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Thread: Michael Allen - California

  1. #1
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    Michael Allen - California




    Summary of Offense:

    Cleamon "Big Evil" Johnson, described by police detectives and FBI agents as the city's most violent gang member, was sentenced to death on December 12, 1997, along with co-defendant Michael "Fat Rat" Allen, for the August 5, 1991 murders of two men at a South-Central Los Angeles carwash.

    In another case, prosecutors said an inmate known as "Big Evil" was assigned as a trusty after being sentenced to death for killing two people in South Los Angeles in 1991. Cleamon Johnson, a leader in the violent street gang 89 Family Bloods, was in County Jail awaiting trial on a new murder case at the time. While an inmate worker, prosecutors said, Johnson used his privileges to intimidate witnesses against him.

    Donald Ray Loggins worked at a local cable company, and since the birth of his son five months earlier, he had been as punctual as a Marine Corps reveille. He would pull into the driveway of his pleasant two-bedroom, South-Central Los Angeles home at 2:45 p.m. to watch the baby while his wife Violet got ready for her swing-shift job. But on August 5, 1991, Violet was sitting on the couch, cradling their child and staring at the telephone, wondering why her husband was so late.

    Loggins and his friend were killed because they lived east of Central Avenue, a dividing line between (Kitchen) Crips and Bloods. Evil says neither was a gang member, but Johnson, seeking to provide a newly recruited Blood with a mission to earn his stripes, spotted them and issued their death sentences.

    In total, police attribute more than 20 murders to Johnson. But even using the lower figure to which Johnson has confessed, that means he murdered as many people as "Freeway Killer" William Bonin or "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez. In all likelihood, Evil's relative obscurity has to do with where the slaughter occurred. No celebrities among these victims. No Palos Verdes bankers or Newport Beach realtors. These were innocents just trying to survive, or young gang members in way over their heads. Johnson's defense tried to portray him as a victim of geography. "Evil is a product of 89th and Central," said Joe Orr, counsel for Johnson's co-defendant, Michael "Fat Rat" Allen. "With his charm, there's no telling how far he could have gone. He was talented, but his abilities were diverted to the streets. If he had been raised in a different area, this would not have happened."

    On August 5, 1991, Johnson ordered Allen to get an Uzi submachine gun and "serve" two men at a carwash at Central Avenue and 88th Street. Allen shot to death Donald Ray Loggins and Payton Beroit in broad daylight in front of more than a dozen witnesses, according to authorities. Loggins and Beroit were not gang members, but lived in rival gang turf. Johnson, who authorities say killed at least a dozen people during his reign as the shot-caller of his gang, the 89 Family Bloods, declared his innocence after he was sentenced. He called police a "lynch mob" and vowed to have his conviction overturned.

    For more on Johnson, see: http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...hlight=cleamon

  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    THE PEOPLE v MICHAEL ALLEN and CLEAMON JOHNSON

    In today's California Supreme Court opinions, Allen's conviction and death sentence were reversed.

  3. #3
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    December 5, 2011

    CA Supreme Court reverses death sentence of 'Big Evil' gang leader

    In a rare double-reversal in a capital murder case, the California Supreme Court on Monday threw out the convictions and death sentences of notorious South Los Angeles gang leader Cleamon "Big Evil" Johnson and one of his cohorts for the August 1991 slayings of two rivals.

    The state's highest court unanimously ruled that the trial judge erred by discharging a juror during deliberations in the guilt phase of the trial for prejudging the case and relying on evidence that was not presented at trial.

    "Because the record does not show to a demonstrable reality that Juror No. 11 was unable to discharge his duty, the (trial) court abused its discretion by removing him," according to the court's ruling.

    Johnson, 44, and co-defendant Michael "Fat Rat" Allen, 39, were convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances for the Aug. 5, 1991, killings of Donald Ray Loggins and Payton Beroit, who were shot three times each while sitting in a white Toyota Supra parked outside a car wash in the 8700 block of South Central Avenue.

    They have been on San Quentin's Death Row since Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charles Horan sentenced them in December 1997, calling the death penalty the "only appropriate sentence in this case."

