PASSAGE OF THE DAY: Background: "The finding of factual innocence by Judge Otis Sterling means that Parker wasn’t just cleared beyond a reasonable doubt, but that he factually didn’t commit the murder. The District Attorney’s Office did not oppose the Monday, Aug. 23, court order, which also seals the file. “That’s a pretty good indication these charges would never be brought back in,” said attorney Kim Trimble, who represents Parker. Parker, 31, was arrested in the stabbing death of a homeless man, Brandon Stevenson, 29, who slept in a truck outside a home where Parker lived with a roommate. Desert Hot Springs police zeroed in on Parker for the death of Stevenson and coerced a confession out of him, according to one of the prosecutors on the case. But prosecutors found evidence, including multiple DNA tests, that appeared to exonerate Parker. His roommate also made self-incriminating statements in phone calls recorded by authorities. Ross said he turned over the favorable evidence to the defense, although he was told by his boss not to. Federal law requires prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys under a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case known as Brady v. Maryland. "
BACKGROUND: By way of background, it is important to understand the case that Former prosecutor Chris Ross alleges led too his firing was after he finding evidence exonerating Roger Parker, a jailed defendant in a murder case. I am therefore grateful for the The Press-Enterprise's story on Roger Parker's exoneration, by Legal Affairs Reporter Tony Saavedra, which was published on August 25, 2021, under the heading: 'Desert Hot Springs' man held for four years on a murder he did not commit declared factually innocent. ........."A Desert Hot Springs man released from jail in 2014 after spending four years behind bars for a murder he did not commit was found “factually innocent” this week by a Riverside County Superior Court judge. The case against Roger Parker was so flimsy that two prosecutors advised the District Attorney’s Office beginning in 2011 to drop the homicide charge. But officials in the office held Parker for four years — without a trial — on the 2010 homicide. One former prosecutor, Christopher Ross, has filed a lawsuit contending he lost his job because he refused an order to hide evidence that supported Parker’s innocence. The finding of factual innocence by Judge Otis Sterling means that Parker wasn’t just cleared beyond a reasonable doubt, but that he factually didn’t commit the murder. The District Attorney’s Office did not oppose the Monday, Aug. 23, court order, which also seals the file. “That’s a pretty good indication these charges would never be brought back in,” said attorney Kim Trimble, who represents Parker. Parker, 31, was arrested in the stabbing death of a homeless man, Brandon Stevenson, 29, who slept in a truck outside a home where Parker lived with a roommate. Desert Hot Springs police zeroed in on Parker for the death of Stevenson and coerced a confession out of him, according to one of the prosecutors on the case. But prosecutors found evidence, including multiple DNA tests, that appeared to exonerate Parker. His roommate also made self-incriminating statements in phone calls recorded by authorities. Ross said he turned over the favorable evidence to the defense, although he was told by his boss not to. Federal law requires prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys under a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case known as Brady v. Maryland. Parker, who has spent most of his life institutionalized in group homes, foster homes, mental hospitals, juvenile facilities and jails, has remained in Desert Hot Springs and works as a dishwasher. He says he carries no anger over his homicide-related incarceration, but has filed a lawsuit against Riverside County alleging malicious prosecution. Ross, the former prosecutor who blew the whistle on the misguided prosecution, now practices commercial law in San Antonio, Texas.
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STORY: "Inside Ex-Prosecutor's Suit Alleging Honesty Cost Him Job," by Legal Industry Reporter Rachel Rippetoe, published by Law360, on December 19, 2021.
Ross is a former prosecutor with the Riverside District Attorney's Office who took on murder and death penalty cases with a nearly perfect conviction record. He is also an Iraq War veteran who served in the Green Berets, one of the most dangerous jobs in the Army.
But driving around Indio in December 2013, Ross felt defeated. He said none of his friends from the DA's office would answer his calls. "It was like I had the plague," he said.
