Gerardo Cabanillas was just 18 when he was framed for rape and kidnapping in 1995, but he was exonerated three decades later and now, his lawyers have filed a lawsuit against the cities and police departments of South Gate and Huntington Park.
“Gerardo Cabanillas was robbed of nearly 30 years, at an age when his life was just beginning,” said Steve Art, of the firm Loevy + Loevy, one of Cabanillas’ attorneys.
“Nothing can compensate Gerardo for the loss he has suffered or the horror of the unjust imprisonment he endured for so long,” the civil rights attorney added.
“But Gerardo has a right to justice and will hold the South Gate and Huntington Park officers who framed him accountable for their illegal and unethical misconduct,” he said.
The civil rights lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
Named as defendants in legal documents are Detectives Lee Jack Alirez, David Pixler, Jonathan Sekiya, Gregory Wells, Detective Lopez of the South Gate Police Department; Sergeant Sullivan, Police Officers Reyes, Ayestas and Salcido, and SGPD Supervisor Sergeant Martin Van Lierop.
Named in the suit are Detectives Carl Heintz, John Navarrete, Cosme Lozano (current police chief) and Anthony Porter of the Huntington Park Police Department, as well as the cities of South Gate and Huntington Park.
The red pants
During January and February 1995, a series of robberies and sexual assaults occurred in almost similar fashion in South Gate and neighboring Huntington Park.
A couple assaulted on January 18 described one of their attackers as wearing red pants.
At that time, Gerardo Cabanillas was an 18-year-old young man who had just married and had an eight-month-old daughter.
According to an investigation by attorneys at The Innocence Center, Gerardo Cabanillas had nothing to do with the crimes, but he did have the misfortune of being standing on a corner on Jan. 20, wearing red pants, when South Gate Police Detective Lee Jack Alirez walked by.
Alirez approached Cabanillas and discovered that he had an outstanding traffic fine and arrested him.
From there, the complaint says, Alirez and the other South Gate police officers “fabricated a case” against Gerardo Cabanillas.
“They arranged for him to be identified as one of the attackers using doctored photo arrays that were shown to the victims,” the lawsuit said.
“They obtained a false confession from Mr. Cabanillas after hours of interrogation and without the presence of a lawyer, and [le hicieron] false promises that he would be released on parole if he confessed,” the lawsuit added,
The lawyers said that because he was innocent, Cabanillas did not know what to put in the confession, so the officers provided him with the necessary details (repeatedly rehearsing them on him) and even took him to the scene of one of the crimes.
Even with all of these prompts, Cabanillas’ recorded confession was riddled with misstatements and inaccuracies. To bolster their case, South Gate detectives falsified their investigative documentation to conceal their misconduct and implicate the then-young Latino.
The lie continued…87-year sentence
In the weeks following the arrest—while Cabanillas was in custody—the wave of robberies and rapes continued throughout February 1995 in South Gate and Huntington Park.
Huntington Park police eventually arrested another suspect, who was positively identified by the victims and who, during questioning, confessed to committing the crimes in both cities. The crimes the suspect was accused of were directly related to the crimes for which Cabanillas had been arrested.
Still, the case against Gerardo Cabanillas continued and he was wrongly convicted of car theft, robbery, kidnapping and rape. Still a teenager, he was sentenced to a minimum of 87 years in prison.
He always maintained his innocence
In the decades that followed, Cabanillas steadfastly maintained his innocence and fought for his freedom. After a quarter-century of fruitless appeals and petitions, DNA tests conducted in 2020 finally proved that he was innocent of the rape for which he had been convicted.
In 2023, after an investigation by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, the Court vacated Cabanillas’ convictions, dismissed all charges against him, and issued an order declaring him objectively innocent. He was finally freed, having spent more than half his life wrongfully imprisoned.
Apology from the prosecutor and silence from the police
“We recognized a grave injustice that resulted in Mr. Cabanillas’ unjust incarceration for more than 28 years,” said District Attorney Gascón. “After a thorough reexamination of the evidence and a comprehensive review of the case by my office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, it became clear that a grave error was committed.”
Gascón apologized to Mr. Cabanillas for the judicial error and the failure of the criminal legal system.
“It is imperative that we reflect on this case as a stark reminder that our criminal justice system is not infallible,” Gascón said.
Cabanillas, who lives in Downey, was conditionally released from prison in May 2023 and permanently released four months later when District Attorney George Gascón announced that a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge vacated his conviction and declared him innocent.
South Gate Police Chiefs Darren Arakawa and Cosme Lozano of the Huntington Park Police Department, respectively, had not responded by press time to the question of how it was possible for a man to have been wrongfully framed and arrested and to have lost nearly 30 years of his life to being framed by numerous police officers and detectives.
It is legal to lie to adults
Audrey McGinn, one of the attorneys who worked to obtain the exoneration and declaration of innocence of Gerardo Cabanillas through The Innocence Center -based in San Diego- said that it all began with the request of the defense of the imprisoned person.
“We investigated and realized that one of the detectives lied at the time they accused [al señor Cabanillas] robbery and rape,” he told La Opinión.
That detective lied on several occasions: he told Gerardo that he was only accused of robbery and that if he admitted his guilt he could return home with his daughter, who I think was barely a year old.
“To obtain a false confession, he lied to her about the charges and that he would be granted probation. “There is nothing, there is no problem,” the 18-year-old was assured. “Gerardo was very afraid; he wanted to return to his girlfriend and his daughter and he admitted his guilt. He just wanted to go home.”
He was later forced to admit to a rape he did not commit.
“Detective Lee Jack Alirez lied to witnesses, telling them that Gerardo had already confessed and admitted to many things, which was never true,” the attorney said.
However, Gerardo Cabanillas was never positively identified by witnesses.
“They said he looked like a man [autor de los robos y violaciones]”but they weren’t sure they would charge him,” Audrey McGinn said.
Although McGinn has no statistics on cases in which police detectives or sheriff’s deputies have deliberately lied to obtain a confession in order to reach a guilty verdict against an innocent person, he said, “I only know of those who have been exonerated; thank God with the DNA evidence we were able to prove that Gerardo did not commit any rape.”
“It is absolutely common for detectives to lie to suspects in order to receive information. That is legal,” he stressed.
In his office, they are working to change the policy codes in California so that the criminal justice system is fairer and that detectives and police cannot lie to adults, as they did two years ago to minors.