Our D.A. Had No Case, but Goodwin Sure Does

From his Orange County jail cell, Michael Goodwin has won a big one.

The man charged with arranging the execution-style hits on former business partner Mickey Thompson and his wife, Trudy, in 1988 has beaten the Orange County district attorney. Goodwin has argued that the county had no legal jurisdiction to charge him, and last week a state appeals court agreed and dismissed the case, while leaving open the possibility it could be filed in Los Angeles County, where the murders occurred.

And what is Goodwin’s prize for winning?

Well, on Tuesday before last, he began his 29th month behind bars. And the meter is still running.

He deserves to be released immediately or, at minimum, to be allowed to post bail. No doubt, his attorneys will tackle that Monday morning.

You’d think something as basic as whether a county has jurisdiction in filing murder charges might get resolved before someone spends 2 1/2 years in jail, but that’s not how it works. Goodwin, now 59, was charged and taken into custody in December 2001; the appeals process didn’t even begin until the latter half of 2002.

The next time you think the defendants get all the breaks, think of Goodwin.

I’ve never lobbied for Goodwin’s guilt or innocence (the killers never were found), but the case for Orange County jurisdiction has always struck me as paper-thin. Having read the briefs filed in the case and heard the oral arguments in court, I considered it no small feat that the D.A.’s office could make its case with a straight face.

The appeals court showed its skepticism as far back as November 2002, when it first ordered the Orange County D.A. to make its case for trying Goodwin here, when Los Angeles County, which had previously refused to file charges against Goodwin, was the obvious choice.

The best the D.A.’s office could do was suggest that Goodwin once owned both a stun gun and a 9mm pistol and gave them to the killers -- because he didn’t have them after the murders. It couldn’t prove either allegation but argued for them anyway. Indeed, a 9mm was used to kill the Thompsons, but about a year ago prosecutors had to take that argument off the table when ballistics tests ruled out Goodwin’s model as a possible murder weapon.

A stun gun was found at the murder scene (it wasn’t used on the Thompsons), but, more tellingly, prosecutors had no evidence that it was Goodwin’s. As the court wrote last week, “... it is unreasonable to infer that, simply because Goodwin lived in Orange County, he must have given the murderers a stun gun from his home that may [their italics] have been seen there two years before.”

Prosecutors also argued that a man identified Goodwin (admittedly 13 years after the murders and after having seen a TV crime program that identified Goodwin as a suspect) as having scoped out the Thompsons’ neighborhood a few days before the killings. That meant, prosecutors argued, that Goodwin must have driven there from his Orange County residence. The appeals court disregarded that, ruling that the information about the potential witness came from hearsay evidence at Goodwin’s preliminary trial and is not relevant to the issue of jurisdiction.

The appeals court also rejected the argument that the county has jurisdiction because of Goodwin and Thompson’s well-documented rancorous business relationship in Orange County in the 1980s. That might qualify as a motive, the court ruled, but it doesn’t satisfy the legal requirement for establishing venue.

In short, the D.A.’s office came up holding an empty bag.

The D.A.’s defeat raises again the question of why it so insistently wanted to prosecute a case that should belong -- as the appeals court noted again -- to Los Angeles County.

Goodwin’s defense team has said repeatedly the decision was based on Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas’ friendship with Collene Campbell, the sister of Mickey Thompson. Both Campbell and Rackauckas deny that, but the appeals court’s thorough rejection of Orange County’s jurisdictional claims give more credence to Goodwin’s suspicions.

If this is the end of the prosecution against Goodwin, the lingering question is whether he’ll follow up on a pledge to publicize what he sees as the injustice done to him.

John Bradley, a longtime friend and Goodwin’s chief spokesman, suggests he will. Goodwin’s team says that L.A. County Sheriff Department detective Mark Lillienfeld testified falsely at Goodwin’s preliminary hearing in 2003 and that the D.A.’s office withheld exculpatory evidence until after the hearing.

Knowing that public sentiment rarely rests with a defendant, Bradley and Goodwin hope to change that through a nonprofit organization Bradley has set up.

“Most defendants don’t have people like me and other supporters of Mike out there,” Bradley, a former TV producer, says. “They are cooked. They can’t beat the system, especially when it’s loaded against them like in Mike’s case. We plan to expose what’s happening here and help others expose what’s happened to them.”

I’ve never detected much public sympathy for people who claim they’re falsely accused. Having someone spend 28 months in jail -- as Goodwin has -- only to have a higher court say the local jurisdiction didn’t have legal grounds in bringing charges in the first place, just doesn’t seem to upset most folks. Maybe Goodwin, if he gets a soapbox, can change that.

I talked to Goodwin briefly Saturday, before he granted a longer interview to a Times reporter. He was upbeat and not trash-talking.

“ ‘Vengeful,’ I think, is the wrong word,” Goodwin said. “I want to correct the injustices.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.