He still speaks like a soldier. In clear concise sentences, he gave a no-frills, but detailed, account of how he was ultimately driven out of the state, caught up in what would be a seven-year legal battle with his former employers after they allegedly pushed him out of a job.
Ross had spent three years insisting that evidence did not support the theory that a jailed suspect, Roger Parker, murdered Bryan "Tennessee" Stevenson back in 2010. But instead of being rewarded for his diligence, Ross said he was taken off the case in 2013, put on administrative leave a few weeks later and eventually prohibited from returning to the office. Ross' superiors maintain that he voluntarily resigned because he did not want to provide medical records and that his leave had nothing to do with the Parker case, but rather his own personal health.
Parker, now 32, was in jail for four years before his case was dismissed by the district attorney's office in March 2014. His factual innocence was legally declared just three months ago.
While the murder case has officially gone cold, civil litigation stemming from the investigation is ongoing.
Ross and his lawyers just secured fresh momentum in a discovery battle before the state's highest court, and his wrongful termination suit is advancing toward a trial next summer. Separately, Parker himself has sued officials, seizing on Ross' allegations of prosecutorial misconduct as part of his wrongful imprisonment claims.
"I was on the side of right," Ross told Law360. "I did the right thing. I was honest. I did what I was raised to do by my parents, what the Army makes you live by: honor, integrity, veracity. These people did anything but that, and they prevailed. How could this happen?"
In July 2014, Ross filed a wrongful termination suit against Riverside County alleging retaliation and disability discrimination. The lawsuit has lasted longer than he ever expected. It kept Riverside County in his life.
To Ross' shock, his case was dismissed by Superior Court Judge David Chapman in 2017. Judge Chapman said that Ross' retaliation claim didn't hold up because he couldn't show that he was engaged in protected activity.
Ross said he spent all of his retirement fund to appeal the decision to California's Fourth Appellate District.
"When that motion for summary judgment was granted, it felt like somebody took a bat to my stomach," he said. "I had to say: Do I really want to do this? Is it worth it? But there's a reason I never lost a trial. It wasn't that I'm smarter or better than anybody. I was smart enough to know when I was wrong and when I was right."
In 2019, an appellate panel agreed with Ross that the suit should be allowed to proceed.
"If credited by a trier of fact, the evidence shows Ross engaged in protected activity because he disclosed information to a governmental or law enforcement agency and to people with authority over him which he reasonably believed disclosed a violation of compliance with federal and state law applicable to criminal prosecutions and prosecutors," the appellate court said.
Although he was victorious in his appeal, Ross says he still feels like he is facing an uphill battle as a trial in the case approaches.
The county's lawyers argued in a response to Ross' complaint that Ross has little to support his retaliation claims, particularly because the DA's office eventually agreed with him about Parker's innocence, dismissing Parker's case in March 2014. They say that Ross had a medical condition that made it difficult for him to work, but instead of accepting a role in the filings unit or providing the appropriate medical records so that his supervisors could accommodate him, he chose to resign.
Ross remembers things differently, but he's worried about the venue in which he will be telling his version of events to a jury.
The former superiors Ross accused in the suit not only of harassing him but illegally hiding Brady evidence and keeping an innocent man in jail for four year without trial have gone on to powerful positions in the county. Sean Lafferty, a former assistant district attorney, is now a Riverside Superior Court judge. Jeffery Van Wagenen, ex-Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach's chief of staff, was appointed county executive officer of Riverside in February.
Not only does Ross see this as unfair, he worries it is undermining his case, which is being heard in Riverside County Superior Court.
"There's a lot of emotion when I think about this," Ross said. "It's about these people in positions of power."
Representatives for Lafferty, Van Wagenen and the Riverside County District Attorney's Officedeclined to comment for this story. Zellerbach did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Womack told police officers, detailed in several memorandums provided to Law360, that Stevenson was homeless and would sometimes hang out in Womack's garage. Someone had sliced open Stevenson's esophagus, and the top of his head was oozing "brain matter," reports said.
