4 Guards Acquitted of Setting Up Prison Rape

Four Corcoran State Prison guards were found innocent Monday of setting up the March 1993 rape of an inmate troublemaker, a verdict that the guards union said was vindication for the accused and for correctional officers sullied by wide-ranging probes of alleged abuse in California prisons.

After five weeks of testimony about the arcane world of Corcoran’s Security Housing Unit, the jury deliberated two days before announcing the verdict in Kings County Superior Court.

The officers--Robert Decker, 41, Joe Sanchez, 38, Anthony Sylva, 36, and Dale Brakebill, 34--who had sat resolutely, side by side, throughout the trial, bowed their heads in relief and hugged their attorneys as family members gasped and applauded.

“I am very bitter. I’m very upset. I’m very mad that my family had to go through this,” Brakebill said. “This has effectively ended my career. . . . And for nothing. For allegations by two inmates and a disgruntled former employee. Now I stand before you today and say I’m vindicated.

“Mr. Sylva, Mr. Sanchez, Mr. Decker, the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., [our] attorneys, the entire Department of Corrections and especially my friends at Corcoran State Prison, we are vindicated.”

Jurors said the case put forward by state Deputy Atty. Gen. Vernon Pierson, which relied heavily on testimony from inmates and discredited former guards, was full of holes and inconsistencies.

“We went over everything, covered everything, a lot of documents,” said the jury foreman, who declined to give his name. “In the end, there was just too much reasonable doubt. There just wasn’t a lot of evidence that supported what the prosecutor was trying to prove.”

The case, the first criminal trial of Corcoran guards in more than a decade, centered on allegations that the four guards set up the rape of inmate Eddie Dillard by putting him in the cell of an inmate enforcer nearly twice his size who had a long history of sodomizing cellmates.

The stakes were high not only for the officers, but for two powerful forces on the California stage: the state prison guards union and the attorney general’s office, which was criticized in legislative hearings last year for ignoring alleged brutality at Corcoran.

Don Novey, president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., said the officers should not have been charged in the first place. “They were falsely accused by two convicted felons, charged by the state for purely political reasons, then tried and convicted by the media long before the facts were known,” he said.

But the head of the state corrections department, Cal Terhune, said the prosecution was not only warranted but necessary.

Verdict No Surprise to Former Inmate

Dillard, the 29-year-old former inmate and rape victim who testified that guards intentionally set out to harm him by putting him in the cell of Wayne Robertson, Corcoran’s notorious “Booty Bandit,” said the verdict did not surprise him.

Speaking through his wife, Lisa, Dillard said that convicts--even after paying their debts to society--are never believed by the public. And former guard Roscoe Pondexter, the whistle-blower fired by the corrections department for a separate brutality incident, who backed up Dillard’s account of the rape in court testimony, said the verdict was part of a long, sad chapter at Corcoran.

“There aren’t any winners in this thing. No winners at all. I just hope the Department of Corrections has changed because of what I and the others brought forward.”

In the past year alone, the department has beefed up its internal investigations of brutality and halted guards’ practice of shooting at unarmed inmates engaged in fistfights. At several state prisons, officials are investigating alleged physical and sexual abuse by guards. A federal trial of eight Corcoran officers accused of setting up gladiator-style fights is scheduled for March.

Jurors Monday cited the lack of any testimony that the four guards actively conspired with Robertson to sodomize Dillard and the lack of a motive. There was no testimony offered that officers were moved by a desire to see Dillard punished for assaulting a female guard at another prison.

Even Robertson, the state’s key witness, testified that Decker, a sergeant, told him only that Dillard needed to be taught a lesson about “how to do his time.” Robertson, a 6-foot-2, 220-pound convicted murderer, said he then took it upon himself to rape Dillard over a two-day period after the tiny inmate showed him disrespect.

State prosecutors said they were hamstrung by their inability to find correctional officers willing to testify about their knowledge of the rape or Robertson’s well-known history of violent sexual assault.

The case was made more difficult, they said, by Superior Court Judge Louis Bissig’s ruling that the prosecution was required to prove the four officers knew for a fact that Dillard was going to be raped. A more liberal burden of proof would have required the state to show only that the officers knew that rape was a “likely and probable outcome” of placing Dillard in Robertson’s cell.

