#121 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Daniel Villegas

Like so many of our cases at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Steve first learned about Daniel Viegas through one of his infamous online searches. By this time, I actually had my own news feed, and so did our colleague Josh Tepfer. But Steve had his own reasons for being particularly excited about this case. So after all three of us read about a possible false confession case in El Paso, it seemed like destiny for us to get involved in

this case. You see, in two thousand and six, Alpasso was host to one of the most important conferences in the history of false confessions that brought together many of the leading experts on the subject to the University of Texas. For people like US. This is basically the Olympics meets Coachella. Who was there? Well, Donald Connery, the author of Peter Riley's book, was there. Steve's talking about a book called

Guilty Until Proven Innocent. We'll tell you that story in a later episode about a false confession from three and Easy. Good Johnson, the famed Icelandic detective turned psychology professor at King's College of London. You might remember easily from our last episode his scientific expertise helped exonerate Tana Pora in New Zealand. Richard off She and Richard Leo and Saul Casson some of the leading experts in the United States on false confessions. We're there. We're going to hear from

salcasm in another episode two. All of these guys are o G experts in the world of false confessions. They're Steve's heroes and mine too. So if I've turned into a geek here, you know who to blame. This conference was a watershed moment in the history of false confessions and the idea of going back to El Paso to work on an actual false confession case. It just seemed like destiny to me. This story starts in El Paso,

a border city in West Texas. Now, in the early nine nineties, El Paso was a different place than it is today. The crime rate was sky high. There was lots of gang activity. Street violence was a daily problem, and in some neighborhoods, shootings were regular occurrences. We start our story in the early morning hours of April tenth, Good Friday. It's just after midnight and four teenagers are walking home from a party and they find themselves in

a rough neighborhood. Three of them, Mando Lazo, Juan Carlos Medina, and Jesse Hernandez, were seventeen years old. The fourth, Bobby England, was eighteen. All of them were good kids. None of them were caught up in gangs or the street life. But they ran into trouble anyway. At the intersection of Electric Street and trans Mountain Road. That's where a maroon car with tinted windows rolls up behind them and starts

following them slowly. Now, just as the four of them start to get scared, the car takes off its speeds away, But a few minutes later it comes back, and this time the driver turns off the headlights. Words are shouted from the car in Spanish, possibly an insults, and then a series of shots ring out, one right after another. Juan and Jesse take off running as a matter of sheer instinct, and they think that their two friends are

running away alongside them. But when Juan and Jesse feel that they've run far enough that it's safe to slow down, they look around them and they don't see Mondo or Bobby with them at all. They take a deep breath, go back to the scene of the shooting and they see police lights flashing. Bobby had been shot in the head and died in the street. Mondo had been shot

in the stomach and the thigh. He made it a hundred yards to a house up the street, where he collapsed in the front yard and died as the residents frantically dialed Now. The police found six shells from a twenty two caliber handgun littered on the street right where the car had pulled over. But that's about it in terms of evidence. There were no fingerprints, no DNA, nothing forensic to help them solve this crime. It was going

to have to come down to confessions. The El Paso police assigned one of the toughest cops on the force, to the Good Friday shooting. An officer whose name we can't share, but an officer who was known as a closer. This guy is so tough he's even been featured on the TV show Cops. Now, what's a closer? A closer

is someone who is very skilled at police interrogation. A good closer will gather at it and then slowly revealed that evidence to a suspect, like peeling off layers of an onion, so that the suspect feels like he is nabbed, his goose is cooked, and that leads the suspect to confess. But there are other kinds of closers. Closers who use brutality and threats, and they don't only use these tactics

with suspects. Their modus operandi is to use these tactics with suspects, with witnesses and sometimes with victims, and they get statements, but those statements are coerced and false statements. This detective, he was in that second camp exactly, so the closer is brought in right, This detective from the Al Paso Police Force. He begins investigating the case and pretty soon he comes across a seventeen year old boy named David Wrangel DaVita is brought into the police station

in Theory about a completely different case. The police had told his mom that they needed to talk to David about some telephone harassment complaints, but when questioning actually began, it had nothing to do with telephone harassment. Police began accusing David of committing the Good Friday shootings. Now later on, David said that the police falsely told him during this interrogation that his friends had implicated him, and Davite himself

was threatened. He says he was told that he was a pretty white boy with green eyes who would be raped in prison if he didn't confess. This scares David and eventually he starts offering some information. He tells police that his sixteen year old cousin, Daniel Viegas, had been bragging about committing the Good Friday shootings, although he added that everyone was sure Daniel had been joking. He see

