Standing Up for Convictions

What was fuzzy to me was crystal-clear to many readers. And they let me know in very precise terms.

Ah, the joys of writing for the newspaper.

The offending column was about the Slick ‘50s, a group of South County teens who sport the “greaser” look of the 1950s and, according to Orange County prosecutors, have become a violent street gang.

Four of them, along with a 21-year-old “associate” who didn’t belong to their group, were convicted of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon for their involvement in a street fight in which a 16-year-old was hit over the head with a beer bottle, beaten up and then stabbed.

My contention was that the two assailants known to have inflicted the most serious damage deserved the more serious punishment. The others, I suggested, should get lesser punishment--unless they knew in advance that their cohorts intended to inflict potentially lethal damage.

I raised the specter of “guilt by association,” although apparently not convincingly enough for many readers. I also questioned whether the Slick ‘50s was a gang, a legal determination that helped convict them and added more time to the defendants’ sentences.

“When a group comes together with the intent of forcing their will

on someone, they are a gang,” one reader wrote. “Four guys, including a 21-year-old, leaving a 16-year-old seriously injured in the street, sounds like a gang to me.”

Another wrote: “Guilt by association? Well, if you want to join a gang that gets into fights, that stabs a human, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

And another: “I just finished reading your column with absolute disbelief. . . . All four chose to be with the 21-year-old who did the stabbing, all four chose not to stop the attack or get help, so all four chose their consequences.”

In addition, one of the Slick ‘50s jurors contacted me. We spoke for about an hour and she, a 38-year-old software technical writer from Anaheim, walked me through the jury’s deliberations. She didn’t want to be identified for fear of retaliation.

She said the jurors decided early on that the Slick ‘50s met the legal definition of a gang. While two of the attackers did most of the damage, the jury determined that at least two other defendants took part aggressively and that the fifth defendant, at minimum, kicked the victim.

The jury decided that four of the five defendants used a potentially deadly weapon during the initial phase of the melee, when the victim was on the ground. When he got up to walk away, the fifth defendant, Steven Crader, kicked him, the jurors decided. It was while the victim was walking away that he was stabbed by the 21-year-old.

What about assigning group responsibility for the actions of various individuals? I asked the juror. “Essentially what we decided,” she said, “was that the group went to this party and immediately accosted somebody, hit him over the head, and three or four others jumped on him immediately, including hitting him with a bottle. After the fight dies down, they chase him into the street and attack him again. That pretty much is a description of a gang assault.”

Jurors said earlier accounts of fights involving Slick ‘50s members helped convince them the group had evolved into a violent street gang. Jurors weren’t certain the fight on the night in question was planned, but that uncertainty didn’t weigh heavily on them, she said.

It’s possible, the juror said, that the defendants could have been convicted even if they weren’t linked to a gang. Jurors found that, in legal terms, the defendants aided and abetted the assault on the victim, which made them criminally liable.

My overriding question was whether all should have been found guilty of attempted murder. I argued that the “gang” element raised by the prosecution skewed the nature of the case, but the jury obviously disagreed.

In his post-verdict remarks, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marc Kelly told another newspaper that the gang element made it easier to convict all five of the attempted murder charge.

Patrick Rossetti, who defended one of the Slick ‘50s members, said the gang element “from Day One was a very big part of the case.”

He said the verdict “represents kind of a precedent which might start to get a bit out of hand--to start holding other people responsible for what others did, just because they happened to be present--and the use of a gang allegation to get a conviction that might not be possible otherwise. That is kind of scary. In a lot of cases it’s justifiable, but in a case like this, I still don’t see them as a criminal street gang.”

The district attorney’s office was highly critical of my column last week. Claudia Silbar, an assistant district attorney who heads the D.A.’s Target Gang Unit, complained that I misrepresented the facts of the case and the legal theory behind the prosecution’s case.

Beyond saying the “community has spoken through the jury’s verdict,” she wouldn’t go into detail for this column. She said her boss, new Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas, fears I would misconstrue what she said.

Instead, Silbar said, she’s preparing a letter to the editor of The Times, which will amplify on her remarks.

Fine.

Her enforced silence, however, precluded me from asking her this question: If I’m so out of touch on this case, why did the D.A.’s office originally offer a plea-bargain--later rescinded--that would given them much lesser sentences than the 15 years they’re now facing?

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.