Arthur Carmona is one more victim of California ex-Governor Pete Wilson's direct assault on minority youth to appease the bloated state prison guard lobby, Wilson's biggest campaign contributor Stop the Juvenile Justice Initiative before it kills your child.
	more on Arthur Carmona at www.freecarmona.org Teen has hope for new trial in robbery Judge will decide whether the convict should get another chance TONY SAAVEDRA Orange County Register 7/1/2000

Carmona, the nephew of a high-profile Santa Ana police officer, has drawn support from Hispanic leaders and actor Esai Morales. The Costa Mesa teen was convicted of robbing two restaurants at gunpoint in February 1998 of almost $700. He is now represented by one of the largest law firms in the country, Sidley & Austin, with 900 lawyers on three continents.
Muns-Park said Carmona's previous lawyer did not present Carmona's alibi during trial, or evidence that an eyewitness had identified somebody else in the robberies. Prosecutors contend that other eyewitnesses gave compelling testimony that Carmona was the robber.

free Art
by   Matt Coker OCWeekly 2/11/2000 p11

Now if only District Attorney, shamed by a string of recent high-profile overturned convictions, would only unmix things up & let the lad out already.
Carmona is part of a growing trend: A new study shows minority youths charged with serious crimes are much more likely than white juveniles to face trials in adult courts and end up in prison. Hispanics accounted for 42.4 percent of the youths arrested for felonies in California from 1996 to 1998 and 51.5 percent of the juveniles sent to prison by adult courts, according to the Justice Policy Institute.

Whites made up 28 percent of juvies arrested for felonies, but only about 9 percent got prison time from adult courts, the San Francisco criminal justice think tank found. A spokesperson says the Governor "believes the laws should be fairly applied" but will wait to see if lawmakers take action. Whoa; don't go too far out on that limb there, Gray.

By DANA PARSONS, Los Angles Times Jan 12 2000

Carmona was 17 and had broken down only once during the long afternoon leading up to the judge's toneless pronouncement. That was while his aunt was testifying that Arthur tried to help his mother provide for his younger sister.

I'd written a number of columns last spring questioning Carmona's conviction in October 1998 for two armed robberies earlier that year. It was impossible for me to know the absolute truth about his guilt or innocence, but what left me angry and deflated on sentencing day was knowing that the prosecutor and judge who sent him off to prison couldn't have, either.
Those feelings haven't been easy to shake. But this week, seven months after that day at Harbor Court, relief arrived in the form of 400 pages of legal arguments filed on Carmona's behalf.

I don't know if the appellate briefs will free Carmona. But anyone who reads them will be forced to question with even more intensity whether Carmona was the gunman who robbed a juice bar and a Denny's restaurant two days apart in February 1998.
The briefs give a much more fleshed-out picture of who Carmona is and how a legal system that aspires to justice let him down. Some of the answers lie in honest mistakes and differences of opinion. Others, I fear, are more darkly rooted.

Heavy Hitters Come to Bat

Muns-Park wanted to work on the case and suggested to her firm that it handle the Carmona appeal on a pro bono basis.
This week, partner James Harris, who worked on the appellate brief with Muns-Park, explained why the firm took the case.
"We're deeply committed to pro bono work and try to find cases where we think we can make a difference and there's something important to pursue," Harris says. "This seemed to be a case of importance."
The firm delved into the case and "thought an injustice has been done and wanted to participate in trying to right it," Harris says. Mindful that the overwhelming percentage of appeals fail, Harris says, "We think we've presented a strong ground for reversal here and are hopeful that the conviction is reversed or, at the very least, that he's given a new trial."

Ronnie Carmona, Arthur's mother, has been sparing in her interviews since her son's arrest.
"This isn't about Kenny Reed [her son's original trial attorney who comes in for scathing rebuke in the appeal] or about the cops or the D.A.," Ronnie Carmona says. "This is about a person's life."
She says Arthur, scheduled to be transferred to state prison when he turns 18 next month, has already had to fight to protect himself at the Northern California youth facility where he's being held.

Shades of Prison

As I've written from the outset about Carmona, those are the stakes.
Last June, about 10 days after his sentencing, I got a two-page handwritten letter from Arthur. He thanked me for my advocacy, noting, "I'll never forget what you did for me."
Then he gave me an insight that I hope signals the strength that will see him through this:

"I'm angry, but who should I be angry at? Am I angry at my lawyer or my D.A. or the judge? I'm not angry at any of them. They were just doing their job. Maybe I'm angry at the fact that I told the truth but still got found guilty and got 12 years. . . . I'm not going to let this get the best of me. I'm still going to do all the positive things I've been doing."
This is the first time I've mentioned his letter. His mother didn't think he'd mind me quoting from it.

Now, after spending all night reading Sidley & Austin's mammoth brief, I think I can offer Carmona something other than false hope:
Hang in there, Arthur. It's not over yet.

