 Photo courtesy California Innocence Project On March, 27 1994, Felipe Angeles was shot and killed by two men outside of a Los Angeles apartment building that was being used as a brothel. The men argued, and during what appears to have been a robbery attempt Angeles was murdered.
A resident of the building, John Jones, told police he saw the shooter run away from the scene with a leg injury. Police searched local hospitals for suspects with leg injuries and found Reggie Cole. Jones identified Cole as the man he saw fleeing the scene. Roughly a month later police arrested Obie Anthony in an unrelated crime. Jones then identified Anthony as the other shooter. No physical or forensic evidence connected either Cole or Anthony to the murder.
Jones testified against both men and claimed he had clearly seen them and that he received no benefit for his testimony. Cole and Anthony were convicted of first degree murder on August 1, 1995. Both were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In November 2000, Cole stabbed a man during a prison fight. The attorney representing him in that case looked into his original conviction because a second murder conviction would make him eligible for the death penalty. The attorney discovered that the prosecution had withheld evidence that Jones had fabricated his testimony. Cole’s attorney, working with the California Innocence Project, filed a habeas corpus petition with the Los Angeles County Superior Court based on the withheld evidence and ineffective representation by his defense attorney at trial.
The prosecution conceded that Cole’s legal defense had been inadequate and the court granted Cole an evidentiary hearing in 2007 to determine if that inadequate representation had likely affected the outcome of the trial. At the hearing, Jones admitted that he had never seen the shooter and that he had relied on the description provided by his daughters. There was also evidence that Jones himself may have been the shooter.
In April 2009, the Superior Court judge vacated Cole’s conviction, and the charges against him were dismissed in July 2009. Cole remained in prison for the November 2000 stabbing until 2010. After his attorneys argued that Cole should receive credit for time served on the overturned conviction, the district attorney’s office filed new charges against Cole for allegedly concealing a razor blade in his mattress while in prison. Cole was acquitted on that charge in December 2009.
The California Innocence Project also received a request for help from Anthony and became involved in his case in 2008. They established that in addition to fabricating his eyewitness testimony, Jones had perjured himself when he claimed that he had received no benefit for his testimony. In fact the district attorney had granted him favorable treatment on a pimping and pandering charge he was facing, and the trial prosecutors failed to inform the court or the defense that Jones had presented perjured testimony. The Innocence Project also showed that Anthony's trial attorney had not conducted an investigation that would have undermined the prosecutors’ case.
On October 1, 2011 a judge vacated Anthony’s conviction because of ineffective assistance of counsel and prosecutorial misconduct, and he was released on October 4th. Prosecutors dismissed the charges on November 18, 2011.
In August 2012, Anthony filed a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking damages from the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County.
During the lawsuit proceedings, lawyers for Anthony took a sworn deposition from former Los Angeles Times reporter Miles Corwin, who wrote a book that featured the case involving Anthony and Cole.
The lawsuit accused Marcella Winn and Pete Razanskas, the detectives in the case, of concealing evidence that Jones, whom they claimed at trial was just a citizen bystander, in fact ran a brothel at the building. The lawsuit asserted that the officers ignored the fact that Jones may have been the person who fired the shots, including the bullet that killed the victim.
At Anthony’s post-conviction hearing, Corwin and detective Winn testified that detective Razanskas had found and pocketed bullets. Both, however, failed to mention that Razanskas had given slugs to Corwin and Corwin never mentioned that he had kept them.
At Corwin's deposition for the civil lawsuit, Corwin admitted that he still had the bullets from the night of the shooting that Razanskas gave him. Lawyers for Anthony obtained the bullets from Corwin and retained an expert who conducted a ballistics analysis. The expert concluded that the bullet matched a bullet found on the ground that may have been the slug that killed Angeles.
In 2015, the city of Los Angeles agreed to settle the lawsuit and Los Angeles County settled the case. Anthony also received compensation from the state of California.Cole also filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city and county of Los Angeles. That suit was settled for $5.2 million in January 2017. In July 2017, California Gov. Jerry Brown approved $340,620 in state compensation for Cole.
– Michael S. Perry and Maurice Possley
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