Six years after a jury acquitted a defense lawyer of Modesto and his encoded in an alleged conspiracy of murders, Stanislaus County agreed to resolve a demand for malicious prosecution for $ 22.5 million, one of the greatest payments of his kind in the history of the courts of California.
County supervisors approved the agreement on Tuesday at the threshold of a trial in the federal case, which was filed by eight plaintiffs who argued that the police and prosecutors had manufactured the charges against them.
In the heart of the case was the late Frank Carson, a veteran Modesto defense lawyer with a pugilistic style that delighted in antagonizing the police and prosecutors. The bad feeling towards him in the office of the District of the Stanislaus County was no secret.
In August 2015, after a three -year investigation, the district prosecutor's office accused him of making a goal of a complicated plot to kill a scrap thief, Korey Kauffman, as revenge for the alleged theft of pipes in Carson's property.
OTHER EIGHT were accused of helping Carson murder Kauffman or cover the crime: two brothers owners of a local liquor shop; three members of the California road patrol; Carson's wife and stepdaughter; and a drug aggregate maintenance personnel who reached an agreement in exchange for their cooperation.
No physical evidence linked any of the defendants with the death of Kauffman, 26, whose fragmented skeleton was found in the National Forest of Stanislaus in 2013, 17 months after he disappeared. Kauffman, who usually stole to feed his methamphetamine addiction, ran in a world where many people wanted to harm him.
The skeletal remains of the Korey Kauffman scrap thief were discovered in August 2013 in the National Forest of Stanislaus, 17 months after his disappearance.
But the investigators of the District Prosecutor's Office, including those who Carson had denounced and ridiculed publicly, decided to concentrate on it based on a council that Kauffman had planned to steal from Carson's property. The case resulted in an 18 -month preliminary hearing and a 17 -month trial, the second longest murder trial in California's history. Even while it was a trial for murder, Carson continued to practice the law in the Palace of Justice of the Center of Modesto.
“They return me 25 years of putting my thumb in the eye of man,” Carson would say.
The Times explored the case in a 2021 podcast, “Frank Carson's tests.”
The star witness was the Manita, Robert Woody, who according to the testimony was smoking glass methamphetamine when he confessed to a girlfriend who had killed Kauffman and fed his body to the pigs. Police arrested him, and Woody insisted that he had invented the story to impress the bride.
But a principal investigator in the district prosecutor's office, Kirk Bunch, a man Carson had attacked as “dishonest and non -professional,” promised Woody's consequences if he did not cooperate, in an interview captured on tape.
“We can opt for the death penalty or life without probation,” Bunch told Woody, who finally gave prosecutors an elaborate story that involves Carson and others.
Woody's story changed many times, often under a very suggestive interrogation of the application of the law, and could not take the police to a single part of physical evidence linked to homicide.
That did not prevent prosecutors from building their case in their word. At the trial, he testified that Carson had asked the owner of the Bobby Athwal liquor shop to watch the thieves in their lot full of garbage in Turlock, where, Woody, he said, witnessed Athwal and his brother fatally attacked Kauffman.
In an interview with The Times after the trial, Woody said he invented the entire account because he had no choice. He faced a first degree murder position and wanted to see his family again. He described his testimony as “fantasy” and “stories they wanted to listen.”
In the end, Woody, who was allowed to claim any contest to involuntary homicide in exchange for a seven -year prison sentence, was the only person convicted in relation to Kauffman's death.
Carson and the owners of the liquor stores, Athwal and his brother Daljit, were acquitted in June 2019, and the charges against the other coacked were discarded by the court or the prosecutors.
Carson's family believes that the stress of the criminal case, including 17 months in jail, destroyed his health and contributed to heart attack that killed him at age 66, a year after his acquittal.
Georgia Defilippo in March 2021, standing on the property in Turlock that he shared with his late husband, Frank Carson. It was known that local thieves attacked the scrap batch.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“They called him aggressive, but he was the type of defense lawyer who defended his clients,” said Carson's widow, Georgia Defilippo, whose cutting of the agreement is $ 4 million. “I think he broke his heart and broke his spirit. He was not the same.”
She said she would like to see criminal charges filed against former Stanislaus Dist county. Atty Birgit Fradager, who presided over the Prosecutor's Office, and against others in his office.
“They invented a fiction and placed us there as if we were characters in a badly written novel,” he said this week. “I will never overcome the fact that this could be done, and they could get away from it without any [consequences]. “
Defilippo said that she believes that she and her daughter were arrested for spurious charges simply to press her late husband to declare himself guilty of a murder he did not commit.
“I didn't care about my daughter or those poor road patrolmen. They ruined their lives. They were behind Frank,” he said. “I will never think about the application of the law in the same way. I wake up and I think: 'Thank God, I am not in prison.'”
It is co-ejector of Carson's Estate, which will also receive $ 4 million in the agreement. His lawyer, Gary Gwilliam, described the case as “a warning story.”
“This is what happens when the government chases people who don't like them,” Gwilliam said.
He said that during the statements in the civil case, prosecutors and law agents who attacked Carson did not recognize that they had done anything wrong. “You can take it to the bank, there was never a discipline of anyone,” Gwilliam said. “They said they thought they did the right thing.” We thought Woody was credible. “They have to make the line.”
The case was full of errors, including the assignment of key roles to researchers with “pronounced stories of enmity” towards Carson and confidence in a witness, Woody, who had an incentive to lie, according to an analysis of Matt Murphy, a former prosecutor of Orange County who served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs.
Threatened with the death penalty, Robert Lee Woody told the story that fed an epic prosecution of murder, and then admitted that he did everything.
(Department of the Stanislaus County Sheriff.)
In a detailed report, Murphy said that the “acrimoninary history” between Carson and local prosecutors should have forced the district prosecutor's office to be challenged. He concluded that the case should not have been presented first. “I don't think any reasonable jury has condemned these defendants,” he wrote.
Doug Manner, a former Stanislaus County Prosecutor and frequent critic of the District Prosecutor's Office, said the Prosecutor's Office was “the most horrible abuse of justice” and that the size of the agreement suggested a realistic fear that the jurors could deliver a much greater fine if the case had gone to trial.
“The risk must have been gigantic to pay $ 22.5 million for it,” he said. “Obviously they must have been concerned about a double judgment, triple that, which would have been appropriate under the facts of this case.”
“They were after the defense lawyer who hated the most,” he said. “They took a lawyer and locked him for a year and presented charges against his wife and his [step]daughter to extort a plea. “
The $ 22.5 million will be divided between the eight plaintiffs, including the three former CHP officers and the landlord owners.
Thomas Boze, Stanislaus County lawyer, said the money will be paid from the General Fund and County Insurance.
Stanislaus County Dist. Atty. Jeff Laugero, who assumed the position in January 2023, described the agreement as “a necessary step to close a difficult chapter and maintain our focus on current public security priorities.”