Daniel had a reputation as a jokester. He was the type of kid who always boasted about things he hadn't actually done. Daniel had bragged about owning a water bed when he didn't He bragged about owning a fancy stereo when he didn't. He even bragged about being ascended from Italian Royalty when he definitely wasn't. I want to be descended from Italian Royal to me too, But that kind of looks just ain't for us, Steve, anybody. When it came to the Good Friday shootings, Davite never believed Daniel

to be serious, not even for a minute. It just wasn't him. Daniel had nothing serious like this in his background. Just like criminals have a modus operandi, many times closures or interrogators have a modus operandi, and in David's case, we saw evidence that we later were able to demonstrate was a modus operandi. Almost always, this interrogator would tell the suspect that his best friend or close associate had implicated him in the crime, even if that's untrue, right

always untrue. He would threaten the suspect with the death penalty. And he also told the suspects, or the witnesses or the victims in this case, that they were going to go to prison and they were going to be raped. I mean, if you're a seventeen year old kid, and most of these witnesses were teenagers, and you're told that you're looking at going to an adult jail where you're going to be a rape victim. You're gonna say just about anything you need to to get out of that interrogation.

It's terrifying stuff. And for David, the information he gave was that his cousin Daniel, had been joking about committing the Good Friday shooting. He never believed Daniel to be serious, but this information was enough for the police. They asked David to write out a statement describing what Daniel had said.

David wrote that Daniel had bragged about using a shotgun to commit the shootings, but the detective had David take that part out and write the statement a second time without mentioning the type of weapon, because remember, the shells at the scene had come from a twenty two, not a shotgun. Even with the detective's edits, David's statements still

contained errors. He remembered his cousin bragging about being in a black car, not a maroon car, and Davite said that Daniel described firing a few shots, then getting out of the car, chasing Mondo Lazo to the house and shooting him again. There that's just not how this crime happened. The shots were all clustered together, not spaced out, and there were no casings found near Mondo's body, But none of us mattered. Now, this is a statement that David

regretted giving. It haunted him for the rest of his life that he'd implicated his own cousin in the Good Friday shootings, when even he didn't believe that Daniel was guilty. But it was a statement that he felt he had no choice but to give in light of the threats that he was encountering in the interrogation room. So there are errors, errors in da vide statement, errors in the statements of other witnesses, errors that the true perpetrator would never have made. That's a red flag. It's a huge

red flag. But it doesn't stop these police. Within hours, three more people are brought in for questioning late at night on April one, two friends of Daniel's, Marcos Gonzalez and Rodney Williams, and Daniel himself. They're all questioned and when Daniel is interrogated, he'd and eyes involvement. He tells the police he was babysitting that night with a group of friends and they were all watching white men can't jump on TV. But here comes that modus operanda exactly.

Daniel reports being told that if he didn't confess, he would be taken to the desert to get beaten, and then to jail where he would be raped by old men, then sentenced to death by the electric chair. This is how they scared Daniel. This is how they began reducing him down to this feeling of hopelessness. But if he confessed, on the other hand, he was told that he would get leniency because he was just a minor. And after about five hours of interrogation, Daniel ends up signing a

confession typed out by detectives. It's about three o'clock in the morning. He repeats the same errors that David Wrangel had made, but he makes other mistakes too. First of all, what about the people in the car. Daniel says the driver was someone nicknamed Popeye and that the front passenger was someone nicknamed DROOPI. But the only known Popeye was incarcerated at the time, and the only known Droopie he was also on house arrest at the time. They could

not possibly have been in the car. The color of the car. Da Vine had said the car was black, survivor Jessie Hernandez, he had said the car was maroon. Daniel said they were in a white four door sedan at the time of the shooting. And finally, Daniel said that he had shot Bobby and Mando in the back, but it was clear from the medical examiner's report that they had been shot from the front. The more and more you study Daniel's confession, the more you start to

