It's Never Too Late...

...to help a man, wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit, regain his freedom. Regardless of the years remaining of the unjust sentence he has been forced to endure, his quest for freedom is just as important as those of men in the early stages of wrongful incarceration.These pages will contain his story, his pleas for justice that have heretofore fallen on deaf ears. His voice, broadcast to the unhearing, unwilling to listen, unable to help shall find a home here. Hope springs eternal in his heart that society, law enforcement, friends and those in a position to help will hear of his case and put an end to this tragedy of justice.Please use the navigation bar above to view contact information, court documents, letters written by Bruce, new articles and photographs of Bruce and the life he was forced to leave behind.

THE COST OF WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS

Can we afford to let wrongful convictions go uncorrected and to continue happening? Society is greatly affected when an innocent citizen is unjustly convicted and imprisoned.   The loss is to individuals, families, communities, and society in general. How many contributions to our world have been lost because someone has been unjustly locked away? Could cancer have been cured? Could there have been a solution for world peace? What art has not been created? How much good would have the wasted money and resources done to benefit our state and nation.

 The California Wrongful Convictions Project has found that since 1989 two hundred thirteen (213) innocent Californians spent a collective 1,311 years in state or federal prisons before their convictions were reversed or dismissed. It cost the taxpayers over one hundred twenty million dollars ($120,000,000) for incarceration, settlement, and compensation.

As the pace of DNA exonerations has grown in recent years, wrongful convictions have revealed disturbing fissures and trends in our criminal justice system.  These cases have shown us the criminal justice system in California is broken and how urgently it needs to be fixed.

The numbers do not tell the real cost in human suffering and lost lives.  The stories all have the same elements but in different combinations; negligent attorneys, witness misidentifications, lax investigations, and a rush to judgment by the members of law enforcement.

Herman Atkins, a resident of Riverside spent almost twelve (12) years in prison for the rape of a woman during a robbery in 1986 before he was finally released due to results of DNA testing.  In 1996 Kevin Baruxes was convicted of a rape in San Diego County and served seven and a half (7-1/2) years of a life sentence before the was exonerated faulty eye witness testimony. Arvind Balu lost eight (8) years of his life convicted of a gang rape he never committed. He was finally released after the eye witness testimony was false.

These men, however, are the “lucky” ones.  They finally received justice. How many more men are still serving time in California prisons for wrongful convictions? How much of your taxpayer money is used each year to house and feed these people? Those who have been exonerated by DNA testing are few compared to the citizens who have been wrongfully convicted in recent decades.  For every case that involves DNA evidence, there are thousands that do not.  Only a fraction of criminal cases involve biological evidence that can be subjected to DNA testing.  Even when such evidence exists, it is often lost or destroyed after the conviction which greatly reduces any chance of prevailing at or ever winning an appeal.  Without it, wrongfully convicted citizens have a slim chance of ever proving their innocence.

I have spent the last thirty (30) years in prison for crimes I did not commit because the evidence in my case was “routinely destroyed”.  My negligent trial attorney failed to serve the LAPD with the court order to have the forensic evidence preserved.  It may be a good idea for the evidence to be “routinely” preserved at least until ALL appeals have been exhausted. Had it been a practice to preserve evidence, I would be a free man today!

What is even more troubling is that the State Appellate Court refused my request to collect and test the saliva from one of the victims even while knowing my attorney had been negligent, that there was conflicting witness testimony, no physical evidence that implicated me, and that the same type of crimes continued at the same locale after I was convicted.  Citizens, BEWARE, you or someone you love could be wrongfully accused and jailed for someone else’s crime.

(For more information and to read court documents, see www.freebrucekanter.blogspot.com)

“These tragedies must not be compounded by stubbornness, or arrogance or, worst of all, indifference.  The more we can learn about wrongful convictions the better we will be able to prevent them, or failing that, to identify and correct the problem after the fact.” ~ The Innocence Project

(Note: Bruce Kanter is currently incarcerated at Avenal State Prison.  He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and completed the Teaching Program at California State University, Los Angeles. He had a stable job, was in a loving relationship with a young woman, had friends and family, and enjoyed life before the fateful day the LAPD knocked on his door.)

This letter appeared in the June 2013 edition of the Community Alliance (www.FresnoAlliance.org), a free publication.

