FREE JIMMY SEGURA

The Justice for Jimmy Committee, 505 N. Arrowhead Ave., Suite 503, San Bernardino, CA 92401
Tel. 909/888-0185 - Fax 909/889-8118 - Internet URL: http://www.silvercloud.net/freejimmy - Email: FreeJimmy@aol.com.

Jimmy Segura was wrongfully convicted in 1978 in San Bernardino, California, of the highly publicized murder of twenty-one year old college student David Leon, the son of Angel Leon, then a controversial police homicide detective. Jimmy had nothing to do with the murder, as numerous witnesses now attest. He has now been confined to prison for nearly twenty years and needs your help.

In January 1995, the San Bernardino Superior Court issued an order to show cause on Jimmy’s eighth habeas corpus petition. In upholding his order, the judge, Hon. Bob N. Krug, stated:

However, before Judge Krug could order a hearing, the Court of Appeal, after sitting on the case for fourteen months, ordered him to dismiss the petition. He did so in October 1996.

Jimmy’s first petition, filed by his trial attorney in 1986, when the truth first started to come out, was woefully inadequate. The next five petitions were also woefully inadequate, mere two-page form petitions without factual support prepared by Jimmy from his cell without access to his legal documents, which were taken from him.

The seventh petition, however, filed in 1991 by an attorney who had been persuaded to look into the case, was strongly supported by facts and declarations and clearly ought to have resulted in a post conviction hearing, something Jimmy has never had. At such a hearing, he could present the newly discovered evidence proving his innocence. This petition, however, was dismissed without a hearing and without requiring the government even to respond to Jimmy’s detailed allegations by Hon. Dennis G. Cole, a former police officer whose son is currently a member of the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department.

The following account is taken from the 621-page ninth petition for writ of habeas corpus incorporating 1,611 pages of exhibits which is currently pending in the California Supreme Court (In re Segura, case no. S60768, filed April 25, 1997).

The David Leon murder was especially emotional because David’s bloody body was left sprawled on the steps of a downtown school in plain view of passers-by on Easter Sunday morning, March 26, 1978, where it lay for six hours before anyone called the police. Det. Leon would have been called to the scene of his own son’s murder but for just having been dispatched to another murder. In addition, the day before, a highly-publicized and well-attended Peace Rally was held a few blocks away, at which warring Hispanic-American gangs had declared a truce to stop the numerous gang-related street shootings.

All this made nearly everyone assume that David had been killed for revenge against his father, who had functioned for years as a one-man gang squad and was much disliked, especially in the Hispanic-American community, for being "hard on his own." Det. Leon even described himself as being an emotional person, adding, "A lot of people describe me as an asshole, which I do not deny."

The community was already in a turmoil over race. The Wednesday before the murder, the school board had announced a "voluntary" integration plan which might result in school busing. The plan was the result of a 1972 lawsuit filed by the NAACP to ameliorate racial imbalance, then ninety-five percent minority in Westside elementary schools. The uproar when the suit had been filed was so great that the entire school board was recalled in a vicious campaign. The new school board had appealed the Superior Court’s decision requiring integration but, in 1976, the California Supreme Court upheld the NAACP. The result was the new "voluntary" plan.

In this setting, the murder of Det. Leon’s son simply could not go unpunished. Community leaders publicly worried that the violence would spill over into the community’s major month-long event, the National Orange Show, which was then going on, and that the gangs’ truce would be broken. The Hispanic-American community was in an uproar after the murder because their community alone was canvassed door-to-door by the police in spite of the fact that David’s car was found in an African-American neighborhood several miles north of the school. Their anger was further fueled when, nine days after the murder, Det. Leon lost his temper and attacked three Hispanic-American youths who had been stopped on the road by another policeman with his flashlight and fists, leading to a federal investigation instigated by MAPA.

All this pressure focused on Homicide Det. Randy Bliss, to whom the case had been assigned. For over two weeks, he had no leads. The local newspaper published an article with David’s picture in which the police asked for help in solving the crime.

On August 14, 1978, came Det. Bliss’ first and only lead. In Monday’s newspaper the day after the murder, an article had reported that David had been shot elsewhere and "dumped" on the steps at the school. That same day, after a criminalist looked at the scene, the police corrected this opinion and reported that David had been shot right where he was found, probably between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.

