Reexamining Prosecutor’s Eyewitnesses

Like me, Stephanie Harrigan wants the truth.

Did Arthur Carmona commit two armed robberies last year?

If he did, he deserves to be locked up.

But if he didn’t--and he’s looking at a possible 30-plus years in prison, according to his attorney--a horrible mistake is about to be made.

Harrigan showed up at a court hearing for Carmona on Friday, thinking

he might be sentenced (it was delayed until June 4).

For the last 18 months, she’s been a teacher’s aide at the Santa Ana city jail, where Carmona has been since his arrest in February 1998.

Harrigan says Friday was the first time she’d ever come to support an inmate.

She says Carmona, 17, is different from almost all the other youthful inmates she sees.

Most of them will either brag about themselves or try to work the angles with the teachers, she says.

“Carmona has never done any of that. He stays mostly to himself. He’s just very quiet, very shy. Sometimes when I talk to him, it’s very hard to hear him, because he’s really quiet. I can’t picture him doing anything really loud or screaming.”

Harrigan is only the latest to harbor serious doubts about the case.

I’ve already written three columns questioning Carmona’s conviction and supporting a new trial. As I’ve said before, I can’t be sure he didn’t do the robberies. But the complete lack of physical evidence against him and the nature of the eyewitness accounts--which is the backbone of the case against him--have left me dubious.

Jana Hoffman, the deputy D.A. who prosecuted Carmona, says she is “absolutely, 100%” certain that the jury was right when it convicted Carmona last October.

I wonder, how can she be so sure?

Unless she’s sitting on some secret confession from Carmona or the confessed accomplice, who’s in prison for his part in the robberies, she can’t know the truth either.

Hoffman had declined my earlier requests to discuss the Carmona case, but now that it’s gotten some publicity, she doesn’t have much choice.

And so, she stood cool and calm Friday in a small media gaggle outside a courtroom and told them how she knows Carmona, within days after turning 16 and with no previous record, robbed a juice bar and a Denny’s at gunpoint.

She said that eight eyewitnesses either described or identified Carmona in circumstances that led to his conviction.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the case is that for eyewitness identification purposes, the police took a hat from the getaway truck involved in the robbery and placed it on Carmona, who was hatless when stopped by police and never linked by physical evidence to the truck.

When someone on Friday asked Hoffman about the propriety of police doing that, she suggested that an eyewitness saw Carmona get into the getaway truck.

That caught my ear, because I’d written in previous columns that nobody had identified Carmona as getting in the truck. I asked Hoffman which witness she was talking about.

She referred the assembled media to her closing argument in the trial transcript. I suspect she thought they wouldn’t bother to look it up.

I’d already read the 700-page transcript, so I accepted the invitation.

She did, in fact, mention eight eyewitnesses in her closing argument. However, the only two who testified about someone running to the getaway truck were a bystander and the then-manager of a Texaco station where the getaway truck was parked.

The station manager could only describe the person running to the truck as being Latino, late teens, skinny, 5 feet 6 or 5 feet 7 (Carmona is about 5 feet 10) and wearing baggy clothes. The other witness, Kenneth Cashion, was more specific. He described the person he saw running to the truck as 5 foot 10, 18 to 25 years old and slender. He also noted the same dark clothing that the robbery victims described.

An Irvine police officer testified that Cashion later identified Carmona when taken to the residential street in Costa Mesa where Carmona was being detained.

But that wasn’t how Cashion himself remembered it, according to the trial transcript.

Under Hoffman’s questioning, Cashion testified: “I viewed another person they had detained [Carmona] and basically all I could give the police officer was that his body shape was the right size.”

Hoffman: Did his clothing look the same?

Cashion: No.

Hoffman: What was different about his clothing?

Cashion: The jacket was gone. The hat was gone. And I think the pants were different.

Hoffman: Are you sure about that?

Cashion: No. I’m sure that he was dressed differently. That’s about all.

A bit later, Hoffman asked: “That person running across the street, would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

Cashion: No.

Later, under cross-examination by defense attorney Kenneth Reed, Cashion summed up what he meant when he said the person running toward the getaway matched Carmona’s description: “Just his overall build,” Cashion testified. “But basically I did not get a good view of the person running.”

Such are the two eyewitnesses who, in Hoffman’s view, link Carmona to the getaway truck, in which there were no fingerprints or any other physical evidence to suggest Carmona had ever set foot in it.

I asked Hoffman Friday why either of those people counts as a witness implicating Carmona. She said it’s because both provided descriptions that corroborated what others said.

In essence, she said, because they didn’t rule Carmona out, they ruled him in.

Harrigan, the jailhouse teacher’s aide, says she doesn’t think Carmona committed the robberies. The eyewitnesses’ reliability, especially when it comes to identifying Carmona wearing the robber’s hat, also leaves her cold.

“One of the other teachers and I were talking about the case the other day,” Harrigan says, “and we were saying you could probably stick a baseball hat on 10 of our guys and they’d all have the same description. They’d all probably look the same.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to [email protected]