    Johnson was once described by police detectives and FBI agents as Los Angeles' most violent gang member. Police have attributed more than 20 murders to him, including the killings of witnesses to his "89 Family Bloods" gang's other crimes, and, according to the FBI, he admitted to 13 murders by his own hands.

    Johnson, who was 24 at the time, allegedly gave Allen the assault weapon used in the slayings of Loggins and Beroit. Allen — 18 at the time — volunteered to commit the crime after Johnson asked his fellow gang members who wanted to shoot Payton, authorities said.

    While the jury was deliberating in the guilt phase of the trial, Judge Horan discharged Juror No. 11 for making up his mind before deliberations began. Two jurors reported that he said on the second day of deliberations, "When the prosecution rested, she didn't have a case."

    An alternate juror replaced Juror No. 11 and the reconstituted jury convicted Johnson and Allen of first-degree murder with special circumstances and, after the penalty phase, recommended that they be sentenced to death.

    In its ruling, the California Supreme Court said Juror No. 11 had "only made reference to his previous state of mind at a single point during the trial" and there was no evidence that he "began deliberations with a closed mind, or declined to deliberate."

    "That Juror No. 11 was unimpressed by the strength of the evidence and unpersuaded by his colleagues' assertions during deliberations does not amount to prejudgment," the court said. "To conclude otherwise would threaten the ability of jurors to express minority viewpoints during deliberations and undermine the principle that both parties are entitled to the independent judgment of each individual juror."

    Horan also found that Juror No. 11 based an opinion of a witness' credibility on evidence that was not presented at trial. The witness, Carl Connor, claimed to have been near the scene at the time of the shootings and identified Allen as the shooter. Explaining why a timecard showed he was at work at the time, Connor said a friend had punched in for him.

    Juror No. 11 was skeptical of that testimony, saying during deliberations, "That's a lie. I know Hispanics, they never cheat on timecards, so this witness was at work, end of discussion."

    The Supreme Court said the juror "expressed no general bias against any group of which the witness Connor might have been a member. Rather, he drew on his own personal life experience to conclude this witness lacked credibility because of the explanation he gave for a critical discrepancy."

    http://www.wavenewspapers.com/news/l...135047878.html

  4. #4
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    LAPD detective's use of the N-word roils infamous gang murder case

    By Corina Knoll
    Los Angeles Times

    At a Little Tokyo bar, drinks fueled a heated discussion among a group of lawyers and a Los Angeles police investigator.

    Then talk turned to police corruption.

    Veteran LAPD Det. Brian McCartin told his three companions about his experience encountering black gang members. He referred to them using the N-word.

    “What, you’ve never used that word in the privacy of your own living room?” he asked when the slur was met with shock, according to court documents.

    Among the group was Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Rabbani, who was prosecuting Cleamon Johnson, a black gang leader known as “Big Evil” and charged with five murders. McCartin was his lead investigator.

    The May 2014 conversation, which was not turned over to the defense until earlier this year, has become a thorny legal issue in the pending death penalty case against Johnson and offers a glimpse inside a police department that tried over the last two decades to weed out the systemic, casual racism that was once an inherent part of its culture.

    Johnson’s attorneys argue that Rabbani should be disqualified from the case because he failed to hand over evidence of a law enforcement officer’s racial bias, despite their repeated requests for exculpatory evidence. By law, prosecutors are required to turn over “Brady” evidence — named for a landmark Supreme Court decision — which includes information that could undermine the credibility of government witnesses.

    They also argue McCartin’s words suggest that racism permeated his entire investigation.

    “The willful and deliberate cover-up of the incident in which McCartin’s racist beliefs were expressed brings into question … what other forms of racism or inappropriate conduct have been suppressed and what each agency feared in exposing this particular incident,” defense attorney Stephen Dunkle wrote in his motion for an evidence hearing.

    Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Curtis Rappe denied the motion in March, ruling that Rabbani had acted in good faith by reporting the exchange to his office’s discovery compliance unit.

    A prosecutor with the unit at the time concluded that McCartin had been referring specifically to gang members and that his use of the slur “taken in proper context, does not provide circumstantial evidence that he is biased against African Americans,” according to court documents.

