Los Angeles Criminal Lawyer Blog

In 1994, Felipe Gonzalez Angeles knocked on the door of an apartment/brothel in South Los Angeles, and before the door opened he was robbed outside by two men who ended up shooting and killing him. The key witness in the case was John Jones, who called himself the "apartment manager," but who was actually the pimp. Jones testified that he saw the shooting and picked Obie Anthony and Reggie Cole out of a lineup, identifying them as the two armed robbers.

Anthony, from the beginning, has maintained his innocence, insisting that he wasn't at the scene of the crime. Approximately two years ago, Jones admitted "although I told police and testified at trial that I had seen two of the men well enough to positively identify them, I never clearly focused on their faces, but primarily saw them running away."

Despite this admission by their sole identifying witness, lead LAPD detective Marcella Winn insisted, "this guy did this murder, and there's no doubt in my mind," she said. She went on to say "it was a good case [then], and it's a good case now." The Deputy District Attorney who prosecuted the case echoed these sentiments after finding out that Jones admitted lying to the jury.

Sound familiar? A similar case out of Georgia has gotten a lot of press lately, wherein seven of nine identifying witnesses later recanted their testimony, and the other two were shown to be unreliable. Nonetheless, there too the police and prosecutors insisted that they were sure they had convicted the right guy. The difference is the defendant in that case, Troy Davis, was recently put to death by the State of Georgia.

In Los Angeles on Friday, however, Judge Kelvin Filer ordered that Anthony be released from prison on the grounds that the identification witness recanted his testimony and that, additionally, the jury was not told about the leniency he was given by the prosecution in the sentence on his resulting pimping charges. This, despite the resistance from the prosecution, who have even gone so far as to say they may re-try Anthony for the murder. Responding to the assertion that the jury had not been told about the leniency promised to Jones, the prosecutor explained that the jury had not been mislead, since "this was not a deal in exchange for testimony . . . [i]t was simply a thank-you for cooperating with the LAPD in a homicide investigation."

All of this raises the question of why the prosecution so often clings to their guilty verdicts even when it is later shown that the evidence presented to the jury who rendered that guilty verdict - the same evidence the prosecution themselves relied upon in formulating their belief in the defendant's guilt - is flawed, faulty, or outright recanted? Perhaps it is a deep-seated recognition that they never really know whether the people they are prosecuting are, in truth, guilty, and facing that fact would cause a cognitive dissonance that would call into question their purpose as lawyers, or their image of themselves as the force of good.

Whatever the reason, thankfully Obie Anthony is still alive to walk out of those prison doors when a judge had the guts to right an old injustice.