This matched the statements of three of David’s close family friends who owned Charita’s Restaurant, located on Mt. Vernon Ave. near David’s home, where he came late every Saturday night to eat tacos, beans, and rice and drink coffee. They had known David since birth and were the last people known to have seen David alive. They said he was alone and left between 3:30 or 4:00 a.m., saying he was going home. The most reasonable assumption was that he was apprehended as he left, before getting into his car, and that he was forced to go to the school where he was shot, since it was in the opposite direction of his home. He may have had mechanical trouble, since he had grease on his hands. His car was then driven from the scene.

By coincidence, on the same Monday that the article appeared, Rick Riggins, Nick Cummings, and Jimmy Segura borrowed a Mustang from one Liz Cruz to commit a burglary to get money for heroin or Dilaudid, a synthetic heroin. The victim, whom Nick knew, found out who did it that afternoon when Liz’ car was traced and came looking for them. All three went into hiding. Rick abandoned his apartment on Crescent near 9th and H Streets, next to Nick’s, a few blocks from Jimmy’s parents, where Jimmy lived, and went to his mother’s in Rialto.

From his mother’s, Rick called his estranged wife, Karen, in Pismo Beach. She had left him two months earlier because of his drug use. Having read Monday’s paper about David’s murder, he told her that he needed to move back in with her right away because he had been in a car when two guys shot a cop’s kid and the two killers were looking for him. She relented and the next day he took a bus to Pismo Beach.

Two weeks later, Rick was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon on a friend of Karen’s over rent money. The victim told the investigating officer that Rick had said he was hiding out from the two guys in San Bernardino who had killed a cop’s kid, a story which Rick had repeated to different people in at least three different versions. The officer called the San Bernardino Police Department, who connected him with Det. Bliss.

When Det. Bliss arrived in Pismo Beach, Riggins first adamantly denied the truth of his story, admitting that he had only read about the killing in the newspaper. Riggins was exhausted from lack of sleep, alcohol, the fight, and the arrest. When Det. Bliss persisted until nearly midnight in insisting that he knew for a fact that Riggins was there when the cop’s kid was shot, Riggins finally gave in. He later declared under oath that he made up the story only to get some sleep, and that he thought he could explain the next morning that he really had not seen any such thing.

According to the transcript, Rick said that Rick, Nick, and Rita, Jimmy’s girl, were at Rick’s, all very much under the influence, when "Jimmy called and told us to pick him up." Rick then drove to Jimmy’s in Rita’s maroon Mustang Mach I because Rita was passed out. When they picked up Jimmy, someone who was taller than Jimmy with light hair whom he didn’t know was with him. They got in the back with Nick and the five of them just drove around for two hours, stopping only to inject Dilaudid (except for the person with Jimmy). After about two hours:

Jimmy was a likely target for such a story. Then twenty-three years of age, he had already served time in prison for manslaughter. When he was seventeen, he had been shot in the foot while at the front door of the low income housing unit, Waterman Gardens, in which his family lived, by rivals from another similar unit, the Meadowbrook Apartments.

Less than a year later, while Jimmy was home alone, another car from Meadowbrook cruised slowly by, yelling insults at Jimmy, and then stopped. Jimmy got the .22 rifle which an older brother had left by the front door and fired at the car. It then slowly drove off. Jimmy only learned the next day that the driver had been shot. He died several days later. When Jimmy was released from prison three years later, he could not find a job and started using heroin, sometimes selling it to support his habit. Nick was one of his customers, although he had nothing to do with Rick, whom he had met through Nick only in mid-March.

Among the many things about Rick’s Pismo Beach interview with Det. Bliss showing that Rick was making up a story, five stand out: (1) Rick said they pulled off a freeway and dumped the body "five streets" from Del Rosa Ave when, in fact, Del Rosa Ave. is six miles from the school; (2) when Det. Bliss asked Rick to describe the parking lot, he replied, "That’s why I didn’t want this to happen;" (3) Rick said the person with Jimmy was taller than Jimmy when, in fact, Jimmy is about 5’9" and David was 5’3"; (4) Rick first said that, when they dumped the body, he didn’t even stop the car when, in fact, David’s body would have had to be carried many feet to have been placed on the steps; and (5) there was no phone at Rick’s

In fact, the night of the murder Riggins had been with Cummings and nine other people at Riggins’ small apartment, some of whom, including Riggins and Cummings, spent the entire night there. Riggins had just acquired fifty Dilaudids, known as synthetic heroin, which most of them injected. Jimmy was not there at all that night. He was with his family at a family gathering held to plan the Easter Picnic scheduled the next day. About midnight, he and a friend, Mike Cotton, left for about fifteen minutes while he picked up his girlfriend, Olga Hinajosa—there never was a "Rita." They returned home immediately and he spent the entire remainder of the night with her, first in the living room, watching television, and later in the basement, making love.

