Press Coverage

Did migrants get fair trials?

Lawyers say info left out in '98; killers got justice, family thinks

Arnold Hamilton

The Dallas Morning News

LITTLEFIELD, Texas -- Alberto Sifuentes and Jesus Ramirez were convicted of murdering a convenience store clerk during a late-night holdup here nine years ago.

But were they guilty?

An investigation by a Dallas law firm at the behest of the Mexican Consulate has found a pile of evidence that doesn't seem to add up.

There's the key witness who concedes that she was passing-out drunk at the time. Videotape shows another witness at the crime scene about 90 minutes earlier than she testified.

And, among additional evidence: a recently discovered memo in which the district attorney asserts that he was duped by a lying Texas Ranger into filing the case.

Attorneys for the two men, poor immigrants who spoke little English, argue a pattern suggesting that they were easy marks for authorities under pressure in 1998 to solve a South Plains murder.

"They happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Barry F. McNeil, a former Justice Department lawyer heading Haynes and Boone's pro bono appellate team.

The attorneys hope to win Mr. Sifuentes and Mr. Ramirez new trials or freedom, citing evidence of inadequate trial counsel and prosecutorial misconduct.

State prosecutors and the victim's family, however, remain adamant the men murdered Evangelina "Angie" Cruz -- a mother of four who was shot nine times, including once in the face. She was in her first week on the job at the Jolly Roger convenience store.

"I don't want innocent people in jail, but they're not innocent," said Ms. Cruz's sister, Gracie Rodriguez, who sat through Mr. Ramirez's and Mr. Sifuentes' separate trials. "They did it."

Mr. McNeil's team thinks otherwise. Among their findings:

*One witness testified she remembered being with the men at a place that could have been the Jolly Roger. However, she conceded at trial, she was so drunk that she was in and out of consciousness. Appeal lawyers for Mr. Sifuentes and Mr. Ramirez say defense attorneys failed to properly emphasize that evidence at trial.

*Another witness testified she saw Mr. Sifuentes and Mr. Ramirez at the convenience store just before the murder. But security videotape from a nearby store, which the woman testified she had visited immediately prior to the Jolly Roger, shows she was there about 1½ hours before the killing. The videotape evidence was not disclosed by prosecutors at one of the trials.

*And a third witness was a jailhouse "snitch" who received a "very favorable plea" when he agreed to testify that he overheard Mr. Ramirez, in a nearby cell, claim that Mr. Sifuentes "pulled the trigger."

A combined appellate hearing for both men began in late August, but has been twice interrupted -- first while a judge decided whether Lamb County District Attorney Mark Yarbrough could be forced to testify fully about the cases. The judge limited the scope of Mr. Yarbrough's testimony because he remains the attorney of record in Mr. Ramirez's case.

It was halted a second time in order to schedule testimony from the lead investigator, Sal Abreo, who is on leave from the Texas Rangers because of an undisclosed medical condition. The hearing tentatively was scheduled to resume Wednesday, but that is unlikely because of Mr. Abreo's continued health problems.

Neither Mr. Abreo nor Mr. Yarbrough returned calls for comment.

Racial feelings

Nine years later, the case still stirs powerful emotions on the South Plains, where memories of mistreated Hispanic farmworkers remain fresh for many -- and where the plight of Mr. Sifuentes and Mr. Ramirez recalls, for some, the nearby Tulia case, in which blacks were targeted in what turned out to be bogus drug cases.

The mere suggestion that today's Littlefield -- an agriculture center perhaps best known as the hometown of country singer Waylon Jennings -- would tolerate, much less encourage, race-based police work and prosecution angers many.

"I've never seen a racial problem," said Mayor Shirley Mann, a lifelong resident. "We don't hate in this area."

Juan Chavez, a 35-year Hispanic rights activist who won election last year to the neighboring Bailey County commissioner's court, agreed that race relations in the area are much improved.

But this case, he said, is eerily reminiscent of a darker past: He viewed the evidence as so weak against the men that he doubts they even would have been prosecuted had they been white.

"We thought they were railroaded," Mr. Chavez said over coffee at the McDonald's in Muleshoe, where he earlier was a four-term City Council member.

"They needed to find somebody guilty," he said. Mr. Sifuentes and Mr. Ramirez were "pretty easy to find guilty. That was the end of that."

The men's innocence is not universally accepted among Latinos, however.

