A 63-year-old man convicted of forcing an Anaheim bank employee to help him with a heist has won a new trial on kidnapping charges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The ruling handed down Oct. 22 granted the relief for Charles Craig Clements based on the misuse of a jailhouse snitch and refers to the jail informant scandal in Orange County that came out of the prosecution of Scott Dekraai, the worst mass killer in Orange County history.
Ninth Circuit Judge Matthew F. Kennelly, who wrote the majority opinion, sided with Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw with Judge Patrick J. Bumatay dissented.
Clements prevailed on a claim that prosecutors allowed the informant to testify falsely that he was not given any special treatment in exchange for his help in the trial.
Clements also challenged his convictions based on prosecutorial misconduct related to not turning over evidence, which is known as a Brady violation, and the use of an informant to question another inmate already represented by an attorney, which is called a Massiah violation.
Clements was sentenced in January 2012 to two life terms plus 18 years on two counts of kidnapping to commit robbery and three counts of second-degree robbery.
The new trial on the kidnapping charges was granted based on what is known as a Napue violation.
The judges “held that the prosecution violated Napue by permitting a jailhouse informant to testify that he had received no parole consideration for his actions and that his motives for coming forward were altruistic, when the prosecutors knew or should have known that this was false.”
Clements was convicted of pretending to be a package deliveryman Jan. 27, 2009, so he could abduct Bank of the West employee Alison Lopez, who was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and was off work for the day. Pointing a gun at Lopez, he told her “not to panic or do something stupid” before he “put gloves on and pulled a bandana over his face,” Kennelly wrote.
“Clements told Lopez his 10-year-old son had been kidnapped by a gang that was making him rob the bank where she worked,” Kennelly wrote.
He told her the gang would kill them and his son and the bank’s employees if she didn’t cooperate, Kennelly wrote.
Clements also “told Lopez that she had to be the one to go into the bank and get the money, and that he would kill her if she did not cooperate,” Kennelly said.
The package he had on him in his guise as a deliveryman was a black trench coat, a black wig, a black laptop case, zip ties, a black duffel bag, and a second gun with a silencer, Kennelly said.
They drove to the bank in Lopez’s car with Clements behind the wheel, and when they got there Lopez called a co-worker, Cindy Chin, to come out, the judge wrote. Clements had Chin stay with him and instructed Lopez to go into the bank vault and get money, according to the opinion.
Lopez stuffed money into the duffel bag, returned to the car and Clements drove to a bowling alley, where he said would make the exchange for his son, but he stopped at a side street and told the two bank workers to go back to the bank and wait 10 minutes before calling police as he fled with the money, Kennelly said.
After Clements was charged with the bank heist he was later also accused of soliciting to kill the victims based on the allegations of snitch Donald Boeker.
The informant “testified that Clements became obsessed with having Lopez killed and that he wanted her dead so she could not testify against him and there would be no kidnapping charge,” according to the ruling.
“Boeker told Clements that would cost him, and Clements claimed to have money left over from the robbery and offered Boeker $10,000,” Kennelly wrote. “He testified that Clements wanted him to kill the woman’s husband and baby as well.”
Jurors deadlocked on the solicitation of murder charge and it was later dismissed.
Clements’ appeals fell flat in state and federal courts until the Orange County informant scandal broke when he made a legal claim based on Boeker’s use in the trial, Kennelly wrote.
Records showed sheriff’s deputies had been using Boeker as a snitch since the mid-1990s, Kennelly wrote.
“The records also reflect coordination between the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and the Anaheim Police Department to set Boeker and Clements up on a recorded van ride, and that Boeker was handled at various times by officers implicated in the informant scandal,” Kennelly wrote.
There were also records that Boeker had a “history of mental health concerns beginning in 2008-10,” Kennelly wrote.
Deputies wrote that Boeker “needs psych meds, hears voices,” Kennelly wrote.
In 2012, there was a “notation to the effect that Boeker is `basically mental,’ and “a little crazy,’ ” Kennelly wrote.
Boeker received a break with a lesser sentence and that investigators on the case worked to help him get the lighter punishment, Kennelly wrote.
“This included the lead detective, who contacted Boeker’s parole agent on at least two separate occasions and then wrote the parole board, imploring them to `consider a new parole sentence hearing or a review of (Boeker’s) current sentence for a possible reduction in time,’ ” Kennelly wrote.
The prosecutor was alerted to the efforts in a memo, the judge wrote.
“Given these circumstances, the prosecution knew or should have known Boeker’s testimony was untrue and did not fulfill its duty to correct it,” Kennelly wrote.
Kennelly noted the victims could not pick Clements out in a lineup or identify him at trial, making Boeker’s testimony key to the convictions. Kennelly also notes in the opinion that during the trial a juror asked about prior statements Boeker made with a detective and that the jury requested readbacks of his testimony twice.
“This strongly indicates that his testimony played a role in at least those jurors’ assessment of the aggravated kidnapping charges,” Kennelly wrote.
The judges found that Clements did not meet the standards to show a Massiah violation because a “reasonable jurist could determine after setting aside Boeker’s testimony that the other evidence, including the testimony of Lopez and Chin, as well as weapons recovered from Clements’s home that resembled used during the crime, $36,000 in hundred-dollars bills in his storage locker, and DNA evidence from Lopez’s home, was sufficient to establish his guilt on all of the charges on which he was convicted.”