Police ruled out Womack as a suspect early in their investigation. They focused instead on Womack's 20-year-old roommate, Roger Parker.
Parker, who has a developmental disorder that can sometimes manifest as uncontrollable rage, appeared to fit the bill for a suspect in a violent crime. He had a long rap sheet. Moving in and out of group homes throughout his childhood, he was arrested at 11 years old, twice at 15, and three more times after that, nearly all on assault charges.
But Parker's assaults weren't random. He told Law360 that growing up, he didn't take kindly to the bullying he received from his peers, who frequently mocked his mental illness. He said he would sometimes lash out at authority figures: staff at the group homes and psychiatric facilities he used to live in, social service workers or teachers.
"Words hurt me at that time," he said. "I didn't have parents. I had given up on the world, pretty much."
Stevenson, on the other hand, was a distant acquaintance at best. In interrogation, Parker "adamantly denied knowing anything" about the murder. According to the district attorney's office memos provided to Law360, Parker willingly went in for questioning and agreed to take a lie detector test, give his fingerprints and a blood sample, and submit to a DNA swab.
But police "were confident it was Roger," according to a memo from deputy district attorney Lisa DiMaria, who handled the case for the Riverside District Attorney's Office prior to Ross' involvement. The interrogators were trying to get Parker to confess, she noted. They continually told him that if he said he had acted in self-defense, "that's not a crime."
Finally, officers falsely told Parker that Womack was planning to evict him when he got out of the police station. That's when Parker said he cracked.
"I thought to myself, 'Man, I'm not going to be able to make it,'" Parker told Law360. "I was like, 'Well, you got a choice. You go back to the fucked-up world you are in, or you just crack and say I did it and go to jail for a while and just get out. I'm tired, bro. I'm just gonna quit. You win.'"
At 4 p.m, after having been in the police station for 15 hours, Parker called in the detective to confess formally. He gave hardly any details and was not asked to provide more, DiMaria noted. He was arrested and put in Riverside County jail just a week before his 21st birthday.
DiMaria didn't respond to a request to be interviewed for this story, but Rod Pacheco, who was the district attorney of Riverside County from June 2006 until January 2011, told Law360 she was "honest and formidable," and one of the best prosecutors in the office.
Immediately, DiMaria saw flaws in the Parker case. In a memo she wrote to then-Assistant District Attorney Lafferty on July 22, 2011, DiMaria said she was concerned Parker's confession was coerced.
"As I expressed at the initial staffing in March, 2010, I have serious concerns about his guilt (if we have the right person)," she said.
She asked police investigators to lead Parker through a videotaped reenactment of the murder at the crime scene. He was not convincing. Parker changed details of his confession and gave explanations that made "absolutely no sense," she said in the memo.
The fingerprint on a knife left at the scene did not match Parker's. He was also eliminated as a DNA match on a white sweatshirt that Stevenson was wearing. And when a Riverside detective reinterviewed him, Parker said he made the whole thing up.
DiMaria told her superiors she did not want to prosecute Parker. She suggested to Lafferty and District Attorney Zellerbach, who had just entered the office in January 2011, that Parker's case be dismissed and the investigation be reopened. Instead, Lafferty tapped another deputy district attorney, Chris Ross, to take a second look.
"We had 275 lawyers, and there were one or two, maybe three, that we could count on to win cases that were almost unwinnable," Pacheco said. "Chris was one of those. He was not afraid of anything."
But Ross said he was suspicious when Lafferty pulled him into a meeting and asked him to take a second look at the Parker case. DiMaria was "one hell of a prosecutor," Ross said. He trusted her, and he didn't understand why Lafferty was ignoring her advice.
Following orders, Ross began to dig deeper into the case. He sent Parker's boxer shorts, bedsheets, pants and shoes back for more DNA testing. He didn't find Stevenson's blood on them.
