The Murderer, the Prosecutor, the Stripper…..and the Supremes

It is a dramatic legal story….but with a twist. And it’s a hell of a twist having to do with a well-known prosecutor and a stripper.

First, here are the basics:

On Monday, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously that San Quentin inmate Adam Miranda should not have been sentenced to death twenty years ago because senior District Attorney Curt Hazell—and two sitting judges (formerly prosecutors), Judge Lance Ito, Orange County Superior Court Judge Frederick Horn —-either knowingly or accidentally failed to hand over an essential piece of exculpatory evidence—-namely the confession to a related killing by the prosecution’s star witness.

The Cal Supremes were aided in their decision by the findings of appointed “Special Master,” San Diego Judge Roger Krauel, who reported to the court that the failure to hand over the confession letter crucially damaged Miranda’s defense.

This is complicated case, and Miranda is not a good guy. Here’s how the LA Times explains it in yesterday’s editorial:

[Adam] Miranda is not a sympathetic symbol for abolishing the death penalty. Jurors were presented with a videotape at trial that showed him killing an Eagle Rock convenience store clerk; having committed such a brutal crime, he should never again walk free. But his sentence — death, and not life without parole — was based in part on another killing. The letter found in the prosecutor’s file, but never shared with the defense as required by law and thus never considered by the sentencing jury, contained evidence of another man’s admission to that crime.

In other words, Miranda is a stone killer who deserves life without possibility of parole. But, given the laws of the state, the central issue around which his death sentence was built, was entirely false.

Scarily, it was only the nearly two decades of pro bono digging on the part of entertainment lawyer George Hedges, that got Miranda off death row. Here’s what Hedges told Business Wire:

“We have been through a 20-year struggle to locate evidence the DA’s office intentionally withheld that showed our client did not commit the murder that placed him on death row 26 years ago,” said Mr. Hedges. “The case reveals an outrageous miscarriage of justice.”

“It took us years to force the DA’s office to turn over the Miranda files, and there in the back of one of the files was an envelope containing a confession to the murder by the star witness the prosecutors used to condemn our client to death,” added Mr. Bensinger. “It shows just how corrupt the system is. Without an all-out legal assault our client would have been put to death years ago for a crime he didn’t commit.”

And if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the twist to the story:

The main witness in Miranda’s murder trial (the murder for which he was righteously convicted), was a woman named Donna Navarro who was working as a stripper at the time of the trial, but who happened in on the scene of the crime, and had the courage to come forward in order to testify to what she saw.


Curt Hazell, a well-liked prosecutor and District Attorney Steve Cooley’s former college roommate, was the prosecutor who took over the Miranda prosecution from Ito and Horn, is one of those who is, rightly or wrongly, in Hedges’ cross hairs when iit comes to the withholding the evidence that ultimately got Miranda off death row.

It turns out that this same Curt Hazell had an affair with Donna Navarro, the primary witness on the death penalty case. Hazell, maintains that the affair did not begin until after the trial was over—but certainly before the appeals process commenced. (My pal former LA Weekly reporter, Jeff Anderson did the initial story back in 2006)

Yet there are those inside the prosecutors office who have long believed that the affair began before the trial was over.

So are they right, or just talking smack about a colleague? And if they are correct and Hazell did begin his affair during the trial, did it affect any part of the case itself—either directly or indirectly—or the subsequent sentencing?

And how is it possible that an envelope with a confession to a murder that made all the difference in a man’s death sentence……got somehow “misplaced” by all those smart prosecutors?

With Monday’s decision by the California Supremes, these are among the unanswered questions that still hang in the air.

Jeff Anderson is now living and reporting in Baltimore so not available to do a follow-up to his original story.

So-o-ooooo. calling all LA papers….LA Times? LA Weekly? LA Citybeat? Daily News? Is this a story that merits further examination? My sources inside the prosecutors office say it is. What do you think?