Flight Puts Luster in Rare Company

It was Woody Allen who once said “Eighty percent of life is just showing up.”

But a small group of defendants -- now including accused Ventura County rapist Andrew Luster -- apparently think even that’s a bit much.

Luster left town midtrial a week ago, joining what could be thought of as the brotherhood of the empty chair: defendants who find themselves in the urgent grip of a need to be elsewhere. It’s a desperate tactic that prosecutors pounce on for their advantage -- though there might be no one around to put away -- and that defense attorneys must deal with as best they can.

In some ways, Luster, the great-grandson of cosmetics magnate Max Factor, followed a path trod by Ricardo S. Meza, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who sauntered past startled Ventura County jurors during a break in his 1995 trial on an attempted murder charge.

Both men were facing the possibility of life sentences and both were in ongoing trials. Luster was out on $1-million bail, but Meza was in custody, becoming the first inmate to escape during trial at the Ventura County Hall of Justice. Both are still “in the wind,” as courthouse regulars say, Luster for just over a week and Meza for more than seven years.

Richard Simon, a Ventura County prosecutor since 1984, vividly recalls the day Meza fled.

The 5-foot-2, 26-year-old defendant had already served time for rape and burglary. Accused of stabbing a Camarillo man more than 25 times, he was facing his third strike and a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life.

As jurors milled around in a hallway outside the courtroom, Simon was setting up exhibits for his closing argument. That was when a bailiff checked the holding cell between courtrooms and found it empty. Flustered, he asked Simon, “Where’s Meza?”

“What do you mean, where’s Meza?”

Simon flung off his jacket, burst out the courtroom door and took off down the crowded corridor.

“I ran faster than I’d ever run before in my life,” he said. “I went on a dead sprint to try to find this guy.”

Sheriff’s deputies joined in the search, but Meza, who had slipped through a cell door that wasn’t properly locked, eluded them. He was later spotted hiding under a truck a few blocks away at a nursery, telling passersby he needed a ride because gang members were after him. Then he disappeared.

Back in court, Judge Charles Campbell ordered that the trial proceed. In Luster’s case, Judge Ken Riley made the same decision last Monday, three days after authorities realized that Luster had left his oceanfront Mussel Shoals home despite the electronic ankle bracelet that was supposed to keep him there.

Many legal experts contend judges have little alternative when defendants fail to show, unless there is reason to believe they were abducted, ill or involved in an accident.

“It would be a troubling message for a judge to send,” said Loyola University Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor. “It would be an incentive for defendants to jump bail when it looked as if the trial wasn’t going their way. There would be nothing to lose.”

In the Meza case, jurors were told by the judge that Meza had “left custody without permission” -- a conclusion they had reached themselves after witnessing the wild pursuit during their morning break. Meza’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Todd Howeth, argued unsuccessfully for a mistrial.

Howeth declined comment for this story.

Luster’s jurors have not been told that the surfer charged with drugging and sexually assaulting young women as he videotaped them is now a fugitive. However, prosecutors are expected to ask Riley for permission to do so next week.

“Right now they just have an empty chair,” Levenson said. “They want to establish consciousness of guilt. They want to make it an affirmative issue in the case -- just like someone running from police officers.”

But a defendant’s bolting is no guarantee of his conviction. When judges advise jurors on a defendant’s flight, they must say that guilt cannot be determined just by considering the escape.

Some juries have taken that to heart.

Philip Schnayerson, past president of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a defense attorneys group, said he had a client who was acquitted despite her absence in the courtroom.

“She was a drug-user who was there for the first day but apparently overslept and was afraid to come back,” he said. “The jury just didn’t believe she’d done what they alleged.”

Then there’s the case of Stephen Bingham, a Berkeley attorney who allegedly slipped his client, a Black Panther imprisoned in San Quentin, a gun used in a prison break and riot. Six people were killed and Bingham was charged with murder and conspiracy. Even after fleeing to Europe and waiting 13 years to turn himself in, Bingham was acquitted.

“He had felt the hysteria around the Panthers was so virulent he couldn’t get a fair trial,” Schnayerson said.

In Meza’s trial, the jury deliberated two days as he headed for parts unknown. They came back with a verdict of guilty and a couple of them interviewed afterward said his vanishing act had nothing to do with their decision.

But his whereabouts now is just as mysterious as Luster’s, despite the verdict.

“It’s a hollow victory,” said prosecutor Simon, “unless you make the person pay for the crime.”