California: Crooked officials in the gun at last?

A man who spent 24 years in prison before his murder conviction was overturned can move forward with a lawsuit against two former top county prosecutors, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The ruling by a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's refusal to grant immunity to former Los Angeles County District Attorney John K. Van de Kamp and former Chief Deputy Attorney Curt Livesay.

The two had argued they should receive the same immunity routinely granted to courtroom prosecutors. However, a federal judge ruled last year that they could not be dropped from Thomas Lee Goldstein's civil lawsuit since they had served administrative rather than prosecutorial functions during Goldstein's murder trial.

Goldstein filed suit against Los Angeles County, the city of Long Beach, a Long Beach police detective and others, alleging their actions led to his wrongful conviction. He claimed Van de Kamp, who later became state attorney general, and Livesay failed to train prosecutors in their office on how to share information about jailhouse informants.

Goldstein was arrested after the Nov. 3, 1979, shotgun killing of his neighbor, John McGinest in Long Beach. No physical evidence linked Goldstein to the killing, and the weapon was never found. However, a jailhouse informant testified Goldstein told him in jail that he shot McGinest over a debt.

The county's case fell apart when evidence suggested the informant struck a deal in the Goldstein case to get a lighter sentence, and an eyewitness in the case recanted testimony identifying Goldstein as the gunman. Two federal judges and a federal appeals panel eventually ruled Goldstein was wrongly convicted and he was freed in April 2004. Trial in the civil lawsuit has been scheduled for May 2008.

Report here



(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)