Imprisoned Gadfly Wins Freedom

In those moments when Jerome Valenta must account for his life-- a letter to his son, an application for a job-- he is never quite sure where to begin.

In the last 15 years alone, he’s lived the life of a rich businessman and community crime fighter, a convicted sex offender, an out-of-work parolee, a muckraking Christian journalist and, finally, an inmate again.

Now, in one more twist to an already improbable life story, Valenta has used his skills as a jailhouse lawyer to free himself in the middle of a seven-year prison sentence--this one for the obscure crime of secretly recording his own conversations with law enforcement authorities. The conversations--recorded in 1995--were part of Valenta’s journalistic probes into the alleged misdeeds of Kern County sheriffs and prosecutors, he says.

In what the 55-year-old Valenta calls a delicious bit of irony, he was released from prison two weeks ago after his eavesdropping conviction was overturned because of misdeeds by the Kern County district attorney’s office.

The Fifth District Court of Appeal in Fresno found that local prosecutors engaged in “gross violations” during his 1997 trial, including repeated use of evidence deemed inadmissible. The court also found that a recorded conversation between Valenta and one sheriff’s deputy was not confidential and thus did not violate the law.

It’s rare that an inmate representing himself persuades appellate judges to reverse a conviction, but Valenta was no ordinary prisoner. A former state tax auditor and self-described “documents freak,” Valenta generated thousands of pages of legal briefs from his cells inside some of California’s toughest prisons and fasted for 51 days--to near death, he says--to draw attention to his case.

“I persevered against some long odds and I’m glad to be out, but I’m still waiting for an apology from Kern County,” he said. “If the powers that be think I was a pain in the butt before, just wait. Getting railroaded has convinced me even more that someone needs to be watching and writing about the abuses of the criminal justice system here.”

The freeing of Valenta after three years in prison is the most recent in a series of cases in which state appellate courts have overturned Kern County convictions, citing misconduct and a rush to judgment by cops and prosecutors.

Ever since his rearrest in 1995 for surreptitiously recording conversations with sheriff’s deputies, prosecutors and parole agents, Valenta and a band of supporters have maintained that Dist. Atty. Ed Jagels and other local officials pursued the case for no other reason than to retaliate against Valenta, shut down his newspaper and silence a public scold.

Two of Valenta’s favorite targets in his now-dead monthly newspaper, the Bakersfield Reporter, were Jagels and the Sheriff’s Department. In the mid-1990s Valenta repeatedly accused county authorities of ignoring widespread brutality at the local jail and employing bogus evidence and trumped-up charges to win convictions against innocent people.

Often he was a lone voice in the media on behalf of several defendants whose convictions on murder and child molestation charges were later reversed by appellate courts.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Yraceburn, who reviewed the appellate court ruling and decided against prosecuting Valenta a second time for eavesdropping, said there was no conspiracy to target Valenta for his outspoken views.

Before Valenta, he said, the county had prosecuted three other people for secretly recording telephone conversations. “We went after an ex-city councilman for the same thing and the conviction was upheld,” Yraceburn said.

He downplayed the misconduct cited in the appellate court’s ruling, saying that it was “technical” in nature, including the prosecutor’s having inadvertently played snippets of recorded conversations for the jury that were not covered by the official charges.

But the appellate court found that the prosecutor’s misconduct was serious. It resulted in the jury’s learning that Valenta was a parolee and that he had tape-recorded many more telephone calls than were covered in the charges.

As for the larger issue that Kern County has engaged in a pattern of injustice, Yraceburn said he has personally prosecuted or been involved in thousands of cases over 15 years, only two of which have been overturned by higher courts.

“The notion that we’re engaging in rogue justice in Kern County is a pile of bull,” he said.

Some of his detractors dismiss Valenta as an extremist who sees conspiracies everywhere, but he is not an easy man to pigeonhole. An accounting graduate of Los Angeles City College in 1968, he went to work as an auditor for the State Board of Equalization, eventually heading the agency’s Santa Maria office.

He had a genius for numbers and a golden touch with investments, according to court records and friends. He made more than $3 million in the stock market and branched out into real estate and construction. Valenta became president of the Santa Maria Kiwanis Club and vice president of the Boys Club and started Santa Barbara County’s We Turn In Pushers program. In 1978, he served as county chairman for former Los Angeles Police Chief Ed Davis’ campaign for governor.