see a pattern. The only facts about this murder that he was able to get right are facts that had been publicized about the Good Friday shootings in the local paper, the El Paso Times. Now, this is a pretty big red flag when you can only get facts right when you've read about them in the newspaper. And there's another red flag in this case too. As soon as the interrogator left the room, Daniel immediately recants to a juvenile

probation officer. I didn't do it, he said, and he explained that he only confessed because the cops kept harassing him. He said, I was tired, so I told them what they wanted to hear. And the police and prosecutors ran with that confession, even though it was filled with many false facts and errors, despite the red flags in his confession, despite the recantation, despite the lack of any physical evidence connecting him to the crime, Daniel Viegas is arrested and

charged with capital murder. He's sixteen years old. Now, Daniel didn't come from a family with a lot of money, but his parents managed somehow to scrape together ten thousand dollars for an attorney. Daniel viegass first trial took place in December. At that trial, da Vida Rangel testified, but he maintained that Daniel had been obviously kidding when he'd

bragged about the shooting. Rodney and Marcos, Daniel's friends, well, they had given police statements implicating Daniel when they've been questioned, but on the witness stand they said their statements were false and had been obtained through threats of prison, rape and other similar threats. And Daniel's attorney called eighteen defense witnesses, including several alibi witnesses, who testified that Daniel was with

them babysitting and watching TV at the time of the shooting. Right, white men can't jump, and Daniel's attorney argued strenuously about all these inconsistencies in Daniel's confession, how it just didn't match the facts of this crime, how it showed every indication of being false. He even called other witnesses who called into question the credibility of this detective, former prosecutors who had sought indictments for perjury. The defense mounted a

huge fight. They made every argument they could. The trial lasted a week and at the end there was a hung jury eleven to one, but it was eleven to one in favor of a conviction, which gave the district attorney some thought that this would be an easier case to convict the next time around. Sure enough, about nine months later, again Daniel Viegas has tried for the murders of Mondo and Bobby. But the second trial was different.

You see, Daniel's parents had spent every penny they had on the first trial, and they couldn't afford a lawyer for the second trial. This time around, Daniel was represented by a court appointed lawyer, someone who had been assigned the case only two months before the trial began, and so when the second trial rolled around, that lawyer called

only one defense witness, no alibi witnesses at all. He hardly pointed to any problems with Daniel's confession, even though he had a blueprint for success in the form of the first trial, and he didn't make a full frontal attack on the integrity and credibility of the police officer who got these unreliable statements, and so on August, Daniel Viegas was convicted of capital murder. Because he'd been a juvenile at the time of the offense, he wasn't sentenced

to death. Instead, he was given two life terms in prison, one for Bobby and one for Mondo. Daniel was a teenager when he went to prison, and he might still be there today if it weren't for a man named John Mabella. Now, John is the head of a successful El Passo construction firm, a firm that hired a lot of formerly incarcerated people because John is a guy who

believes in second chances. One day in two thousand five, John Mabella walks into an El Passo bank and he ends up asking his teller, a woman named Lucy, out on a date. Six months later, we were buried. Lucy had three daughters with Daniel's brother, so Daniel was actually Lucy's ex brother in law. I adopted Lucy's daughters two

years later, and that's when I learned more about Daniel's case. Now, Lucy and brought the girls to see their grandparents, who were Daniel's parents, and eventually John started coming along too. That's where he started to hear stories about their son, Daniel, who was serving life in prison for two murders he didn't commit. At first, I thought, you know, any parents gonna not want to accept that their son might be a killer. I had a lot of faith also in

our system. You know, I always believe that if a jury found you guilty, it must have been because they had plenty of evidence against you. So I figured, hey, you know, they must have all kinds of evidence on this kid if they sentenced him to life. John was skeptical, but he saw how heartbroken the grandparents were and he agreed to read through the court papers. Before long, he was dumb struck. There was no reliable evidence tying Daniel to these shootings at all. And then John Manbella became