The morning after Det. Bliss went to Pismo Beach, he took Rick to San Bernardino, where he and his wife and daughter were given clothes, food, and money, and put up in a motel. The agreement was that, if he testified in accordance with his statement, he would not be charged with accessory to David’s murder and the Pismo Beach charges would be dropped.

Det. Bliss knew that the next step was to get Cummings to go along with Rick’s story. They accomplished this by having Rick buy heroin from Nick. They did this three times, although Det. Bliss’ report said they could not find Nick the first time. Former narcotics officer Richard Lonsford declared later that he monitored Nick the first time and included in his report that Rick immediately started using heroin with Nick, which he had been forbidden to do, and refused to come out of Nick’s apartment.

Prior to trial, Lonsford discovered that his report was missing from the police file, something that had never happened before. Det. Bliss told him not to worry about it, that he probably would not be called anyway. This surprised Off. Lonsford, for he knew his testimony would cast doubt on Rick’s and Nick’s testimony. As he later declared, he felt at the time that he was being dissuaded from finding his report. Only later did he learn that Det. Bliss had falsely claimed that they could not find Nick the first time.

Nick, who was extremely addicted to heroin, was arrested on Thursday morning, April 27, 1978. He had gone without heroin for many hours, so that he was undergoing very severe withdrawals. On the way to the police station, Det. Bliss told Nick that he had been arrested for the murder of David Leon, and that they already knew that Jimmy Segura had committed it.

At the police department, Det. Bliss commenced his interrogation, which lasted all day. Even in Nick’s weakened condition—he actually vomited on his shirt in the interrogation room and lay writhing on the floor—Nick denied knowing anything about the murder and was clearly incredulous when told that Rick had said that Nick was with them when David had been shot, adding that he would spend the rest of his life in prison for first degree murder if he did not cooperate and admit who the shooter was. Finally, after many hours during which Nick maintained his denials, Det. Bliss put Rick in the room alone with Nick, declaring later that Rick was "asked to persuade" Nick to go along with Rick’s story.

The twenty-five minute conversation between Nick and Rick when they were alone was recorded. Ten of the minutes consisted of undecipherable whispering. Among the many statements which can be heard during the other fifteen minutes that show that Rick was trying to let Nick know what to say and then get him to go along with it when both knew it was a lie, the one that stands out the most is Nick’s whispered statement to Rick, "You gotta tell me what to tell ‘em."

When Det. Bliss returned to the room, Nick, his shirt long since removed due to his sweating and vomiting, was ready to go along with what Rick and Det. Bliss proposed. He then made a taped statement roughly similar to Rick’s. Just before he did, he asked Det. Bliss, "You want it detailed, or just you know?"

All during the eight-hour interrogation, Nick had been asking to be taken to a hospital. Det. Bliss had been saying that, as soon as Nick cooperated, he would be taken to one. But in the end, Det. Bliss took him to a motel room, where he was handcuffed to a bed while a uniformed officer stood watch over him until morning. The inference is that Nick’s condition was too bad for him to be admitted to jail and that, if he was admitted to a hospital, it would be too easy for an attorney to cast doubt on the voluntariness of Nick’s statement. The next day he was taken straight to the Glen Helen jail, where he was accepted and placed in solitary confinement.

As soon as the police had Nick’s statement on tape, they moved to arrest Jimmy. He was found the next morning, April 28, hiding in the attic of his brother’s house. He had been told that the police had been to his parents’ house the night before, and were looking for him for a murder. His girlfriend, Olga, went to the store to find a newspaper, hoping to find out what murder he could be accused of, but the paper showed nothing. Her friend’s mother offered to let him stay at her house until he found out. Jimmy had gone to his brother’s house to get some clothes when the officers arrived. In his statement to Det. Bliss, he denied having anything to do with David’s murder, saying that Det. Leon had never done anything to him or his family and that he did not even know he had a son until he read in the paper that his son had been murdered.

