LAPD’s Gift to MS-13 Defense

A January 14, 2008 threat assessment by FBI on Mara Salvatrucha, (MS-13) called that organization’s crimes “exceedingly violent.” http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/january/ms13_011408

The Keys to Safer Schools website noted about MS-13:

FBI Update - 01/14/08 - MS-13 operates in at least 42 states and the District of Columbia and has about 6,000-10,000 members nationwide and is described as “America’s Most Dangerous Gang.”

http://keystosaferschools.com/ms-13.htm

Keys to Safer Schools also referred to La Mara Salvatrucha as “The Worst of the Worst.”

According to a 2005 Newsweek article, THE MOST DANGEROUS GANG IN AMERICA (Arian Campo-Flores, Andrew Romano. Newsweek. New York: March 28, 2005.Vol. 145, Iss. 13; pg. 23, 3 pgs):

Bloods, Crips, Folk, Vice Lords, Latin Kings are names that often cause alarm and fear among the gentle people of America. Now a gang is emerging on the scene that causes members of these notorious gangs to fear or at least have second thoughts about venturing onto the wrong street. La Mara Salvatrucha is a well organized and very violent, very brutal gang born in El Salvador. It is more commonly known as MS-13.

and:

Composed of mostly Salvadorans and other Central Americans-many of them undocumented-the gang has a uniquely international profile, with an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members in 33 states in the United States (out of more than 700,000 gang members overall), and tens of thousands more in Central America. It’s considered the fastest-growing, most violent and least understood of the nation’s street gangs-in part because U.S. law enforcement has not been watching as closely as it might have.

With all that said and done, you can imagine my jaw dropping yesterday during the preliminary hearing in People vs. Irving Guevara, at Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building (CCB, 210 W Temple Los Angeles CA 90012) when Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Officer Michael Boyle, testifying as a gang expert for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office that MS-13 is no more or less violent than other gangs.

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At issue is whether or not the Defendant, my client who is represented by Attorney David Yardley, is or is not an MS-13 member so that the government can give him a gang enhancement under Section 186.22 of the California Penal Code. On cross examination we were trying to bring out the facts surrounding something the prosecution agrees occurred, that Guevara warned a young woman friend of the victim at the scene of an attempted murder to get away because somebody had a gun.

If you’re an MS-13 member and you engage in an act of disloyalty to MS-13, like trying to keep somebody from getting shot, you die next and you die more violently than you can imagine. This is not rocket science for gang expert witnesses. Anybody who knows anything about MS-13 know that. The rule is similar to the rule in the Red Mafiya (Krasnaya mafiya) that if you foul up a hit you’re assigned to perform, you will die far more horribly than your intended victim.

Another issue that I found astonishing is that Officer Boyle apparently didn’t understand the term Consafos (alternatively spelled, Con Safos and designated symbolically as C/S). It appeared from his testimony yesterday that he’d never even heard the term. How you can be designated as an expert on gangs without knowing the term is just beyond me.

What’s more troubling is that if you don’t even know the term Consafos, when you see it you won’t understand the significance because it isn’t all that common anymore in some gang tagging territories and it does still exist in others. When I see it these days (whereas in the past you’d have seen it on virtually all Chicano graffiti) it automatically alerts me to a particular context in the community involving factors of how long the gang has existed and whether there is continuing influence of Veteranos in the organization.

There is of course the legal definition of who qualifies as an expert witness in court but for me there’s also an ethical and moral definition of who is an expert. I’m certainly NOT a gang expert by any means. I’ve qualified in a murder trial as an expert on entirely different issues, although that expertise also includes why I understand the relationship of the use or non-use of “Consafos” in gang graffiti and its relevance to gang structure and culture. By my way of thinking, you cannot come close to emulating the Aristotelian “perfect form” of being an expert witness without understanding formal logic (and especially the informal fallacies of inference and propositional calculus) and epistemology, including a working knowledge of the Heisenberg “Uncertainty” Principle, the mathematical “impossibility theorem,” and the proper application to investigation of “Ockham’s Razor.”

The preliminary hearing in People v Guevara will continue on Wednesday September 5 in Department 53 at the Criminal Courts Building just in case you want to come down because you can’t wait for my next blog on this case…which amongst other things will deal with the uncivilized approach of Los Angeles law enforcement to compliance with the rights of foreign nationals under the Vienna Convention…..

In the meantime, I guess my criminal defense investigator and lawyer friends will just be eating up these statements by Officer Boyle the next time he gets on a witness stand for gang expert witness testimony….

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Jan Tucker