Global Courant 2023-04-21 17:00:50
Through his arrest, at the age of 19, for a murder in South LA, through the trial where he was sentenced to 72 years to life in prison, and through fruitless appeals, Abel Soto maintained his innocence.
In 2020, after serving more than twelve years in prison, his family and friends started looking for a lawyer who would prove once and for all that he was wrongly convicted.
They went with Aaron Spolin – a decision Soto and his supporters would deeply regret. Instead of thoroughly investigating his case to find exculpatory evidence, Spolin filed a thin lawsuit with unsubstantiated claims and was quickly dismissed by a court.
“He told me, ‘If they hear us, we’ll introduce the evidence,'” Soto said in a phone call from Soledad State Prison. “That didn’t seem right to me. How do you expect to get a witness interview without any evidence?”
Advertising himself as “California’s top habeas attorney,” he charges more than $20,000 to pursue habeas corpus petitions, the complicated and consequential path by which inmates who have exhausted their appeals make a last-ditch effort to get a court to have their to quash convictions.
The Times found that Spolin’s company failed to conduct investigative work or research that experienced habeas attorneys said was necessary. Federal, state and local courts have repeatedly rejected Spolin’s petitions for lack of fundamental evidence.
For example, in the petition he filed on Soto’s behalf in 2021, Spolin listed eight individuals who could testify to his whereabouts on the day of the crime, but did not interview them or provide affidavits from them.
In numerous other petitions reviewed by The Times, Spolin argued that clients should get a new trial because their previous attorneys had failed to call expert witnesses. But he himself did not engage experts to present evidence to the court on how their testimony could have led to a different verdict, which is common practice in habeas petitions.
“The petition contains no evidence or statements from a video expert claiming what forensic video techniques would reveal in the video in question,” Alameda County Supreme Court Justice Morris Jacobson wrote last year when he denied the conviction of Spolin client Alex Ivey to undo.
An LA federal magistrate judge reviewing a petition for a convicted murderer named Davione Wiley noted, “Petitioner failed to explain what opinions a gang expert would have added that would have benefited his defense.” She added: “This court is not the forum for the petitioner to develop the evidence.”
Top habeas experts said courts need detailed evidence in filings before considering whether to hold an evidence hearing.
“You have to have the raw evidence for the judge to analyze. You can’t just say, “I asked my lawyer to hire a ballistics expert and he didn’t do it.” That’s bullshit,” said Cliff Gardner, who has been handling habeas cases in California for 40 years and represented Scott Peterson in his successful effort to have his death sentence overturned.
Showing some of Spolin’s documents, he said, “That’s a pointless, completely unimaginable way to approach a habeas petition.”
Presented by The Times with seven different cases where courts noted weak evidence, Spolin argued that judges in those cases and others were wrong from a constitutional point of view. He said he had not submitted the evidence that other lawyers had on principle because “there shouldn’t be such an incredibly high bar” for a judge to order a witness hearing where witnesses can be subpoenaed and testimonies can be obtained. made in a public court. He described himself as a lonely but righteous quest to change the law, akin to fighting for same-sex marriage.
“I believe that if we keep knocking on the door like this, we will have a judge who will be brave enough to change the law,” he said in an interview at his office.
When asked if he conveyed this unusual strategy to clients’ families, Spolin said, “Often.”
“You have to have the raw evidence for the judge to analyze. You can’t just say, “I asked my lawyer to hire a ballistics expert and he didn’t do it.” That’s nonsense.’
—Cliff Gardner
Ivey’s sister, Rosia, a psychologist who works with autistic children in LA, denied that he ever informed her of that opinion.
“That would have been a red flag for me,” said Rosia Ivey, who paid part of Spolin’s fees in installments and put part on her credit card. “We certainly wouldn’t have paid $28,000 for that.”
Angelia Spikes, who worked overtime as an Oakland mail carrier to help pay for her brother Demond’s petition, also said Spolin never told her he was pursuing an unorthodox approach.
“I would never have given $20,000 for that. Hell no,” she said.
As in Soto’s case, the petition Spolin filed for Demond Spikes referred to the existence of an alibi witness, but did not include the man’s name, details of his account, or a statement. The petition was rejected.