The night after he arrived at Glen Helen, Nick was permitted to call his father from the nurse’s office at the jail while Dep. J. V. Singley stood by two feet away. As Dep. Singley’s memo to Captain Hagstrom showed, when he heard Nick telling his father that what he had said about Jimmy murdering David Leon was not true, and that he had been forced to say it because he was undergoing withdrawals and would be going down for murder one if he had not made the statement, he interrupted the conversation and warned Nick that his conversation was being overheard.

Afterward, when Dep. Singley told Det. Bliss what Nick had done, Det. Bliss merely told Dep. Singley to give Nick pencils and paper since Nick was testifying on two murder cases. Two days later, as Det. Bliss’ report shows, Nick told him that what he had said before was not true and that he had just relayed information given him by Rick.

What Det. Bliss and the police department had not counted on was Juli Seaman. At the time, she had just taken the bar exam, having worked her way through law school by working as an interviewer for the San Bernardino Public Defender’s Office. Because of her talent and enthusiasm, some of the senior deputies asked her to investigate their cases. One was Bill Russler, who was assigned to defend Nick, who was charged with murder in the same complaint as Jimmy.

Juli was immediately taken by the strangeness of the case. For one thing, Nick was insisting that neither he nor the sole prosecution witness, Rick, knew anything about David’s murder and that he was with Rick at Rick’s apartment the whole night of the murder. Besides, the whole story was preposterous—why would a straight-arrow like David ever be with a heroin user ex-con like Jimmy? And everyone knows that heroin users don’t just drive around while shooting up, especially not in attention-grabbing cars such as Rick claimed.

Not only that, Juli contacted the people that Nick said they were with at Rick’s the night of the murder. She interviewed them all and they all independently confirmed Nick’s story. Russler was so convinced that the whole thing was a mistake that he summarized Juli’s interviews and sent them in a memo to the prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney John Arden, expecting a dismissal and offering to make the witnesses available to Det. Bliss for interviews.

Det. Bliss interviewed none of them, telling Juli that he did not intend to interview "sleezebag junkies." Instead, he upped the stakes, as two jailhouse informants were brought into play. The first claimed that Nick had admitted to him that it was Nick, not Jimmy, who shot David, that the murder was a mistake, since the "hit" was for David’s father, and that Rick had been let out of the car earlier. The second claimed that he had overheard Nick describe the murder more in accordance with Rick’s story to "someone" in the cell block. He also said that Nick had said to an "unknown subject" that David had been drugged and that, "We should have killed the old man too, the mother fucker." John Arden also filed an amended complaint charging Jimmy and Nick with the burglary which they had committed with Rick the Monday after David’s body had been found.

On top of this, for some reason Russler got off Nick’s case, arranging for the appointment of David Whitney, now a deputy district attorney. A few weeks later, Whitney persuaded Nick to plead guilty to accessory to David’s murder in exchange for a dismissal of the burglary charge and an agreement not to file the sale of heroin counts. By so doing, Nick avoided a maximum sentence of up to fifteen years in exchange for a maximum sentence of only three years. But Nick still thought he was going to get probation.

In the meantime, Rick had decided that he could not go through with testifying that Jimmy had shot David Leon. On July 4, he got drunk and decided to go tell the Segura family the truth about what happened. But when he got there, he was beaten up by someone who said he was Jimmy’s uncle. He then vandalized a church and wound up in jail on this charge and for setting fire to his old apartment, which had burned after Rick had gone to Pismo Beach. Det. Bliss immediately came to visit him, but would not get him out of jail. Rick became angry and said to another officer, "Tell Bliss that he just bought himself a witness for the defense."

Det. Bliss’ handling of this episode apparently angered senior members of the police department for, from this time on, he had nothing to do with the case other than sit in court during the trial. Det. Bliss was apparently angered by this treatment, for he then prepared three previously unwritten reports, all favorable to the defense: that Nick had said would do anything to stay out of prison; that he had lied in his first statement; and the first informant’s statement that it was Nick, not Jimmy, who was the shooter.

