Wrongfully convicted man sues city
“Mr. Ciria is not just seeking justice for the egregious violation of his civil rights ..., but also to hold the City and County of San Francisco accountable and responsible for its misconduct and to deter its recurrence.”
Jim Bennett and George Harris, attorneys for Joaquin Ciria, below, in a joint emailed statement
Seven months after emerging from 32 years of wrongful imprisonment, Joaquin Ciria on Tuesday filed suit against the city of San Francisco, alleging that police misconduct led to his long plight.
Ciria, 61, was convicted in the 1990 homicide of his best friend, Felix “Carlos” Bastarrica, 30, in a South of Market alley. He was convicted largely on the testimony of an 18-year-old who admitted driving the killer. The witness has since said that Ciria was innocent and that police pressured him to implicate Ciria, according to sworn witness statements.
Ciria “was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned because the San Francisco Police Department knowingly manufactured false evidence against him,” Ciria’s attorneys, Jim Bennett and George Harris, said in a joint emailed statement. “By filing this Complaint, Mr. Ciria is not just seeking justice for the egregious violation of his civil rights that he suffered, but also to hold the City and County of San Francisco accountable and responsible for its misconduct and to deter its recurrence.”
Ciria’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, seeks a jury trial to determine what damages he’s owed.
Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, had no comment except to say the suit will be reviewed.
Ciria was freed in April, joining the ranks of at least six men — all Black — who were found to have been wrongfully convicted in San Francisco since 1990. While the city has paid settlements to at least four of the men — and lost a civil lawsuit to
one at trial, leading to a $13 million payout — city attorneys spent varying amounts of time opposing them first.
Ciria’s suit is unique in that the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office — through then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin — has admitted in court filings that police inappropriately pressed the star witness to identify Ciria. In other cases, the city argued police had done nothing wrong.
This marks the second time the city has been sued over a wrongful conviction involving homicide inspectors Arthur Gerrans and James Crowley. The now-retired detectives were the lead investigators in Ciria’s case as well as the case of Maurice Caldwell, who was also convicted in a 1990 homicide.
Gerrans has said he and his partner did nothing wrong in either case; Crowley couldn’t be reached. In Caldwell’s case, both men have denied wrongdoing.
Caldwell was released in 2011 after a judge overturned his conviction. He sued the city, which fought nearly a decade before agreeing to an $8 million settlement.
Ciria’s conviction was overturned following investigations by attorney Ellen Eggers, the Northern California Innocence Project and the San Francisco Innocence Commission, created by Boudin and operating under the purview of the District Attorney’s Office. In addition to the recantations of the star witness, the commission cited statements by a man who said he was a long-silent witness to the murder and knew the killer as a different man.
The Innocence Commission found that the Police Department secretly paid a witness $10,000 for her testimony incriminating Ciria at trial, according to the lawsuit.
The suit also names as a defendant retired longtime San Francisco police officer Nicolas Rubino. The suit alleges that Rubino, who didn’t immediately respond to messages, and other unknown officers had been surveiling Ciria in a drug investigation at the time of the murder and, thus, had to have known that Ciria couldn’t have been at the crime scene.