"There was nothing more that I could do," he said. "I had exhausted all the remedies for forensic testing, for investigating all the witnesses. So at this point in time, I concluded I can't prove this man did it."
He wrote Lafferty several memos, provided to Law360, explaining his doubts about the case. One, in May 2012 said, "Dismiss the case as it appears rife with reasonable doubt. There were many mistakes made during the investigation of this case. These mistakes cannot be undone, nor can many of them be remedied by further investigation."
However, Ross said Lafferty remained unconvinced and, at several points, Lafferty explicitly asked Ross not to turn over his analysis of the evidence to Parker's defense attorneys.
Since a 1963 landmark ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court, Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors in the U.S. must turn over all evidence that might exonerate a defendant.
"I was in disbelief," Ross said. "I had never, ever heard of a prosecutor being told not to turn over exculpatory evidence."
The county didn't specifically address Ross' claims about violating the Brady rule in its response to his wrongful termination suit. However, it generally denied all of Ross' allegations. It has also maintained that the details of the Parker case had nothing to do with Ross' exit from the office.
Ross began to suspect that Lafferty, Van Wagenen, and Zellerbach all had an agenda: Zellerbach's campaign for reelection in 2014. Ross suggested that dismissing Parker's case would put a stain on Zellerbach's conviction record as DA, something that would hurt his chances of staying in office.
"It started to dawn on me, 'Wait a minute, this is a homicide,'" Ross said. "There's not that many, thank God. So it's like a GPA. You get an A, your GPA goes up 0.1 or 0.3. You get an F, and your GPA goes down 1.5. It drags it down like a concentration gradient."
Ross' suspicions were, in part, fueled by Zellerbach's reputation, both as a prosecutor and as a former Superior Court judge.
During his judicial tenure from 2000 to 2011, Zellerbach was publicly admonished by the California Commission on Judicial Performance twice. In 2006, he was chided for attending a baseball game while a jury was deliberating in a murder case and holding up the verdict by refusing to leave the game early or letting another judge hear the jury's decision.
He ran into trouble again as a judge in 2010, when he lambasted the Riverside District Attorney's Office during a discovery hearing on a case against a former employee of then-DA Pacheco, one of Zellerbach's political foes. The commission said Zellerbach did not disclose that, at the time, he was already planning to run against Pacheco for district attorney.
While Zellerbach defeated Pacheco in 2010, he would go on to lose his 2014 reelection bid to now-District Attorney Michael Hestrin after being charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly stealing Hestrin's campaign signs.
When Zellerbach was deposed in Ross' wrongful termination case, he said he was hardly aware of Ross and the Parker case.
"My involvement was second and third and fourth hand," Zellerbach said. "I'm not aware of what specific cases prosecutors usually are handling. We file 40 [thousand] to 50,000 crime cases every year in the office, and I'm not aware of who's handling which case usually."
Stevenson's murder was one of just three homicicides in Desert Hot Springs in 2010 and one of 87 homicides in Riverside County overall.
Zellerbach said in his testimony that Ross was becoming "more erratic, more argumentative, to a certain extent more paranoid."
"He was mis-recalling or misrepresenting meetings that he had with administrative or management personnel," Zellerbach said. "He was calling people liars. Those are some of the things that I recall now, years later, about the concerns that the office had with respect to Mr. Ross' attitude or behavior that was of a growing concern as time went on."
This was a far cry from what Ross' superiors, including Lafferty, said about him in a performance appraisal signed in July 2013. The appraisal, which was provided to Law360, describes Ross as the "epitome of a prosecutor," and "one of the top prosecutors in the office," primed for management, if he chose to pursue it.
"I think that one of the most complimentary comments that I have heard about Chris from another manager is that if their family member had been killed they would want Chris to prosecute the case," the report said. "In a word, Chris Ross is exceptional."
