El Paso inmate gets a second chance, and a song

They put him inside a police car;

He had a feeling

He would not return soon.

“El Corrido de Daniel Villegas”

For 200 years, the corrido served as the soundtrack to Mexico’s tempestuous history. Often written by the poor at the expense of the powerful, the folk ballads spoke of revolution and social justice, of heroism in battle and cowardice behind the palace walls, all set to a buoyant rhythm.

In recent years, many prominent corridos have been exercises in vanity in three-quarter time — narco-corridos commissioned to celebrate the exploits not of Pancho Villa or Francisco Madero but of drug traffickers.

It was left to a town on the north side of the border to offer a reminder of what the corrido has been, and can be.

A faction of El Paso has come to believe that a local son, 34-year-old Daniel Villegas, has spent half his life in prison for two murders he did not commit. The case has struck a chord in El Paso, literally. A corrido about Villegas’ case is popping up on the radio, on the Internet and in CD players, serving as an unusual anthem for an unlikely movement.

It was written by Ernesto Martinez, a manager at a construction company by day, a gifted norteno-style accordion player by night, who performs under the moniker El Zorro de Chihuahua. When he first heard of the Villegas case, Martinez didn’t think much of it because of one simple fact — Villegas had confessed to the killings. Then he heard the rest of the story and determined, he said, “that it all started with a lie.”

He began to write.

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The laws of the United States of America

Indeed very powerful

But there are times they fail.

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A few years ago, an El Paso businessman named John Mimbela fell in love with a woman who was a teller at his bank. They married, and Mimbela adopted her three daughters. Mimbela soon learned that the girls’ uncle was in prison — and, according to the family, he was innocent.

A devout Catholic, Mimbela believed in second chances, and employed a number of ex-cons at Mimbela Contractors Inc. He too was skeptical when he heard about Villegas’ case, well aware of the old sarcastic saw — that everyone in prison is innocent. But he agreed to take a look.

Like him, Villegas grew up in a tough neighborhood known as the Devil’s Triangle. Villegas was never able to sit still in school. He dropped out before high school, with a third-grade reading level. He glamorized the life of the streets, where he was known as Danny Boy. But the worst crime he got booked on was a curfew violation.

Often, Villegas tried to make his life sound more interesting than it was. He bragged to friends that he slept on a water bed, that he was descended from Italian royalty, that he owned a fancy stereo — none of which was true. He was, as his little sister put it, “a liar,” and as his mother put it, “a pain in the butt.”

So in the spring of 1993, after two teenagers were killed in a sandy lot off Electric Avenue, some thought it was just more bragging when Villegas, then 16, boasted that he’d pulled the trigger. The police, however, were not ready to ignore Villegas’ claims.

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Whenever there is a murder

Someone is to be blamed.

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Though it abuts Juarez, Mexico, one of the most dangerous places in the world, there were just five homicides last year in El Paso. It was a very different place in 1993. That year there were 56 homicides, most attributed to gang warfare.

The drive-by shootings of Robert England, 18, and Armando Lazo, 17, left no physical evidence beyond shell casings. But authorities had Villegas’ one-page confession, dictated in the language of a schoolboy. In it, he couldn’t spell his father’s first name, though he did note that a detective had given him a Coke. The confession did not offer a motive for the crime, other than a desire to frighten the victims.

“Give their families my regrets,” the confession concluded. “I would not of done it, but I wanted to scare them.”

Villegas later recanted, asserting that he had confessed under duress and in fact had been baby-sitting with friends across town at the time of the shootings. Still, he was charged with capital murder. El Paso County Dist. Atty. Jaime Esparza, who was newly elected, personally tried the case.

Prosecutors painted the crime as a drive-by shooting carried out by members of one gang against neighborhood rivals. Villegas’ first trial ended in a hung jury. At the second trial, in 1995, a jury deliberated for three hours before finding him guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Years later, Mimbela began poring over court records. He learned that Villegas had bragged to a relative that he’d used a shotgun — the boast that sparked a round of gossip that led to his arrest. But the murder weapon was a small-caliber handgun.

According to interviews and court documents, Villegas’ confession also did not jibe with some of the facts.

Villegas said he’d been riding that night in a car driven by a gang member — a man who turned out to be in prison at the time.

