VI. JAIL HOUSE INFORMANTS: POLICE COMPLICITY

    In April, 1983 I was illegally removed from juvenile hall and housed in the adult County Jail's infamous snitch tank, the 7000 Module. There, I was set up (or "booked" [447] in inmate parlance) by three savvy jail house informants who, after I discussed my case and, with one of them, even shared my police reports, all claimed I'd confessed to them [350].

    In 1989, a Grand Jury investigation found L.A.'s jails rife with lying informers and jail staff who facilitated and even encouraged such behavior, while the courts and judges seemed oblivious to what was happening [348]. Prosecutors routinely used the testimony of these informants to achieve convictions [349]. Their tacit approval of whatever methods the snitches may have used to obtain their information is evident in the lack of prosecutions in obvious cases of informant perjury [355]. At best, prosecutors seem not to have asked too many questions.

    Police complicity is suspected in my mysterious transfer, in accord with the Grand Jury's findings that such setups were commonplace. And the circumstantial evidence that the transfer was rotten exists in the record.

1. On April 4, Sylmar Juvenile Court Judge Martha Goldin ordered that I be retained in juvenile hall rather than transferred to the adult County Jail [679]. She cited a probation report which found juvenile hall to be the appropriate place of detention, based on case factors and my emotional needs at the time [455C].

But just four days later, and without the required court order [455B], I was taken to the adult [332] County Jail's notorious snitch tank, the 7000 Module (also called the "hospital floor" [427], which the Grand Jury later discussed as a place where informants seeking to book unsuspecting criminal defendants were placed by jail staff [677].

To police, the 7000 Module was a 'black box' amplifier for their weakest cases. Simply have a defendant placed there, wait a while, and "sooner or later" [354] out popped one or more snitches claiming he'd confessed. One prosecutor told the Grand Jury this was especially true in the weaker cases he'd seen, where such a statement would certainly be helpful in obtaining a conviction [Id]. Another perceptive prosecutor testified of the informants, "I just pretty well assumed they were all untrustworthy" [Id].

And the Grand Jury found that the deliberate placement of inmates to elicit informant testimony did occur with shocking regularity [Id].

But the State defended my illegal transfer as merely an accident, not a setup at all. However, consider that claim for a moment. What are the odds that I could be mistakenly removed from Sylmar (a prisoner transport which required someone, for some reason, to initiate the transfer paperwork), not just absent the required court order to transfer me, but in sheer defiance of a specific order that I be retained in juvenile hall, after which I was placed, not just anywhere in County Jail, but in the infamous 7000 Module snitch tank, housed away from all other juveniles, isolated by myself in a three bed cell surrounded by cells housing three known, savvy, adult informants, with holes two to three inches in diameter carved into the separating walls, allowing all of the snitches unlimited contact with me, in plain violation of Welfare and Institutions Code §§ 207b, 208a, and 707.1, which forbid the placement of juveniles in adult jail without a court order, and further forbid such juveniles from ever coming into contact, even momentarily, with adult prisoners?

Those odds aren't just negligible, they're infinitesimal.

2. Police complicity in the informant set up is also suggested by the un taped, un transcribed visit they paid to informant Hughes just two weeks before his taped interview [459].

Other than to hide whatever was said, what legitimate law enforcement goal could have been achieved by police not tape recording their first visit with Hughes? I have long believed Hughes' first visit was a 'coaching session' where law enforcement could both feel out his capabilities and correct and polish the rough spots in his claims, because if Hughes' statements failed to align with their theory his information would be useless to them [351]. They tried, but since the very foundation of his claim was a lie, significant flaws inevitably remained. [Cf. § V].

3. Dowtu and Wallace claimed I confessed that an argument over money and music being played too loudly had led to the supposed attack [456].

Not surprisingly [351], this was also Monsue's early theory [458].

But it's pure sophistry. When I moved out of our family home I took my stereo receiver and all my albums with me to my apartment, and hadn't played any music in the house since that time. Even if I'd wanted to, there existed neither the music nor the equipment on which to play it. No albums, no tapes, no working stereo equipment and no speakers were observed in my former bedroom, in and around which police personnel spent up to six hours on March 10 searching and photographing our house [548].

Curiously,' there was and old, broken Sanyo turntable in the bedroom, which I told Monsue about during the interrogation [457]. Monsue is the only other connection to the snitch Wallace, whom he interviewed at County Jail on April 21 [456] and to Dowtu, who both echoed the 'music played too loudly' theory. Considering that Hughes' first interview was not taped [Cf. § V (2)] and was likely a coaching session [459], it is not difficult to imagine Monsue planting the 'music' and 'theft' segments of his theory in the snitches' minds before the tape recorders were turned on, as well.

