In 2006, Augustin Uribe was convicted of child molestation and sentenced to 38 years to life. He will be a free man this week after Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Andrea Bryan ruled yesterday that Deputy District Attorney Troy Benson, who prosecuted the case, engaged in “numerous acts of misconduct.”
Bryan’s ruling follows a 2008 appellate court finding that the DA’s office withheld a videotape of a physical exam conducted on Uribe’s alleged victim.
The DA’s office has rejected the recent ruling, and is investigating a possible appeal.
Read More at CBS 5.
Read More at the Mercury News.
Augustin Uribe was convicted in Spring 2006
District Attorney George Kennedy took office in December 1990 and retired from the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office at noon on January 8, 2007.
DA Kennedy’s office has a culture of prosecutor’s winning cases regardless of guilt or innocence of accused and a number of Assistant DA’s will get disbarred or suspended
It will take years and million of taxes to clean up DA office especially as ” many as 3,300 cases of sex crimes against children following revelations this year that medical examinations of victims had been videotaped since 1991. ”
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Sins of Omission
When prosecutors don’t play fair with evidence
http://www.callawyer.com/story.cfm?eid=903325&evid=1
“More than four years ago, in response to mounting exonerations of death-row inmates nationwide through DNA testing, the California state Senate created a commission to investigate the causes of wrongful convictions. Headed by former state Attorney General John K. Van de Kamp, the 22-member California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice looked at police procedures, the competence of defense counsel, and the conduct of district attorneys. Last summer it delivered a 185-page report to the Legislature and the governor. Included in the report was an examination of prosecutorial misconduct.
Looking at 2,130 cases of alleged ethics violations by prosecutors over the past decade, the commission found misconduct in 443, or 21 percent of the total. In the vast majority of those instances (390), the judges concluded that the misconduct was harmless error. But in 53 cases the misconduct was sufficiently egregious to reverse a conviction. Some 30 cases involved repeat prosecutorial offenders, and two-thirds of those had engaged in the same bad behavior in multiple trials.
The most common type of prosecutorial misconduct? Failure to disclose exculpatory evidence. “
” The Field case was just one of a series of recent scandals in the Santa Clara County DA’s office. In February, Deputy District Attorney Peter S. Waite received a public reproval from the State Bar Court for withholding evidence about the sanity of a defendant in a murder trial. By signing an agreement with the court, Waite essentially admitted that he had kept from the defense the fact that an expert witness who previously testified for the prosecution had changed his opinion and considered the defendant insane at the time of the murder.
The office also is immersed in a dispute over review of as many as 3,300 cases of sex crimes against children following revelations this year that medical examinations of victims had been videotaped since 1991. Defense attorneys had routinely received photos from the exams but were never provided copies of the videotapes, which could be crucial in a fraction of cases in which the assault is disputed.
During hearings to determine when prosecutors first learned of the taping, prosecutors Troy Benson and Paul Colin testified they knew about the practice as early as 2005. But supervising attorney Victoria Brown of the DA’s office said she didn’t learn that exams were videotaped until April 2006, when the procedure surfaced in a habeas claim by defendant Augustin Uribe. Brown testified that she then immediately alerted her staff.
In a tense day of testimony in May, Brown denied knowing about the taping prior to its discovery by Uribe’s defense attorney, Al Lopez. Uribe had been convicted and sentenced to 38 years in prison for molesting one of his granddaughters. Lopez now wants the entire DA’s office recused for bias in Uribe’s retrial. Lopez also found that a paralegal responsible for gathering discovery in response to defense requests had no training. “
Panel To Probe Wrongful Convictions
July 9, 2007
San Jose Mercury News
By Fredric N. Tulsky
http://www.nacdl.org/public.nsf/defenseupdates/innocence116
Disputes over evidence
Both sides argue about its value
In any trial, the prosecutors’ duty seems clear enough: They are required to turn over all material evidence that might help the defense, whether it is in their files or in the files of police, prosecution experts or other members of the prosecution team.
But that duty is not as simple as it seems. Disputes over withheld evidence have repeatedly marred Santa Clara County cases and are frequently contentious, with both sides arguing about the value of the information.
Sometimes, the argument hinges on who is a member of the prosecution team. That is the case with Agustin Uribe, convicted last year on charges that he had sexually assaulted a child. Uribe insisted he was innocent and the girl’s version of what happened was not consistent.
That gave special importance to the findings of a physical examination of the girl conducted by Mary Ritter, a physician’s assistant at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. Ritter concluded that the exam supported the allegation of sexual assault.
But experts disagreed about whether photographs taken during the exam supported Ritter’s conclusion. The defense expert, Dr. Theodore Hariton, concluded that Ritter was misreading the images and focused on one key photograph to support his view. Ritter’s boss testified that the defense expert was relying too heavily on a “bad photograph” with a shadow.
Only after Uribe’s conviction did the defense learn a videotape of the exam existed, which provided additional evidence. Hariton contended that the videotape reinforced his conclusion that no sex occurred.
When Uribe sought a new trial based on the withheld evidence, the district attorney’s office argued that the videotape was conducted for training purposes only. As a result, they said, the prosecutor had no duty to provide it to the defense.
Trial Judge Paul Bernal agreed. Uribe has appealed to the 6th District Court of Appeals.
Plain sick and evil to throw someone behind bars for something they did not do. I think it is a crime that should be punishable by prison time to the prosecutor who withholds exculpatory evidence.
If anyone has information about the process of getting information in the hands of an organization who might be able to assist my brother, who has a similar situation. Which by the way was also prosecuted out of the San Jose Prosecuters office, about six years ago. His circumstances are very similar to the Uribe case, in addition to a gross lack of evidence including one of the victims (his 13 year old step daughter) who testified under oath that she lied about the charges, which she had also made up similar stories in the past, after being grounded by my brother. My brother was convicted without any physical evidence, and based solely on the testimony of a deviant child attempting to seek revenge on her step father for being too strict, which she later recanted under oath.
If anyone who lead me in the direction of getting my brother’s case presented to someone who might be able to assist us.
Much appreciated!