Inmate’s Alibi Is Verified

Prosecutors said Monday they will seek dismissal of two robbery convictions against a Los Angeles man after finding evidence he was working at a Huntington Beach golf shop the same day one of the robberies took place.

Joshua Moore, 21, is serving a 12-year sentence in Wasco State Prison after being convicted in 1999 of robbing a Fullerton video store and a man in front of an automated teller machine in Orange.

In the Fullerton robbery, a video-store clerk identified Moore as one of two men who robbed the store at gunpoint on Aug. 29, 1998, just before noon.

Moore has maintained he could not have been the robber because he was working at Las Vegas Golf & Tennis in Huntington Beach. The store manager confirmed Moore’s alibi but was never called to testify during the trial.

On Monday, Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Brian Gurwitz said forensic tests on sales receipts from the store for that day showed Moore’s fingerprint.

“We found out this morning,” Gurwitz said. One of the receipts “has come back with the defendant’s fingerprint, thereby corroborating his alibi.”

Gurwitz, who represented the prosecution in Moore’s appeal process, said his office will seek to throw out Moore’s robbery convictions early next month. However, prosecutors will file new charges against Moore in the Orange ATM case, he said.

Three months after the video-store robbery, Moore was arrested after police stopped a car he was driving following the ATM robbery. The victim said he followed the robbers and called police.

Police later arrested Moore and two others. Moore was driving and had a fake gun under the seat, Gurwitz said. The jury may have been biased by the evidence in the Fullerton case, Gurwitz said.

Moore’s attorneys could not be reached.

Moore’s former manager at the Huntington Beach shop, Sean Barbosa, said he finally spoke to prosecutors last month.