a man possessed. I've got a couple of friends and I asked them if they could set up a meeting with our d A because I saw some serious problems in Daniel's conviction. Our DA happened to be high Miss Barsa, and he personally trialed Daniel. So I figured, you know what, if there's some mistake, if there's some doubt, you know, he's going to reopen this case. So we had the meeting and I told him, I go, you know what I think, Daniels, it isn't something stronger. You know, we

need to look into it. This d A fought us a lot just to get evid entry hearing. After he told me the higher good appeals lawyer and opened up the case again, he fought us to the nee. Now this really fired John up. It didn't make any sense. He starts paying for billboards around El Paso. That's a free Daniel Viegas. He starts organizing rallies and protests outside the courthouse, and he hired a private investigator. He read the transcripts and he was dumbfounded too. He goes to John,

I was a homicide detective for twenty years. This case would never have gone to trial. I would never have presented this to my d A if this is all I had. He was very upset and he goes, yes, John, I'll take your case. John, Manbella is invested in Daniel's innocence and the work he would go on to do ended up costing him personally hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He's the patron saint of the Daniel Viegas case. You know, I went down to El Paso shortly after John had hired lawyers and investigators to reopen Daniel's case, and when I went into the courthouse, they were like fifteen or twenty people walking around with signs saying free Daniel Viegas.

You know, false confessions happened. Justice for Daniel Viegas. John had organized a rally right in front of the courthouse, and on the street in front of the courthouse was a truck that had billboards on both sides of it that was driving around the courthouse. So when you walked into the courtroom and El Paso, you were just blitzed by this notion that an injust just had occurred and that it needed to be fixed exactly. And John brought

his entire community into this case too. There was a manager who worked at his construction company who was a songwriter, and he ends up writing a corrido, a traditional Mexican ballad about the wrongful conviction of Daniel Viegas. John was so proud of that song that one of the first things he did when I was down in al Passa was to play that for me. It's on YouTube now

if you want to hear it. John and the private investigator, right, they want to really find out what happened, and one of the first people they go to speak to is Jesse Hernandez, one of the survivors of the shooting. Of course, Jesse was now a grown man, and John shows Jesse for the first time a copy of Daniel's confession. Jesse's like, John, this is not what happened. This just not look like a confession from somebody was there who took this confession down?

And I told him. At that point, Jesse turns pale and he's like, John, that same detective almost had me confessing to that crime. He shows up that night and he tells me, we know you shot your friends, your buddy Kuan Mead, and I just told us that you did it, and Jesse says that he was just hysterical. He's like, wait a minute, these are my friends. I love my friends. I would never do anything like that

to my friends. He goes, well, maybe you blacked out, you know, and you shot them and you didn't even realize it. And at that moment, Jesse goes, well, man, you know, why would my friends say I shot them if I didn't showed them. Maybe I did do it, And he put his head down to the table and just crying uncontrollably. Had it not been for his mom that stepped in, he says, he was almost ready to confess. So Jesse's like, the last thing I want is somebody

innocence spinning the rest of their life in prison. That could have been me. This was an absolute bolt from the blue when John heard this story from Jesse Hernandez, and it only motivated him to continue pounding the pavement. Eventually, John hires a highly skilled El Paso trial lawyer, a man named Joe Spencer. Now Joe files a state petition for a wit of habeas corpus, arguing, among other things, that Daniel's lawyer at his second trial had been ineffective

for failing to call Daniel's alibi witnesses. There's a hearing plan it's going to happen in two thousand eleven, and in the run up to that hearing. That's when Steve and I first heard about this case. Yeah, we heard about it through our news feeds. And this time what made this special is it wasn't just me who came in to the office the next day. It was me and Laura, and so did our third attorney, Josh Kept.

All three of us got this news feed at the same time, a case of a juvenile who had confessed to a crime he didn't commit and who was trying to reopen his case through a new hearing. At the hearing, Jesse Hernandez takes the stand for the first time. Jesse testifies that Daniel's confession didn't match what actually happened to him and his friends. Daniel's alibi witnesses also testified, saying that they were with Daniel on the night of the crime.

