Thread: Latino convicted of hate crime murders

sacbee.com - The online division of The Sacramento Bee

This story is taken from Sacbee / News.
Jury convicts man in racially motivated shootings
By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, September 6, 2008

When it came time for revenge, Jorge Padilla Ruiz listed only one criterion: The targets of his retribution had to be black.

On Friday, a Sacramento Superior Court jury convicted Ruiz of two murders he committed two years ago in North Sacramento in a case that prosecutors said was motivated solely by racial hatred.

Deputy District Attorney Dawn Bladet told jurors in her closing argument that Ruiz, 30, shot and killed Roosevelt June Campbell and Lonnie Lee Taylor, both of whom were 40-year-old African Americans, "because of their race, because of their color, because of their ethnicity."

Ruiz was angry, Bladet said, because the defendant's brother had been pummeled an hour before the 4 a.m. murders on April 23, 2006, in a fight that pitted a group of Latino men against a gathering of young African Americans.

Upset over the beating, Ruiz armed himself with a 9 mm handgun and took to the streets in a relative's sport-utility vehicle. He came across Campbell and Taylor at the Shell station on Del Paso Boulevard and El Camino Avenue, a popular hangout for street people on the city's north side. It's two miles from the site of the earlier fight at the 7-Eleven on Northgate Boulevard.

"His motivation wasn't to get the people who hurt his brother, but to strike out against a group of people who represented the people who beat down his brother," Bladet said in her closing argument Tuesday.

Ruiz fired four times and shot his victims dead, the jury found.

"He goes there to hunt down targets like they're sitting ducks at a shooting range," Bladet told the jury.

The prosecution's case was built almost exclusively on statements Ruiz made to his relatives in the hours after the shooting. The relatives then related those comments to police and prosecutors.

"I'm very grateful the jury saw the truth, and I'm grateful to the defendants' family members for telling the truth," Bladet said in an interview after the verdict.

According to trial testimony, Ruiz woke up his cousin barely two hours after the shooting to tell him, "I think I just shot two guys at the Shell."

He also told an uncle and a housemate about the shootings.

"I killed two black people," he said afterward, according to testimony.

The day after the shooting, Ruiz, a Mexican national, departed Sacramento for his native country. He later returned to the United States, where he was arrested and placed on an immigration hold.

Ruiz's conviction carries three special circumstance allegations – multiple murders, racially motivated murders and shooting and discharging a firearm from a motor vehicle.

He faces a life term without possibility of parole at his Oct. 17 sentencing.

Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.

Bladet said top officials in her office, including District Attorney Jan Scully, decided against seeking capital punishment, mostly because it would have jeopardized their chances of getting a conviction.

"The only evidence we have is his family members," Bladet said. "It certainly was hard enough already for them to cooperate. If the penalty was death, it's likely we would have no witnesses."

Ruiz's lawyer, Jesse Ortiz, described his client as a laborer with a wife and two children. Ortiz said Ruiz went to Mexico the night after the shooting to visit a sick sister.

The defense lawyer argued to the jury that Campbell and Taylor were murdered as a result of a drug rip-off that had taken place earlier at the notorious "Compound," the drug-ridden apartment complex on Dixieanne Avenue, around the corner from the Shell station.

The defense lawyer said there was no physical evidence to link Ruiz to the murders. He argued that his theory of the murder, which was based on testimony from neighborhood denizens questioned by police in the wake of the shootings, had enough credence to raise a reasonable doubt about the prosecution's case.

Bladet countered that the defense based its case on "a parade of crack addicts" that the jury should dismiss.

Jury foreman Catherine Palmer said it took the three days to reach the verdict to overcome some members' questions about reasonable doubt.

http://www.sacbee.com/101/v-print/story/1214611.html

A "minority" convicted of a hate crime? Has common sense via an unbiased review of the cases facts returned to (some) juries???