Defense Landed All the Punches in Corcoran Case

Midway through the criminal trial of eight Corcoran guards, the jury made its trek to America’s deadliest prison, past the dairies and vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley and deep into the never-ending fields of cotton. They had come to Corcoran, an hour’s drive from the Fresno courtroom, expecting to glimpse humanity at its worst.

Throughout the federal trial that ended Friday with acquittals for all guards, jurors heard defense attorneys pound away at what they called the real villains of Corcoran. The bad guys weren’t the guards accused of setting up gladiator fights, they argued, but the “vile, violent and predatory” convicts who make our lives so fearful.

When it came time for the jury of seven men and five women to finally step inside the dank chambers of Corcoran’s Security Housing Unit, the inmates did not disappoint.

For the occasion of the jury’s visit, the prisoners got undressed. Cell after cell displayed naked bodies. Inmate-to-inmate notes, known as “kites” in prison parlance, flew back and forth in a frenetic dance across the concrete floor and up the metal cells. Prisoners glowered.

Jurors seemed to pull back, frightened. The tour had been opposed by federal prosecutors for precisely this reason. It was one more example of how the team of high-priced defense attorneys outflanked the U.S. government during the nine-week trial.

By the time the tour was over, the pretrial rhetoric of the state prison guards’ union--that Corcoran officers walked the “toughest beat in the state”--had taken on an all-too-real dimension for jurors. The guards in military fatigues were the thin green line that separates “Us from Them.”

Friday’s resounding not guilty verdict in one of the largest prison guard trials in California history came as no surprise to the eight defendants and their attorneys, nor to the team of federal prosecutors or the young FBI agent who cut her teeth on the Corcoran case.

The government’s case--and the deadpan way it was presented--lacked luster, not to mention solid evidence, jurors said. Foreman William Lee told reporters after the verdict that there was no one turning point in the trial. He discerned holes in evidence throughout.

“We felt [the government] had some dynamite here. But there is a firecracker here, not some TNT,” he said. “It all boils down to evidence, and the evidence wasn’t there.”

The defense didn’t build its case on the menace of inmates alone, but also sought to show that the fights were a direct consequence of flawed policy handed down from Sacramento. No matter how violent Corcoran became, corrections officials insisted that rival inmates needed to share the same tiny exercise yards--a now defunct policy that led to fights and shootings.

Civil rights attorneys who followed the case said prosecutors made a tactical mistake by all but ignoring the integrated yard policy as a factor in the more than 50 serious and deadly shootings at the prison from 1989 to 1994.

“The government ran away from the integrated yard policy because they were afraid it would excuse the behavior of the officers, but the government could have had it both ways,” said Catherine Campbell, a Fresno attorney who won an $825,000 state settlement for the family of a slain inmate.

“They could have talked about the policy and showed that the guards were engaging in a cynical manipulation of it. Instead, the jury was left with no context to understand the government’s case.”

If the trial lacked an instant of high drama when the winds suddenly shifted the guards’ way, it did offer moments when the blood went out of the prosecution’s case. The prison tour was one such moment, and the way the government handled its star witness, whistle-blower Richard Caruso, was another.

Prosecutors were attempting to show that the eight correctional officers encouraged fights among rival inmates in the Security Housing Unit--fights that sometimes ended with guards firing deadly shots.

Carl Faller, head of the local U.S. attorney’s office who has a habit of taking on tough cases that challenge the powerful here, conceded midway through the trial that guilty verdicts were a tall order.

This was the conservative farm and prison belt, and it didn’t help that U.S. District Judge Anthony Ishii had seated a jury that included a correctional officer from a neighboring county and another juror who had applied to be a state prison guard.

Only six months before, Faller had watched a Kings County jury acquit four other Corcoran guards accused of setting up the rape of a problem inmate. State prosecutors had put on a sprawling case full of arcane prison documents and conflicting inmate testimony.

In the name of simplicity, Faller truncated his case. Even though the government’s potential witness list ran 60 names long, Faller decided to call a single whistle-blower--Caruso--and eight other witnesses.

“We made a conscious decision not to make this an ‘inmate trial,’ ” he said. “We decided to come in lean and mean.”

What the government considered “lean and mean” turned out, in the eyes of courtroom observers and jurors, to be paltry. Relying heavily on a statistical analysis that showed a high number of repeat fights in the unit overseen by the accused guards, the government’s presentation seemed stiff and bleached compared with the no-holds-barred approach of the defense team.

Still, there was hope among the government team that Caruso, the former guard who had spirited damaging documents out of the prison and handed them over to the FBI, could turn the case around.

Prosecutors considered Caruso a key link to alleged wrongdoing by several officers.

He had told the FBI that one accused officer liked to ring a red fire bell to open the exercise yard and announce over the prison loudspeaker, “Let’s get ready to rumble.”

Caruso said Sgt. John Vaughn held meetings with him and other gun post officers before the yards opened, to review which inmates were going to fight. This was done so they could bunch the fighters in the morning hours, Caruso said, and the supervisors could get a head start on the paperwork for each incident.

What concerned defense attorneys the most about Caruso was his testimony before the grand jury about a 1994 conversation with defendant Jerry Arvizu. Caruso had told the panel that he and Officer Arvizu had shared concerns over the shooting death of inmate Preston Tate. Caruso said Arvizu told him that the shooting of the 26-year-old Tate was unjustified and resulted from a fight that officers knew in advance was going to occur.

But when Caruso took the witness stand during trial, prosecutors asked him to recount only his conversation with Arvizu. Under cross examination by defense attorneys, Caruso had trouble recalling the exact time and place of the telephone conversation with Arvizu. He said that in preparation for his testimony, prosecutors had never sat him down and reviewed his employee work sheets, which showed the precise time frame.

One by one, defense attorneys began to question Caruso’s motives as a whistle-blower, pointing out that he had signed a recent movie deal potentially worth more than $500,000. Caruso testified that he didn’t care if a movie was made, didn’t care if he received the $500,000.

Defense attorneys shouted “liar,” and prosecutors sat in silence as Caruso was left shaking his head in the witness box. When it came time for prosecutors to repair the damage, they never elicited testimony from Caruso that the reason he didn’t need the money was that the state recently paid him $1.7 million to settle his lawsuit alleging retaliation for taking his allegations public.

It was the largest amount ever given to a whistle-blowing officer in California and the jury never heard about it.

“The prosecutors did nothing to enhance my credibility to the jury, and they had plenty to work with,” Caruso said. “I was on the honor guard at Corcoran and my record was outstanding. Instead, they let me twist in the wind while the defense attorneys called me a liar and a cheat.”

Another damaging moment for Caruso was when an FBI agent contradicted his testimony about a high-speed chase. Caruso had testified that the day he turned over documents to the FBI, he and an agent were pursued by state prison investigators. Agent Jennifer Murphy testified that the chase never happened. Caruso said he has a tape-recording in which he and Murphy discussed the chase.

In retrospect, Faller said, he should have taken the opening provided by the defense and asked Caruso about the $1.7 million settlement. He said he might have also done more to introduce Caruso’s testimony about Sgt. Vaughn and the pre-fight meetings. But because that meeting and other incidents occurred outside the six-month indictment period in 1994, the issue would have had to come before the judge as a pretrial motion.

Faller said the prosecution team had a strained relationship with Caruso until shortly before the trial.

“By the time we got around to talking to Caruso, it was too late to pursue some of that stuff,” Faller said. “Maybe I would have changed a few things, but we did the best we could.”