Lawyer’s Dedication Helps Free Wrongly Convicted Family Friend

Alison Tucher was in her final year of Stanford Law School when Quedellis Ricardo Walker was wrongly convicted of murdering Lisa Hopewell, his ex-girlfriend. That was in 1991.

Walker, who goes by the name Rick, returned joyfully to his mother’s home in East Palo Alto, Calif., last week because Tucher, now an attorney in San Francisco, unearthed new evidence that persuaded prosecutors and a judge to set him free.

A dozen years in the making, Tucher and Walker’s triumph over a disturbing injustice is the culmination of a deep friendship between two families that refused to give up on each other.

The lawyer’s mother, Carolyn Tucher, was serving her first year on the school board in prosperous Palo Alto when she befriended Rick’s mother, Myrtle Walker, her counterpart on the neighboring but impoverished Ravenswood School District in East Palo Alto.

Divided by the Bayshore Freeway, the two cities and their children seemed to have little in common. But the two women worked together: visiting kindergarten classes in each other’s districts, creating a joint arts program, coming to know and confide in one another through their mutual love of politics.

Alison, Carolyn’s daughter, met Myrtle’s son, Rick, for the first time when she visited him in the county jail. He had just been convicted of a horrible crime: taping Lisa Hopewell’s mouth shut with duct tape and then slitting her throat. The promising young law student took an interest in his case because of their mothers’ close friendship.

Walker was “persuasive in arguing his innocence” that day more than a decade ago, recalls Tucher. But she said it was her work years later, “talking to and learning about other witnesses that really convinced me he was innocent.”

Although a Santa Clara Superior Court judge still must consider the evidence before Walker is formally declared innocent, the judge released him from Mule Creek State Prison on Monday. At a hearing Friday, the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office said it would support Walker’s attorney in her bid to have him declared factually innocent

The district attorney’s office, which had convicted Walker, had taken the rare step of joining Tucher in seeking his immediate freedom. New testimony has been taken from five witnesses and new physical evidence has been collected that places another person -- now believed to be an accomplice in Lisa Hopewell’s murder -- at the scene of the crime.

Court documents show Walker was framed by his co-defendant in the case, Rahsson Bowers, a drug dealer who killed Hopewell in her Cupertino home. Bowers left fingerprints at the scene, and then falsely accused Walker, according to the papers filed in court by Tucher and supported in a report by the district attorney’s office. Bowers claimed that he had assisted with the crime because Walker had threatened to kill him if he did not.

As Walker and Bowers stood trial together, Bowers struck a plea deal with Santa Clara County prosecutors, gaining lenient treatment for himself, and protecting his true accomplice to the crime by testifying against Walker, Tucher said.

But Walker had an alibi for the night of the murder: He had spent a few days with a married woman at a nearby hotel. There were room service records to back the woman’s statements.

Bowers’ testimony was the only evidence presented against Walker; still, the young auto mechanic was sentenced to life in prison. His first parole hearing wouldn’t have been until 2017.

Inside tough and austere Pelican Bay State Prison, Walker fought off despair by embarking on a rigorous quest for self-improvement. He painted pictures and immersed himself in Bible classes, eventually becoming a Bible study teacher.

He had been hanging with a reckless crowd before his arrest. But behind bars he focused on doing the right thing.

“I just looked at it as an opportunity to better myself,” Walker said. “There are all kinds of paths in prison. You can choose to stay only with people who are doing the right things, and then the path gets smaller and smaller.... It’s like the branches of a tree. Sometimes you find yourself out there on a limb, all alone.”

Meanwhile, Tucher’s legal career was flourishing. She landed a coveted Supreme Court clerkship for Justice David Souter and then a job as a prosecutor in the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, the same office that prosecuted Walker. Sometimes she helped Walker’s father, who is now deceased, to collect information about the case.

After Myrtle Walker left the school board she went on to serve several terms on the East Palo Alto City Council, eventually becoming mayor.

For the first few years of Rick’s sentence, Carolyn and her husband, Tony Tucher, kept in touch with him by mail, sending him letters and newspapers to read at Pelican Bay, in the far northwest corner of the state. When Walker was transferred in 1996 to the closer Mule Creek facility in Ione, about 120 miles from Palo Alto, Tony visited him four or five times a year.

