Credibility of inspector questioned by defense
Attorneys for the man accused of killing Kate Steinle on San Francisco’s Pier 14 said Monday they should have been told that a former city police inspector who is a key prosecution witness in the second-degree murder trial had been sued over purportedly false testimony he gave in a separate murder case.
But the district attorney’s office said claims made in a lawsuit do not necessarily reflect on a police officer’s credibility.
The dispute involves John Evans, a now-retired crime-scene investigations inspector, who testified Oct. 30 that Steinle’s death at age 32 must have been the result of an intentional shooting toward her.
“A human being held a firearm, pointed it in the direction of Ms. Steinle and pulled the trigger,” Evans said. “This is the only way this could have occurred that is reasonable.”
But attorneys for Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, 45, say the killing was an accident that happened when the defendant found a stolen gun, which went off in his hands and fired a single bullet that bounced off the concrete ground. A defense expert disagreed with Evans, testifying that a bullet that ricochets may veer left or right rather than continuing on a straight path.
Defense Attorney Matt Gonzalez of the public defender’s office said Monday that he had, last week, filed a motion to Superior Court Judge Samu-
el K. Feng seeking more information about Evans’ role in a separate case. The officer was accused this year in a lawsuit of misrepresenting gun evidence in a 2007 homicide that led to an overturned conviction and then an acquittal.
Such information, defense attorneys argue, could raise questions about Evans’ credibility and should have been turned over by prosecutors prior to Garcia Zarate’s trial under a Supreme Court ruling that governs potentially exculpatory evidence. They said they didn’t know about the past case until after Evans took the stand, when their own expert witness told them he had been retained in the lawsuit against Evans.
It’s not clear if the dispute will affect Garcia Zarate’s trial, in which closing arguments are scheduled for Nov. 20. Prosecutors sought Monday to recall Evans to the stand as a rebuttal witness, but the judge did not allow it, without elaborating on his reasons.
“Our general sense of this witness after seeing him on the stand and cross-examining him was, ‘Wow, this guy is willing to say whatever he needs to say to help the prosecution,’ ” Gonzalez said. “That was before we knew about (the earlier case). Certainly after the fact, it leads us to think, this is the guy’s M.O. He’s there to assist the prosecution.”
Evans did not respond to requests for comment. John Coté, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, called the civil complaint against Evans “completely false,” while the district attorney’s office said the accusation has not been proved.
“We make determinations of people’s credibility based on objective, verifiable facts,” said Alex Bastian, an office spokesman. “We don’t make them based on unsubstantiated allegations made in a civil lawsuit.”
Evans is one of several defendants in a pending federal suit filed by Jamal Trulove, a onetime reality TV contestant who spent six years in jail before he was found not guilty. Trulove’s attorneys said evidence Evans documented from the crime scene relating to the position of shell casings ejected from a gun should have discredited a key eyewitness account, but that his testimony distorted a study on shell casings done by a fellow forensics inspector.
That inspector — Ronan Shouldice, who is also named in the suit — said in a sworn deposition that Evans’ testimony at Trulove’s second trial was “inaccurate” and a “misrepresentation” of his study.
The case began in July 2007, when Seu Kuka, 28, was shot nine times at the Sunnydale public housing complex. Trulove was arrested the next year, and in 2010 he was convicted and sentenced to 50 years to life in prison. An appeals court reversed the conviction in 2014, saying the prosecutor made an unsubstantiated claim to the jury that the eyewitness was risking her life. Trulove was retried and acquitted in 2015.
The eyewitness told officers she saw the shooting from her grandmother’s apartment window. She tentatively identified the killer as Trulove, affirming her judgment after seeing him three months later as a guest on the reality TV show “I Love New York 2.”
Trulove’s suit says crimescene evidence, including the position of shell casings, discredited the witness’ account. She told officers the attacker shot Keku from the west, but investigators found shell casings trailing away on the opposite side of the body.
A 2001 city study by Shouldice found that most shell casings ejected by 9mm pistols, like the one used in Sunnydale, travel to the right and rear of a gun. But in 2010, Evans testified that a shell casing is “subjected to whatever the environment holds for it out there,” and in 2015 he testified that “casings go in all directions,” saying it was a “fallacy” to trace the location of a shooter based on shell casings.
For the casings to end up where they did in the case, as described by the witness, they would have had to be ejected forward over the muzzle, Trulove’s lawsuit says.
Evans testified that “studies that we have done in the San Francisco Police Department crime scenes investigation unit” showed that “a large percentage” of shell casings end up in front of the gun.
In a civil-court deposition, Evans said he was referencing Shouldice’s study and his own experience. Shouldice, who testified in 2015 that his study showed that “end results would be random” when it came to ejected shell casings, admitted in his own deposition that this was inaccurate.
Evans initially stated in his deposition that he hadn’t read Shouldice’s study in full before he testified, but later said he was referencing it in his 2015 testimony, and that he had spoken to Shouldice about the study before the second trial.