine back then. That she absolutely would have appeared at trial had she been called to do so, but she wasn't even interviewed. Quite simply, he didn't interview witnesses. He didn't call these witnesses that were so crucial. And then in fact, it's very apparent that he lied to the court about having interviewed these witnesses. You know, he stood up, he looked around court and said, I don't see them here. I don't know why they're not here to testify. Well, because he hadn't bothered to even talk to them.

00:18:40
Speaker 1: And then at one point I think the judge said, we'll give you twenty more minutes.

00:18:44
Speaker 4: So even when the judge gave an additional twenty minutes, even if Patrick had called, then she would have been completely unprepared. She probably in LA. She wouldn't even be able to get to the courthouse in that amount of time.

00:18:54
Speaker 2: My mom passed me a NOE that morning. She said, fire your lawyer, like this guy do nothing for you. He didn't even contact your alibies. I raised my hand and the judge was like, what are you doing? And I said, man, I want to fire this guy. And he's like, well, hold on, hold on, and he took everybody out the court. Room, and he said, you're doing a Marston motion or something like that, and I was like, I'll go I don't know what that is. I just want to fire this guy because he hasn't been representing me. And he goes, Oh, you just don't like the way your trial's going, and so you just want to get rid of your lawyer. He goes, it doesn't work that way, you know, sit back down. So I was like, man, let me take the stand in. I was like, man, at least let me show the jurors because they're going to see the whole of my leg and they're going to be like, oh, man, this guy wasn't able to do this crime. As soon as I got up on that stand, I just felt attacked by the DA and then next thing you know, it was go sit back down. So I turned around and told the judge, Hey, Judge, I show my leg to the jurors.

00:19:41
Speaker 3: He said, now go back and sit down.

00:19:43
Speaker 4: Patrick Lake could have asked to show that to the jury, but Oscar, as the witness at that time, can't just turn around and ask to judge, hey, let me show my leg.

00:19:52
Speaker 1: And then a detective takes a stand. He holds up two pictures. One is you holding a gun, no context of where or when it was taken. The other one is you standing next to somebody holding a gun. And on March twelfth, nineteen ninety nine, you were convicted of attempted first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison plus twenty five years.

00:20:19
Speaker 2: At that moment, you know, I was stoic and shocked. I didn't know how to react, but I.

00:20:25
Speaker 3: Just remember my brother. She was right behind me.

00:20:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, I heard her cry. When I heard her cry, I turned around. The judge was talking and I didn't hear nothing at all. I just just my brother. I was feeling double. She said, she was feeling you know, they're separating us for life. My mom I stopped drinking when I was probably about twelve thirteen years old.

00:21:12
Speaker 3: She made me a promise that she wasn't gonna drink no more. And after I.

00:21:15
Speaker 2: Got convicted, I started hearing that she was drinking and I was like, what the hell there? And I knew I knew it was it was because of.

00:21:25
Speaker 1: People, because of what was done to you.

00:21:31
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:21:33
Speaker 1: You then ended up entering California's adult prison system as a teenager.

00:21:41
Speaker 2: I got there at nineteen years old. I didn't know how to sell it at that time. It was twenty four hour lockdown, sometimes going years and year's lockdown.

00:21:50
Speaker 3: It was a biling. It was riots.

00:21:52
Speaker 2: When I got there to Pelican Bay, there was a big riots and a fair way of two thousand and I ended up going to the ads say for that for sixteen months, and then I ended up in ire Was state prison.

00:22:02
Speaker 3: I found a good program right.

00:22:04
Speaker 2: There in a completed computer class, and I started having a border job.

00:22:08
Speaker 3: And I always been drawing, you know, that was my thought.

00:22:11
Speaker 2: So I used to tell my mom those semi money, just buy me my art supplies and I'll figure out how to get money.

00:22:17
Speaker 1: While Oscar's early appeals failed, the LAPD was still reeling from what became known as the Rampart scandal. It began with a nineteen ninety seven road rage incident, but exploded the following summer when crash unit officer Rafael Perez was caught stealing cocaine from an evidence locker and selling it nearly eight hundred thousand dollars worth to save himself. Perez turned state's witness and became a whistleblower, exposing everything Oscar had already experienced and more brutality, planted evidence, perjury, drug trafficking, bank robbery cover ups, and even ties to organized crime. Perez also revealed the officers would gather at a bar near Dodgers Stadium to celebrate their shootings, handing out red cards for a wound and black cards for a kill. Perez implicated at least seventy officers, including crash officer Nino Durden, and how he had engineered the false firearm charge against then sixteen year old Oscar Eagle, but that was a different crime, so Oscar remained behind bars for yet another crime he did not commit.

