Wheels Wobble but Justice Rolls On

A fortuneteller’s toy sits on the desk in the public defender’s office. Shake the pirate’s head and lift the eye patch to read the future.

Michelle Paffile gives it a try. “Clear sailing ahead, matey.”

About time, she mutters impatiently. It’s about time for the justice system to clear things up and deliver some justice to one defendant.

Paffile is a public defender at the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Norwalk. She shares an office with attorney Ramiro Cisneros, who has guided The Times for a week into the courthouse’s felony criminal calendar -- the daily process that delivers a good share of the ground-level justice on the southeastern flank of the county, the kind of justice that seldom rates headlines. On this Friday, the spotlight turns from Cisneros to Paffile’s case of the man with an eye patch who didn’t do it. Or supposedly didn’t do it.

It is a case that has dragged on for months with an eyewitness who is ready to clear the man.

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Back in April, police were summoned to the scene of an attempted burglary in Downey. A man had been seen cutting a screen to gain entry into an apartment, the kind of crime that raises a community’s blood pressure and police statistics but gets little attention beyond that. A woman from an upstairs unit rushed out and confronted the man face-to-face in the manner of, just what do you think you’re doing? He fled.

Later that day, officers on patrol attempted to question a 25-year-old Compton man in the case.

He ran. Police chased. He was arrested. The man had a prior conviction for grand theft and an outstanding warrant for driving with a suspended license. To top it off, officers reported that the eyewitness identified him. Police had their man.

This, Paffile says, was the first, and crucial, misunderstanding.

The neighbor who witnessed the crime is a native of Greece and speaks with a lingering accent. Officers believed she was identifying the defendant as the suspect. The witness later said that all she meant to do was identify him as someone she had observed in the vicinity, but not the man who cut the screen, not the man whose face she saw close-up.

The witness has told Paffile -- and has been trying to tell others -- that the man she confronted at the scene has a pair of eyes.

The defendant did not. The first time Paffile peered under an eye patch it was on the head of the accused. Underneath was an empty socket. He had lost his eye, he said, as a teenage victim of a drive-by shooting in Long Beach.

In May, a preliminary hearing was held in a Downey satellite court. But that didn’t end it.

Investigators heard the witness say that she had become fearful. This was interpreted by prosecutors to mean that the defendant must have had his pals threaten her with harm if she testified.

This, Paffile said, was the second misunderstanding.

What the witness meant was that she was afraid because she could be labeled a false accuser. And let’s face it, the defendant was a young man who traveled in the social circles of the rough streets, and he looked the part. Might he be, ah, upset at being locked in jail on someone’s mistaken say-so?

The one-eyed man remained in custody and the case was sent to Norwalk. The defendant lacked the money to hire his own attorney, and Paffile was assigned to his case.

At a hearing in June, the one-eyed defendant was granted release from jail on his own recognizance. But with a prior felony conviction, he still faced up to seven years in prison for attempted burglary.

As the case dragged on, Paffile assembled the defendant and the eyewitness in court, where she hoped to secure dismissal. Instead, the district attorney had sought a postponement, infuriating both the public defender and the eyewitness, if not necessarily the laconic defendant.

Finally, the day of reckoning arrived. That was yesterday. But matters got off to a rocky start. The one-eyed man didn’t bother to show up for the 9 a.m. hearing. For that matter, the eyewitness who held the key to his fate was also a no-show. A judge prepared a warrant for the arrest of the accused in the event he arrived later than 2 p.m.

Spitting mad, Paffile stabbed the keypad on the telephone, trying to hunt down her client and witness.

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If stereotyping -- profiling -- runs just beneath the surface in encounters, the courthouse seems to invite it in exaggerated measure. The tall, slender defendant, who bears a resemblance to Kobe Bryant, could have chosen to be on time, to wear a pressed shirt and slacks, to sit attentively in his chair, to humble himself before The Man.

As it was, he arrived on Thursday within five minutes of being arrested. He carried himself with the rolling swagger of the boulevard tough, with the baggy-pants uniform to go along. He sprawled in the courtroom chair. Nobody remotely believed his excuse for being late -- that the police mysteriously sent him to San Bernardino to clear a traffic warrant, except there was no warrant.

On this day, the street and The System bumped heads. The outcome was a draw. Having been made to appear, the accused was sent home. He was ordered to reappear Friday, today, when proceedings would resume. The accused said he would return, but his body language seemed to add a postscript: If he felt like it.

Paffile rolled her eyes. Friday was supposed to be her day off.

