The
California Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected a 25-year-old death
sentence after it was found that the prosecution deliberately lied and withheld
vital evidence favorable to the defense during both the guilt and penalty
phases of the capital trial of Miguel Angel Bacigalupo who was convicted of the
1983 murders of a San Jose jewelry store owner and his brother.
Bacigalupo,
a Peruvian immigrant, had admitted after his arrest on December 1983 that he
shot Orestes and Jose Luis Guerrero but he maintained that a Colombian cartel
had "contracted" him to do it and had threatened to kill him and his
family if he refused.
The
lead prosecutor then, Joyce Allegro, who is now a Santa Clara County Superior
Court Judge, told the jury that the duress brought about by the alleged threat
from a Colombian drug cartel was "a total fabrication"
notwithstanding that an investigator for her office, Sandra Williams, had
interviewed a confidential informant who admitted driving a Colombian drug
kingpin to meet Bacigalupo the night before the crime, presumably to arrange
the contract killings.
In
2001, the Supreme Court referred Bacigalupo's habeas case to retired Contra
Costa County Superior Court Judge Richard Arnason for an evidentiary hearing.
Seventeen witnesses were called to testify, including Gail Kesselman, the
confidential informant who had once been romantically involved with a Colombian
drug kingpin who leased space to one of the murder victims. Kesselman testified
that she had told Williams that she drove the kingpin to a meeting with a man
who looked like Bacigalupo the night before the killings and that after the
killings, the kingpin told her it was "an organized murder" because
of "something that happened years ago.” Williams, when her turn came
during the hearing, told Arnason that she did not consider Kesselman's
testimony reliable.
The evidentiary hearing stretched over three years after which Arnason concluded that Kesselman was telling the truth and that Williams was lying. The retired judge also established that Williams had instructed Kesselman to deny any knowledge of a contract killing at the 1985 in camera hearing before Judge Read Ambler. Arnoson further states in his report to the Supreme Court that as for Allegro, she "knew about the San Francisco meeting as she testified that she thought information about the meeting had been provided in discovery."
Justice Joyce Kennard who wrote the ruling for a unanimous court concurred with the evidentiary hearing finding that Williams "failed to disclose favorable and material evidence... without this evidence, the jury likely disregarded as self-serving and implausible petitioner's claims to police that the Colombian Mafia had ordered him to kill the Guerrero brothers, and that his entire family would have been killed had he disobeyed that order.”
Justice Goodwin Liu concurred separately, saying Arnason's finding that "Williams lied and induced Gale Kesselman to lie at the September 1985 ex parte hearing...that misconduct concealed the very information that would have led Judge Ambler to conclude that Kesselman was a material witness at least for the penalty phase of the trial...Thus, the prosecution did not simply suppress favorable, material evidence. It also affirmatively dissuaded the defense from pursuing a line of inquiry that would have uncovered such evidence."
Bacigalupo is hence officially out of death row. However, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said he would review the decision and "will then decide whether to retry the penalty phase or simply allow Mr. Bacigalupo to die in prison."