“Talk to me about the Hernandez case,” he said. “What’s your new evidence?”
Baxter sighed and shifted the files to the other arm. She was a short, chubby woman with cropped black hair and cinnamon-brown skin. “Got a minute? I’d like to drop these at my office. We can talk there.”
Marinelli checked his watch. He had a hearing in an hour, so he nodded and followed her to the small windowless room she shared with another public defender, who wasn’t there at the moment.
Baxter lowered the files onto a side table with a grunt, sat down and waved Marinelli into a guest chair. “Hernandez lied. He’s taking the rap for someone else.”
“And you know this ... how?”
“Inconsistencies, mainly. Things I didn’t catch at the time.” She yanked a file from the middle of a stack, pulled out some papers and lay three documents like playing cards across the top of her state-issue metal desk.
“The police report and the autopsy show Ramirez was shot in the chest, point-blank, with a nine-mil Glock. A semi-automatic handgun.”
“Right.”
“In his statement to the police, Hernandez admitted that he had shot Father Ramirez with a pistol he got on the street. He said the same thing when I interviewed Hernandez through an interpreter. In fact, he told me very little he hadn’t already told the cops. But, at one point, the interpreter referred to the gun as a revolver. When I asked him about that, the interpreter said something to Hernandez. Both of them seemed to get very agitated. Then, the interpreter said he’d made a mistake in his translation. He told me it was a revolver, when he should have called it a handgun.”
“And you didn’t think to question his story at the time?”
“I did—believe me, I tried my best—but the interpreter insisted it was his mistake and Hernandez wouldn’t change his story.”
“So what makes you think it wasn’t just a mistake?”
“As you know, Ramirez was shot at St. Ignatius Church after hearing confessions on a Saturday night. According to his statement, Hernandez waited for everyone to leave, then ran up to the communion rail and shot Ramirez as he was crossing the altar. Then he tried to move the body. He’d gotten as far as the rear of the altar when he was caught by the maintenance man, who’d heard the shot. I went through this version with the interpreter to make sure it was right. I go through a series of questions. Where were you standing? Where was he standing? Yada, yada, yada. I couldn’t get a straight answer on why he moved the body, but the man isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the drawer, so I figured maybe he panicked. The bottom line is, Hernandez confirmed shooting Ramirez, standing outside the communion rail.”
“And got caught by a witness. Pretty damaging.”
“Yes and I didn’t think much more about it. Two weeks ago, I happened to be in the neighborhood to speak to a witness on another matter. I was near the church, so I stopped in. I noticed the dais is raised. So if Hernandez only ran up to the communion rail, the bullet would have entered at more of an angle.” She pointed a finger in an upward slant to demonstrate. “So I rounded up the interpreter again and went to see him, to ask some more questions. I go over it again—where he was, where the priest was, why he tried to move the body. The more I questioned him, the more rattled he and the interpreter got. Finally, Hernandez refused to say anything more.”
“So why didn’t the police catch this?”
“Cause they were too busy listening to the maintenance man and my own client’s confession. A story he continues to stick by, but I don’t believe it. I think he’s lying to cover for someone else. And I think the interpreter knows that.”
“So, you don’t actually have any new evidence. You have a new theory based on old evidence.”
“I know I have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning this.” She heaved another sigh. “But unless Hernandez stepped onto the dais or Ramirez came out from behind the rail, the forensics don’t make sense. Something is wrong here. So I’m taking a shot.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Two possibilities.” She held up a finger as she counted each. “To take the fall for someone he cares about. Or because he’s afraid to tell the truth.”
*****
Marinelli took his role as officer of the court seriously. Even after years of contact with the criminal justice system, he hadn’t become so jaded he was willing to settle for anything less than a clean conviction. He knew about police corruption—the occasional use of “throw down” weapons to “prove” an officer had shot someone in self-defense, the overzealous interrogation tactics that were sometimes employed to break a suspect
down. He knew these were the exception, not the rule, and that most cops played it as close to the book as they could. Cops had a tough job and he felt empathy for them, even for the ones who crossed the line thinking they were doing it for the right reasons.
That night, he kept going over what Baxter had said. You did your job, he told himself. And it wasn’t your job to show inconsistencies between the defendant’s story and the forensic evidence. But it is your job to prosecute bad guys, not put away innocent ones.
So what to do? Baxter will file her motion. She has no new evidence, so that argument will fail. She could prevail on the ineffective assistance of counsel argument, but then again, maybe not. You could never tell how a judge would rule and Judge Gardena tended to side with prosecutors anyway. And Judge Gardena wouldn’t recuse himself from the case. There simply weren’t grounds for it.
But Baxter’s words stayed with him and refused to go away, until it was Marinelli who had a reasonable doubt about the guilt of the man he’d successfully put behind bars.
So Hernandez could be covering for someone else or could have been threatened into lying. If the latter, Marinelli had a good guess who might have threatened him. He knew there were gangs who ran the Culver City drug trade who’d intimidate witnesses to beat charges against them. Could a gang member have murdered Father Ramirez, then framed the simple-minded Hernandez, assuring his cooperation through threats? If so, why would the gang want the priest dead?
The next day, Marinelli put in a call to a detective he’d worked with in the Culver City Police Department’s Violent Crimes Division. He told the detective he was looking for some information on the street about Father Jaime Ramirez, just to confirm a few matters, since the defense intended to seek a new trial.
He told no one in his office about these inquiries, as he knew Finnegan and the others would just give him shit. It wasn’t his job to do the defense attorney’s work. But he burned with silent anger and humiliation at the notion of being a tool for a guilty party who’d let someone else take the blame for a murder.