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Today, Friday, the eyewitness to the crime arrives on time and would like to hurry things along. How many hours had she devoted to this already? Predictably, the accused is late -- as though taunting The System: The witness and my attorney will get me off, so I’m going to show up when I’m ready and droop across this chair here and get some sleep.

The System taunts him back: The case is called, but the prosecutor reports that there is no investigator in the courthouse to interview the witness and take her statement, at last. The prosecutor herself doesn’t want to conduct the interview because that could leave her liable to be a witness in her own case, if the case were to continue.

Standoff.

The eyewitness grits her teeth. She volunteers to rise and tell her story directly to the judge and get it over with -- a suggestion the judge simply ignores by way of saying, “Thank you.”

Paffile is trying to hold things together, even as her own temper is rising. She tells the witness, “What can I do? I can’t make him listen to you.... It is what it is.”

Unruffled, the accused, meanwhile, is catching up on his sleep.

The judge retires to his chamber. Others on hand in the courtroom cluster in groups for idle conversation.

Intermission.

Paffile wakes her client and tells him that she is going to start jabbing him with her pen if he falls asleep. She then hovers around the eyewitness, trying to be reassuring but also making certain the woman doesn’t just give up on justice and go home.

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After half an hour, although it seems longer, an investigator from the district attorney’s office arrives to take a statement from the witness. Based on that statement, the prosecutor will decide how to proceed.

Voices from the counsel table turn angry, sarcastic. Paffile tells the deputy district attorney that she doesn’t want the witness harassed during the interrogation. The deputy D.A. snarls back: “Yeah, that’s what I do, harass witnesses.”

Another prosecutor intercedes, and Paffile warns him: “Stay out of this case! I’m telling you.”

The interview with the eyewitness is conducted privately in the hallway. Paffile shakes her client awake. People are looking at their watches as if the batteries are dying.

Finally, Deputy Dist. Atty. Julianne Walker returns to the courtroom, her face revealing nothing. The judge is summoned. Paffile and Walker take their places at the counsel table.

Based on the statement of the eyewitness, the prosecutor moves to dismiss the case. After 59 days in jail and 106 days of doubt, the accused saunters out the door. In the hallway, the witness tells The Times that she has lost faith in American justice.

“They wouldn’t listen to me. This wasn’t the guy. I feel bad for him.”

*

Cut and dried?

Maybe. Maybe not.

With 19 years experience as a prosecutor, Walker later reflected on the outcome. Perhaps there had been a mix-up, Walker allowed; maybe officers at the crime scene really didn’t grasp what the witness was trying to express. But the woman had a chance to say so at a preliminary hearing and did not. “That’s the time she could have said it, but didn’t.”

Walker once specialized in gang prosecutions and is keenly familiar with the dread that overcomes witnesses as criminal cases unfold, with a defendant behind bars and his friends still walking the streets of a neighborhood. “It happens more than you think. After the fact, they want to recant. In this case, that’s what I perceived was happening.”

A second deputy district attorney who had a hand in the case shared her suspicion. So did the original prosecutor at the preliminary hearing as well as the police investigator.

Ultimately, Walker said, she dropped the charges because she found the witness to be convincing during the hallway interview with an investigator. “Possibly, there was a misunderstanding.” Or maybe, the woman was simply too scared to stick with her original accusation and was skilled at covering up her feelings. “I’m looking at her, and I’m not sure.”

In any event, Walker said, “I’m not saying he didn’t do it, or wasn’t involved in some way. I felt we couldn’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.... I think this is a case where the system worked, not where it didn’t work.”

*

Downstairs, Paffile drops off her paperwork, glances at the cases piling up on her desk. Her officemate, Ramiro Cisneros, sits in his swivel chair in the windowless room with manila folders spread around him -- each folder telling the story of a crime, the story of someone accused of a crime, the stories of all those others who were drawn into the event from victim to police to witness.

On the second floor, Walker and Norwalk’s cadre of deputy district attorneys similarly take stock of the stacks of case files awaiting them.

Friday does not wrap up a courthouse week. It’s the day before Monday, when the criminal calendar will again roll in the ceaseless march of steps that we rely on for achieving the Constitution’s lofty ideals to “establish justice ... and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves ... “

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john.balzar@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

GROUND-LEVEL JUSTICE

Monday

Going to bat for those who have hit bottom.

Tuesday

Should the judicial system lock up a man if he hasn’t broken the law?

Wednesday

A retrial and a sweet victory for the public defender’s office.

Thursday

An extortionist is sentenced and a drug user returns to jail.

Today

The case of the one-eyed man comes to a conclusion.

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On the web

Find previous installments at latimes.com/norwalk.