And remember Dr Richard Leo, one of the experts from that false confession conference in El Paso back in two thousand six. He took the stand too, and testified that Daniel's statement showed every sign of being false. There was even evidence introduced that two other known gang members had threatened Mando Lazo's life right before the shooting, and they

bragged about killing him. Afterwards, when one of those two gang members was called to testify, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination and refused to answer anything. And Joe Spencer also mounted again a direct attack on the integrity of the detective who had taken the false witness statements, who had almost gotten a false confession from the crime victim, and who had gotten the confession from Daniel.

And one of the things he discovered, which is pretty incredible, was that one of the tactics that this detective had used in another case was that he would enter an interrogation room dressed in a smock. Now, why would anybody wear a smock? Well, he tried to mislead the suspect into thinking that they were speaking to a medical person, a doctor, instead of a police officer. And when the judge heard that evidence, his eyes rolled back into his head.

And eventually we had an opportunity to file an amicus brief about the unreliability of Daniel's confession and add that to everything that Joe Spencer was already doing in the courtroom, and we pha size how vulnerable a teenager like Daniel would have been to making a false confession. The hearing concluded, and then we waited. The judge took nine months to reach a decision, but on August seventeenth, two thousand twelve, Judge Sam Madrono recommended that Daniel Viegas received a new trial.

Judge Madrono concluded that Daniel's trial lawyer had provided ineffective assistance by failing to investigate or introduce evidence of the unreliability of Daniel's confession. Now, Judge Madrono's decision was a fabulous victory, but it was only a recommendation. It had to be adopted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. It was at that point that we joined the team to craft a presentation to that court that we hoped

it would accept. As that appeal process is ongoing, Daniel's lawyer, Joe Spencer, asked Judge Madrono to free Daniel on bond let him go home as the appeal process dragged on, and on January four, to thousand fourteen, after nearly two decades in prison, Daniel was released on bond, straight into the arms of John Mabella, who drove him home in a brand new, shiny red convertible. It was almost like a kicker tape parade, Daniel was free, he got started

living right away. As soon as he was released. He got married to a woman named Amanda, whom he met when he was behind bars, and in short order they had two beautiful children. But even though Daniel is walking out of the prison into the arms of a crowd of supporters, that could have all been taken away from them. And the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas is a court that has a reputation of being hostile to defendant's claims,

especially claims regarding their actual innocence. So it wasn't anything but a sure thing that Judge Medrano's decision would be affirmed. Long story short, the High Court affirms Judge Madrono's ruling. Yes, Niel Viegas deserves another trial and a chance to prove his innocence. But the d A didn't get around to the new trial until eighteen So for four years Daniel's living with a sword hanging over his head. If he goes to trial and loses, he'll be back in prison

for life. This is enormously stressful. The months and years are ticking by. Daniel's starting a family. He's working at John Manbella's construction company. Tasting freedom and cherishing it. What does the d A do? He asks Daniel to enter an Alfred plea, stay free as long as you plead guilty. It's such attempting offer, especially to somebody who was locked up for a crime they didn't commit as a teenager and had to spend two decades or more in prison

suffering under the weight of that wrongful conviction. But now Daniel's got other people, yes to think about his wife and their children. Daniel consider the Alfred plea option seriously because it meant that he wouldn't have to go back to trial. You would be a convicted murderer, but at least he would have his freedom. Of course, he was tempted to put the whole thing behind him. But Daniel lived in El Paso, Texas, and El Paso had become

home to a small community of wrongly convicted individuals. Among that community was a man named Jason Baldwin. Now that's a name that true crime junkies might recognize, because Jason Baldwin was a member of the West Memphis Three, a group of three teenagers from Arkansas who had been accused

of the killings of three eight year old boys. One of them, Jesse mss kelly, had falsely confessed, and the three of them were convicted, two sentenced to life in prison, and the third, Damian Eccles, sent a death row in Arkansas. They fought their case for seventeen years. Steve and I were fortunate enough to join Damian eccles legal team at the very end, and they were freed only when the

