Legal Morass Robs Father of 3 1/2 Years After Infant’s Death

Later, after 3 1/2 years in jail and more than 70 continuances, Chester Carter finally got a trial.

All along, Carter’s neighbors and relatives had said authorities investigating the suspected abuse and death of Carter’s infant son, Daniel, had the wrong man. That the soft-spoken 38-year-old Carter often accompanied Daniel to the doctor for his checkups. That he had frequently kept Daniel with him when he ran errands or tinkered around at home. That the day Daniel inexplicably stopped breathing, he listened to the step-by-step directions from the 911 operator and tried in vain to coax Daniel’s barely beating heart back to life.

But on Aug. 22, 1991, Carter was arrested in the death of his son and placed in the Los Angeles County Jail, where he waited for trial. And waited. And waited. Until this month, when a jury, in a matter of minutes, acquitted him of murder charges and the jailer told him he was free to go.

“To me, they took three years of that man’s life away from him,” juror Earl D. Bullard said. “This was a guy who got caught up in the system. Any time you get 12 jurors to walk into a room and agree in 10 minutes, that says something. To tell you the truth, it was sad. It was sad to see that our system works that way. Whatever happened to the right to a speedy trial?”

Sheriff’s detectives had alleged that Carter, at 240 pounds, stomped on his 5-month-old son, stuck his face under running water and smothered him with pillows. They said he had abused Daniel since he was barely 6 weeks old, and in a fit of rage, slew the boy during or shortly after Daniel went down for a nap Aug. 18, 1991.

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But jurors and the judge who presided over the trial have expressed doubts about the quantity and quality of the evidence against Carter, who at one point rejected a plea offer by the prosecution, according to his public defender.

Besides the questions being raised about whether Daniel died from abuse, a heart condition or sudden infant death syndrome, the prosecution suffered by relying heavily on the testimony of Stacy Hisek--Daniel’s mother and Carter’s live-in girlfriend--whose account of how the baby died unraveled during the nine-day trial after a series of inconsistencies.

“It had become clear” that there were questions about Hisek’s credibility, Judge Morris B. Jones said. “She said he stood on the child with one foot. Well, on a child that size, that would have crushed the child. Things like that were not realistic.

“Everybody who testified said that he cared for the baby,” Jones added. “If she was being untruthful, then he spent this time erroneously in jail.”

After celebrating three birthdays behind bars, Carter, now 41, has indicated that he plans to return to his native Texas and rebuild his life, according to court documents. But at last sighting, he was staying in a Los Angeles homeless shelter.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office says the time from arrest to trial in a murder case can be as short as 90 days and, on average, is up to a year. But Carter’s case languished for 40 months. At least 12 judges and six prosecutors had a role in the case, court records show.

Of the 70-plus continuances, or postponements, granted since July, 1992, the vast majority were requested by Carter’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Victor Escobedo, who said he was trying to locate a key witness in Texas who never did appear once the trial began Jan. 20. On several occasions, court records show, the case also was postponed because one of the lawyers or judges was busy with other cases, or one of the major players was ill.

Through it all, Carter--a welfare recipient who has worked as a security guard, welder and hotel clerk, but who has led a mostly vagabond existence--sat in a jail cell. At least three times he objected to the delays, records indicate. But each time the postponements were granted over his objections because the various judges ruled that they had good cause to do so. At one point, Carter asked for a new lawyer, records show, but that request was denied.

“If I had had the money, I would have gotten him (another lawyer),” said Chuck Carter, Chester Carter’s uncle. The elder Carter, who retired after 30 years in the Marine Corps, estimated that he placed hundreds of phone calls to the district attorney’s office and public defender’s office to find out why the case was taking so long. Numerous times, he said, Chester telephoned him collect from the jail, pleading with him to find a way to speed up the process.

“The kid was crying sometimes when he called here,” he said. “But it was always something; they were waiting for a courtroom, they were waiting for this, they were waiting for that.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” said Carter, 58, of Oceanside, noting that he served as a federal grand jury foreman in San Diego County in 1986 and 1987.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Amy Suehiro blamed the defense for the continuous tarrying, although she acknowledged that she was one of a series of prosecutors to be assigned to the case.

“The case was continued so much, people got transferred out of this unit,” Suehiro said.

Although she still believes Carter is guilty and said the case against him was a good one, she acknowledged that at least one of the seeming inconsistencies in Hisek’s account could have been discovered earlier, within months of Daniel’s death. “But nobody ever bothered to check,” she said, “including the defense.”

Early on, Hisek had said she lived in fear of Carter, who, she said, had abused her. But records later showed that she had visited him in jail at least three times after his arrest.

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For jurors, Hisek’s credibility also became an issue when she admitted on the stand that it was she who once had bloodied Daniel’s lip while spoon-feeding him. She also said she had been abused as a child--a possibly significant revelation because some experts believe that victims of child abuse can be prone to abusing their own children.

Also called into question was Hisek’s account of the order of events leading up to Daniel’s death. At an earlier court proceeding, she had testified that Carter placed Daniel’s face under a running faucet, stomped on him and then stuck him in a crib surrounded by big pillows that smothered him. She said Carter did this because she refused to give him beer money out of her welfare check.

