Things Now Look Different to Witness

Racked with doubts, one of the key witnesses against convicted teenage robber Arthur Carmona, whose conviction I have questioned in this space in recent days, now says she doesn’t know if the soft-spoken teen really was the robber.

“I’m really beginning to think I made a mistake,” says Casey Becerra, “and if I can’t undo it, then I don’t know how to live with myself.”

By all accounts, eyewitness identifications are the sole reason Carmona, convicted of two armed robberies within two days of each other, is two weeks away from a possible 20-year prison sentence.

In a series of columns, I have questioned the propriety and reliability of the eyewitness identifications, two of which were unequivocal only after police placed a hat worn by the robber on Carmona, even though no evidence linked Carmona to the hat. Besides the hat, police recovered a getaway truck, a gun and a backpack, all believed used by the robber but none of it linked to Carmona. Not a single fingerprint on a single piece of evidence.

The physical evidence, it turns out, is, in large part, the source of Becerra’s anguished second thoughts.

In a two-hour interview this week in her Brea home, Becerra said authorities misled her into believing Carmona, a special-education student whose only prior violation was for not wearing a bike helmet, had been tied to the physical evidence.

“I feel like I was tricked,” she says, referring to prosecutors and police who talked with her about the Carmona case. “They said they found his gun. Not a gun somewhere. They found his gun. His hat. His backpack. He was seen in the truck that everyone else identified. I was thinking, ‘Wow, good work.’

“But then to find out it wasn’t his gun, his prints weren’t found on it, it’s not his hat, he was never seen in the truck, there was no connection to the person driving. How could they screw up so badly?”

Since my first column three weeks ago, Becerra says she’s been anguishing about whether to come forward--in part because of where it might lead.

No witness was stronger at Carmona’s trial last October than Becerra, now 25 and a receptionist at a pharmaceutical company.

She says she considered herself a pro-prosecution witness. Her husband, Michael, even advised her not to mince words when she testified that Carmona, then five days after turning 16, was the person who stuck a gun in her face Feb. 10, 1998, while she worked the graveyard shift at a Denny’s restaurant in Costa Mesa.

Her testimony was riveting, so strong that Deputy Dist. Atty. Jana Hoffman used it to begin her closing arguments.

“Casey Becerra put it best,” Hoffman told the jury. “It was not a picture that robbed me, it was the defendant, and I wouldn’t put him through this if I wasn’t sure it was him.”

Now, beset by her own doubts about the reliability of eyewitness identifications, and angered that she was led to believe the case against Carmona was stronger than it was, Becerra is a woman torn.

She won’t go so far as to recant her testimony, but the certainty with which she delivered it in front of a jury is gone.

Becerra remembers being certain when she identified Carmona--for the first time since the robbery--at his preliminary hearing two months afterward. Ten days after the robbery, she’d been unable to pick him from a photo lineup. In person, she says, it was different.

“It was just his eyes,” she says, recalling that moment when Carmona walked into the courtroom at his preliminary hearing. “I don’t know how to explain it. Just a feeling I got when I looked at him.”

That’s also how she testified at his trial.

I ask why she’s wavering now. “I don’t want to say for certain I was mistaken,” she says, “because I do know how strongly I felt. . . .”

However, she says, doubts arose when she learned when reading my first column about Carmona that no physical evidence linked Carmona to the robbery.

She wonders whether authorities telling her about the “case” against Carmona subtly influenced her testimony.

“I was talking to the [assistant] D.A.,” Becerra remembers, “and she told me all the evidence they had against him and it was an open-and-shut case, because they had his gun, his backpack, his hat and he was seen in the truck.”

I ask what impact that news, albeit untruthful, might have had on her testimony.

“I felt the police did their job,” she says, “and we wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t. If they had all that evidence, how could I be wrong?”

Just as she doesn’t want to be swayed by suggestion from police or prosecutors, neither does she want to be swayed by my columns, she says.