State of Arkansas made them an offer. All three of you enter Alfred, please say you're guilty of these crimes, and then we'll let you out. Now, this is an easier decision when it came to Damien, he was on death row. But Jason, who had been sentenced to life in prison, wrestled with it. He didn't want to admit to a crime he didn't commit, even to secure his own freedom. Ultimately, he chose to accept the Alfred plea

to help save Damien's life. One of the consequences of entering an Alfred plea is that you can't get compensated through state compensation statutes. The Alfred plea is considered a plea of guilty, and that disqualifies you from recovering any compensation. Prosecutors dangle freedom so long as they can secure guilty, please and return and prevent themselves from being sued down the road. It's a tool of injustice that happens way

too often. It was used in the Robert Davis case, it was used in the West Memphis three case, and it almost worked on Daniel Viegas. You see, Jason Baldwin had moved from Arkansas to Texas, where he became involved in a wrongful conviction advocacy organization called Proclaim Justice and joined John Mabella's fight to free Daniel Viegas. Jason Baldwin became one of his closest friends and confidence As Daniel

wade whether to accept that Alfred play. Daniel told me, Johnny goes, if I take this deal, all this work that you did is for nothing. So we called Jason Bodwin for his advice, and he said, let's talk about it before you decide anything. And he tells Daniel, no, I I can't tell you what to do. You have a family. But in my case, you know there's no way that I would do it again. It bothers me every day of my life. So just think hard about this because it could bother you the rest of your

life too. And with Jason Baldwin's counseling and support, Daniel Viegas found his courage and turned down that unjust Alfred Plea offer. He decided to go to trial. The stakes were so high at this trial. Daniel had tasted freedom, he was starting to live the kind of life he had always dreamed of. But here he was back in that courtroom, a place where the last time had ended in a conviction. Now this trial was very different because this time Daniel's team of lawyers we succeeded in getting

his confession thrown out as involuntary and coerced. And without that confession, there is precious little evidence to go on. The state presented a case to the jury, the jury deliberated, and in October of eighteen, a verdict came back us Daniel Viegas. Now this is one of the highest profile cases in the history of El Paso at this point, and the courtroom was packed with supporters of Daniel Viegas.

Jason Baldwin of the Western that this three is there, the local wrongful conviction advocacy organization Proclaim Justice is there, and John and Lucy Mabella sitting in the front row right behind Daniel and his lawyers. They are there, and when the judge asks Daniel to stand up for the verdict, his knees buckle. He almost collapses. He has to hear whether this beautiful life that he has started reconstructing is

going to continue. Where is he going to end? Daniels lawyers actually have to help him stand up, and he was able to stand just long enough to hear the verdict. They finally defended Daniel viegas not guilty, not guilty, and the courtroom erupts in a sound of both cheers and incredible relief, and then he collapsed under the weight of a lifetime's worth of fighting. He had finally been exonerated. It was it was a feeling that I don't think I'm ever going to feel again in my life. Hey, Daniel,

got you? Yes, tell me about your kids? How many kids you got? Now? There's four all together? A man of my wife. I remember I told her man, I'm told to be a dead and right at that time, my daughter got pregnant too, and I was like, oh man, you know I'm too young to be a grandpa. What do you tell your kids about what happened to you? The two little ones are too small to know about it. Uh, they don't understand yet. Like I love when they tell

me life saying fair. I don't tell me. Everybody do nineteen years in print and tell me how life be fair. Clean your room. I know that the Wrongful Conviction podcast played an important role in your case too. Yes, a man of chieved really into the Wrongful Conviction community. Right, She's like, don't vote a fan to change the plant. So when they came to me with that offer, pleading they will just call me by signing to see the

paper cake it close. So I was going to sign it almost and that's when Amanda jumped into like, no, no, I know all about yourself and please you know Jason Flom told me about this. She educated me on that, and then that's when we decided not to take that pre deal. Daniel, you're an incredible human being. To see you as a freeman at Innocence Network conferences, at events for Proclaimed Justice, it makes my heart sink. You're a symbol of endurance. It's been her honor to know you

and to tell your story today. That's the story of Daniel Viegas. Join us next week when we'll tell you about Honed Hyatt, a California man falsely accused of terrorism based on one of the most outlandish confessions I've ever heard until then. Thanks for listening to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for

Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flom and the team at Signal Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Special thanks to jog Hammer for additional script editing and for wrangling and writing like a madwoman. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura night Rider and you can follow

me on Twitter at s Drizzen. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction