A Guilty Plea to Obsession With Injustice

The reader was, if nothing else, succinct:

“Enough on the Carmona case. You have gone way past reporting, past even advocacy, and have arrived at mania. You are biased and one-sided. Move on.”

That sentiment doesn’t represent anywhere near the majority of my mail on the Arthur Carmona case, but it’s a fair challenge.

Why have I written, as of today, eight columns in the last month about Carmona’s conviction on two armed robbery counts? Why question a guilty verdict from a jury that sat through a trial last October and deliberated over a two-day period?

The simple explanation is that I think the verdict may be wrong.

Having spent many a late night reading the 700 pages of trial transcript, now many times over, I’m not convinced that Carmona, a special-education student then five days after his 16th birthday, held up a Denny’s restaurant in Costa Mesa at 2 in the morning and then an Irvine juice bar two afternoons later.

I don’t deny being an advocate for Carmona, who has been in custody since the day of the juice bar robbery--Feb. 12, 1998--and is now four days away from a possible state prison sentence.

But it doesn’t do me or anyone else any good to misrepresent the facts of the case, and I’ve tried my best not to do that.

For starters, I have no sympathy for armed robbers, even teen-aged ones.

It’s just that the more you slog through this case, the less there is that meets the eye.

No physical evidence linked Carmona to the crimes. No fingerprints of his were found in or on the getaway truck or gun believed used in the robbery. Police and prosecutors acknowledge that the money from the robbery never was found. Nor did they ever establish any previous connection between Carmona and Shawn Kaiwi, the then-33-year-old getaway driver who pleaded guilty to the robbery, received a two-year sentence and is now on parole.

The D.A.’s office had evidence, all right; it’s just that it all was found at Kaiwi’s house and not in any way tied to Carmona.

For Carmona, the case was built solely around eyewitness testimony, and that is a distinction well worth noting.

From two Iowa State researchers in an article in the March 1999 issue of the American Psychological Society: “Over 75,000 people become criminal suspects each year in the United States after having been identified from either a lineup or a photo-array.

“Our experiments, as well as those conducted by other psychological scientists, have revealed that the frequency with which eyewitnesses will make mistaken identifications can be surprisingly high under some circumstances. . . . DNA exoneration cases show that confident-yet-mistaken eyewitness identifications account for more wrongful convictions than all other causes combined.”

Moreover in the Carmona case, the boatload of “eyewitnesses” the prosecution touts could fit in a phone booth.

Between the two robberies for which Carmona was convicted, the Orange County D.A.’s office called five people who were there--all employees at the two establishments.

Of the three Irvine juice bar employees, one told police flat out he couldn’t identify the gunman again. A second was taken to a residential street where Carmona was being detained an hour after the robbery. “That’s where I, like, sort of identified the guy,” the employee testified.

Asked what he meant, the witness said he couldn’t identify Carmona by his face. He identified Carmona, who wasn’t wearing a hat when stopped by police an hour after the robbery, only after police put a Laker cap on his head identical to one worn by the robber. Police retrieved the hat from the nearby home of Kaiwi, the getaway driver who had been arrested 30 minutes after the robbery.

The third juice club employee gave the most emphatic identification, first saying he was “80%” sure Carmona, without the hat, was the robber. When police again put the Lakers cap on Carmona, the employee then said he was 100% sure.

The other two robbery victims worked at the Denny’s restaurant, robbed two days before the juice club.

One identified Carmona in a photo lineup 10 days after the robbery. At trial eight months later, however, he couldn’t identify Carmona sitting in court, saying too much time had passed to be sure.

The other Denny’s employee made an emphatic identification at Carmona’s trial last October but told me in a lengthy interview two weeks ago that she now feels she was misled by prosecutors about the evidence against Carmona and, as a result, has serious doubts about her identification.

That is the sum total of the testimony from actual witnesses to the two robbery scenes.

Two other “eyewitnesses” outside the juice bar didn’t identify Carmona, giving only physical and clothing descriptions of the fleeing robber that, as logic would dictate, generally matched those given by the juice bar employees who had seen him less than a minute earlier.

The eighth and final eyewitness identified Carmona as the person wearing a hat she saw sliding down a freeway wall beyond her backyard in Costa Mesa about 15 minutes after the robbery. He then walked or ran down an embankment and out of sight within a minute.

Taken a few blocks away within the hour to where Carmona was detained, the woman identified him but, as had the others, asked if he had a hat. For a third time, the hat from Kaiwi’s truck was put on Carmona’s head, and the witness said that cemented her identification.

As with any case, there are myriad other details. In previous columns, I’ve outlined some of those that I think cast doubt on Carmona’s involvement in the robberies.

I talked to a few Carmona jurors last week and they remain convinced of his guilt.

I don’t claim to be smarter than the jurors, but I know additional details about the case--only because they were limited to what was presented in court.

For instance, jurors told me, they weren’t permitted to discuss the incongruity of Carmona, then 16 and with no prior serious run-ins with the law, committing the robberies with the 33-year-old Kaiwi, to whom investigators never established a prior connection.

Nor did they hear from numerous adults who had prior dealings with Carmona and strongly believe in his innocence. Those beliefs aren’t evidence. But they help provide some context, perhaps, for such things as Carmona’s dealings with police, who acknowledge that Carmona has repeatedly maintained his innocence but who have deemed some of his other statements “inconsistent.”

Carmona was stopped on the street, at gunpoint, by a police officer.

Later, under interrogation by two veteran police officers (I’ve read the transcript of the interview), Carmona waived his Miranda rights to have an attorney present. Police saw some of his subsequent answers as suspicious, but those who know Carmona see it differently.

Jean Bain was Carmona’s special education teacher at TeWinkle Middle School in Costa Mesa. She phoned me last week to voice support for her former pupil.

We began discussing the case and she reiterated what other teachers, relatives and acquaintances had told me--that she could easily see how Carmona’s quiet personality and learning disability could contribute to a police officer’s skepticism.

I asked her to picture how he might fare in a police interrogation. “I can truly see him shutting down,” she said. “If he’s bombarded with questions, he’s not going to be able to answer quickly. By the time he’s processing question one and ready to answer, they probably were on number five.”

That reminded me of a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with Bill Riddell, Carmona’s teacher and track coach at TeWinkle. “You really have to know him to understand him,” Riddell told me. “To a lot of people he’s a tough read, but he’s really at heart a nice kid. He just is.”

Like many students, Riddell said, some of Carmona’s friends “were not in a great crowd, but that’s true of a lot of our students.

He added, “I probably knew Arthur better than most because I did spend a great deal of time with him because I was concerned about which direction he was going to go after he got out of here; I can’t see Arthur waving a gun in someone’s face.”

As for the eyewitnesses? “You drive around in Costa Mesa, you’ll see so many guys who look alike it’s unbelievable,” Riddell says. “I’ll bet my bottom dollar they made a mistake.”

Since his arrest nearly 16 months ago, Carmona has denied any involvement in the robberies. This Thursday in Harbor Court, he may learn his fate.

From the start, I have argued that he deserves a new trial, which is what his defense team has asked for.

If some readers think I’m obsessed with the case, so be it. If Carmona has a dark side that has fooled family and acquaintances, OK.

Obsessed? Maybe. But a 17-year-old going to prison for a crime he may not have committed brings out the obsession in me.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.