00:23:32
Speaker 2: My mom died in two thousand and seven, and after her death, I went into the depression and I couldn't snap out of it. I was breeving. I started making poor decisions. Eventually, the squad unit came in and the gaffled me up. They had searched my cell and they found an address book. I had an address to Gigi Gordon that was helping me in my case years prior, and she happy to have a client that was a member of the Mexican mafia.

00:23:56
Speaker 3: And they said that.

00:23:57
Speaker 2: I was using her as a third part dropped to connect with the mesic of mafia. So they sent me to the whole You're.

00:24:04
Speaker 1: Again like falsely accused and you get thrown pretty much in solitary for six years.

00:24:12
Speaker 2: Yes, I just would think that, man, I must be cursed. You know that that night marries got worse and worse. And so I was like, man, you guys are just stretching. You guys are just stretching to validate me or to break me or something. And I got a visit from my dad when I was in essay. That was the last time I see them. I told me that they're trying to they're trying to break me in here, and yeah, he just said, he said, oh, you know, don't break. Just believe in a higher power, man, just don't break.

00:24:44
Speaker 1: You mentioned that that was the last time you saw your father, because unfortunately both of your parents passed while you were incarcerated. What at that point kept you from giving up hope completely?

00:25:00
Speaker 3: I was in the shoe.

00:25:01
Speaker 2: We end up having a hunger strike, and the result of the hunger strikes that we went through, they start to release suspect to the general population. I started to see the GP as freedom, you know, So I was like, oh shit, I'm going to go.

00:25:14
Speaker 3: Back to the mainline.

00:25:15
Speaker 2: I always loved running laps, so I was like, man, I could go out there and run again, you know, like I could get into school and try to get an education, and.

00:25:24
Speaker 1: With greater freedom of movement and access to educational materials. He was able to submit his case to the Conviction Review Unit under Jackie Lacy, the LA District attorney at the time, but citing that it was submitted with no new evidence, he was denied a reinvestigation, so Oscar had to wait for the election of George Gascon in order to resubmit his case, around which point Megan got involved.

00:25:51
Speaker 4: I was actually at a transitional house at an event for other clients, and I was approached by a couple of Oscar's friends. They had with them an entire file full of things, and they sat me down and showed me. During this party, they ended up showing me all this evidence and how Raphael Press had admitted that they had essentially placed at false gun charge on Oscar to begin with. And what really drew me to his case was it doesn't seem that Arias ever really identified Oscar until the police pointed him to do so. So I had been working in other cases with doctor Wicksted. He's an eyewitness identification expert, and there is a new consensus in the eyewitness identification scientific community, and I thought that Oscar's case fell perfectly in line with that. So I was gathering everything that we needed. I went to the offices of Gig Gordon, whose Gordon has passed away. I contacted all of Oscar's prior council and got materials from the California Court of Appeal. That all takes a lot of time to gather the materials. In the meantime, the LA District Attorney's office, well, Oscar was blessed. I'll just say that because there was a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles who is behind I think seven exonerations. Now. She really believed in these cases and incorporated the eyewitness identification consensus into most of them. She has now gone on to become a judge, which is a great loss to the innocence community. But she ended up looking at the case as well, so she and I actually ended up working on the case together. We interviewed witnesses together. I flew to northern California to interview Benjamin Arius, who was actually incarcerated at that time, interviewed him with some attorney investigators as well, and it just seems so clear that there was no evidence against Oscar. The only evidence was this quote unquote identification by Arius, which never existed.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: Baca and the DA's Habeas Corpus litigation office together filed a joint writ arguing that Oscar's conviction was the result of ineffective counsel for all the reasons we've already discussed. His attorney had failed to impeach Benjamin Urius or Detective Muriel, with the audio recording of the flawed identification process, ignored the issue of Urius's unrelated criminal case, did not present more alibi witnesses or supporting evidence. Most critically, the defense never introduced proof of Oscar's compromised physical condition or called his doctor to testify that given his injuries, he could not have committed this crime.

00:28:45
Speaker 4: So, although the ineffective assistance of counsel is what led Oscar to be wrongfully convicted in the first place, Elisa meant that some of this evidence that we were able to use to prove his innocence wasn't already used in the past, so that we couldn't, you know, bring that up again post conviction.

