Judge Backs Defense Lawyer, Orders Report : Bias Charged in Murder by Vehicle Cases

The San Diego County district attorney’s office was ordered a second time Tuesday to provide information to a defense attorney who claims prosecutors target drunk drivers involved in fatal crashes with stiffer charges if they are members of ethnic minorities.

Defense attorney John Jimenez hopes to show a prosecution pattern of charging white drunk drivers with vehicular manslaughter in death cases while filing more severe second-degree murder charges against non-white drunk drivers. Jimenez represents a defendant who he claims has been unjustly accused of second-degree homicide because he is a Latino.

A deputy district attorney labeled the charge “nonsense.”

The district attorney’s office in recent years has charged five alleged drunk drivers with second-degree murder--a white and a non-white in San Diego Superior Court and three non-whites in Vista Superior Court. Both defendants in San Diego were convicted of the reduced charge of vehicular manslaughter, and the other three are awaiting trial in Vista Superior Court, Deputy Dist. Atty. Rupert Linley said.

List Not Compiled

The district attorney’s office in Vista is prosecuting a fourth person--a non-white--for vehicular manslaughter and is considering filing a second-degree murder charge against him as well before it goes to trial, Linley added.

Superior Court Judge Lawrence Kapiloff previously had ordered the district attorney’s office to compile a list of persons it has prosecuted in cases involving fatal drunk-driving accidents, and on Tuesday prosecutors asked that the order be dismissed.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Myers said his office had not yet complied with the order because it had been preoccupied filing a motion in appellate court challenging the order--an appeal that was rejected in October--and because there was a discrepancy between what Kapiloff had previously ordered and what the defense attorney had sought in his written papers.

Kapiloff on Tuesday clarified the confusion and again ordered the list be compiled--and that it be done by Jan. 28 or he would consider dismissing the second-degree murder charge against defendant Rudy Martinez, 20, of Oceanside.

Martinez is charged with felony drunk driving, vehicular manslaughter and second-degree murder for the deaths of two pedestrians last February along Cardiff’s restaurant row.

Kapiloff said he shared a concern by Jimenez that not all drunk driving defendants involved with fatal crashes are treated equally by the district attorney’s office.

Four-Martini Lunch

“The respected businessman with a three- or four-martini lunch has to be treated the same way as some kid,” Kapiloff said. Jimenez, Martinez’s court-appointed attorney “has a right to challenge the district attorney as to whether or not he is using and applying these laws in a fair way, regardless of race,” Kapiloff added.

Jimenez is contending that Martinez is unfairly being charged with second-degree murder because he is Latino.

Martinez was bound over to trial in Superior Court after testimony in his preliminary hearing that he ran two stop signs and almost hit another car and then participated with the driver of the other car in what was characterized as a drag race along Old Highway 101.

The other driver, David Carroll, 32, testified that he tried to catch up with Martinez to “make him aware of how he was driving,” and that they ended up side-by-side at a traffic signal a quarter-mile north of restaurant row. Carroll, who was granted immunity against prosecution for several misdemeanor violations he may have committed during the incident in exchange for his testimony, said both he and Martinez sped away from a traffic signal, accelerating side by side.

Carroll said he slowed down as he approached the heavily congested restaurant row.

Other witnesses testified that Martinez lost control of his Camaro Z-28, hitting several cars before striking Michael Wolf, 25, and Daniel McAllister, 19. Both men had just left a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and had driven to the oceanfront string of eateries to meet with Wolf’s girlfriend.

Conscious Disregard

Blood tests after the crash indicated Martinez had an alcohol level of 0.14 in his blood, well above the 0.10 level for being legally intoxicated.

Vista Municipal Judge William Draper Jr. ruled in the preliminary hearing that Martinez had exhibited a conscious disregard for human life, the legal threshold for raising the incident from manslaughter to murder.

On Tuesday, Kapiloff credited the district attorney’s office “for trying to do something about (drunk driving) by treating drunken driving cases as seriously as they are.”

“But there is another side to it,” he said. “You have to apply those laws equally and fairly.”

Referring to Jimenez’ accusation, Kapiloff remarked: “He wants to know why there have been no whites (prosecuted for second-degree murder in Vista Superior Court) and that’s a good question. Mothers Against Drunk Driving want to know, too.”

The judge said that if the district attorney’s office does not currently keep statistics on its prosecutions, it should. “They should be required to collect data . . . to allow citizens to see if the law is being applied across the board,” he said.

Jimenez said outside the courtroom his office would analyze and evaluate the district attorney’s printout of defendants and ethnic makeups “to determine what is so distinguishable about this (Martinez) case” that it would be prosecuted as a murder.

He said his office would then consider filing a “selective prosecution” motion against the district attorney’s office, depending on the findings.

Jimenez suggested that the district attorney’s office was pursuing the murder degree because “there appears to be an overzealous interest group exerting a lot of pressure on the district attorney’s office.”

‘A Cheap Shot’

The Martinez case has been closely monitored by MADD, but Diane Fradin, a MADD court monitor who attended Tuesday’s hearing, said Jimenez’s suggestion that her group had specifically pressured the district attorney’s office to seek murder charges against Martinez because of his ethnicity “is a cheap shot.”

“That’s a defense ploy to dilute the very serious nature of the crime of drunk driving,” Fradin said. “A person’s ethnic background should not be the criteria (for second-degree murder). Nor should it be the reason not to charge second-degree murder. It’s regrettable he has tried to reduce this case to one of a person’s ethnic background. I’d personally like to see all cases charged as second-degree murder. The car is the weapon.”

Myers said his office “will do everything in our power” to comply with Kapiloff’s order.

He characterized Jimenez’s accusation of selective prosecution as “nonsense.”

“The decisions we make are based on the facts and how they square with the law,” he said.