Man May Be Retried in 2 Bank Heists : Courts: Valencia resident, acquitted by a federal jury, now faces charges at state level in robberies. His attorney calls it a case of double jeopardy.

Alex Yepes thought his legal troubles were over when he was cleared in October of federal bank robbery charges.

The 26-year-old from Valencia re-enrolled in international business classes at College of the Canyons, went back to work as a carpenter and even began talking with his wife about starting a family.

But in what his attorney calls a case of double jeopardy, Yepes was rearrested in February and now faces kidnaping charges in Superior Court for the same pair of bank robberies that a federal jury acquitted him of.

County prosecutors will pursue their case Wednesday in a preliminary hearing in San Fernando Municipal Court to determine whether Yepes will stand trial on more than 40 counts including kidnaping for robbery, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

“I never thought this could happen again,” Yepes said in a telephone interview from Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Castaic, where he is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail. “It’s just vindictiveness. They just don’t want to admit they are wrong.”

Vindictive or not, county prosecutors said justice was not done in federal court, and the state charges are an attempt to keep a dangerous criminal off the streets.

“We have an obligation to protect the public,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen L. Cooley, who heads the district attorney’s San Fernando bureau. “This is a highly sophisticated and dangerous man. The federal jury bought into a false alibi.”

Assistant U.S. Atty. David R. Fields, who prosecuted Yepes in federal court, declined to comment on his unsuccessful trial, except to say, “I don’t think justice was done.” He also refuted Yepes’ claims that federal officials pressured county prosecutors to file the state charges.

“Their decision was strictly on their own,” Fields said.

Yepes and another man were arrested Feb. 4, 1994, in Las Vegas, in connection with the robbery of the TransWorld Bank in Canyon Country. During the June 11, 1993, crime, bank officer Toula Demosthenous and eight others were held overnight by gunmen in Demosthenous’ Canyon Country home.

Soon after the arrest of Yepes and his traveling companion--Chad Pelch, 24, of Saugus--the two were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy, armed bank robbery with forced accompaniment and use of a firearm during a crime of violence.

Two more men were charged with the robbery: Darren Patrick Towers, 25, of Saugus, who had been arrested in December and confessed to the FBI, and Pelch’s brother Brett Pelch, 27, of Valencia.

Yepes, Towers, Brett Pelch and another man--Donald Patrick Sallee, 26 of Santa Clarita--were also charged in the Sept. 17, 1993, robbery of a Coast Federal Bank branch in Northridge. As in the Canyon Country case, a group of gunmen invaded the Canoga Park home of bank officer Terry Duranso and held her and four others hostage the night before the robbery.

In both cases, gunmen accompanied each of the bank officers to their branches the following morning and forced them to open vaults. The robbers stole $107,689 from TransWorld and $107,449 from Coast Federal, according to court documents. No one was injured in either robbery.

Brett Pelch and Sallee have never been caught. Towers pleaded guilty to the charges and agreed to testify against the others. He is currently serving a 15-year prison sentence. Chad Pelch also pleaded guilty in July and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In the federal trial in October, Yepes testified that he was with friends on the night preceding the first robbery and at a concert the night before the second robbery. He said that the real thieves--whom he acknowledges knowing--implicated him because he refused an invitation to participate.

Yepes, who faced life in prison if convicted, was acquitted Oct. 26 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

But on Feb. 3 in Santa Clarita, while picking his wife up from work, Yepes was arrested again and newly charged.

His attorney, Gerald V. Scotti, called the filing of state charges a “scam” by federal officials and said he plans to file a motion to have the charges dropped on the grounds that Yepes is essentially being tried twice for the same crime.

“The FBI is not used to or can’t accept the fact that they lost, and they can exert pressure on the state,” Scotti said. “This is clearly a violation of Alex’s Fifth Amendment right against double jeopardy.”

But other defense attorneys and a legal scholar disagreed, saying that as long as the charges are different--even if they stem from the same incident--they can be filed.

“It’s not fair, but it’s reality,” said attorney Ira Salzman, who represented former LAPD Sgt. Stacey C. Koon in both state and federal courts on charges related to the beating of Rodney King.

The difference in that case was that Koon and the three other accused officers were first acquitted of state charges before they were brought up on federal charges, which is the more typical scenario.

Mark J. Werksman, a former assistant U.S. attorney now working as a criminal defense attorney, said the Yepes case is probably not double jeopardy because the federal charges focused on the actual robberies while the state charges involve crimes against individuals leading up to the robberies.

However, Werksman said the fact that Yepes was acquitted in federal court--where the government wins about 98% of the time--gives him a good chance of being acquitted in Superior Court, where county prosecutors only win about 75% of the cases.

UCLA law school professor John Shepard Wiley, who also worked as a federal prosecutor from 1990 to 1994, said the Fifth Amendment bans a person from being tried for the same criminal offense for which there was an acquittal.

However, federal law treats the state and federal government as “separate sovereignties.” That opens the door for the federal government to retry someone who was acquitted in Superior Court--which happens frequently, Wiley and others said.

Although it is less common for county prosecutors to retry someone who was acquitted in federal court, Wiley cites a 1959 case in Illinois in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a bank robber in state court after the defendant had been acquitted for the same offense in federal court.

Meanwhile, Yepes, unable to post bond, has spent more than a year in jail for a crime he maintains he did not commit.

“Some of the things I used to hear about people fearing government abuse I didn’t believe,” Yepes said. “But now I know it does happen.”