00:29:04
Speaker 1: And relatively speaking, once you got involved, it was pretty fast.

00:29:10
Speaker 4: It was really fast. And again that is thanks to Dia Laura bazign of the LA District Attorney's office. She was in the conviction integrity unit and then went over to the habeas litigation unit. And you know, if she hadn't been working with us jointly, then this would have taken years and years.

00:29:30
Speaker 1: On July tenth, twenty twenty five, Oscar's conviction was vacated.

00:29:35
Speaker 4: Once he was out, we got to meet face to face for the first time, and now he's my next door neighbor.

00:29:42
Speaker 1: That's amazing. You know, the Los Angeles Times did basically where are they now in terms of all the different people who contributed to this wrongful conviction and the LAPD spokesperson had no comment on it. Others denied wrongdoing. You know, even Patrick Lake, your attorney, who claims he doesn't even remember your case. I want to ask about accountability. What does accountability mean in a case like this.

00:30:16
Speaker 2: I just don't see them taking accountability. I should think, like man, I wonder sooner or later are they going to step up and say, you know what, I did something wrong back then. You know, I gotta get off the streets in But I'm not the only one. There's other guys still stuck in there from the rap par scandal. I would love to see these officers have integrity and do the right things, but I don't think it's going to.

00:30:40
Speaker 4: Happen no matter how we hold the people responsible to account. Oscar lost his entire twenties and thirties to prison. He wasn't there when either of his parents passed away, and there's absolutely nothing to get him that time back. I think that the state bar should take these cases more seriously when they is such egregious, ineffective assistance, just simply no evidence put on that was very apparent and readily available. I also think that qualified immunity is a huge issue. I don't see how prosecutors or police can ever really be held accountable so long as there's this immunity. I also think that even all of these years later, even when district attorney's offices are willing to do the right thing, and they you know, they get so much credit for me. I'm so grateful to them. You know, even in Oscar's case, the elected DA of La County showed up and appeared on the record in his case, which is huge. However, you know, the police still aren't held to account for the wrongdoing. And the problem is the police are the investigating agency for the District Attorney's office. I mean they work together, they work hand in hand. Police unions don'tate to prosecutorial elections. Aside from overhauling the system completely, I don't know how we can ever prevent this sort of thing from happening again, considering that they work so closely together.

00:32:14
Speaker 1: And when people say, oh, well, they're settlements and there's money paid, that money is not coming from the people who caused the wrongful conviction. That's not accountability. That's society basically trying to pay off to protect the people in power.

00:32:35
Speaker 4: Right right, That's coming from the taxpayers.

00:32:39
Speaker 1: So with that, we're going to close out this interview by asking our audience to support Megan's organization. They're out there doing the work necessary to finally bring about some measure of justice in these cases. So we're going to link California Innocent's advocates in the episode description. Please donate, follow them on social media, or otherwise get involved. And now I'm just going to thank you both for sharing this story with us before I leave the floor to you for any final thoughts.

00:33:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, I will say that I am consistently shocked by how little evidence needs to be put on for a jury to convict. I don't think that people understand the burden of beyond a reasonable doubt. And when the crime is allegedly gang motivated and they have gang investigators coming up and testifying, it just sort of scares the jury into let's lock up whoever, because it sounds like, you know, hoodlums. It's all these hoodlums out there destroying our communities, like the crash units.

00:33:43
Speaker 1: I was just about to say, like the crash unit street hoodlum.

00:33:48
Speaker 4: That's right, even though in Oscar's case, what he was doing was artwork on walls. He was doing graffiti. You know, he wasn't out shooting people. But they lump them all into being sort of the same, and that, you know, anybody that's getting associated just having grown up in that neighborhood, they're necessarily evil and violent.

00:34:07
Speaker 2: I just want to let people know that, you know, our system is bad, you know, like they don't need concrete evidence or direct evidence to find you guilty. Here, it's like they don't take a human life serious, you know. And I just tell people just to be more open minded and look beyond somebody's image because it's easy for a district attorney, it's easy for a police officer to draw a negative image to somebody.

00:34:38
Speaker 3: That's understand.

00:34:39
Speaker 2: We take their word as gold, and they got to be able to see behind the words. When you make a person into a monster and an animal, it's real easy to convict them as soon as you have that thought in your mind.

00:35:00
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week early and add free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as executive producers Jason Vlahm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Clyburn. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at Lauren Bright Pacheco. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One.

00:35:38
Speaker 2: We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good