by Chuck Sharman

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted on July 15, 2025, to pay $14 million to former state prisoner Alexander Torres, 45, to settle his federal civil rights claim over his wrongful conviction and two-decade imprisonment for a 2000 murder that he didn’t commit.

Torres, then 20, was accused of the fatal drive-by shooting of acquaintance Martin “Casper” Guitron, 19, shortly before midnight on New Years Eve, 2000. But the facts of the case, like those in so many wrongful convictions, appear almost absurd: No physical evidence tied him to the crime, and Torres was, in fact, wearing a cast on his arm at the time which made it unlikely that he could even pull the trigger.

Submitted to supervisors with the request for the payout was a summary corrective action plan (CAP) by the County Sheriff’s Department (LASD), which recalled several contributing factors to Torres’ wrongful conviction—including that his alibi kept changing. But Torres and his attorneys disputed this, noting how he consistently claimed that he was at his mother’s birthday party when the shooting occurred.

Despite that—and the cast on his arm and the lack of physical evidence tying him to the shooting—LASD detectives focused on Torres because of his alleged affiliation with the Compton Vario Tortilla Flats gang, a rival of the Compton Vario Segundo gang to which Guitron belonged. They fed Torres’ photo and description to Enrique Valdivinos, another acquaintance of Guitron’s and eyewitness to his killing. While Valdivinos initially said that he couldn’t identify the shooter, detectives pressured him until he changed his story and fingered Torres. Testimony of a second eyewitness, Carlos Arechiga, was compelled to identify Torres from a photo array after detectives allegedly circled his picture and instructed Arechiga to point to it as the shooter.

Sadly, these machinations by LASD lost most of their outrageous punch in the anodyne language of the CAP that accompanied the payout to Torres, which distilled them to this: “A key eyewitness provided conflicting statements during the investigation which raised questions about the reliability of his testimony”; and “[i]t was alleged that the Homicide Investigator’s methods of conducting photo arrays with witnesses of the Plaintiff were deemed to be suggestive.”

Torres, after spending his 20s and 30s in state prison for a second-degree murder he didn’t commit, got help in 2021 from the California Innocence Project (CIP), which convinced the Conviction Integrity Unity of then-District Attorney George Gascon to get involved. That led to Torres’ exoneration of the charge and, in 2022, a court finding that he was factually innocent of the crime. When he was released from prison in June 2022, Gascon was there to apologize to him and to the family of Guitron, whose true murderer remained uncaught, “for a system that failed them.”

With the aid of attorneys from Loevy & Loevy, as well as San Diego attorney Jan Stiglitz—who co-founded the CIP—Torres filed suit in 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, accusing LASD personnel of his wrongful conviction. Central to his theory of the case was the misconduct of LASD “deputy gangs”—cliques of deputies who assumed control of some stations, undermining the chain of command to advance their own brand of “justice,” as PLN reported. [See: PLN, July 2023, p.30.] Torres’ attorneys attempted to compel discovery from the LASD related to the deputy gangs. But they were stonewalled, until the district court issued an order to force their compliance on February 27, 2024. See: Torres v. L.A. Sheriffs Dep’t, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33783 (C.D. Cal.).

Defendants then moved for summary judgment. But the motion was largely denied on August 12, 2024. That left to survive for trial the meat of Plaintiff’s case: that detectives conducted an unduly suggestive eyewitness identification; that they deliberately fabricated evidence; that they suppressed exculpatory evidence; and other state-law claims. The district court also denied claims of qualified immunity made by Defendant LASD supervisors. See: Torres v. L.A. Sheriffs Dep’t, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 206617 (C.D. Cal.).

The parties then proceeded to reach their settlement agreement, which included costs and fees for Plaintiff’s attorneys. One of them, Loevy & Loevy’s Steve Art, called Torres “proof of the human toll of a system that has tolerated and empowered police misconduct for far too long.”

As far as the CAP was concerned, the LASD has little to improve because of “multiple policies” which the agency has since published to address “[s]uspect identification procedures, responsibility for documentation, recording admonishment to witness arrays, retention of ‘raw’ victim/witness interview notes and recordings.” See: Summary Corrective Action Plan 2024-206, Cty. of Los Angeles (May 2025).  

Additional source: Los Angeles Times

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