By July 27, Rick had had enough. After agreeing to testify against Jimmy, he was released from custody after pleading guilty to vandalism. The arson charge was dismissed. Det. Dave Snell and another officer, who told Rick they had "just picked up the case," went over Rick’s statement. They then took him to a freeway, where he hitchhiked to the State of Washington to await Jimmy’s trial.

One thing remained—to get Nick to also testify against Jimmy. To accomplish this, the prosecution waited until Nick was sentenced to two years in prison. He was terrified, thinking that he would be killed in prison for sure, since the whole world knew he had stated Jimmy had killed David. That very day, Det. Lewis contacted Nick—who from the time of his plea regarded John Arden as his attorney—and offered him a new deal. All he had to do was to testify against Jimmy like Rick had done at the preliminary hearing, help the officers try to find Rita and the Mustang, and make a new taped statement and he would be released from custody the very day he testified. Nick accepted.

On August 24, 1997, a week before the trial started, Nick gave his new statement, in which he got a little carried away. He had been told that David had been seen by the three unimpeachable witnesses at Charita’s Restaurant between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. This made Rick’s version impossible, since Rick had testified that David had been picked up for the two-hour ride about midnight. Now Nick remembered that they had dropped David off to eat and then picked him up before Jimmy killed him. Now the prosecution was ready for trial.

Jimmy was defended by Alan Spears, a court-appointed lawyer who was handling his first murder trial and whose third investigator was not even appointed until a month before trial. John Arden, on the other hand, had the whole homicide detail at his disposal and had probably tried more murder trials than anyone else in the county.

At trial, Rick and Nick testified pretty consistently with their previous statements, except that the time the ride started was now pushed back to "after 2:00 a.m." and that Arden had Nick explain that his most recent version about dropping David off to eat was not true.

Det. Bliss committed serious and undeniable perjury at trial. He falsely testified that there was no tape recording of his first interview with Riggins because the tape recorder’s batteries had run down. The attorney general, however, furnished a copy of the tape to Jimmy’s lawyers in 1993. As a result, the jury never learned of Rick’s initial statement which was inconsistent with the basic facts of the crime, such as where David had been "dumped."

They also did not know that Riggins had denied the truth of his story to the police even before the trial, as he has repeatedly done under oath since then. This fact was withheld from Spears, as was Lonsford’s missing report about Rick’s using heroin with Nick during the first arranged buy.

The jury also did not know that Nick’s whispered statement to Riggins, "You gotta tell me what to tell ‘em," was really on the tape. After the trial, while preparing the record on appeal, the court reporter, Isolde Stodelle, heard the statement and so stated in the record on appeal—but she had not heard it at trial.

The trial judge, J. Steve Williams, must have thought he heard something like the statement, since he asked his clerk to prepare a transcript of the tape for him. She did so and also heard it, as did her attorney-husband, Wally Farrell. She gave the judge her transcript, but he took no action and allowed Arden to tell the jury that the statement was not on the tape and that they should listen to the tape to see.

If they did, they no doubt would not have heard the statement because the tape introduced at trial was not the original—it was a copy produced by Det. Bliss which Spears had never heard. This was permitted by the court after Det. Bliss testified on the day he was to play the original to the jury that it had been damaged the night before, when he and Arden attempted to listen to it.

A great deal of time was spent on the testimony of the prosecution experts because their initial conclusions, made before the prosecution was committed to Rick’s story, were inconsistent with it. The autopsy had been conducted by coroner’s pathologist Irving Root. Dr. Root had determined that David’s blood alcohol at the time of his death was 0.18%, more than double the amount allowed for driving, yet there hardly any mention of David’s drinking in Rick’s statement.

Det. Bliss, who had attended the autopsy, prepared a synopsis of case immediately afterwards in which he had written:

But at trial, Dr. Root testified (1) that the abrasion could have been caused when the body was turned around; (2) that the "grease type substance" could have been gunshot residue, so the shot could have been fired from closer than eighteen inches because David’s hands could have deflected the residue from his face; and (3) that he was unable to give an estimate as to how long the food had been in David’s stomach.

Similarly, the sheriff’s criminalist, John Davidson, had initially concluded that the body had been shot right where it was found. But at trial, in very confusing testimony, he testified that it had been shot elsewhere and brought to the scene. He also testified that he had had the grease type substance on David’s hands analyzed by an electron microscope at Aerospace Corporation and had concluded that it contained some elements which were also contained in gunshot residue—but amazingly he had not asked Aerospace what the substance was.