In Ross' view, his career as a prosecutor in California ended three months after that glowing review when, in October 2013, he had his investigator obtain the jailhouse call transcripts of Womack, who was beng held on separate charges. Ross discovered that Womack — Parker's roommate and the man who reported Stevenson's murder to the police — had inadvertently confessed to killing Stevenson, not once, but twice.
Ross recalls hearing Womack say to his girlfriend on the phone, "Hey, if that guy is messing with you, I'll cut his head off like I did that other guy in my place in Desert Hot Springs." Womack had a nearly identical phone conversation with his sister, Ross said.
"So right there. That is the most compelling evidence that you can ever have."
A few days after Ross showed Lafferty the call transcripts, on Oct. 29, 2013, Ross recalls Lafferty telling him that he was no longer the prosecutor on the Parker case. Lafferty came down to Ross' office and asked him to hand over the Parker case files, Ross said. He asked where the jail calls were. Ross told him he had given them to the paralegal for homicides.
"Do you want me to turn them over to defense?" Ross said he asked.
Ross recalls Lafferty saying, "No, I don't." Lafferty took the case and said he would take care of it, Ross said. On Nov. 1, Ross said his superiors told him to transfer all his murder cases to another prosecutor, John Aki. A week later on Nov. 7, Ross was placed on administrative leave."
GIST: Chris Ross remembers vividly the moment he knew he needed to leave Riverside County, California, for good.
Ross is a former prosecutor with the Riverside District Attorney's Office who took on murder and death penalty cases with a nearly perfect conviction record. He is also an Iraq War veteran who served in the Green Berets, one of the most dangerous jobs in the Army.
But driving around Indio in December 2013, Ross felt defeated. He said none of his friends from the DA's office would answer his calls. "It was like I had the plague," he said.
He still speaks like a soldier. In clear concise sentences, he gave a no-frills, but detailed, account of how he was ultimately driven out of the state, caught up in what would be a seven-year legal battle with his former employers after they allegedly pushed him out of a job.
Ross had spent three years insisting that evidence did not support the theory that a jailed suspect, Roger Parker, murdered Bryan "Tennessee" Stevenson back in 2010. But instead of being rewarded for his diligence, Ross said he was taken off the case in 2013, put on administrative leave a few weeks later and eventually prohibited from returning to the office. Ross' superiors maintain that he voluntarily resigned because he did not want to provide medical records and that his leave had nothing to do with the Parker case, but rather his own personal health.
Parker, now 32, was in jail for four years before his case was dismissed by the district attorney's office in March 2014. His factual innocence was legally declared just three months ago.
While the murder case has officially gone cold, civil litigation stemming from the investigation is ongoing.
Ross and his lawyers just secured fresh momentum in a discovery battle before the state's highest court, and his wrongful termination suit is advancing toward a trial next summer. Separately, Parker himself has sued officials, seizing on Ross' allegations of prosecutorial misconduct as part of his wrongful imprisonment claims.
"I was on the side of right," Ross told Law360. "I did the right thing. I was honest. I did what I was raised to do by my parents, what the Army makes you live by: honor, integrity, veracity. These people did anything but that, and they prevailed. How could this happen?"
Filing Suit
Ross moved to Los Angeles in December 2013, but said he couldn't get a job at any district attorney's office in California or even a low-level public defender position. Eventually, he moved to San Antonio, where he was hired by a civil law firm in the Lone Star State.In July 2014, Ross filed a wrongful termination suit against Riverside County alleging retaliation and disability discrimination. The lawsuit has lasted longer than he ever expected. It kept Riverside County in his life.
To Ross' shock, his case was dismissed by Superior Court Judge David Chapman in 2017. Judge Chapman said that Ross' retaliation claim didn't hold up because he couldn't show that he was engaged in protected activity.
Ross said he spent all of his retirement fund to appeal the decision to California's Fourth Appellate District.
