A Painful Case Reopens

As Ventura County prosecutors stood before a jury last year and argued that Michael Raymond Johnson should die for slaying Deputy Peter J. Aguirre, they kept secret a memo in which their own expert confirmed the defense argument that Johnson was a schizophrenic suffering from a paranoid delusion.

Would knowledge of that memo have kept the jury from finding Johnson guilty, or from sentencing him to death?

Should that memo--an interoffice communication based on an interview with a psychologist who never examined Johnson and was never called to the witness stand--have been shared with Johnson’s defense team?

Those questions will be central to the defense’s request for a new trial. Perhaps the information contained in the memo would not have affected the outcome of the case, but the decision to conceal it has cast a shadow over this case and could result in an order to retry it.

This controversy has reopened a case that was painful to all involved. Johnson, 51, was convicted in January 1998 of the execution-style murder of Aguirre, 26, who responded to a domestic-disturbance call at the home of Johnson’s estranged wife in Meiners Oaks. Prosecutors argued that Johnson committed cold-blooded murder, but defense lawyers pleaded with jurors to spare the Vietnam veteran’s life because he didn’t know what he was doing when he shot Aguirre.

The defense called other psychologists to testify that Johnson was mentally ill. The prosecution not only disputed that conclusion, one of the lead prosecutors smirked and ridiculed the testimony so openly that he was reprimanded by the judge and later suspended.

Last week Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury notified the state Supreme Court and defense lawyers of the existence of a nine-page prosecutor’s memo that summarizes the opinion of psychologist Daniel A. Martell. In that memo, Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox wrote that Martell “indicated that this is indeed a rare case in which a defendant does indeed suffer from exactly what the defense says he does,” according to Todd Howeth, Johnson’s public defender.

In general, prosecutors are required to promptly reveal information that tends to prove a defendant’s innocence or could affect the severity of sentencing. Bradbury argued in his letter to the Supreme Court, however, that failure to disclose a prosecutor’s memo should not undermine Johnson’s conviction because the memo was a confidential “work product” and protected from disclosure by law. He further argued that the death penalty was properly imposed on Johnson, and that any appeal of his conviction should be rejected.

When a police officer is killed, it is understandable that the rest of the law enforcement community would make extraordinary efforts to bring the killer to justice. May those efforts go so far as to ignore or suppress information that might weaken the state’s case? The state Supreme Court could answer that in deciding whether to order a new trial.

Meanwhile, because of an extremely ill-advised decision by a prosecutor, the pain of this tragedy flares anew for the families of Peter Aguirre and Michael Raymond Johnson, for everyone else involved in this case and for the taxpayers who pay the bills.