And as Walker and his attorneys lost appeal after appeal, Alison Tucher kept track of the case.

“One by one, other sources of help dropped out of the picture,” recalled Carolyn Tucher. But it wasn’t until 1999, when the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Walker’s last chance at another hearing, that daughter Alison took up the case, pro bono.

“I always knew that some day I would be out,” Walker said, “but I was kind of assured that I’d get out when Alison took my case.”

Through the births of two children and a busy commercial litigation practice at her firm, Morrison & Foerster, she kept at it: visiting potential witnesses in prison, scrutinizing trial transcripts and ultimately unearthing gaping holes in the prosecution’s case.

“I think there’s enough blame to go around for what happened in 1991 and 1992,” Tucher said. “Neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney did their jobs right back in 1991.”

According to documents filed by Tucher on Wednesday, a blood sample taken from the newly alleged accomplice matches saliva taken from a cigarette butt that was found at the crime scene. The alleged accomplice, whose name has not been revealed in court documents, is in custody on another matter, according to Assistant Dist. Atty. Karyn Sinunu.

And Bowers, who was convicted of second-degree murder in Lisa Hopewell’s death, is serving a life sentence for his role in the slaying.

“There was a travesty, and I don’t think we can blame it on the investigative agency or the courts,” said prosecutor Sinunu. “Every team on the criminal justice system did something wrong.”

“We flipped a witness that we shouldn’t have flipped,” Sinunu said about Bowers’ false testimony. “In retrospect, that wasn’t the right thing to do.”

While others look for ways to finally create justice, Walker insists that he feels no anger or bitterness about what he has been through. Of Bowers, the man who stole a dozen years of his life, Walker said only, “I think he needs to get right with God.

“Everyone thinks I’m angry. They can’t believe I’m at peace,” Walker said Wednesday, just two days after his release from prison. “You shouldn’t be bitter about it because it doesn’t help.

“I came to a place in prison where I was at peace, and I was actually more free than I had been when I was not in prison,” he said. “Freedom is a state of mind. I was really free in there at one point.”

A report filed in support of Walker’s release, from the correctional counselor who had monitored his conduct for six years, called his prison behavior exemplary. “This is a remarkable record, especially for a man housed among violent felons who started serving his time at Pelican Bay,” the counselor wrote.

Walker will need all of his apparent equanimity as he reacquaints himself with freedom and comes to terms with the changes that 12 years in prison can bring to someone’s world. On returning home that first day, so much was different that Walker didn’t even recognize the highway exit for his mother’s house in East Palo Alto.

And days after his release, a cell phone rang several times from his jacket pocket before it occurred to Walker that the phone belongs to him. He also looks wondrously at the new Palm Pilot his mother has given him. He plans to learn to use it really soon.

Walker’s father and grandmother passed away while he was behind bars. His son William was not even a teenager when Walker was sent away; he is 24 now. “I didn’t have anything to do with it, but by the grace of God he’s a good man now,” Walker said.

At Tucher’s law firm on the 33rd floor of a San Francisco skyscraper last week, Walker and his attorney chose their words carefully as they described their journey. He was trying to not cry; she was battling the exhaustion of an emotional week, making sure she didn’t say anything that could be misconstrued while Walker’s case, technically, remains open.

Walker looks at what Tucher has been able to do for him, and he feels the work of God. “You’ve got to believe this didn’t happen by coincidence,” he said. “When people are set in your path, you have to ask yourself why they are there.”

Tucher’s navy woven suit is creaseless; her eyes are a piercing crystal blue even after days without enough sleep. She shows no emotion while Walker sings her praises.

“It is thrilling to be able to play a role in setting an innocent person free,” she says carefully. She pauses, and her voice wobbles. “It’s terrible it took this long.”

When the attorney called Walker’s mother with the miraculous news that Rick would be coming home, it took two days before Myrtle Walker could get word to her son. Walker’s section of the prison was in lockdown.

“Rick, you’re coming home,” his mother finally told him on the Wednesday before he was released.

For a moment, he didn’t believe her.

“Mom,” he asked, “Are you sure?”

Yes, she said, “Alison said so.” Those words made him believe.