2 Inmates May Be Innocent and Freed After 17 Years : Justice: Officials are not convinced the two murdered a deputy. Lawyers say they may have been framed by LAPD.

Seventeen years ago, Clarence Chance and Benny Powell were convicted of murdering a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy and carted off to prison to serve life sentences. Now, they are on the verge of being freed--not because their time is up, but because authorities are no longer convinced that they committed the crime.

In court briefs to be filed today, lawyers for Chance and Powell outline how a New Jersey independent investigator--through four years of painstaking work--uncovered evidence that, they say, proves the two were framed by overzealous investigators for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Three people who testified against Chance and Powell in 1975 now say that officers pressured them into lying. Moreover, new evidence shows that during the trial, the Los Angeles Police Department withheld from prosecutors information that a jailhouse informant who testified against the pair may have been lying, and had implicated others in the crime.

And so, in an extraordinary move, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office says that at a court hearing scheduled for March 25, it will join defense lawyers in asking a Superior Court judge to free Chance and Powell and wipe the conviction off their records.

“This case is so infected that we cannot allow this kind of verdict of guilt to stand,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Bozanich, a high-level district attorney’s official who conducted his own inquiry when confronted with the new evidence. “Justice wasn’t served. We no longer have confidence in the conviction.”

The Police Department has refused comment on the case. A spokesman said the department wants to first conduct its own review. But Bozanich said the district attorney’s office has interviewed several of the LAPD officers involved, and has concluded that the Chance and Powell convictions were irrevocably tainted by the withholding of information about the informant.

During his two decades as a county prosecutor, Bozanich said, he has never seen the district attorney’s office work toward release of people it has convicted.

The man most responsible for giving Chance and Powell a shot at freedom is Jim McCloskey, a 49-year-old Protestant lay minister from Princeton, N.J., who has dedicated his life to working on behalf of those he calls “the convicted innocent.” Barry Tarlow, the Los Angeles defense lawyer whom McCloskey persuaded to take Chance’s case, calls him “a living hero.”

McCloskey is the founder and sole full-time investigator of Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit organization that functions as a free detective service for people who--because of police or prosecutorial corruption, incompetent defense lawyers or human error--are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Unless he is absolutely convinced of an inmate’s innocence, McCloskey will not take the case.

If, as McCloskey hopes, Superior Court Judge Florence Cooper orders Chance and Powell released on March 25, his tally will be 12 inmates freed in as many years. “It doesn’t get any sweeter than this,” he said.

In telephone interviews last week from Solano and Old Folsom prisons, Powell and Chance seemed sad, subdued and almost overwhelmed by the results of Centurion Ministries’ work.

Each has maintained his innocence throughout his incarceration. Powell, 44, became a jailhouse lawyer of sorts, peppering the courts with legal briefs that he said were inevitably turned down because of technical mistakes. Chance, 42, even skipped his parole hearings; the parole board will not release a prisoner unless he is remorseful, and Chance said he could not show remorse for something he did not do.

Of Centurion, Chance said: “Without them I would be buried here. I screamed to the appellate court and every other court and nobody listened. I had written many letters to various different people, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP, many people who didn’t respond to my call. . . . One can continuously battle and wave the bat, but if no one listens to you, you are not going anywhere. But Centurion Ministries, they listened to me.”

On March 21, 1987, Chance sent a letter to McCloskey. He told the lay minister that he had been wrongly convicted of killing David Andrews, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy who was gunned down Dec. 12, 1973, in the bathroom of a gas station at Exposition Boulevard and Normandie Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles.

Police believed that the motive was robbery. Powell, who sometimes lived in the neighborhood, turned up on a list of suspects. Chance came under suspicion because he hung around with Powell.

In the letter to McCloskey, Chance said he had an alibi--he was in jail at the time of the murder.

Chance was in the Los Angeles County Jail on the day that Andrews was killed, on an assault charge that was dismissed. But he was also released that day. His release papers show that he was cleared for “debooking” at 4:53 p.m. The murder occurred at 7 p.m., but Chance said he was released after 8 p.m. because the paperwork took several hours to process.

At the trial the jury was told that Chance was released at 4:53 p.m. Chance’s lawyer did not object, and Chance did not take the stand in his defense. When the judge sentenced him to life in prison, he leaped from his chair and cried: “But I was in jail when it happened!”

Chance’s letter also told McCloskey that the only eyewitness was “a scared 11-year-old girl” who had mistakenly picked him out of a police photo lineup, and that other witnesses had lied under pressure from police.

All of this intrigued McCloskey, but it would be another 14 months before he and an assistant winnowed down their hundreds of requests to just two--that of Chance and Joyce Ann Brown, a Texas inmate who was freed as a result of McCloskey’s efforts.

