Los Angeles prosecutors have filed charges against a Los Angeles man for murder, their second attempt to secure a conviction. The man's first conviction was overturned by a federal judge in 2010. With the help of Los Angeles criminal attorney Okorie Okorocha, the man is asking the court to dismiss the new indictment and to allow him to move on with his life.
Los Angeles County prosecutors charged Paul Christian Blumberg with murder in 1997 after an investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division. Based on evidence the Rampart officers blatantly manufactured and the perjury committed by Rampart officers, a jury convicted Blumberg of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Blumberg spent fourteen years in prison.
Blumberg filed a petition for habeas corpus relief in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in 2004. He asked the federal court to overturn the state court conviction based on due process violations and other serious irregularities in the evidence presented at his trial. The court found that the prosecution at the murder trial relied on inadmissible and possibly perjured testimony, and that the prosecution committed at least seven violations of the Brady rule. This rule, named for a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case, states that due process requires prosecutors to provide criminal defendants with exculpatory evidence in prosecutors' possession. Such evidence would allow a defendant to impeach the credibility of prosecution witnesses or challenge other evidence presented by prosecutors.
After a recommendation by a magistrate judge to grant the habeas petition, U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder signed a judgment granting Blumberg's petition on February 7, 2010. She ordered Blumberg released from custody, unless a new trial began within ninety days. The prosecutors are still seeking to convict Blumberg who is being defended by Okorie Okorocha.
Blumberg and his attorney argue that this new prosecution cannot proceed because of the manifest injustice, not only to Blumberg himself but to all notions of fairness in the criminal justice system. They have filed several Motions to Dismiss the entire case on many grounds.They rely largely on the Chapman doctrine, named for a case decided in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008. The doctrine holds that prosecutors who commit serious misconduct during a criminal trial should not get an opportunity to retry the case if the original conviction is reversed. Since a federal judge found sufficient evidence of crimes committed by the Los Angeles District Attorney who prosecuted the case and the Rampart police during the case, prosecutors should not get a second chance at this case, Blumberg and his attorney argue.
They further argue that a retrial of this case is barred by the double jeopardy provision in the Fifth Amendment, which states that a prosecutor cannot subject a person to prosecution for a particular crime more than once. They add that the court has "supervisory power" to dismiss an indictment "in cases of flagrant prosecutorial misconduct." Finally, they note the many potential sources of prejudice against Blumberg if the new indictment were to go forward, including Blumberg's own faded memory of events, difficulty in locating key witnesses, loss or "disappearance" of key evidence in the custody of police, and reliance on transcripts and evidence from the first trial, which were the products of the same misconduct that led to a federal court overturning the conviction.
Okorie Okorocha, a Los Angeles board-certified criminal trial attorney, represents people whose rights have been violated due to police and other official misconduct. To schedule a confidential consultation to discuss your case, contact him today through his website or at (310) 871-3217.
Web Resources:
Judgment Granting Habeas Relief in Paul Blumberg v. Silvia Garcia, United States District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division, February 7, 2010
United States v. Chapman, 524 F.3d 1073 (9th Cir. 2008)
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Photo credit: Alvimann from morguefile.com
