Scandal Over Jail Informants Forces Retrial

In the first conviction to be overturned in the jailhouse informant scandal, a judge Friday ruled that a Montebello man serving a life sentence for murder is entitled to a new trial.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Alexander H. Williams III made the ruling after the district attorney’s office admitted it had inadvertently failed to disclose information jurors should have had, and joined a defense request to reverse the conviction.

The undisclosed information was necessary for jurors to fairly evaluate the credibility of a longtime informant who testified that the defendant had confessed, prosecutors said. It consisted of psychiatric reports and testimony in prosecutors’ files that the informant, Stephen Jesse Cisneros, was an inveterate liar.

The man whose conviction was overturned, Carlos Herrera Vargas, 37, remained in custody after the ruling, pending a bail hearing next Friday and a judicial decision that could come as early as next month about whether he will be retried.

He was described by one of his attorneys, Lorenzo Pereyda, as “delighted . . . with the . . . half-step toward justice.”

The district attorney’s office said that if it is allowed to retry Vargas it will rely on circumstantial evidence, rather than Cisneros’ testimony.

Referring in court to Vargas as “the killer,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Frank Sundstedt said he believes there is enough evidence to convict Vargas without Cisneros.

Vargas’ other attorney, James McGrath, disagreed. He said he will argue at a hearing in January that the judge should dismiss the murder charge because there is not enough evidence to warrant subjecting Vargas to a second trial.

Vargas has been serving a sentence of 29 years to life after his conviction in 1987 for the 1984 attempted rape and murder of Mary Torres. Authorities said the young woman was slashed, strangled and left in an alley near her Montebello residence.

Vargas, a divorced electrical equipment salesman, was the last person known to have seen her. He said he gave her a ride home from a nightclub, but dropped her off at an intersection near her residence at 2 a.m., rather than at her door. The trial prosecutor, relying on testimony from Torres’ friends that she was frightened to walk alone in her neighborhood after dark, argued that Vargas’ story did not make sense.

Other key evidence against Vargas included some blood in Vargas’ car of the same type as the victim’s and a pubic hair found on the woman. An FBI expert testified that it matched characteristics of Vargas’ hair, but he would not say that it probably was Vargas’.

In his petition for a writ of habeas corpus, Vargas’ attorney, McGrath, asked that the conviction be overturned because Cisneros has recanted his testimony that Vargas confessed.

In a sworn statement made recently to McGrath and a court-appointed investigator, Sue Sarkis, and later repeated to The Times, Cisneros said he committed perjury in the Vargas case at the behest of Montebello police officers.

McGrath alleged in his petition that there had been a conspiracy to suborn perjury involving the police, prosecutors and informants.

But Judge Williams did not overturn the conviction on the basis of the recantation. Instead, he endorsed the prosecution view that the conviction should be overturned because of a failure to disclose critical information, and he lauded the district attorney’s office for owning up to its error.

It was Williams himself, a former federal prosecutor, who apparently initiated the review of the case that led to the decision Friday.

Williams called attention to the case shortly after the jailhouse informant scandal broke last year with a demonstration by another informant, Leslie White, that he could easily fake another inmate’s confession and fool police and prosecutors.

In the wake of White’s demonstration, the district attorney’s office moved quickly to restrict the use of jailhouse informants, who trade supposed confessions for favors from law enforcement. The Los Angeles County Grand Jury and the State Bar launched separate probes and the Legislature passed a law requiring that jurors be warned to view informants with suspicion. About a dozen defense attorneys have challenged convictions based in part on informant testimony.

According to defense attorney Gigi Gordon, who had been named the Superior Court’s expert on informants, Judge Williams contacted her with information that a team of prosecutors constituted to examine jailhouse informant cases had refused to look into Vargas’.

She said the judge told her that the district attorney’s office balked on the grounds that Cisneros was not in custody and therefore technically not a jailhouse informant when he supposedly heard Vargas confess.

Gordon said she knew of Cisneros’ activities as a jailhouse informant in other cases and already had hired Sarkis, the private investigator, to look into them for California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a statewide defense lawyer group.

Williams subsequently appointed Sarkis and Vargas’ appellate lawyer, McGrath, to look into the Vargas case at public expense.

Recently, senior officials in the district attorney’s office ordered the jailhouse informant litigation team to become involved.

Once that happened, prosecutors found files on Cisneros that Vargas’ trial prosecutor had never seen but which the district attorney’s office was nonetheless legally obliged to have turned over to the defense.

The critical information was contained in a file on a 1974 case in which Cisneros was charged with setting a series of fires. In one of the fires, two children died. Cisneros confessed to setting the fatal blaze and was charged with murder in the children’s deaths. Although he confessed, he did not plead guilty. Rather, he presented a psychiatric defense.

A partial trial transcript which, for unexplained reasons, was not in the publicly available court file, showed that a psychiatrist testified that Cisneros’ own confession could not be believed because he was a habitual liar.

A judge acquitted Cisneros of the murders but found him guilty of setting other fires.

Cisneros, who is currently serving 70 years in prison for a series of kidnapings and rapes, went on to testify in at least five other cases as a jailhouse informant for the district attorney’s office. He now says he committed perjury in four of those cases when he testified that the defendants confessed. Two of those cases resulted in convictions.

However, Sundstedt indicated that the district attorney’s office probably will fight new trials for those defendants, if they are requested, on the ground that Cisneros’ testimony was less critical than in the Vargas case, where it was “vital to the case as presented.”

In the Vargas case, a second informant also testified that the defendant confessed. Prosecutors said no decision has been made about whether this informant, Leo Zendejas, would testify at a retrial. But Zendejas has told his former lawyer that Vargas never confessed. So it seems doubtful that prosecutors would rely on him again.

Ironically, the jury foreman at Vargas’ trial, Guy Trimarchi, said in an interview recently that jurors ignored the informants’ testimony and convicted Vargas on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

A county Probation Department report prepared after the conviction said Vargas had been convicted of five other crimes and had once served a year in jail. The convictions were for battery in 1970, assault in 1971, shoplifting in 1972, assault with a gun in 1975 and battery in 1979, the report said. In addition, Vargas was found to have violated probation in 1981 for a reason that was not specified in the report and sentenced to spend 24 weekends in jail.