Faulty rap sheet haunts accused

PERSISTENT ERROR -- DESPITE ATTEMPTS AT CORRECTION -- HELPED LEAD TO ROBBERY CHARGE

San Jose police used good detective work in trying to identify the ringleader of the four intruders who had burst into a San Jose home in early 2005. By monitoring phone calls and visitors to jail, police connected Larry Adams to a suspect already in custody. At 6-feet-2 and 235 pounds, Adams, 39, met the general description of the ringleader: a large black man, 35 to 40 years old. And when detectives discovered that Adams' rap sheet included a home invasion robbery, they showed his photograph to two victims, who picked Adams' picture from the lineup. Adams was arrested and charged with the robbery.

Case closed? Not exactly. It turns out Adams, a widower who lives with his two children in Salinas, was the victim of a bizarre clerical mistake. Despite what his rap sheet showed, Adams had never before been charged with, much less convicted of, anything resembling robbery. Somehow, a 1990 home invasion committed in Contra Costa County by a man named James Adams mysteriously got listed on Larry Adams' record. It is a mistake that had gone uncorrected for years.

But that uncorrected error was critical to the police theory that Adams was the likely ringleader in the San Jose robbery. Compounding the problem, Adams' photographic identification failed to conform to the county's acclaimed procedures to protect against mistaken witness identifications. Instead, it suffered from several factors that experts say invite errors. "This has been like a nightmare,'' said Adams, who spent more than three weeks in custody last month before officials discovered the rap sheet mistake and lowered his bail. Adams works as a department supervisor at a Mervyn's. "I keep telling people that I never committed a robbery. But it keeps coming up.''

Assistant District Attorney David Tomkins said that the case against Adams was built on more than just the mistaken rap sheet and that, to his knowledge, the prosecution is going forward. The case is unfolding amid increased attention to the potential for wrongful convictions. A Mercury News series in January reported that questionable conduct repeatedly mars Santa Clara County jury trials and that such conduct increases the small but significant potential for wrongful conviction. That potential is especially significant in cases based on eyewitness identification, an area that a California commission last month warned is fraught with danger. Also last month, the newspaper reported that a clerical error in another case had caused a man to wrongfully be identified as a child molester.

According to police reports, four intruders burst into a house not far from Monterey Road and Capitol Expressway shortly after midnight on Jan. 23, 2005. A group of about nine teenagers were together. At least some had been drinking, and one had a bag of marijuana. The robbers told several of the teenagers to lie on the floor. The two brothers who lived in the house were separated and asked where the valuables were hidden. Witnesses said the intruder who appeared oldest carried a handgun, which he used to repeatedly strike one of the brothers in the face.

It did not take long before police arrested Steven Wilson, 29, who was identified after police found court papers left behind in the home with his name on them. Last June, a second suspect, Raymond Goins, was arrested after he was identified following a chance encounter with one of the victims at a McDonald's. But month after month went by and detectives Ronnie Lopez and Ramon Avalos were no closer to determining the identity of the pistol-bearing leader. They studied whom Goins called and who visited him in jail. In January, they discovered that Goins' mother had listed on jail records a telephone number that turned out to be an old number of Adams. The woman was an ex-girlfriend of Adams, but it is not clear why she listed his number on jail forms. When they checked, detectives discovered that Adams was a large black man with a robbery on his rap sheet. They pulled his mug shot and prepared a series of photographs to show the brothers.

Because identifications are subject to the frailties of human memory, Santa Clara County police agencies have enacted safeguards to reduce the chance of wrongful identifications -- safeguards that have been identified as a model for police statewide. Those protocols include showing photographs to victims sequentially, rather than in a group; and having the lineup administered by an officer who does not know the identity of the suspect -- a ``double blind'' safeguard.

In their reports, detectives Lopez and Avalos noted that they followed county protocols in administering the test. However, they described administering the lineups themselves, rather than using another officer who did not know which photograph showed their suspect. They could not be reached for comment. That failure ``increases the possibility of a wrongful identification'' because police who know the identity can influence, unintentionally or overtly, a witness to pick the person they suspect, said Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology professor at the University of California-Irvine, an expert in eyewitness identification. Loftus noted other troubling factors in Adams' case: The identifications occurred more than a year after the crime; the witnesses were a different race than the suspect; and their description lacked detail of his specific features.

Adams said in a telephone interview last week that he was on a lunch break when police surrounded his car March 27 and arrested him. He was charged under the state's "three strikes, you're out'' law, which meant he faced 25 years to life in prison if convicted. His prior strikes were based on the 1990 Contra Costa robbery, which involved several victims. But Adams insisted he had no prior robbery. Two weeks after he was charged, Santa Clara County prosecutors confirmed by checking fingerprints that Adams was not one of the defendants convicted in Contra Costa, despite what the rap sheet showed. Last month, officials dropped the three strikes charge against Adams, and his bail was lowered to $75,000 based on a motion by his lawyer, Allen Schwartz. Adams got out of jail but is awaiting trial in the San Jose robbery.

Exactly how the robbery conviction of James Adams ended up on the rap sheet of Larry Adams remains a mystery. Neither state nor county officials could explain the error. Court records showed Larry Adams has been convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol. He has also been convicted of domestic violence, stemming from a 1991 incident in which Adams became abusive after a girlfriend withheld his car keys to prevent him from driving while drunk. And he once was charged with disorderly conduct after playing his car radio too loudly in a parking lot.

Adams said the rap sheet mistake had caused him problems before. He said after he was arrested on domestic violence charges, police raised the Contra Costa robbery. It came up more recently, he said, during a custody dispute with his wife, who has since died. Adams' aunt, Brenda Wilson, works in the Santa Clara County public defender office, and in 2005 wrote to Contra Costa officials about the recurring problem. Wilson asked Contra Costa officials for copies of key documents from the 1990 robbery to show that Larry Adams ``never had a robbery conviction in your county.'' Adams said the incident has been only the latest difficulty for his children in the past year. ``First their grandmother died, then their mother died, and then their father was wrongly charged with robbery and sent to jail. This has been a very hard time for them.''

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