He said the car was white; two survivors of the attack testified that the car was red or maroon.

He said the car was headed east; it was headed west.

Mimbela eventually won the support of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth at the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. The center, which has prepared a brief in support of Villegas, asserts that false confessions occur with some regularity.

According to the center, of the scores of people nationwide who have been exonerated since the advent of DNA technology, a quarter were convicted after confessing falsely. False confessions are particularly common, the center contended, among juvenile suspects who wilt under police questioning.

Villegas still struggles to explain it — in a letter from prison, he said it would be akin to explaining color to a blind person.

Villegas’ account of his interrogation is impossible to verify independently. He claims that he was questioned for more than five hours, that detectives told him that if he did not cooperate he would be left unprotected in prison and raped, that he would be given the death penalty and that the detectives would personally carry out his execution.

“I was terrified,” Villegas said in an interview. “Anything to get away from these guys.”

Esparza, the district attorney, said in an interview that he still believes Villegas was justly convicted.

“I am convinced that he received a fair trial,” he said. “I think the confession was fully vetted.”

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A crime not committed

Today he pays his penance.

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Mimbela, 54, said he has spent $200,000 trying to prove Villegas’ innocence, much of it on investigators and lawyers — all of whom told him he’d never force the case back into court. He also put together small public events exploring the case and the notion of false confessions. It was at one of those events, held at a church, that Martinez learned the details of the case.

Martinez, the safety manager for Mimbela’s construction company, was skeptical at first. But he said the case began to eat at him.

He realized that he and Villegas were the same age, 34, and that while Villegas has never had a driver’s license or a job, Martinez had pieced together a life Villegas could only dream about — steady, rewarding work; a wife and two daughters; two albums under his belt. The inconsistencies in Villegas’ confession, he felt, revealed a frightened kid out of his league, not a hardened killer.

Martinez had never written a corrido like this one, but the song seemed to be bursting inside him. By the time he drove home from the church that night, most of it was in his head. After he walked through the door, it took him 40 minutes to scribble it down.

He began:

This corrido is sung

For our friend Daniel Villegas

He was only 16 years old

In a traditional structure that includes a salutation from the singer, the story and a moral conclusion of sorts, the song described the crime, the arrest and the notion that, in this case, the justice system had failed.

“It’s just the facts,” Martinez said with a shrug. “He’s innocent.”

Martinez recorded the corrido on a CD and it spread — played, for instance, at a rally held to publicize Villegas’ case.

Villegas has gained the support of religious leaders, as well as a survivor of the 1993 shootings. Jesse Hernandez, then a teenager, ran to escape the bullets and said he grew up assuming that police arrested the right man. Then Mimbela showed him a copy of Villegas’ confession, which Hernandez said was full of factual mistakes.

“I had put it behind me — accepted that he did it,” said Hernandez, now 36. “But nothing he said was right.”

This summer, a judge granted Villegas a hearing to press his case for a new trial.

Villegas’ team was permitted to argue that he was innocent and had inadequate representation at trial; among the witnesses not called in his defense was a young woman who was prepared to testify that Villegas was baby-sitting at the time of the shooting, according to court documents.

The hearing began in June. After four days of testimony, a surprise witness came forward. He did not contend that he had witnessed the crime, but said he had knowledge of who the killer was — allegedly a deceased gang member that many of Villegas’ supporters have long maintained was the real gunman.

Police documents indicate that at the time of the killings, several people pointed detectives toward the same suspect. One witness reported to detectives that the gang member had threatened to shoot one of the victims two weeks before the killings. The gang member’s brother told detectives that he “hated those dudes,” records show.

Esparza said his office is taking the new information seriously.

“It is very important … that the verdict was correct,” he said. “It’s our duty to do what is right and just — and we will do that.”

The judge suspended the hearing until early September to give both sides an opportunity to determine the importance of the new witness.

“I do not believe they want to have an innocent man in prison,” said Villegas’ attorney, Joe Aureliano Spencer Jr. “They played the hand they were dealt. And they assumed it was correct.”

Martinez continues to sing his corrido. He gets so many requests to play it that he often performs it twice in the same show.

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Warm greetings

If you’re ever in El Paso, Texas

This is the path

Of our friend Daniel Villegas.

scott.gold@latimes.com