Road to Vindication Is Paved With Pain : Law: Man’s murder conviction is overturned after seven years in prison.

Melvin Mikes has been a free man for a month, but he still carries a copy of his prison identification card in his wallet--a reminder, he says, “of what can go wrong.”

For Mikes, the card is a bittersweet memento of a chain of events that began in 1985, when he was arrested for a Long Beach murder he swears he did not commit. Mikes was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life based solely on the fact that his fingerprints were found at the crime scene and on the murder weapon--a turnstile bar that had once been used at the entrance of a hardware store.

Mikes’ former employer said recently that she was willing to testify that Mikes was elsewhere when the murder occurred. But she was never called.

After nearly seven years of court battles, a federal panel of judges ruled that Mikes’ conviction was based on insufficient evidence and ordered him set free. Last month, Mikes made good on a long overdue promise, racing from Corcoran State Prison to his 12-year-old son’s elementary school so that they could walk home together for the first time.

“I went through a lot because of this,” Mikes, 32, said in one of several recent interviews with The Times. “I lost a lot. And I never killed anyone.”

Mikes’ case is that rarest of rarities in the American system of justice: one in which a defendant manages to persuade the federal courts to take a second look at the evidence in a state case and find that the judge and jury erred. Even experienced criminal lawyers can count on one hand the number of times they have seen the courts intervene in that way.

“It’s extraordinarily unusual,” said noted criminal defense lawyer Barry Tarlow, a former federal prosecutor. “This must have struck the court as an obvious miscarriage of justice.”

Mikes knows how unusual his case is.

“I believe it was God, without a doubt,” said Mikes, his voice dropping to a murmur. “I kept trying to prove that I didn’t do it . . . (but) even I lost faith after a while. I believe it was the Lord who got me out of there at last.”

Along the road to vindication, Mikes’ mother died, his brother committed suicide and his marriage dissolved. He has battled and beaten the Long Beach Police Department, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the attorney general of California. And although Mikes believes he deserves an apology from the government that put him behind bars, he is not likely to get it.

“I still to this day believe he was guilty,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Scott Carbaugh, who won the verdict against Mikes. “If I felt he was not guilty, I would have fought to have him released.”

The saga began on the afternoon of March 10, 1980, when someone broke into the fix-it shop of Harold Hansen, tied him up and beat him to death in the course of a robbery. The murder weapon, investigators determined, was a three-foot chrome pipe that was part of a dismantled turnstile. A total of 46 fingerprints were recovered from the crime scene, including those on the weapon. Of those, 16 were identifiable and six belonged to Mikes.

Police were able to match Mikes’ prints because, as he admits, his young adult life was not exactly untarnished.

Mikes said that although he had never been to prison he had been arrested for stealing a car, shoplifting and drug offenses. His brothers also were in and out of trouble, and all of them were well known to police in South-Central Los Angeles, where they lived.

So when police determined years later that some fingerprints on the metal bar were Mikes’, they concluded that they had finally wrapped up the 5-year-old case. To be sure, the case was not airtight: Police never found any witnesses to testify that Mikes had been to the fix-it shop and none of the recovered stolen items had Mikes’ fingerprints on them.

Instead, prosecutors argued that the metal posts had been stored for several months in Hansen’s basement, where no one other than Hansen and the people who broke into his shop could have handled them. Therefore, prosecutors said, Mikes could only have touched the metal bar during the break-in and murder.

Mikes’ public defender considered that to be flimsy evidence because it failed to take into account the possibility that Mikes could have touched the posts prior to Hansen buying them. Rather than call witnesses to testify regarding Mikes’ whereabouts on the day of the murder, the lawyer moved for the case to be dismissed on the grounds that the fingerprint evidence was insufficient to warrant a conviction.

Other experienced lawyers say they might have done the same thing if faced with a “fingerprints-only” case, but one consequence of that decision was that the jury never heard from Dorothy Osby. Osby, who works for a union, said recently that she could have explained that Mikes was not at the scene of the crime.

Osby said that between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on March 10, 1980--the hours when authorities say Hansen was killed--Mikes was walking a picket line at a medical facility.

“He was a picketer,” Osby said in an interview. “He was working at a site that day. He could not have killed that man.”