Then, assuming it was gunshot residue, he described bizarre tests he had performed in which he had tried unsuccessfully to duplicate the marks on David’s hands by having a twenty-two pistol fired while he was grasping the revolver while wearing gloves. His conclusion was that the grease type substance was "very probably" gunshot residue, which meant that the gun could have been fired at close range, such as by a person sitting next to another in the back seat of a Mustang with three people on it.

Spears initially focused on showing that people who lived near the school had heard a shot that night, but their testimony had little force since the school is right next to a freeway and the sounds could have been a backfire from a vehicle. He was unable to locate Lynn Arrieta, who told an officer that she heard what she knew was a gun shot and not a backfire between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. When she looked out her window across the street, she saw a person lying on the steps of the school. Spears also called several witnesses tending to show that Liz Cruz’ 1971 Mustang did not look much like a Mach I Mustang. Liz had not testified for the prosecution, although her mother had, since Liz had left for Germany just before trial.

Spears also called a very prominent pathologist, Dr. Rene Modglin, who found the conclusions of Dr. Root and Mr. Davidson very hard to believe, especially in view of their initial conclusions to the contrary. He found it particularly hard to accept that David had been carried to the steps as Rick described without having more blood on the front of his shirt and with no drops of blood leading to the steps. To him, the abrasion appeared most consistent with a fall on the steps after David was shot. But, as Arden pointed out, his testimony was only based on photographs.

For some reason, Spears called only three of the ten or so witnesses who were with Jimmy at the Segura home the night of the murder. Most significantly, these did not include Jimmy’s mother or his girlfriend, Olga. To top it off, Spears would not let Jimmy testify because of his prior manslaughter conviction, so the jury was left without Jimmy’s most important alibi witnesses.

But most significantly, Spears did not call any of Juli Seaman’s powerful defense witnesses, whose statements showed they were with both Rick and Nick at Rick’s apartment the entire night of the murder. Juli still had the reports. She had been so upset about the injustice she saw in this case that she saved her file, which contained her contemporaneous reports of her interviews with these witnesses, for fifteen years. They are incorporated as exhibits in the eighth petition, as well as the ninth. She was not located until after the seventh petition was dismissed, which is why the eighth was filed in the Superior Court. As a result, the jury knew nothing about the powerful alibi defense which Nick would have presented had he not been eliminated from the trial.

Jimmy appealed his conviction, but the judgment was affirmed. His appellate attorney raised only minor issues having nothing to do with Rick and Nick’s false testimony.

Nine months after the trial, Nick’s conscience got the better of him and he called Spears. He said he had lied at the trial and wanted to tell Spears all about it. Spears arranged to meet Nick at a certain place that evening, when Nick would get in Spears’ van. Inexperience led Spears to notify the police of this, so they sent along an undercover officer wearing a hidden transmitter with Spears, who pretended to be Spears’ assistant. Nick, accompanied by a very large friend, met them. Nick related the whole sordid story, which was taped by nearby officers who were monitoring the transmission.

Unbeknownst to the officers, Spears had arranged with a noted polygrapher in Santa Ana to be standing by to give Nick a polygraph. When Spears drove to a nearby payphone to call him, the officers realized they had a major problem on their hands—so they swooped down on the van and removed the undercover officer. Spears could barely restrain Nick and his friend from working him over for his betrayal.

In a panic, Spears went to Judge Williams’ house to tell him what happened, but he wasn’t home. In his excitement, he dropped his wallet. Judge Williams saw it when he got home shortly afterwards and called the police. They showed up at Spears’ house, who barricaded himself inside, announced that he was armed, and refused to come out. It was only due to the efforts of his friend, Wally Farrell, who was called to the house that a very dangerous situation was alleviated.

Neither Spears nor Jimmy’s appellate attorney, who Spears contacted, would prepare and file a habeas petition as a result of Nick’s actions. Unfortunately, neither on informed Jimmy about it either.

In 1987, Jimmy had a parole board hearing at which Det. Leon attended. He told the parole board that he had at last learned why his son had been killed. As he put it:

Detective Leon then explained his conclusion:

So, nine years after Jimmy’s conviction, the father of the victim, a police officer, advised Jimmy’s parole board of a third motive Jimmy had for killing Det. Leon’s son—that Jimmy did it for two pieces of heroin.