“Our hands were tied by some of the judge’s rulings and the fact that it took five years for this crime to surface and be prosecuted,” Pierson said. “And it’s never easy when your best witnesses of what really happened are felons and officers who have committed [wrongs] themselves.”

The case against the four officers--who worked inside the Security Housing Unit, a kind of prison within a prison--traveled a serpentine path. Dillard’s written complaints in 1993 were ignored by Corcoran staff and then again at the highest levels of the Department of Corrections. As late as 1997, Kings County prosecutors declared the case unwinnable and refused to file charges.

The state attorney general’s office formed a special county grand jury last year after a Times story detailed new allegations from Pondexter. The former guard, fired for brutalizing another inmate, told The Times and later the grand jury that Dillard begged officers not to put him in a cell him with Robertson--pleas that were disregarded at every turn.

The grand jury indicted five officers on eight criminal counts, including attempting to threaten witnesses, falsifying documents and conspiracy to commit assault. Seven of the counts--the heart of the alleged cover-up--were dismissed earlier this year when Bissig ruled that the statute of limitations had expired on all but one of the alleged crimes.

Prosecutors had argued that the four-year statute had not run out because the active cover-up continued well into 1996. Charges against a fifth defendant were then dropped.

The state prison guards union agreed to pay for the officers’ legal defenses and launched a media campaign targeting residents in this conservative farm belt. In the weeks before jury selection, union-sponsored radio and TV ads featured menacing inmates with tattoos and harried guards walking the “toughest beat in the state.”

Prison reform groups complained that the deck was stacked against the prosecution from the outset. Not only had the judge dismissed most of the charges, but the trial was being held in Hanford, a cotton and dairy town 20 miles from the gates of the prison where officers are Little League coaches and next-door neighbors.

They contended that race and the sway of the prison industry would be inevitable factors in the trial. The accused officers are white and Latino and the government’s main witnesses--Dillard, Pondexter and Robertson--are black. During jury selection, the defense succeeded in dismissing every prospective black juror.

“The prosecution had to put together a perfect case,” said Catherine Campbell, a Fresno attorney who has represented hundreds of inmates in state and federal court. “Guards are a fixture in Hanford and Kings County. They are friends, neighbors, relations.

Building the Case

During the five weeks of testimony, the state tried to build a case that Dillard and Robertson were documented enemies because of a 1991 fight that took place at another prison. This alone should have precluded Dillard from being housed in a cell with Robertson, who had a long history of beating and sodomizing his younger and smaller cellmates.

Dillard testified that even if officers overlooked prison documents listing Robertson as his enemy, he told them numerous times that his life was in danger if they went forward with the cell move. He said Sylva and Brakebill disregarded his concerns and Sanchez laughed in his face.

But the three officers testified that Dillard was lying and that he never communicated any specific concerns to them. As for Robertson, they said they had never heard the nickname “Booty Bandit” and did not know of his propensity for raping cellmates.

Decker, who was alleged to have orchestrated the cell move to punish Dillard for kicking a female guard at another prison, did not testify. But his attorney said Decker also did not know of Robertson’s past. Decker’s attorney, Curtis Sisk, argued that the sergeant wasn’t even working on the two days when Dillard was transferred to Robertson’s cell and raped.

Prosecutors produced prison documents showing that Decker had visited Robertson’s cell in 1991 and signed forms listing Robertson as a “cellie raper.”

In his closing arguments last week, Pierson conceded that his star witnesses were either despicable felons or guards with less than stellar records. But he reminded jurors that even witnesses with a dark past can tell the truth.

“Eddie Dillard was a gang-banger from Los Angeles. But does that make him a liar?” Pierson asked jurors. He recounted that Dillard had cried when he described the pain and humiliation of being sexually assaulted March 6 and 7, 1993.

“Was that an Academy Award-winning performance or was that an outpouring of emotion from a man who unquestionably believes he was set up?”

Katherine Hart, an attorney for Sylva, said Dillard may or may not have been raped by Robertson, but there was no evidence that her client or the other defendants set it up.

“This is not just a case of a bunch of clever attorneys who outwitted the prosecution,” she said. “We had a case that was fabrication on the part of some convicted felons.”