"When that motion for summary judgment was granted, it felt like somebody took a bat to my stomach," he said. "I had to say: Do I really want to do this? Is it worth it? But there's a reason I never lost a trial. It wasn't that I'm smarter or better than anybody. I was smart enough to know when I was wrong and when I was right."
In 2019, an appellate panel agreed with Ross that the suit should be allowed to proceed.
"If credited by a trier of fact, the evidence shows Ross engaged in protected activity because he disclosed information to a governmental or law enforcement agency and to people with authority over him which he reasonably believed disclosed a violation of compliance with federal and state law applicable to criminal prosecutions and prosecutors," the appellate court said.
Although he was victorious in his appeal, Ross says he still feels like he is facing an uphill battle as a trial in the case approaches.
The county's lawyers argued in a response to Ross' complaint that Ross has little to support his retaliation claims, particularly because the DA's office eventually agreed with him about Parker's innocence, dismissing Parker's case in March 2014. They say that Ross had a medical condition that made it difficult for him to work, but instead of accepting a role in the filings unit or providing the appropriate medical records so that his supervisors could accommodate him, he chose to resign.
Ross remembers things differently, but he's worried about the venue in which he will be telling his version of events to a jury.
The former superiors Ross accused in the suit not only of harassing him but illegally hiding Brady evidence and keeping an innocent man in jail for four year without trial have gone on to powerful positions in the county. Sean Lafferty, a former assistant district attorney, is now a Riverside Superior Court judge. Jeffery Van Wagenen, ex-Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach's chief of staff, was appointed county executive officer of Riverside in February.
Not only does Ross see this as unfair, he worries it is undermining his case, which is being heard in Riverside County Superior Court.
"There's a lot of emotion when I think about this," Ross said. "It's about these people in positions of power."
Representatives for Lafferty, Van Wagenen and the Riverside County District Attorney's Officedeclined to comment for this story. Zellerbach did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A Murder Investigation
On March 18, 2010, in Desert Hot Springs, Willie Womack, who at the time was 50, said he returned home to find a man he knew named Bryan "Tennessee" Stevenson dead in his living room.Womack told police officers, detailed in several memorandums provided to Law360, that Stevenson was homeless and would sometimes hang out in Womack's garage. Someone had sliced open Stevenson's esophagus, and the top of his head was oozing "brain matter," reports said.
Police ruled out Womack as a suspect early in their investigation. They focused instead on Womack's 20-year-old roommate, Roger Parker.
Parker, who has a developmental disorder that can sometimes manifest as uncontrollable rage, appeared to fit the bill for a suspect in a violent crime. He had a long rap sheet. Moving in and out of group homes throughout his childhood, he was arrested at 11 years old, twice at 15, and three more times after that, nearly all on assault charges.
But Parker's assaults weren't random. He told Law360 that growing up, he didn't take kindly to the bullying he received from his peers, who frequently mocked his mental illness. He said he would sometimes lash out at authority figures: staff at the group homes and psychiatric facilities he used to live in, social service workers or teachers.
"Words hurt me at that time," he said. "I didn't have parents. I had given up on the world, pretty much."
Stevenson, on the other hand, was a distant acquaintance at best. In interrogation, Parker "adamantly denied knowing anything" about the murder. According to the district attorney's office memos provided to Law360, Parker willingly went in for questioning and agreed to take a lie detector test, give his fingerprints and a blood sample, and submit to a DNA swab.
But police "were confident it was Roger," according to a memo from deputy district attorney Lisa DiMaria, who handled the case for the Riverside District Attorney's Office prior to Ross' involvement. The interrogators were trying to get Parker to confess, she noted. They continually told him that if he said he had acted in self-defense, "that's not a crime."
Finally, officers falsely told Parker that Womack was planning to evict him when he got out of the police station. That's when Parker said he cracked.
