Charges dismissed against Riverside County woman accused of killing boyfriend in 2003

The murder case against a Riverside County woman once convicted of killing her live-in boyfriend has been dismissed, ending a long-running legal battle during which she received support from the San Diego-based California Innocence Project.

Kimberly Long, 45, spent seven years in prison after the second jury to hear her case convicted her of murder in 2005. The first jury deadlocked in favor of acquittal.

She has always maintained she was innocent.

In late November, the state Supreme Court threw out Long’s murder conviction, ruling that her defense lawyer made a critical mistake at trial. Then late last week, the Riverside County district attorney’s office announced the charges against her had been dismissed.

“Our office carefully looked at and considered all aspects of the case and determined, in part due to the lengthy passage of time since the murder and the deaths of key witnesses, that we can no longer prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury,” Dist. Atty. Mike Hestrin said in a news release.

Long was released from prison in 2012, then spent four years out of custody on bail while her case was appealed. She indicated that she is pleased to be able to move forward.

“I’m so happy I can now put this case behind me and move on with my life,” she said in a statement. “It’s been hanging over my head for so long, but now I am just looking to the future.”

According to prosecutors, Long called 911 on Oct. 6, 2003, and told police something had happened to her boyfriend, Oswaldo “Ozzy” Conde, 31, inside her home in Corona. When police arrived, they found Conde dead. An autopsy found Conde’s cause of death to be blunt force trauma.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise reported that Long had said she spent that evening with friends and came home to find Conde dead.

In 2016, lawyers from the California Innocence Project, based at San Diego’s California Western School of Law, convinced the judge who presided over Long’s two trials that the outcome would have been different if her defense attorney had presented evidence of the victim’s time of death.

The judge reversed her conviction.

After that ruling, while Long was out on bail, a Court of Appeal reversed the trial judge‘s ruling. The state Supreme Court considered the appeal and agreed with the trial court that not presenting evidence about the time of Conde’s death amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel.

Then came the decision by the Riverside district attorney not to retry the case.

“I am grateful to the Riverside district attorney’s office for making the decision not to re-prosecute,” Justin Brooks, director of the California Innocence Project, said in a statement. “Considering the evidence in this case, it was the right decision.”

Long was one of the “California 12,” a group of convicted people whose cases the California Innocence Project has been working on for years. Ten of the 12 have had been exonerated, paroled, had their sentence commuted or verdict reversed.