Six years after a jury acquitted a Defense of the Defense of Modesto and his co -fetches in an alleged murder plot, the county of Stanislaus, agreed to settle a malicious trial for $ 22.5 million, one of the greatest payments of the genre in the history of the Californian courts.
County supervisors approved the regulation on Tuesday at the threshold of a trial in the federal case, which was carried by eight complainants who argued that the police and the prosecutors had made the accusations brought against them.
At the heart of the case was the late Frank Carson, a veteran lawyer for the defense of Modesto with a pugilist style who was delighted to upset the police and the prosecutors. The bad feeling towards him at the office of the district of Stanislaus County was no secret.
In August 2015, after a three -year investigation, the district prosecutor’s office accused him of a complicated plot to kill a scrap thief, Korey Kauffman, as revenge for the alleged flight of pipes on Carson’s property.
Eight others were accused of having helped Carson murdered Kauffman or covering the crime: two brothers who had a local alcohol store; Three members of California Highway Patrol; Carson’s wife and daughter-in-law; And a handymaicomania handyman who has entered into an agreement in exchange for his cooperation.
No physical evidence bound the accused on the death of Kauffman, 26, whose fragmented skeleton was found in the Stanislaus National Forest in 2013, 17 months after having disappeared. Kauffman, who usually stole to feed his dependence on methamphetamine, ran into a world where many people had wished him harm.
The skeletal remains of a scrap thief Korey Kauffman were discovered in August 2013 in the Stanislaus National Forest, 17 months after his disappearance.
But the investigators of the District Prosecutor’s Office – including those of Carson had publicly denounced and ridiculed – decided to focus on him on the basis of a council that Kauffman had planned to steal the property of Carson. The case led to a 18 -month preliminary hearing and a 17 -month trial, the second longest trial for murder in the history of California. While he was tried for murder, Carson continued to practice the right to the Modesto city center.
“I am reimbursed for 25 years to put my thumb in the eye of the man,” said Carson.
The Times explored the case in a 2021 podcast, “Frank Carson’s tests”.
The star witness was the handyman, Robert Woody, who, according to the testimony, smoked crystal methamphetamine when he admitted a girlfriend whom he had killed Kauffman and had nourished his body with pigs. The police arrested him and Woody insisted that he had invented the story to impress the girlfriend.
But a principal investigator in the district prosecutor’s office, Kirk Bunch – a man that Carson had attacked as “dishonest and non -professional” – promised disastrous wooded consequences if he did not cooperate, in an interview captured on a band.
“We can opt for the death penalty or life without parole,” Bunch told Woody, who finally gave prosecutors an elaborate history involving Carson and others.
Woody’s story has changed several times, often under a very suggestive question of the police, and he failed to lead the police to a single physical evidence linked to homicide.
This did not prevent prosecutors from building their case on his word. At the trial, he testified that Carson had asked the owner of the Bobby Athwal alcohol store to pay attention to the thieves on his field marked out in Turlock, where – Woody said – he witnessed Athwal and his brother fatally attacking Kauffman.
In an interview with The Times after the trial, Woody said he had composed the whole account because he had no other choice. He faced an accusation of first degree murder and wanted to see his family again. He described his testimony as an “imagination” and “stories they wanted to hear”.
In the end, Woody, who was authorized to plead without a guilty homicide competition in exchange for a sentence of seven years in prison, was the only person condemned in connection with the death of Kauffman.
Carson and the owners of alcohol stores, Athwal and his brother Daljit, were acquitted in June 2019, and accusations against the other co-accused were thrown by the court or the prosecutors.
Carson’s family believes that the stress of the criminal affair, including 17 months he spent in prison, destroyed his health and contributed to the heart attack which killed him at the age of 66, a year after his acquittal.
Georgia Defilippo in March 2021, standing on the property of Turlock, she shared with her late husband, Frank Carson. Local thieves were known to attack the lot of scrap.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“They called him aggressive, but that was the kind of defense lawyer who defended his clients,” said Carson widow Georgia Defilippo, whose reduction in the regulations is $ 4 million. “I think it broke his heart and broke his mind. He was not the same. “
She said that she would like to see criminal charges against the former Dist of Stanislaus County. Atty. Birgit fladage, who presided over the accusation and against others in his office.
“They invented a fiction and placed us in it as if we were characters in a badly written novel,” she said this week. “I will never overcome the fact that it could be done, and they were able to move away from it without any real (consequences).”
Defilippo said that she thought she and her daughter had been arrested for parasites simply to put pressure on her late husband to plead guilty to a murder he did not commit.
“They did not care about me or my daughter or these poor patrollers of the highway. They ruined their lives. They were after Frank, ”she said. “I will never think of the police in the same way. I wake up and I think, “Thank God, I’m not in prison. »»
She is co-executing on the succession of Carson, which will also receive $ 4 million in the regulations. His lawyer, Gary Gwilliam, described the case as “a edifying story”.
“This is what happens when the government attacks people they don’t like,” said Gwilliam.
He said that during depositions in the civil affair, prosecutors and agents responsible for the application of laws that targeted Carson did not recognize that they had done something wrong. “You can take him to the bank, there has never been anyone’s discipline,” said Gwilliam. “They said they thought they had done the right thing.” We thought Woody was credible. “They have to take the line.”
The case was in the grip of errors, in particular the attribution of key roles to investigators with “stories pronounced from enmity” towards Carson and the dependence on a witness, Woody, who was incentive to lie, according to an analysis by Matt Murphy, a former Orange County prosecutor who was an expert for seekers.
Threatened with the death penalty, Robert Lee Woody told the story that fueled an epic murder – and later admitted that he had invented everything.
(Sheriff department of the County of Stanislaus.)
In a detailed report, Murphy said that “acrimonious history” between Carson and local prosecutors should have forced the district prosecutor’s office to reject it. He concluded that the case should not have been deposited in the first place. “I do not think that a reasonable jury would have ever condemned these defendants,” he wrote.
Doug Maner, a former County Prosecutor of Stanislaus and frequent critic of the District Prosecutor’s Office, said that the accusation was “the most horrible abuse of justice” and that the size of the regulation suggested a realistic fear that jurors could grant a much greater sentence if the case had been tried in trial.
“The risk had to be gigantic to pay $ 22.5 million for this,” he said. “They were obviously concerned about a double judgment, triple who, which would have been appropriate under the facts of this case.”
“They went after the defense lawyer they hated the most,” he said. “They took a lawyer and locked him for a year and made charges against his wife and daughter (step) to extort a plea.”
The $ 22.5 million will be divided between the eight complainants, including the three former CHP officers and the owners of alcohol stores.
Thomas Boze, lawyer for the County of Stanislaus, said that money will be paid by the General County Fund and Insurance.
Stanislaus County Dist. Atty. Jeff Laugerro, who took office in January 2023, described the regulations as “a necessary step to close a difficult chapter and maintain our concentration on current public security priorities”.
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