"I thought to myself, 'Man, I'm not going to be able to make it,'" Parker told Law360. "I was like, 'Well, you got a choice. You go back to the fucked-up world you are in, or you just crack and say I did it and go to jail for a while and just get out. I'm tired, bro. I'm just gonna quit. You win.'"
At 4 p.m, after having been in the police station for 15 hours, Parker called in the detective to confess formally. He gave hardly any details and was not asked to provide more, DiMaria noted. He was arrested and put in Riverside County jail just a week before his 21st birthday.
DiMaria didn't respond to a request to be interviewed for this story, but Rod Pacheco, who was the district attorney of Riverside County from June 2006 until January 2011, told Law360 she was "honest and formidable," and one of the best prosecutors in the office.
Immediately, DiMaria saw flaws in the Parker case. In a memo she wrote to then-Assistant District Attorney Lafferty on July 22, 2011, DiMaria said she was concerned Parker's confession was coerced.
"As I expressed at the initial staffing in March, 2010, I have serious concerns about his guilt (if we have the right person)," she said.
She asked police investigators to lead Parker through a videotaped reenactment of the murder at the crime scene. He was not convincing. Parker changed details of his confession and gave explanations that made "absolutely no sense," she said in the memo.
The fingerprint on a knife left at the scene did not match Parker's. He was also eliminated as a DNA match on a white sweatshirt that Stevenson was wearing. And when a Riverside detective reinterviewed him, Parker said he made the whole thing up.
DiMaria told her superiors she did not want to prosecute Parker. She suggested to Lafferty and District Attorney Zellerbach, who had just entered the office in January 2011, that Parker's case be dismissed and the investigation be reopened. Instead, Lafferty tapped another deputy district attorney, Chris Ross, to take a second look.
Chris Ross:
As a prosecutor, Ross was the person you wanted in a tough battle, Pacheco said. At the time he was handed the Parker case, Ross' had 61 convictions, no defeats and one hung jury."We had 275 lawyers, and there were one or two, maybe three, that we could count on to win cases that were almost unwinnable," Pacheco said. "Chris was one of those. He was not afraid of anything."
But Ross said he was suspicious when Lafferty pulled him into a meeting and asked him to take a second look at the Parker case. DiMaria was "one hell of a prosecutor," Ross said. He trusted her, and he didn't understand why Lafferty was ignoring her advice.
Following orders, Ross began to dig deeper into the case. He sent Parker's boxer shorts, bedsheets, pants and shoes back for more DNA testing. He didn't find Stevenson's blood on them.
"There was nothing more that I could do," he said. "I had exhausted all the remedies for forensic testing, for investigating all the witnesses. So at this point in time, I concluded I can't prove this man did it."
He wrote Lafferty several memos, provided to Law360, explaining his doubts about the case. One, in May 2012 said, "Dismiss the case as it appears rife with reasonable doubt. There were many mistakes made during the investigation of this case. These mistakes cannot be undone, nor can many of them be remedied by further investigation."
However, Ross said Lafferty remained unconvinced and, at several points, Lafferty explicitly asked Ross not to turn over his analysis of the evidence to Parker's defense attorneys.
Since a 1963 landmark ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court, Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors in the U.S. must turn over all evidence that might exonerate a defendant.
"I was in disbelief," Ross said. "I had never, ever heard of a prosecutor being told not to turn over exculpatory evidence."
The county didn't specifically address Ross' claims about violating the Brady rule in its response to his wrongful termination suit. However, it generally denied all of Ross' allegations. It has also maintained that the details of the Parker case had nothing to do with Ross' exit from the office.
Ross began to suspect that Lafferty, Van Wagenen, and Zellerbach all had an agenda: Zellerbach's campaign for reelection in 2014. Ross suggested that dismissing Parker's case would put a stain on Zellerbach's conviction record as DA, something that would hurt his chances of staying in office.
