New evidence revealed as 'Riders' retrial starts

New evidence revealed as 'Riders' retrial starts

By Glenn Chapman, STAFF WRITER

OAKLAND -- Opening remarks commenced Monday in the "Riders" police corruption retrial with a prosecutor dramatically unveiling new evidence indicating the former cops framed and beat young men in West Oakland in the summer of 2000.

Deputy District Attorney Terry Wiley pointed at Matthew Hornung, Clarence "Chuck" Mabanag and Jude Siapno and assured jurors the men were Riders who abused citizens, suspects and police rookies.

The new evidence, handwriting analysis obtained by prosecutors Ben Beltramo and Wiley last month, backs those who testified to abuses by the Riders, according to Wiley.

Lloyd Cunningham, the expert who conducted the tests, found telltale signs that reports were modified, Wiley told jurors.

"You just got busted," Wiley said to Mabanag, Hornung and Siapno as he flashed a picture of a supposedly falsified report onto a screen.

Mabanag, 39, Siapno, 36, and Matthew Hornung, 32, face a combined total of 15 criminal charges. The bulk of the accusations contend the trio, and reputed Riders leader Frank Vazquez, lied in police reports to justify specious arrests and hide brutal tactics.

Mabanag, Siapno, Hornung and Vazquez were fired from their jobs as Oakland police officers after a rookie, Keith Batt, went to internal affairs investigators in July 2000 to tell of violence and deceit by a cadre of officers dubbed the Riders.

"The community called them Riders, and they loved it," Wiley told the jurors. "They'd be in the locker room bragging and joking about being know in the community as corrupt cops."

Wiley lambasted defense attorneys for depicting Batt, now a Pleasanton cop, as lying to get back at taunting veteran officers. Wiley told jurors it was Mabanag who lied when he denied doctoring reports.

The new analysis showed modifications to a written statement signed by then-18-year-old Kenneth Soriano after he clashed with Mabanag outside a cousin's home June 19, 2000, and wound up "face-planted" into the sidewalk. It was Batt's first night on patrol, and Mabanag, his training officer, supposedly promised him a fight.

Batt told of how, after Soriano was dropped off at jail, Mabanag showed him "a little trick." In a space between the end of Soriano's written statement and signature, Mabanag added text exonerating the officers, according to Batt.

Mabanag denied teaching any such trick or making any change to Soriano's statement.

Cunningham found that the portion of the statement Batt says was written by Soriano was "embossed" on the back of the paper because it had been atop other pages. Soriano's signature at the bottom caused the same embossing effect.

Sentences added by Mabanag later, on a clip board, left no marks on the back of the page, Wiley said.

White correction fluid was used on reports from the arrests of Matthew Watson and Delphine Allen, according to Wiley. Watson and Allen were taken on separate occasions for beatings by Vazquez and Siapno as "payback" for defying them, according to Wiley. Vazquez is to believed to have fled the country.

The Watson arrest report originally read that officers noticed the 16-year-old stuff "something" down his pants, Cunningham determined. It was whited out and changed to read "a clear plastic bag containing white rocks."

A time was changed on the Allen report, ostensibly to make it seem officers didn't have the chance to take Allen under a freeway overpass and thrash him so hard his eye swelled shut.

Enlarged color photographs of the injured arrestees, Allen and Watson, were on easels facing the jury as Wiley spoke. Pictures of the accused men hung from a wall behind Wiley.

Almost all of those pounced on by Riders were African Americans, ages 16 to 20, and so limited in education and social status that it was unlikely anyone would believe them over a cop, Wiley maintained.

"They don't have the tools to defend themselves in this environment," Wiley said, adding the purported victims will have pasts that jurors might not like.

"Terry Wiley has presented his case clearly, convincingly and consistently," said the Rev. Frank Pinkard Jr. of Evergreen Baptist Church. "If he keeps that up, we will see a different result from last time."

The original Riders trial spanned more than a year before ending in September 2003 with jurors acquitting on eight charges and deadlocked on the remaining counts.

Pinkard was one of a dozen Baptist ministers in the courtroom Monday.

"We thought it was only fair to come show our respect and gratitude for the district attorney putting himself on the line with a retrial," Pinkard said. "We'll be here throughout the trial."

The three accused men were standing facing the gallery seconds after the jury left when Jonah Zern of Education Not Incarceration shouted an insult and was shooed from the courtroom by a bailiff.

"I called them scum of the earth," the 26-year-old Oakland school teacher said in a hallway. "I'm just angry ... The Riders are a symbol of a deeper problem in the Oakland Police Department."

While the jury was out of the courtroom, defense attorneys Mike Rains, Ed Fishman and William Rapoport lodged a flurry of objections and demanded Judge Jeffrey Horner declare a mistrial because Wiley told jurors that the last jury didn't hear the handwriting evidence.

Horner denied the mistrial motion.

Rapoport, who represents Siapno, contended it was improper for Wiley to tell jurors that because of snags such as "scheduling problems" witnesses sometimes don't testify in person. Watson's previous originally testimony would be introduced at trial, but the teenager won't appear.

Rapoport contended it is unfair to give the impression it was something innocuous that prevents Watson from testifying, when the truth is Watson was shot dead in a carjacking after getting a big chunk of a $10.9 million settlement paid by Oakland to more than 100 people who claimed to be victimized by a clique of cops called the Riders.

Siapno testified at the first trial that he didn't beat Watson. Siapno said he took the teenager for some fast food and lectured him that being a player in Oakland's underworld would get him killed.

Horner dismissed defense attorney complaints that Wiley's emphasis on the ethnicity of the supposed victims implied racial profiling.

Wiley continues his opening statements this morning in Horner's courtroom in Rene Davidson Courthouse in Oakland.