Murder Trial Roils Racial Divide
For years now, prosecutors have been under pressure to get tough on violent crime by young people. But as CBS News Correspondent John Blackstone reports, a murder case in central California is raising accusations that prosecutors are stretching the law to punish the innocent.
The murder trial unfolding at the county courthouse in Fairfield, California seems straightforward. There's no mystery about the weapon, there's no question who the killer is. Chad O'Connell even told the court exactly how he killed. "I stabbed him twice, one after another," he testified.
Seventeen year old Jerry English died two hours later at the local hospital after being driven there by his friends David Moreno and Justin Pacheco. It is Moreno and Pacheco who are on trial for murder, not Chad O'Connell.
"I've told people that it's like an Alice in wonderland adventure," says Moreno's attorney Dan Healy. "Up is down, in is out and the killer has gone free and the friends of the murdered are in jail."
Prosecutors are using a quirk in California law that allows someone to be charged with murder if they cause someone else to kill. For example, let's say an armed robber bursts into a store. The clerk pulls out a gun and accidentally shoots kills a customer. The robber could be charged with murder for causing the customer's death.
In this case the district attorney says Moreno and Pacheco caused the death of Jerry English by stopping their car on this street one evening, letting English jump out and get into a fight with a group that included Chad O'Connell. The District Attorney ruled O'Connell acted in self-defense and arrested the victim's two friends.
Joann Pacheco, mother of one of the accused, says it's a case of blatant bias. "The district attorney's office choose the two Latino boys because they fit his stereotype, but the white boys are free," she says. Healy agrees, "Is this a case of people being charged because of their race? That certainly is the question. The way I put it, sure, a white killer has gone free," he says.
The district attorney has declined to be interviewed. Next week, the jury will begin deliberations to decide whether David Moreno and Justin Pacheco are guilty of a murder they did not commit.