"It started to dawn on me, 'Wait a minute, this is a homicide,'" Ross said. "There's not that many, thank God. So it's like a GPA. You get an A, your GPA goes up 0.1 or 0.3. You get an F, and your GPA goes down 1.5. It drags it down like a concentration gradient."
Ross' suspicions were, in part, fueled by Zellerbach's reputation, both as a prosecutor and as a former Superior Court judge.
During his judicial tenure from 2000 to 2011, Zellerbach was publicly admonished by the California Commission on Judicial Performance twice. In 2006, he was chided for attending a baseball game while a jury was deliberating in a murder case and holding up the verdict by refusing to leave the game early or letting another judge hear the jury's decision.
He ran into trouble again as a judge in 2010, when he lambasted the Riverside District Attorney's Office during a discovery hearing on a case against a former employee of then-DA Pacheco, one of Zellerbach's political foes. The commission said Zellerbach did not disclose that, at the time, he was already planning to run against Pacheco for district attorney.
While Zellerbach defeated Pacheco in 2010, he would go on to lose his 2014 reelection bid to now-District Attorney Michael Hestrin after being charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly stealing Hestrin's campaign signs.
When Zellerbach was deposed in Ross' wrongful termination case, he said he was hardly aware of Ross and the Parker case.
"My involvement was second and third and fourth hand," Zellerbach said. "I'm not aware of what specific cases prosecutors usually are handling. We file 40 [thousand] to 50,000 crime cases every year in the office, and I'm not aware of who's handling which case usually."
Stevenson's murder was one of just three homicicides in Desert Hot Springs in 2010 and one of 87 homicides in Riverside County overall.
Zellerbach said in his testimony that Ross was becoming "more erratic, more argumentative, to a certain extent more paranoid."
"He was mis-recalling or misrepresenting meetings that he had with administrative or management personnel," Zellerbach said. "He was calling people liars. Those are some of the things that I recall now, years later, about the concerns that the office had with respect to Mr. Ross' attitude or behavior that was of a growing concern as time went on."
This was a far cry from what Ross' superiors, including Lafferty, said about him in a performance appraisal signed in July 2013. The appraisal, which was provided to Law360, describes Ross as the "epitome of a prosecutor," and "one of the top prosecutors in the office," primed for management, if he chose to pursue it.
"I think that one of the most complimentary comments that I have heard about Chris from another manager is that if their family member had been killed they would want Chris to prosecute the case," the report said. "In a word, Chris Ross is exceptional."
In Ross' view, his career as a prosecutor in California ended three months after that glowing review when, in October 2013, he had his investigator obtain the jailhouse call transcripts of Womack, who was beng held on separate charges. Ross discovered that Womack — Parker's roommate and the man who reported Stevenson's murder to the police — had inadvertently confessed to killing Stevenson, not once, but twice.
Ross recalls hearing Womack say to his girlfriend on the phone, "Hey, if that guy is messing with you, I'll cut his head off like I did that other guy in my place in Desert Hot Springs." Womack had a nearly identical phone conversation with his sister, Ross said.
"So right there. That is the most compelling evidence that you can ever have."
A few days after Ross showed Lafferty the call transcripts, on Oct. 29, 2013, Ross recalls Lafferty telling him that he was no longer the prosecutor on the Parker case. Lafferty came down to Ross' office and asked him to hand over the Parker case files, Ross said. He asked where the jail calls were. Ross told him he had given them to the paralegal for homicides.
"Do you want me to turn them over to defense?" Ross said he asked.
Ross recalls Lafferty saying, "No, I don't." Lafferty took the case and said he would take care of it, Ross said. On Nov. 1, Ross said his superiors told him to transfer all his murder cases to another prosecutor, John Aki. A week later on Nov. 7, Ross was placed on administrative leave."
The entire story can be read at:
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: "I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL, FINAL WORD: "It is incredibly easy to convict an innocent person, but it's exceedingly difficult to undo such a devastating injustice.
Jennifer Givens: DirectorL UVA Innocence Project.
