Appeals Court Reverses Murder Conviction

A federal appeals court in San Francisco on Monday reversed the 1994 conviction of a Long Beach teenager for murdering a young man from a prominent Belmont Shore family.

In a 3-0 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Long Beach police violated Leif Taylor’s constitutional rights by refusing to permit him to call an attorney after taking him into custody about midnight. The appeals court also ruled that the police, during a nearly three-hour period after the arrest, coerced Taylor, then 16, into confessing.

The appellate judges cast serious doubt about the confession and the methods by which it was obtained.

Long Beach Police Officers William MacLyman and Craig Remine refused to let Taylor call his mother, according to the ruling. At the start of the interrogation, MacLyman brandished his diamond ring in front of Taylor with the number 187 on it -- the number of the California penal code statute for murder.

MacLyman told Taylor that the youth had two choices -- a short sentence if he confessed, or a very long one if he refused to admit his role in the June 1993 killing of William Shadden, 26. Shadden was slain after refusing to give two young men his bicycle.

The opinion noted that MacLyman was one of the Long Beach officers involved in the prosecution of Thomas Goldstein, whom the same court ruled had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 24 years.

Three months after the Shadden slaying, police arrested Victor Rodriguez, 14, and Taylor, both of whom authorities said were members of a tagger gang called Mob 2 Kill, M2K. Taylor was arrested about midnight at his home and taken to police headquarters.

For 2 1/2 hours, according to the opinion, Taylor insisted that he had not shot Shadden, a graduate of USC and an accomplished poet who was studying for a master’s degree at Cal State Long Beach.

Then interrogators “broke his will” and Taylor confessed, according to the 9th Circuit ruling. The 11-minute confession was taped, but none of the earlier 2 1/2 hour interrogation was recorded.

Taylor was convicted of first-degree murder and robbery by a jury and sentenced to life without possibility of parole. In a separate trial, Rodriguez received a 25-year-to-life sentence and was made a ward of the California Youth Authority until he was 25.

No physical evidence tied Taylor to the crime, nor did any eyewitness identify him, according to the opinion.

Less than an hour after Taylor spoke with police, he recanted his confession in a phone conversation with the Long Beach attorney he had been trying to persuade the officers to allow him to call. He knew the attorney, Arthur Close, because he had done yardwork for him, according to the court decision.

At an appellate hearing years later, Taylor explained his confession this way:

“I was just tired.... I wanted to get out of that room.... I am thinking these guys [the police] are supposed to be the good guys. I was never involved in any serious crime, so if I just agree with them, get my phone call, I will get it straightened out. I will go home.”

Judge Alex Kozinski, writing for the 9th Circuit, said Taylor’s explanation that he made a false confession so that he could finally call an attorney was plausible. Kozinski also criticized the conduct of the police.

“The detectives knew Taylor was 16. Yet, having arrested Taylor in the middle of the night, and having found him in his home without a parent present, they chose to conduct the interrogation immediately and to carry it on until they got a confession,” wrote Kozinski, a Reagan appointee.

Police tactics created “far too great a risk that a false confession will be extracted, leading to the unjust conviction of an innocent person.”

“By their unjustified and distasteful actions, detectives MacLyman and Remine lent credence to Taylor’s account of what happened during the three hours that he was trapped by them in the interrogation room,” Kozinski wrote.

Kozinski also criticized the state appeals court, which upheld the conviction and life sentence, for its “laconic” review of the case.

Kozinski’s opinion was joined by 9th Circuit Judge Thomas G. Nelson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, and Jane Restani, a Reagan appointee to the U.S. Court of International Trade, sitting on special assignment.

The appellate judges ordered the California attorney general’s office to release Taylor unless they made a decision within 30 days to retry him. Moreover, the 9th Circuit ruled that if the state decided to retry Taylor, proceedings would have to commence within 70 days and prosecutors would be barred from using his illegally coerced confession.

Hallye Jordan, a spokeswoman for Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, said “we are still reviewing” the 9th Circuit order and had no further comment.

Sung B. Park, the Van Nuys attorney who represented Taylor in federal court, said he was pleased with the outcome and said authorities would be wise to release Taylor, now incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison.

“They did not have much against Mr. Taylor. Without the confession, it will be a tough case to win,” Park said.

Northwestern University law professor Steven A. Drizin, coauthor of a major study on documented instances of false confessions, said the study showed that “juveniles are particularly vulnerable to the kinds of heavy-handed interrogation tactics used in this case.”