2 Acquitted in Friend’s Death During Fight

After spending more than two years behind bars, two young Northern California men went home Thursday when a Solano County jury cleared them of murdering a friend whose life they had tried to save.

David Moreno and Justin Pacheco, both 21, were charged with the second-degree murder of their friend even though another youth admitted to the 1997 killing. Civil rights groups rallied behind the Latino defendants after the actual killer, who is white, received probation. He said he had stabbed the victim in self-defense.

Prosecutors instead charged Moreno and Pacheco under a rarely used legal doctrine called the provocative act murder rule. It says that a third party can be found guilty of a murder if he or she sets off a string of events that provokes another to kill.

When the jury read its verdict Thursday morning after nearly eight days of deliberation, many spectators broke into applause. The defendants, their families and even some of the jurors wept. Several jurors waited with the defense attorneys for Moreno and Pacheco to be released.

They wanted to give them a hug, said Barry Newman, who defended Pacheco.

The jury also acquitted the two men of assault and found an allegation that they were gang members to be untrue. Moreno and Pacheco faced 15 years to life in prison if they had been convicted of the murder.

Prosecutors had argued that Moreno and Pacheco started the street fight in which the victim, Jeremiah Alvarez English, 17, was stabbed twice in the back. Although Moreno and Pacheco rushed English to an emergency room, they were convicted in a previous trial of his murder. That verdict was thrown out because of jury misconduct and the case went to trial again in January.

Solano County Dist. Atty. David W. Paulson defended the prosecution Thursday and expressed disappointment with the verdict. He said there was “ample evidence” to convict and described the provocative act murder doctrine as “well-settled” law. The California Supreme Court is now reviewing how prosecutors used the rule in a Southern California gang murder case.

“It was and remains the position of the Solano County district attorney’s office that these two defendants and their accomplice [English, the victim] acted with conscious disregard for human life,” Paulson said.

Civil rights groups said Moreno and Pacheco were prosecuted because of their ethnicity. Chad O’Connell, who stabbed English twice in the back with a hunting knife, served two days in juvenile hall and received probation for possessing a deadly weapon.

The killing took place on a Sunday evening when Moreno, Pacheco and English were driving through a middle-class Vacaville neighborhood. Vacaville, a former farm town about 50 miles northeast of San Francisco, is now a bedroom community from which many residents commute to jobs throughout the Bay Area.

The three stopped their car and, carrying homemade weapons, confronted O’Connell, then 16, and five other youths. The defendants had scuffled with some of the others the day before, and Moreno’s car window had been broken. O’Connell told police that he stabbed English to protect a friend and himself.

After the acquittal, Solano County Superior Court Judge Luis Villarreal asked Deputy Dist. Atty. Valerie McGuire if she wanted to dismiss two unrelated misdemeanor charges against Pacheco for drinking in public. Those charges were not before the jury.

“They’ve been in jail for over two years,” the judge noted.

“Our office is not going to dismiss,” the prosecutor replied.

On the advice of his attorney, Pacheco pleaded guilty to the misdemeanors. Villarreal sentenced him to time already served.

Defense attorney Newman said he spent two hours with several jurors after the verdict. “They are saying the filing decision definitely involves racism and that there was no basis for the murder charge,” Newman said.

The jury of three men and nine women included one Latino and a woman who said she was half Asian and half Latino. On Friday, one of the jurors was dismissed after other panelists said he threatened them. An alternate juror replaced him and deliberations began anew.

Newman said the jury’s verdict was delayed because one member of the panel wanted to vote to convict the two of assault. He changed his mind Thursday morning.

Several hours after the defendants left jail, JoAnn Pacheco said her son was playing with his nephew at her Vacaville home while his brother and sister shopped for new clothes for him. “He is kind of in awe,” she said. “He is soaking it all in.”

The mother said she was still bitter about the prosecution. “I wonder how many innocent people they put in jail, and we don’t know about it,” she said. “They stereotype our children. . . . This could happen to your child or to your grandchild.”

She said her son wants to go to trade school and become a heavy equipment operator. “If there was any good from this, it’s that my son told me he doesn’t ever want to drink again and he quit smoking,” she said.

Anthony K. “Van” Jones, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, asked the Solano County Grand Jury on Thursday to investigate whether the prosecution had been motivated by race.