    An appellate court panel of three judges ultimately sided with Rappe, although one dissented. The matter now rests with the state Supreme Court, which will determine whether the defense is entitled to a hearing that looks more closely at how prosecutors handled the incident.

    McCartin left the department in June 2015, taking a $485,000 payout as a member of the agency’s deferred retirement program, as well as an annual pension. Records show he now resides in Arizona. He could not be reached for this story.

    The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said in a statement to The Times that it does not condone McCartin’s language and that its legal analysis was conducted only to determine if the detective’s comment was so racially biased that it had to be disclosed to the defense.

    Johnson’s defense attorney, who declined to comment to The Times, said in court documents that the appellate ruling could lead to “recusal of other members of the district attorney’s office or the office as a whole, as well as other possible sanctions.”

    An LAPD spokeswoman said the agency conducted an investigation into McCartin’s comments, but declined to comment further.

    A deadly reputation


    McCartin, who joined the department in 1983, spent years patrolling South Los Angeles. He was eventually put on the investigation into Johnson, whose Blood-affiliated gang, the 89 Family Swans, had a deadly reputation.

    In 1997, Johnson, along with Michael “Fat Rat” Allen, was sentenced to death in connection with the killing of Donald Ray Loggins and Payton Beroit, who lived in rival gang territory. Fourteen years later, the state Supreme Court voided the decision, ruling that the judge improperly removed a juror from the trial.

    Separately, Johnson was charged with the 1991 murder of Tyrone Mosley, who was shot at a gang party. Johnson acted as his own legal counsel. The 1999 case was thrown out after the jury deadlocked.

    On May 13, 2014, prosecutors retracted the first indictment and filed a new complaint against Johnson and Allen.

    Both men are again accused of killing Loggins and Beroit. Johnson is charged with the deaths of Mosley as well as two additional murders — of Albert Sutton in 1992 and Georgia Denise Jones in 1994 — and the attempted murder of Kim Coleman in 1991.

    Johnson’s attorneys argued the prosecution’s move was vindictive. While an appellate court said there was sufficient evidence to raise the issue, it denied the motion to dismiss the case.

    Debate turns ugly

    The day after the new charges were filed, Rabbani wanted to thank his investigator over drinks.

    Bringing along Leslie Hinshaw, a law clerk with the district attorney’s office who is now a prosecutor, Rabbani met up with McCartin at Justice Urban Tavern in downtown Los Angeles.

    The trio eventually made their way a couple of blocks over to Far Bar, where they mingled with other attorneys and watched the Stanley Cup playoffs.

    Peter Arian, then a deputy federal public defender, joined them. The group’s discussion grew heated as they debated controversial topics like drone strikes, Guantanamo Bay and the death penalty.

    At some point, Arian suggested that corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department was pervasive.

    McCartin responded with expletives and talked about his experience with gang members.

    His remarks were detailed in statements written by Rabbani and Arian. Hinshaw recorded her recollection of the night. The three accounts, filed in court in February of this year, varied in details, but the takeaways were similar.

    Rabbani wrote that McCartin “said something to the effect of, ‘I was out there with those niggers.’ … Referring to the gang members, he then stated, ‘They call themselves that.’”

    Rabbani and Hinshaw said the detective then suggested it was not unusual to use the slur in one’s own home.

    In an email he wrote to himself to memorialize the incident, Arian didn’t mention gang members but said McCartin used the slur while making a comparison of black residents.

    Rabbani, Arian and Hinshaw responded that it was racist and inappropriate. The group awkwardly dispersed.

    In a statement submitted to his office about three weeks later, Rabbani said he had known McCartin professionally for two years and had never heard the detective “express any kind of bias towards anyone, whether race-based, gender-based, religion-based or otherwise.”

    Rabbani later notified McCartin that he was looking into whether the racial slurs needed to be disclosed to the defense.

    “Detective McCartin expressed concern that he may lose his job. I told him … it was my legal obligation to pass this information on to my supervisors,” Rabbani said in court documents.