A father of four, Valenta bought a three-acre lot and built a large home with a pool, a hot tub, tennis courts and a stable for his Arabian horses. Through the electronic gates of his walled compound, judges and city councilmen came to party.

“I was worth over $10 million and riding high and then all of a sudden I’m charged with a crime and I’m sitting in county jail,” he said. “My life changed overnight.”

Valenta had divorced his first wife when his pregnant girlfriend accused him in 1990 of molesting her 9-year-old daughter. He said the girlfriend leveled the accusations after learning that Valenta had a second girlfriend who was also pregnant with his child.

Valenta said that the charges weren’t true but that he felt pressured to resolve the case quickly. He said the girl and her mother were threatening to kill themselves and he felt guilty for being unfaithful to them. At the time, the public perception was that children didn’t lie about such cases, and his attorney urged him to plead no contest to “substantial sexual misconduct” in return for probation.

As soon as he entered the plea, court records show, he tried to back out. The judge wouldn’t let him. Rather than probation, he received a six-year prison term.

Santa Maria Police Sgt. Jennifer Alm said enough physical evidence existed to win a conviction, and she believes to this day that Valenta was guilty of repeatedly molesting the girl. But a decade later, some people still wonder.

“I never thought he was guilty,” said Bob Morrison, a local TV newsman at the time. “The fact that these charges suddenly bubbled up from a jealous domestic dispute made them highly suspect in my mind.”

Inside Corcoran and Avenal state prisons, Valenta pored through legal books and fought unsuccessfully for a trial. When guards denied him access to the law library, he papered the prison system with complaints and appeals.

Three years into his sentence, he was released from prison, dead broke after a series of real estate foreclosures and civil judgments. He moved to Bakersfield, where he and five other Christian activists started an organization called Extend-A-Hand For Justice, an effort to help people they believed had been falsely accused of crimes. At yard sales, he hunted down pots, pans and other basics to give to new parolees and helped them find cheap housing. He lent an ear at all hours of the day and night.

“I learned what was going on on the streets from these guys: which cops and sheriffs and parole agents were dirty, who was planting drugs, who was coercing false testimony. That’s when I decided to start up a newsletter and that grew into a newspaper.”

His Bakersfield Reporter, proclaiming itself a voice of the “other news,” had a life span of only half a dozen issues in 1996. As publisher and chief writer, Valenta detailed allegations of sloppy criminal investigations and abuse at Lerdo County Jail--stories that other local media paid scant attention to. He said that local judges were allowing and covering up misdeeds of prosecutors, even as appellate courts were bearing down on the district attorney’s office.

In one remarkable reversal growing out of a huge child-molestation prosecution, the state appellate court struck down seven convictions and more than 2,000 years in collective prison sentences because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Valenta delivered 10,000 copies of his newspaper to minimarkets, convenience stores and the doorstep of Dist. Atty. Jagels. On behalf of inmates and parolees, he filed dozens of brutality complaints against sheriff’s officials overseeing the county jail.

He said the only response he received was a series of raids by parole agents and sheriff’s deputies targeting his Extend-A-Hand office for alleged business license violations.

“You had to admire his persistence and willingness to put himself on the line to expose and make a stand against corruption,” said Christine Mount, whose husband received a life sentence for murder in 1983, a conviction that Valenta believed was unjust.

During one raid, parole agents seized scores of tapes that Valenta had used to record his conversations with law enforcement authorities.

Valenta argued in court that because of his roles as activist and journalist, the officials had no reasonable expectation that the conversations would be confidential.

“Valenta wants to believe there is a grand conspiracy here, but there isn’t,” prosecutor Yraceburn said. “The law is quite clear that you can’t tape-record conversations without someone’s consent.”

A jury found Valenta guilty of two counts of recording confidential conversations and sentenced him to seven years in prison, his prior conviction contributing to the length of the term. His newspaper folded; Extend-A-Hand shut its doors.

No newspaper organizations or 1st Amendment groups came to his rescue. He filed thousands of pages of documents and waited. Three hunger strikes later, the court granted his appeal.

Valenta now counts on the kindness of old friends and family to survive the transition from inmate to free man. When he gets on his feet, he thinks, he might want to start up his newspaper again.

“Maybe I’m asking for it, and I’m no saint, but this county could use another check and balance,” he said.