A Letter From Bruce; May 2012

I have been incarcerated for almost thirty (30) years for sexual assaults I did not commit. When people first hear that, they look at me in disbelief and suddenly the subject is changed. Is it because the human mind can't relate to such a thing? We are all creatures of habit. We all like our freedom and our own space. Throughout history men have given their lives for freedom.

A defense attorney is supposed to defend; defend your right, defend your freedoms. The minute a defense attorney fails to do that, the entire system, and justice itself, has been corrupted and compromised.

My trial attorney, Charles English (now deceased), ran it down to me before the trial started. If I was guilty, we would avoid doing any forensic testing as it would convict me without a doubt. I told him that I was innocent. I told him to run all the tests, but he never did. To this day, I don't know why. What is worse, is that he failed to preserve the forensic evidence, even after personally getting a court order to do so. He simply never served the Los Angeles Police Department with the judge's order. Therefore the evidence that would have set me free years ago was destroyed soon after my trial. How can a man live with himself after betraying his client?

I was convicted solely on witness misidentification. There was never a shred of forensic or physical evidence, such as finger prints that pointed to me as the perpetrator in these horrible crimes. As a matter of fact, blood and fluid samples taken from me did not match any samples taken from the victims. There was no eidence to arrest me, let alone convict me, other than the traumatized testimony of the victims. It was never introduced at my trial that within two months of my arrest, several more women were attacked in the same apartment community (Los Feliz Village Apartments, Los Angeles, CA), in exactly the same manner as the ones I was convicted of. The description of the assailant was very similar to the descriptions that were given in my case.

The police knew that there were two other individuals that were suspect in all the attacks, but did no believe that they had arrested the wrong man. They called it a "copy-cat" crime. The police believed that a man that looked very similar to me decided to continue these attacks, using the very same MO at the very same location.

They never, for a minute, paused to consider that they were plainly and simply wrong and so they rushed to conviction. The actual assailant has been free to roam the streets of Los Angeles, and probably other cities and states, assaulting women for years!

In my petition of Haveas Corpus, which you can read for yourselves in the documents section here, we asked the courts to allow me to obtain and test blood and/or saliva samples from the primary victim in my case. The court refused to grant my request. My family and supporters have repeatedly requested that the victim simply spit in a cup so the enzymes could be tested.

My criminalist said that would be enough for a PGM/DNA test that would absolutely exonerate me. A rational person would think that she would want to make absolute certain that the man she identified as her attacker was actually the right man. She would not even consider giving the sample to be sure that the man that caused her so much pain and suffering was indeed being punished. The sad truth is that her attacker is still out there, free to attack time and again. She has stopped nothing by refusing to let us test her saliva, only succeeded in putting an innocent man in prison for seventy (70) years!

In this country, a person is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. Don't bet on it! When society places expediency over reality; innuendo over truth; there can never be real justice. The prosecution is supposed to have the job of proving a person's guilt. The defense is to prove that the person is not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. that is not what happened to me. I was deemed guilty from the minute I answered my door that awful day.

I look back to the very beginning of this nightmare, and am astonished that this could actually happen to me, to an innocent man. I answered a knock at my door and opened it to find drawn guns pointed at my head. It was so surreal, I kept thinking that it was all some mistake and the police would realize their error and leave. It soon became all too real as i was booked into the LA County jail. That was the very first time I'd ever been in jail for any reason. I closed my eyes and tried to rest, tried not to think. But for me, this was the beginning of the end.

I had graduated from Pace University in New York City in 1971 and moved to Los Angeles in 1972. I just wanted to settle down, get a good job, live a normal life. You know, the kind of life where you work, pay your own way, find someone to love and have a family with, enjoy the simple things in life like friends and parties and freedom to do pretty much what you want.

On November 2, 1982, my whole life and world came apart, destroyed du to a misidentification, and an attorney that did not fulfill his role as someone I contracted with to protect my freedom and innocence.

Now my normal life is being locked up day and night, having maybe a few hours in the sunshine, eating the same meals over and over and over again on the same days each week. I get to make one phone call a week and write letters to my family. There are no special days, holidays, birthdays or celebrations for me. I am paying with my life for someone else's crimes, and he is free.

"So justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for the light but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows. Like the blind we grope along the wall feeling out way like men without eyes. At midday we stumble as if it were twilight; among the strong, we are like the dead. We all growl like bears; we moan mounfully like doves. We look for JUSTICE, but find none; for deliverance, but it is far away." ~Isaiah 9-11

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you would like to contact me, please do.

~Bruce Kanter