    In June 2017, the district attorney’s office notified the LAPD that McCartin had been added to its list of officers with credibility issues, according to court documents. Eight months later, the office informed Johnson’s attorney about McCartin’s racist comments.

    By then Rabbani, although still assisting with the case, had stepped aside as lead prosecutor due to health issues. Deputy Dist. Atty Jonathan Chung took his place.

    “It’s clear that McCartin’s statements were, as counsel is saying, disturbing. They were, in a way, racist,” Chung said at a March hearing, according to a transcript of court proceedings.

    “They have to be understood in the context of where they were said and why they were said. … It wasn’t racist in the sense that he was generalizing all African Americans with that general pejorative. What he was saying was that he had a particularly nasty view as it related to gang members.”

    The district attorney’s office said although prosecutors found in 2014 that they were not legally required to disclose McCartin’s statements, they did so in February “in an abundance of caution.”

    Chung, Rabbani, Hinshaw and Arian declined to comment.

    Johnson, 50, who was on death row at San Quentin State Prison before being transferred to a Los Angeles county jail, is expected to face trial next year.

    Complaints persist

    Decades of reforms at the LAPD have remade a department where officers once exchanged virulently racist messages over their patrol car computers with impunity. Since that era, the LAPD has undergone vast changes in terms of diversity, tactics within communities of color and discipline of openly racist attitudes.

    Longtime LAPD critics acknowledge the improvements, but complaints of racial profiling, excessive force against nonwhite residents and racism persist.

    In 2014, police officials and a disciplinary board recommended the removal of LAPD Officer Shaun Hillmann, who was caught on tape referring to a black man as a “monkey,” among other slurs. Hillmann, whose father and uncle worked for the department, had his job saved by LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, who instead imposed a 65-day suspension.

    Later, Det. Frank Lyga was recommended for termination after making racially charged statements, including one about a black off-duty officer he fatally shot. “I could have killed a whole truckload of them, and I would have been happy doing it,” he said.

    Lyga retired before he could be fired and was eventually awarded a $50,000 settlement from the city after filing a discrimination suit that alleged a black officer would not have been fired for the same comments.

    Civil rights attorney Connie Rice, a longtime critic of racism within government institutions who has advised recent LAPD chiefs on reforming the department’s culture, said the McCartin incident appeared to be more of a failure of the district attorney’s office.

    “This is more about the prosecutorial culture that hasn’t changed,” Rice said. “They’re still stuck in a mindset that you don’t prosecute cops, you don’t hold cops accountable. ... They’ve got too much baggage from the old culture, and they should have turned this information over.”

    http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lapd-racist-slur-20180701-story.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
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    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #5
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Former death row inmate dies awaiting retrial in LA County

    Hey Socal

    A South Los Angeles gang member whose conviction and death sentence for the 1991 killings of two gang rivals was reversed by the California Supreme Court was found dead in his cell while awaiting retrial in the case, state officials said Monday.

    Michael “Fat Rat” Allen, 49, was found unresponsive in his cell at the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles on Feb. 6, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He was treated by medical staff, but was pronounced dead that night, officials said.

    A cause of death was pending.

    Allen was initially sent to prison in December 1993 to serve life without parole for murder and attempted murder. While incarcerated, he was convicted and sentenced to death in 1997 along with notorious gang leader Cleamon “Big Evil” Johnson for the Aug. 5, 1991, killings of Donald Ray Loggins and Payton Beroit, who were shot three times each while sitting in a white Toyota Supra parked outside a car wash in the 8700 block of South Central Avenue.

    That conviction and death sentence, however, were overturned in 2011, with the state Supreme Court ruling that the trial judge erred by discharging a juror during deliberations in the guilt phase of the trial for prejudging the case and relying on evidence that was not presented at trial.

    “Because the record does not show to a demonstrable reality that Juror No. 11 was unable to discharge his duty, the (trial) court abused its discretion by removing him,” according to the court’s ruling.

    Allen was moved from San Quentin State Prison to a Los Angeles County jail cell in 2012 to await retrial in the case, which was still pending at the time of his death.

    https://heysocal.com/2022/03/14/form...-in-la-county/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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