Leaders of the League of United Latin American Citizens issued dueling news releases -- one noting the group's Lubbock district director joined in the appeal, the other backtracking to say the organization supported holding a hearing, but stressing that LULAC "cannot sit in judgment of which side is right or wrong."

At the time of the holdup and slaying, the two men were living in Muleshoe. According to the Mexican Consulate in Dallas, both men were in the U.S. legally as resident aliens and were working.

The men were on their way home from a night of partying in Lubbock, their Dallas attorneys said, when they were stopped by police less than an hour after the slaying, about 10 miles northwest of Littlefield.

Age discrepancies

Police were searching for two Hispanic men, ages 18 to 20. Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Sifuentes didn't exactly fit the profile: Mr. Ramirez was 48 and Mr. Sifuentes 22 at the time. Yet, their hair was similar to the police description -- one had long hair, the other short.

The men were released and went home. The next day, though, they emerged as prime suspects, their attorneys say, when an acquaintance inquired about a Crime Stoppers reward.

Mr. Sifuentes and Mr. Ramirez were convicted in separate 1998 trials and sentenced to life in prison. Their direct appeals were unsuccessful.

Their plight came to the attention of the Mexican Consulate in Midland during a routine, periodic check of U.S. death penalty cases involving Mexican nationals.

"We attended both trials and we realized they are innocent people," said Luis Lara of the Mexican Consulate in Dallas. "We realized it wasn't a fair trial."

As a result, he said, the Mexican government took the rare step of pursuing justice in a case that did not involve the death penalty.

Through its U.S.-based death penalty counsel, the Mexican government made contact four years ago with Haynes and Boone, which agreed to investigate the matter and represent the men at no cost.

The Dallas attorneys are challenging the convictions on constitutional grounds, including ineffective assistance of counsel. Also cited: prosecutorial misconduct in which the state failed to share alibi evidence with the defense as required by law.

"It was just blunder, blunder, blunder," said Mr. McNeil, the Dallas attorney.

Both of the accused were represented by court-appointed, Lubbock-based counsel -- Mr. Sifuentes by Patrick Metze and Mr. Ramirez by Philip Wischkaemper.

Mistakes conceded

The trial attorneys said Friday they have cooperated with the Dallas firm in the latest appeal. They concede mistakes were made and more could have been done for their clients.

"We didn't do all we should have done," Mr. Wischkaemper said. "It's 20-20 hindsight. We should have kicked over a bunch more rocks."

"I don't resent what they're doing," Mr. Metze said of the appeal lawyers. "It's a rare case that's done perfectly. We did the best we could, and obviously it wasn't perfect in the investigative part of it."

Both attorneys, though, also complained that prosecutors withheld key information that hampered defense efforts, including the prosecutor's memo calling the Ranger's truthfulness into question.

Mr. Ramirez is serving time in a Texas prison at Beaumont, Mr. Sifuentes at a unit near Wichita Falls.

Crime denied

"I did not commit that crime. We were never in that store," Mr. Sifuentes said recently during a jailhouse interview. "This has all been truly unjust. And I've wasted a big part of my life in a country that is not my own and in which I was hoping to have a better life."

A spokesman for the Texas attorney general, which is handling the hearing, said the state will do its talking in the courtroom but intends to fight vigorously for the convictions to be upheld.

Mr. Yarbrough, the Lamb County district attorney who prosecuted Mr. Ramirez, also declined to discuss the case, citing his role as a witness in the appeal.

Of particular interest to the Dallas lawyers was a memo Mr. Yarbrough wrote in which he criticized the work of Mr. Abreo, the lead investigator.

"He lied to me to get me to file this case," Mr. Yarbrough wrote.

In court documents, nearly all of the Ranger's memo was redacted by the attorney general's office before it was turned over to the Dallas law firm.

In court, Mr. Yarbrough sought to explain the memo by saying the investigator overstated the certainty of a witness' testimony.

Greg Parrott, a former special agent for the Texas attorney general, testified that he considered Mr. Abreo to be dishonest.

Mr. Metze testified in the since-suspended appeals hearing that he never knew of Mr. Yarbrough's memo that cast doubt on Mr. Abreo's veracity -- key information that could have reshaped the defense strategy.

"I still, to this day, would like to know what the lie is," Mr. Metze said. "These two guys are innocent -- totally innocent of this crime. These guys need relief. They're spending their lives in prison."

Staff writer Isabel C. Morales of Al Día contributed to this report.