By early 1990, wearing the clerical collar that he calls his “door-opener,” McCloskey was working the streets of South-Central Los Angeles and downtown’s Skid Row trying to track down the people who had testified against Chance and Powell 15 years earlier. He retraced the entire initial investigation into Andrews’ death, combing through hundreds of pages of records, interviewing police officers and obtaining statements from witnesses.

What he found, attorney Tarlow said in the legal brief to be filed today, revealed “a shocking pattern of police intimidation and systematic use of perjured testimony.”

There was no physical evidence tying Chance or Powell to the Andrews murder, Tarlow wrote. Fingerprints taken at the scene did not match those of Chance and Powell, and the murder weapon and getaway car could not be traced to them.

The only eyewitness was the 11-year-old girl who testified at the trial that Chance was one of two men at the scene but that Powell was definitely not the other man. Yet when McCloskey interviewed the first LAPD investigator on the case, Roger Fiderio, he discovered that Chance was initially released because the child could not identify him as a suspect.

In an affidavit, Fiderio says he and his partner were taken off the case because their boss, Lt. John Salvino, was upset with their slow progress. “Lt. Salvino made it obvious that he wanted us to speed up this case and clear it with arrests,” the affidavit said, adding that Fiderio believed that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against Powell or Chance.

On Salvino’s order, Detectives William Hall and Richard Knott took over the case. According to Tarlow’s brief, the detectives repeatedly showed the girl photographs of Chance, and she finally identified him “after relentless police pressure.”

Salvino and Knott are retired and could not be reached. Hall declined to return a reporter’s call; an LAPD spokesman, Cmdr. Robert Gil, said he advised Hall not to discuss the case.

In affidavits obtained by McCloskey, other witnesses--some of whom never testified--describe similar pressure from Hall and Knott. Wayne Henderson, a friend of Powell’s, said he implicated Powell to get the officers off his back. “The pressure was intense,” his affidavit says.

The owner of the gas station where Andrews was killed said the detectives repeatedly asked him to identify Powell and Chance, but he could not. A woman who lived across the street said the detectives offered her young sons a bicycle and part of a $10,000 reward in return for testimony against Powell and Chance, “even though my sons had consistently maintained that they were unable to identify the two men.”

And the three women who did testify each gave McCloskey signed statements saying they falsely implicated Chance and Powell because they were frightened of police. Witness Tammy Jackson, who was 14 at the time of the trial, wrote: “This has been on my mind for 17 years.”

Armed with this new evidence, McCloskey sought legal help. He persuaded Tarlow, a well-known criminal defense lawyer, to take Chance’s case at no cost. Tarlow sought free assistance for Powell from O’Melveny & Myers, one of Los Angeles’ leading law firms. Attorney Sandra Smith took the case.

At the same time, McCloskey asked Bozanich if the district attorney’s office would take a second look at the case. But Bozanich was not interested. After all, he said, witnesses change their statements all the time. And Chance’s potential alibi was not enough.

The big break came when McCloskey began probing the testimony of Lawrence Wilson, a jailhouse informant who was discredited in 1981 after he concocted a story about Sirhan Sirhan confessing to a plot to kill Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Wilson had provided key trial testimony against Powell, saying Powell had confessed to the Andrews murder. His testimony was crucial because the 11-year-old eyewitness who placed Chance at the scene had emphatically stated that Powell was not there.

But McCloskey unearthed a report by Wilson’s LAPD “handler,” Detective Rudy Ticer, showing that Wilson had made some of his statements under hypnosis--a fact that was not revealed to prosecutors during the trial. Ticer, now retired, did not return a call seeking comment.

Suddenly, Bozanich was interested. “I’ve seen lots and lots of files,” he said, “and this one just had a funny sort of odor to it.”

Bozanich began his own inquiry. He found documents showing that Wilson, in conversations with an Orange County investigator and Ticer, had implicated two other people in the Andrews killing. And he uncovered the results of two polygraph examinations--one of them taken the day that Wilson told police about Powell’s alleged confession--that deemed Wilson “untruthful in all relevant areas.”

None of this information came out at the trial. And while Bozanich will not go so far as to say that he is convinced that Powell and Chance are innocent, he says the new evidence casts so much doubt on their guilt that his office will not retry them for the Andrews murder.

“In the eyes of the D.A.’s office,” Bozanich said, “this case is unsolved.”

Andrews’ family could not be reached. The Sheriff’s Department had no comment on the turnabout in the case.

Powell and Chance say they are trying not to be bitter about the time they have lost. Chance has no plans other than to “just relax” with his mother and sisters, who still live in Los Angeles. Powell hopes to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter (he has made three music videos while in prison, he said), to write an autobiography and spend time with his family in Phoenix. He has two sons, ages 18 and 19, but has not seen them since they were babies.

The case, Powell said, has reaffirmed his faith in God, but shattered his beliefs about the criminal justice system.

“There is really no justice,” he said, “in terms of 17 1/2 years which can never be given back.”