At the trial, she said the stomping and abuse occurred, but in a different order. As for what prompted the violence, she could not remember.

“If you’re recalling something as horrible as that, do you get the order of things wrong?” asked Escobedo, the public defender. “These were glaring inconsistencies.”

An investigator for the public defender’s office, Douglas Love, also swore under oath that three months after Carter’s arrest he interviewed Hisek and she recanted her accusations against Carter.

“It does seem like they (prosecutors) should have had something more,” Judge Jones said.

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A high school graduate, Carter had had at least one significant brush with the law, court records show--a 1978 arrest for assault with a deadly weapon for which he served four years in state prison. The prosecution believed that the prior conviction showed that Carter had a propensity for violence, but the defense argued that 13 years had passed between the 1978 incident and Daniel’s death. People change, the defense argued.

Daniel was born March 27, 1991, in Culver City, and neighbors said Carter often could be seen pushing the baby in a stroller or carrying him. One neighbor, Alexander Mena, said Carter often played with the boy and toted him about.

The couple took Daniel to the doctor regularly, medical records indicate, and Carter, more often than not, made the trip. Except for a bad case of colic, Daniel was given a clean bill of health at each checkup, the last of which was three days before the youngster’s brief life suddenly ended.

Carter and Hisek were home the day Daniel turned blue. After the baby was found in his crib in that condition--Carter and Hisek both claim to have discovered him--Carter cradled him in his arms and the couple ran to the neighbor’s apartment because they did not have a telephone.

As the 911 operator recited instructions, Carter attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Four days later--after an autopsy indicated that Daniel had been abused--detectives quizzed Carter and Hisek together, but it was not until they were questioned separately that Hisek provided the information that implicated Carter.

A trial was set for July 6, 1992, but that date soon passed. As did the next. And the next.

Defense attorney Escobedo defended his repeated requests for continuances, saying he was trying to locate a key witness in Texas and bring him back to testify. The witness, Randall White, worked for Comic Relief, an organization that had assisted Hisek and Carter.

White had lived with Carter and Hisek for a time, according to court documents, and he was expected to testify that he had observed Hisek “on several occasions acting in a rough manner” with Daniel, and that Carter “seemed to carry the baby more carefully than Stacy.” White, however, suffered severe back injuries in a traffic accident and was never able to make the trip.

At the trial, medical experts offered conflicting testimony on the cause of Daniel’s death. The coroner’s office said the youngster died as a result of a series of traumatic injuries, including a lacerated liver, a bruised intestine and rib fractures, none of which may have been fatal in and of themselves but strongly indicated child abuse.

But the emergency room physician, noting no outward signs of abuse, said Daniel’s death was consistent with sudden infant death syndrome. A defense expert said some of the injuries could have been the result of a bad fall or falls and pointed out that Daniel’s heart was two-thirds larger than normal, and that he may have succumbed to a condition known as “heavy heart.”

When Hisek took the stand, she seemed unsure of herself and her facts. She spoke haltingly. When Carter testified in his own defense, he remained calm and gave an account consistent with his past statements.

“He came across quite well for a defendant,” prosecutor Suehiro acknowledged.

The inconsistencies Hisek was caught in, Suehiro said, “were only revealed after she testified at trial. We believed her. We had no reason to think that she was lying.”

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Moments after the jury retreated into the deliberation room, they voted on the murder charge and unanimously cleared Carter, jurors said. They spent about five hours discussing the charges of child abuse and corporal injury to a child before acquitting him of those too.

“I don’t think so,” said juror Roland W. Atley when asked whether he believed the accusations made about Carter. Atley, who has served as a juror on four trials, was disturbed by Carter’s long stay in jail. “I would like to hear why it took this guy so long to go to trial. You pick a guy up and somebody says he did it. And, of course, he’s a guy with no resources, and so he stays there until they decide to have a trial.”

Chuck Carter, the uncle, said: “It looks to me like justice went at a slow pace. Like somebody said, ‘He’s just a black guy; we’ll get to him when we can.’ I’m not a racist or anything, but that’s what it looks like.”

Suehiro said race had no role in how the case played out. “That’s ridiculous,” she said.

Charles D. Weisselberg, a USC law professor and expert on criminal procedures, said there have been other lengthy detentions that ended in acquittals. But they have been high-profile cases that merited more preparation because they involved hundreds of witnesses and experts, as well as complex legal issues, he said.

In Carter’s case, a total of 15 witnesses testified--10 for the prosecution and five for the defense.

“This sort of delay for such a short trial seems extraordinary to me,” Weisselberg said. “If the defendant was defended by a retained lawyer, perhaps the lawyer would have been able to do the trial in a shorter period of time. One can think of the O.J. (Simpson) case where he pushed for and received an expedited trial date.

“I know the public defender’s office can’t staff all cases like it would like to,” he said, “but three years is a long time.”

“The important thing,” said Escobedo, the public defender, “is I think justice was done. It was. It just took a while.”