The first theory advanced by the police was based on Rick’s false statement that, a few days before the murder, Jimmy had said he wanted to get back at the cop that sent him to prison. Even Nick couldn’t go along with this motive. It had to be abandoned prior to trial when the police realized that Det. Leon had nothing to do with Jimmy’s first case.

As a result, Arden urged a second motive at trial —that Jimmy hated cops so much he didn’t care which one he killed, any cop would do. There has never been an iota of evidence to support this claim.

By 1986, Rick, who had been fighting alcohol and drugs ever since Jimmy’s trial, was getting a grip on himself. He told his probation officer about his perjury in Jimmy’s case. The probation officer wrote the San Bernardino District Attorney’s Office, who notified Spears. This is when Spears filed Jimmy’s first habeas petition, a very brief form petition which merely attached the letter from Rick’s probation officer and the notification from the district attorney’s office. Nonetheless, Hon. Duke A. Rouse issued an order to show cause on it. This was the first that Jimmy knew about the recantations of either Rick or Nick.

Nick was contacted and gave a statement under oath before court reporter Katie Gutherie. Unfortunately, Spears was not present and sent a person who had not been briefed on the case, so Nick’s statement was very brief. The deputy district attorney assigned to the case, Joseph Burns, argued that the statement was too conclusionary to have any weight. He also noted that all they had from Rick, whom Spears had not contacted, was a hearsay statement from his probation officer. This, he argued, was not enough, since they did not even know if he would back up what the probation officer had said he said.

As a result, on June 11, 1987 Judge Rouse dismissed the petition without prejudice. He also wrote:

What neither the court nor Spears knew was that such a "complete and detailed statement" from both Nick and Rick already existed. They had been obtained by district attorney investigator Hans Vander Veen. He had gone to the jail where Nick was on May 15, 1987. In the morning, he had obtained a detailed statement from Nick in which Nick insisted that his trial testimony had been false. During this taped interview, Nick had been told that Rick had also recanted. This and the fact that other charges were pending against Nick led him to agree that nothing he was going to do would help Jimmy, so he might as well help himself.

Therefore, in the afternoon, Nick gave a second taped interview to Vander Veen, in which he said that he had been threatened into making the recantation before Katie Gutherie, and in which he accused Spears of standing guard in his law firm parking lot while Nick was given heroin as an inducement to making the statement. A tape of both statements were furnished Jimmy’s lawyers as a result of the seventh petition, but only the second one contains intelligible sounds.

Two weeks later, on June 4, 1987, Vander Veen traveled to Washington, where he interviewed Rick. The transcript starts:

After more conversation, in which Rick insisted that his testimony was false and Vander Veen insisted it was true, Rick became angry:

A few minutes later, Rick returned. At this point, Vander Veen took a new tack.

Vander Veen continued:

Riggins continued maintaining the falsity of his prior testimony, adding that:

In the meantime, Jimmy waits in prison.

The foregoing summary has only scratched the surface of the facts which have been uncovered showing Jimmy’s innocence and the subsequent cover up. These facts appear much more provable than those of Geronimo Pratt’s, who was recently released after more than twenty years in prison, or those of Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and other well known prisoners who are apparently innocent. As you have seen, Jimmy’s life before his conviction was not noteworthy, such as those of these others.

The Justice for Jimmy Committee, a small San Bernardino group of Jimmy’s family, friends, and supporters believes that, irrespective of Jimmy’s past, he should not continue to be imprisoned for something he had nothing to do with. Besides, he has used his time to develop his considerable artistic talent, as any one who visits his website will soon see.

The committee is putting the proceeds from the sale of Jimmy’s pictures in a trust account so that someday Jimmy will be able to hire an investigator to track down the missing witnesses he needs. With the passage of the Antiterrorist and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which greatly limited federal habeas proceedings, the urgency of time looms greater than ever. Please check out his website and consider buying his artwork. In addition, please contact the committee if you are interested in donating funds or investigative services, or if you simply want to know more about the case. You may also write directly to Jimmy Segura, #B-99772, Correctional Training Center, P.O. Box 705, Soledad, CA 93960. Jimmy answers every letter.

(Rev. 7/97)