“I didn’t know they had to press charges until I got a lawyer from prison and he told me what to do,” Spikes said. He said of his sister’s financial sacrifice, “My credibility has been damaged in her eyes. We couldn’t afford that.”
Habeas petitions are long shot by nature with an estimated failure rate as high as 98%. “All presumptions promote the truth, accuracy and fairness of the conviction and sentence,” states the oft-cited California case law, which places a “heavy burden” on inmates to establish otherwise.
“I believe that if we keep knocking on the door like this, we will have a judge who has the courage to change the law.”
— Aaron Spolin
Still, Erwin Chermerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law and co-author of a book on habeas, said the petitions are vital to a criminal justice system.
“I wouldn’t focus on how many times it fails, I would focus on the times it succeeds. Otherwise there would be times when innocent people were put to death or died in prison,” he said.
At Spolin Law, drafting habeas petitions sometimes fell into the hands of low-paid contract attorneys in other states, several said in interviews. Some said they were paid about $30 an hour and had no previous experience in legal practice. One contractor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect job prospects, said the process was often chaotic with multiple people working on different parts of a single petition to meet a deadline.
Spolin said he and other regular attorneys analyzed each case and devised a strategy for each habeas petition, but contractors were used to find relevant case law and put it into the filing.
“That’s a job many people can do,” he said, pointing out that their work is reviewed and edited by supervisors who are regular employees.
One is Daniel DeMaria, the company’s chief of legal research. Court documents show that New York authorities revoked DeMaria’s law license in 2017 because he failed to disclose that he had previously been caught cheating during an exam for a home use license in Canada.
Spolin said he was unaware of DeMaria’s track record when he hired him, but kept him on because of the quality of his work on federal cases, saying, “He’s a great investigator.”
In Soto’s case, his family paid $21,500 for a habeas petition after a family friend, Requel Becker, spoke to a case manager. “She made me feel like they would do their best to exonerate him.”
Becker was one of the people who had been with Soto on the day of the shooting, but she said the company never asked her or the others to sign a statement and she was unaware that this was standard practice.
Soto and his family might have had to accept the swift rejection of the petition had they not crossed paths with a volunteer who worked to exonerate the other man convicted of shooting a teenager in 2003.
When volunteer Jessica Jacobs Dirschel worked on the exemption case of Abel Solo, whose family initially hired Aaron Spolin to help them, she said she found Spolin’s work on the case “amateur” and “sloppy.” “I was shocked,” she said.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
The volunteer, Jessica Jacobs Dirschel, had searched the police file and police report and concluded that the other man, Jofama Coleman, was innocent. She contacted the Soto family, learned that he too maintained his innocence, and eventually obtained a copy of the habeas petition Spolin had drafted.
“I was shocked,” recalled Dirschel, describing it as “amateur” and “sloppy.” Besides the lack of witness testimony, she said, there was no evidence that Spolin’s company obtained any discoveries from prosecutors, the trial transcripts from the Coleman case or the police evidence known as the murder book. “No investigation, no investigation.”
Dirschel and Ellen J. Eggers, a retired state public defender who works on exemption cases, coached Becker and Soto in recovering their money, including pressuring Spolin about the information he had actually used in preparing the the habeas.
“I request a 100% full and immediate refund of money my family paid to your company after they were lured into an agreement with you that was based on aggressive advertising and/or false claims,” Soto wrote in a statement. letter to Spolin, according to a copy shared with The Times. “It is not right what you are doing to desperate prisoners and I hope you will choose to do me good by immediately issuing you a check for the full amount.”
According to Becker, Spolin’s company eventually returned most of the Soto’s money.
Spolin declined to discuss Soto’s case in detail, but denied that returning the money was an admission of wrongdoing.
“We returned it because we didn’t want to have any issues with these people who obviously seemed a nuisance,” he said.
Soto’s new legal team, led by Eggers, recently met with the LA district attorney’s office to present new evidence.
“They were extremely interested in it,” says Eggers, who previously worked with the Northern California Innocence Project to exonerate three men. She said the exculpatory evidence includes a taped interview with a star witness, exactly the kind of information a diligent habeas attorney would have turned up.
“It’s especially outrageous to think of an innocent man getting screwed over,” Eggers said of what she sees as Spolin’s failures in Soto’s case. “But I also hate that the guilty are screwed… They deserve fair representation and competent advice, too.”