“I don’t know if being certain at trial is because of what I was told, because I know how the mind works,” she says. “I know what happens when you want something really bad. When you want the guy who did something horrible to you to be caught.”

That kind of language from a well-intentioned witness is a defense attorney’s nightmare.

Mark Devore, who wasn’t Carmona’s trial lawyer but now is representing him in a bid for a new trial, says Becerra’s misgivings and disclosures are disturbing.

“Mrs. Becerra was a victim of a horrific crime,” he says. “What we should all be concerned about is the police and D.A. trying to solidify a conviction by strengthening a victim’s ID of a suspect. Why the need to constantly reassure her that all these other factors linked the crime to Arthur when the fact was there weren’t any?

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“The relevant question to ask,” Devore says, “is if Mrs. Becerra had been told there was no evidence at all that it was his gun, no evidence at all he ever was in the getaway truck, if she had been told all that the things that weren’t instead of being misled, would that have affected her testimony. I’d submit it would have.”

Deputy D.A. Hoffman, who prosecuted Carmona, says she isn’t distressed by Becerra’s wavering. The jury, she says, “could see her confidence and her fear when she testified that it was the defendant. The jury was able to weigh her testimony against other eyewitnesses . . . so if Casey Becerra has begun having second thoughts because she doesn’t know the entirety of what happened in trial and she wants other evidence, I’m confident the jury had other evidence.”

“Every day across this nation,” she says, “people are convicted on the testimony of one witness, on testimony of one witness who points to that individual and says, ‘That person robbed me,’ or ‘That person raped me’ or ‘That person molested me.’ One witness. That’s common and normal and to a standard beyond a reasonable doubt.”

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What about a key witness now having buyer’s remorse? I ask.

“I think it means the media has a lot of power,” Hoffman says. “And with that power, there’s a lot of responsibility to make sure you fully report the facts. If Casey Becerra had read the entire transcript, I don’t think she would have any buyer’s remorse.”

Hoffman says she doesn’t recall telling Becerra that physical evidence implicated Carmona. “When I interview witnesses and they ask me about the facts in a case, sometimes I will briefly tell them what’s going on in the case,” she says. “But I don’t recall specifically telling her it was his hat, his gun . . . “

Hoffman says Becerra’s testimony was credible as well as powerful. “From the very beginning, she told me and the jury she wouldn’t testify a certain way if she wasn’t sure. From the very beginning, she said she wanted to be confident this was the person. I think her confidence was unmistakable.”

Which brings us back to a tormented Casey Becerra.

What Hoffman didn’t know is that Becerra told me she wouldn’t be comfortable convicting Carmona only with eyewitness accounts. “I don’t understand how the jury came back with a guilty verdict, if all they were presented with was eyewitness testimony,” Becerra says.

Why not? I ask. Credible people with no ax to grind, such as yourself, testified.

“If I were a juror and that’s all they had--eyewitness testimony--if the gun wasn’t his, the hat wasn’t his, he was never seen in the truck, I couldn’t say this is the guy who did it,” Becerra says.

Despite her own testimony? “To be completely satisfied with my testimony, I’d want other evidence,” she says. “In my case, I want to know. I want other evidence to say for certain it was him.”

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Part of her wants to see Carmona again, to hear his voice. Part of her is afraid to do that. She wonders if she’s been unduly swayed by a prosecutor or the press. But if my columns swayed her, she tells me, how certain was she in the first place?

She testified that Carmona’s face and appearance led to her identification. But in our conversation, she says his voice was much more memorable the night of the robbery. It was a voice that went from soft and polite to loud and angry--a voice that frightened her. It’s a voice she says she hasn’t forgotten.

“Even at trial, I was hoping he’d say something. I was thinking, ‘Just say something, please. Yell out in court, let me hear your voice.’ ”

He didn’t, and Becerra longs for certainty about her testimony.

“I want to put this behind me but with a clear conscience,” she says. “I don’t want to just take the easy way out. I don’t want to say, ‘Fine, I did OK,’ when I’m not so sure right now.”

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