But he didn't even need to do that. As naive and impressionable as I was at the time, I'd answered enough of Dowtu's and Wallace's nosy questions to elaborate virtually all of the police theory to them, which, unbeknownst to me, they were writing in notes [678].

Monsue also shared his 'music' [458] and 'theft' [467] theories with the suspect John "Mike" Ryan, Jr. in their Gulfport, Mississippi interview.

Finally, according to Monsue, our next door neighbors, who were home at the time, hadn't heard anything unusual, presumably including loud music [271], so the 'music' claims of the snitches and corrupt cops remain totally unsupported by any independent evidence.

4. In order to lend its assistance to the snitch, and to bolster its false case, the State claimed that Hughes had knowledge of the crime that "only the killer knew." Prosecutor Rabichow made this claim both in court [450] and in at least two written transmittals.

Rabichow wrote to the California Department of Corrections (CDC):

"I INTERVIEWED MR. HUGHES, WHO PROVED TO HAVE MATERIAL INFORMATION CONCERNING MRS. LISKER'S DEATH AND MURDERER. HE ADVISED ME OF NUMEROUS DETAILS CONCERNING THE DEATH THAT COULD HAVE COME ONLY FROM SOMEONE PRESENT AT THE LOCATION AT THE TIME OF THE MURDER." [674]

And in his memorandum to David Disco of the District Attorney's Office, Rabichow repeated the claim:

"HUGHES TESTIFIED TO DETAILS OF THE KILLING THAT ONLY THE KILLER KNEW, INCLUDING WHICH ROOMS DIFFERENT ALTERCATIONS TOOK PLACE AND THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY TOOK PLACE" [675].

But oddly enough, when Rabichow sought Hughes' early release from Orange County Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin, his appeal lacked any mention of the snitch having known "facts only the killer knew." Perhaps Rabichow didn't want to misrepresent the truth to a sitting judge, that everything Hughes testified to could be found in Monsue's police reports, or heard in detective Monsue's April 4 testimony?

Hughes faking my confession required only his access to Monsue's Follow Up report and to knowledge I possessed after discovering my mom and sitting through my April 4 detention hearing.

Consider:

a) The State said Hughes' knowledge of blood spatters was information only the killer knew [450], when in fact the words "spatter," "spattered," "spatterings," "spot," and "spots" of blood were mentioned twenty three (23) times in my April 4 hearing [451]. I thus heard detailed testimony about the general cause, as well as the specific nature and police claims about blood droplets in my case, as few as four days before I encountered Hughes.

b) The Follow Up report lists each of the rooms where the bloody weapons were recovered by police [364]. Hughes repeating these weapons and room names [363] does not confer upon him any greater credibility, only an increased likelihood that he'd read the police report and lied.

The report said the steak knives were discovered by police in the hallway, so Hughes of course regurgitated that my mom had been stabbed in the hallway. The report said the trophy and the exercise bar were both found in the master bedroom near a number of blood spots and stains [636, 637, 640, 641], so although Hughes didn't specify where those attacks supposedly took place, he apparently registered the bedroom in his mind as a significant room and then claimed the shirt ripping happened there.

Blood spatter patterns on the walls showed that blunt force blows (either trophy or exercise bar) had occurred in the entry hallway [648], the living room hallway [643], the master bedroom hallway [636], and in the hallway adjoining the three back bedrooms [632]. Hughes specified none of these locations in his claim.

Aside from Hughes' statements, and police having found weapons and spatter patterns in various locations, there is no specific evidence that any attacks took place where Hughes said they did. Hughes' information came from the Follow Up police report and from a naive 17 year old who'd frantically run through the crime scene searching for his mother's attacker/s, observing most of the evidence in question, and then had the misfortune to encounter a corrupt cop and, as an extension of that poor stroke of fate, the lying snitch Robert Hughes.

c) Finally, Rabichow got it flat wrong when he said Hughes knew the sequence of the actual attack. The evidence, and my mom's observed injuries, clearly show the (RKTB) sequence Hughes gave is impossible, and the attack could not have been carried out in that order [Cf. § V (3) (a) (b) (c) (d)].

While it is common for snitch wrangling prosecutors to claim their informers knew things only the killer could know, it is simply not true of Hughes. The State's presentation of him to the jury was nothing more than a Potemkin's Village, an elaborate but empty facade cobbled together out of Hughes' obsession for freedom and the State's uncompromising desire to convict, which transformed an ailing six year plea bargain case into a vital, 15 to Life guilty verdict.