Dana Parsons (714) 966-7821 dana.parsons@latimes.com Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626

By DANIEL YI, Times Staff Writer Jan 11, 2000

Arthur Carmona, 17, is being held at a California Youth Authority facility in Ione, near Sacramento. He is expected to be transferred to an adult prison within weeks when he turns 18.
Carmona, who had no criminal record, was arrested nearly two years ago and charged with the robbery of an Irvine juice bar and also for the robbery of a Costa Mesa restaurant two days before the Irvine incident. He was later convicted of both crimes at a single trial.

Since his conviction, two jurors and a key witness in the case have publicly expressed doubts about Carmona's guilt. His cause has drawn attention from many community leaders who believe he is innocent and that he was prosecuted on faulty evidence.
"Arthur has already served two years for a crime he didn't commit," said Jim Harris, a partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Sidley & Austin, which is handling the appeal. "It is an injustice that should be speedily corrected."

The 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana is expected to hear the case within six months.
Tori Richards, a spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney's office, said Monday that Carmona "got a fair trial and the jury properly convicted him. . . . This matter is now in the hands of the Court of Appeal, and we will see what happens."
Richards pointed out that the judge in the case, Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey, turned down a motion for a new trial in June after hearing arguments similar to those in Carmona's appeal.

The appeal is highly critical of Kenneth Reed, Carmona's court-appointed lawyer for his first trial.
"There were at least 10 witnesses who could have supported Arthur's alibi that he was nowhere near the scene when the true robber was casing" the juice bar, the appeal documents state. "Nevertheless by the time trial began, [Reed] had spoken with, at most, only one or two of these witnesses."
One of those, a former girlfriend of Carmona, said she saw him at his house around the same time other witnesses say they saw the robber studying the juice bar. Janett Cortes, the girlfriend, said she was never interviewed or asked to testify.

The appeal attorneys also fault Reed for failing to suppress evidence they said was questionable. Costa Mesa police arrested Carmona within hours of the juice bar robbery and brought in witnesses to identify the teenager. At one point officers placed a hat believed to have been worn by the robber on Carmona's head, even though the hat was found in the getaway car and not on Carmona.
"Police gave the witnesses a nudge" by placing the hat on Carmona's head, Monday's documents state. The appeal also faults Carmona's lawyer for not calling expert witnesses who could have testified that eyewitness identifications of crime suspects often are inaccurate.
Two witnesses who testified against Carmona said they were sure he was the robber only after seeing him with the hat.

The appeal argues that Reed's "ineffective counsel" coupled with other factors are grounds for a reversal of the conviction or a new trial.
Reed could not be reached for comment Monday. In a declaration filed with the appeal, however, he defends his performance.
"I recognize that some of the decisions that I have made in this case are the subject of question to a later observer," he said. "I made these decisions in the heat of trial."

Casey Becerra, a Costa Mesa restaurant worker who identified Carmona as the robber, has publicly expressed doubts about her testimony and even wrote a letter to the young man in jail apologizing for her role. She said authorities influenced her by telling her that they had found the gun, backpack and hat Carmona used in the robberies. In fact, no physical evidence ever linked Carmona to the crimes. Investigators and the prosecutor in the case have denied that witnesses were unduly influenced.

Two jurors have also said they felt pressured to vote for conviction by others panelists despite their reservations. One juror, Sandra Dinardo, alleges in Monday's appeal documents that jurors discussed the case outside the jury room against the judge's orders. If jury misconduct were established, it also could be a basis for seeking a new trial.

by Mike Males

Wilson's mantra: the initiative's drastic expansion of the definition of "criminal conspiracy," harsher sentencing, adult trial, death penalty and anti-gang measures is crucial because juvenile crime is out-of-control. As proof, he pointed to the "31 percent increase" in "serious violent crime" by juveniles in South Orange County from 1997 to 1998.

Wilson deceive us? Perish the thought. The juvenile-crime leap he cited did, indeed, occur. It amounted to a whopping 30 more arrests in South County's dozen cities, which house some 600,000 people.

South County cities have so little youth violence that the numbers bounce up and down erratically. In Mission Viejo (population 95,000), arrests "quadrupled" to 30 in 1998, up from seven in 1997 (which represented what one might call "a dramatic plummet" from 1996's 22). San Juan Capistrano's 31,000 souls suffered a "tripling" in youth mayhem (three arrests in 1997, nine in 1998). Most terrifying was the 700 percent eruption in teen savagery in San Clemente (in a city of 48,000, seven arrests in 1998, one in 1997).

Going the other way, Dana Point, Lake Forest, Newport Beach and the three Lagunas (combined population 280,000) slashed their youth-violence toll from 49 arrests in 1997 to 40 in 1998. It may boil down to which town hosted a good Little League brawl.

In all of South County—from the raging slums of Irvine to the sordid alleys of Coto de Caza—youth-violence arrests increased from 97 in 1997 to 127 in 1998. To put that figure in perspective, the same South County cities' police logged 2,300 domestic-violence calls—1,600 involving weapons—in 1998. The tony toll-way towners are safer outdoors than indoors.