Osby said she had reviewed time cards from the day of the murder and was prepared to produce them in 1985--but she was never called.

Had she testified, Osby would have been subject to cross-examination, and her story might or might not have affected the verdict. As it was, the jury never heard her and voted to convict Mikes. The judge refused to dismiss the case and sentenced Mikes to 25 years to life.

Within weeks, Mikes was housed at the first of several California prisons, thrust into a world of violence and prison gang rivalries. Although he said he was not in a gang, Mikes was in a number of fights. He also went through huge weight fluctuations and developed a large and painful cyst in one arm. It still flares up occasionally.

Mikes also learned to read and write, and he earned a high school equivalency degree. Today, he speaks with confidence and cites legal principles with ease.

“In some ways, the time did me some good,” he said. “I had to learn a whole lot about myself.”

While Mikes struggled in prison, the state appeals courts upheld his conviction, as did a U.S. district judge in Los Angeles. Despite those setbacks, Mikes’ attorney for the appeal, Jill Ishida of the state public defender’s office, pressed on, and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear the case.

Donald F. Roeschke, a deputy attorney general in Los Angeles, argued the prosecution’s case and stressed that the fingerprint evidence was uncontested. He also said that the pattern of Mikes’ fingerprints suggested that he had grasped the bar in a manner consistent with wielding it as a weapon.

Mikes believes he must have touched the bar at some point but has no recollection of when. “Let’s face it. His fingerprints were on the murder weapon,” Roeschke said in a recent interview. “What are the statistical odds on those being placed there?”

Roeschke said he does not know “with 100% certainty” that Mikes committed the murder that sent him to prison for seven years. But the standard for finding a defendant guilty of a crime is proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” not certainty.

“Except for God, who knows anything with 100% certainty?” Roeschke said.

The 9th Circuit panel was unconvinced. Specifically, the judges noted that although the fingerprint evidence proved that Mikes had touched the metal bar at some point, it did not show when he had touched it.

“The defense expert testified that fingerprints can last indefinitely,” the judges wrote. “This is consistent with the testimony of government experts in other cases.”

Under the evidence presented, the court ruled, “the fingerprints could have been placed on the posts by a person who disassembled the turnstile, a person who sold the turnstile to Hansen, or any person who considered buying the turnstile prior to Hansen’s acquisition. It is also possible, though less likely, that the fingerprints could have been impressed on the posts on the last occasion on which the turnstile was in general use.”

The court also rejected the argument that the pattern of the prints indicated that Mikes had used the post as a weapon. “People generally grasp turnstile posts while using them for the purpose normally intended,” the court said.

On Oct. 7, 1991, the 9th Circuit ruled that Mikes was wrongly convicted, and it ordered him set free.

Even after that ruling, the state pressed ahead, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. That took almost a year, and when the Supreme Court rejected the state’s appeal, paperwork delayed Mikes’ release for another four months.

On Oct. 21, 1992--seven years and six days after Mikes was arrested--a prison guard came to Mikes’ cell and told him he had good news and bad news.

“I’ll take the bad news first,” Mikes remembers saying.

“The bad news is that I’ll miss you,” the guard responded. “The good news is that you’re leaving.”

Within hours, Mikes was on his way back home, leaving all his possessions, except for a few legal documents, behind.

Today, he is getting reacquainted with his family and looking for work in a world far different from the one he left in 1985.

Although he has experience as a construction worker and as a roofer, the building business is slow and jobs are hard to come by. Last week, he was up and out of his apartment early, lining up for work on a construction project. But he did not get a job.

Hardest of all, he says, has been returning home to the wreckage of his family life. Mikes’ mother died in 1989, and he could not go to her funeral. A few weeks later, his brother overdosed on heroin.

After years of holding their marriage together, Mikes and his wife were divorced in 1991, just days before his conviction was overturned.

Of all that he has been through, nothing pains Mikes more than the fact that his mother did not live long enough to see him freed. She had urged him to keep his faith year after year, and she had long predicted that the courts would someday agree.

“She kept trying to prepare me for this day,” Mikes said. “I believe, in some strange way, that my mother had to die for me to be free. . . . I just wish she could be here.”