The fiscal-impact note accompanying Wilson's JJI warns the measure will bring "unknown major net costs" of "at least hundreds of millions of dollars annually" to state and local governments.

Most inconveniently for Wilson and his fellow travelers, youth violence is way down—and has been throughout the 1990s. Down in Orange County as a whole, down in LA, down in San Francisco, San Diego, San Bernardino, down from Coyote Wells to Fort Dick.

On Which Way LA? as elsewhere, Wilson claimed that tough laws like Three Strikes brought adult crime down but youths continue to run wild. It's a complete fabrication. Led by enormous drops among blacks and Latinos, youth homicide fell by 12 percent in 1998 and is down 61 percent from its 1990 level. Violent crime by youths dropped 9 percent last year and is 20 percent lower than in the early '90s. Juvenile-crime declines are far larger than declines among adults.

But juvenile crime is not down in every hamlet, and JJI backers have apparently decided to trumpet each and every exception, no matter how laughably tiny. In fact, the tinier the better. In smaller cities where crime is rare, even a small increase looks big when converted to a percentage.

So Wilson and JJI backers are pushing a nickel-and-dime "juvenile-crime wave" strategy to scare richer voters, mostly white, into approving a billion-dollars-plus initiative to criminalize thousands more youths, mostly black and brown. Such crude dishonesty certainly would be exposed were it not for a more dismal parallel development: the news media's herd-journalism stampede to terrify suburban voters that their own kids lead "secret lives" of gun- happy barbarity and that gangs are invading posh enclaves.

Even by the Los Angeles Times' and other mainstream news media's sub-National Enquirer ethics governing youth-issue coverage (in which one bloodletting in five years becomes an "alarming trend" and two a "terrifying epidemic"), recent features on "gangs" and killer kids menacing paradises like Aliso Viejo and Ojai are a disgrace. So once again, Pete Wilson's genius at divining the optimum wedge-issue strategy—one that piggybacks political demagoguery on journalistic fearmongering—gives his pointlessly draconian, exorbitantly costly JJI a shot it doesn't deserve.

COMMIE GIRL

The New New World Order

While we hate to judge boobs by their covers, we can only too easily imagine these morons doing all kinds of crimes—raping, looting, being ugly—but we can't imagine them ever being brought to justice: too white, too privileged, too damned entertaining in their retardedness. Someone less white and less retarded will probably be brought to justice in their place. Someone, perhaps, like 17-year-old Arthur Carmona.

Carmona, a good boy with the wrong skin pigment and a Latino last name, was walking to a friend's house in Costa Mesa on the wrong day in February 1998. He was gently detained at gunpoint by the Costa Mesa PD for fitting the description of a robbery suspect wanted for a crime committed just a few minutes earlier. OC prosecutor Jana Hoffman used tainted witness identifications (witnesses told LA Times columnist Dana Parsons that police had told them there was physical evidence tying Carmona to the scene; also, they weren't sure it was him until a baseball cap—which he was not wearing when arrested—was placed on his head) to convict him; there were absolutely no fingerprints or physical evidence linking Carmona to the crime, although the suspect had not been wearing gloves. And Carmona had been on the phone in Costa Mesa with friends when the robbery occurred in Irvine. But Carmona's court-appointed defense was less than dazzling, summing up:

"I've been up here today over 50 minutes, but been up here for the better part of an hour, and my voice is getting dry, and I am tired, and I am missing things. I write these notes, and I get wound up and forget what I am saying, so I will stop. . . . We go to law school, got to give us a chance to talk to you. Part of the rules. We need to be able to talk and say what we feel. We need to argue. I made arguments or said things, objected, argumentative. This is the time for me to argue to you. . . . So when I sit down, I know I have forgotten something because I've forgotten something every time I've done this."

Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey (perhaps gun-shy after the storm of law-and-order outrage that hailed down when he ordered the release last year of Geronimo Pratt for prosecutorial malfeasance) denied a request for appeal based on the lameness of the defense, saying, "The court can't really grant a new trial for the purpose of trying the whole thing again. No trial is ever perfect."

We wonder what hay the late and lovely former California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird, who died of breast cancer on Dec. 4, would have made of that. Perhaps her opposition to the death penalty was spurred by such spurious and malevolent prosecutions as the one committed against Carmona. We miss her already.

A fund-raiser for Carmona's appeal will be held Wednesday night at the Santa Ana Elks Club (see the Calendar's Politics listings for more info or call 714-740-4099). And as for prosecutor Jana Hoffman, well, we wish her a merry Christmas, all snug and cozy in her well-appointed bed while Carmona attempts to find peace in a juvenile prison facility in northern California. We really can't think of anything funny to say here about that whore. Damn, she's even managed to steal our vaunted and deservedly well-praised wit. Now that makes us mad.

CommieGirl99@hotmail.com. We really can't get over what a whore Jana Hoffman is.

mail letters to
Arthur Carmona (MD086) Preston Youth Correctional Facility - Juniper Lodge
201 Waterman Rd Ione CA 95640

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