By A.C. Thompson

DOCUMENTS FILED IN federal court last month place notorious San Francisco attorneys Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller at the heart of a conspiracy to cover up the 1998 murder of an inmate at Pelican Bay State Prison.

Noel and Knoller, the court papers allege, worked with a cabal of prison guards to ensure "that all of the true circumstances of the killing of William Boyd were not revealed."

The allegations are made in a wrongful death civil suit lodged in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by Boyd's widow, Kim Boyd. Noel and Knoller are accused in the suit of misleading Kim Boyd, but aren't named as defendants.

William Stanton Boyd was stabbed to death March 9, 1998, in exercise yard "A." The inmate was 36 at the time of his slaying and had been serving a sentence of 28 years to life for a murder conviction in Riverside County.

While Noel and Knoller have been sued repeatedly over the years – they're named as defendants in at least 11 civil suits on file in San Francisco Superior Court – this latest legal salvo is intriguing because it could shake loose more evidence of corruption within the ranks of California's 29,000 correctional officers and bring closure to one of the more gruesome episodes in state prison history.

"This is really an extraordinary and exceptional situation," Catherine Campbell, a Fresno lawyer representing Kim Boyd, said in an interview. "Nobody's ever seen a case where the lawyers' work was so perverted by a conflict of interest."

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In the late 1990s Noel represented three Pelican Bay prison guards charged with engineering assaults on inmates serving time for child molestation. According to state and federal prosecutors, the correctional officers collaborated with inmates to shoot, stab, and otherwise attack the sex offenders.

The first guard to face a jury was Jose Garcia, who was tried in January 1998 on felony charges of assault and conspiracy to assault. Noel provided his courtroom defense. Fired by the prison while the prosecution was pending, Garcia was found guilty and sentenced to four years and eight months behind bars. (His conviction was eventually overturned by an appellate court because of incompetent representation by Noel, but he was convicted in federal court in May 2002 of related assault charges. At press time he awaits sentencing.)

One of the witnesses called by the prosecution to testify against Garcia during that first trial was William Boyd.

According to Campbell, Boyd had been a "shot-caller," a key member of the squad that attacked child molesters. But he was reconsidering his role in the gang after getting married and converting to Christianity. The close timing of his testimony and subsequent execution – roughly two months apart – prompted some to speculate that the killing was payback.

Reenter Noel. When Kim Boyd wanted help filing a wrongful death claim against the prison shortly after her husband's slaying, Noel and Knoller took on her case.

Court records show Noel in the late 1990s represented three clients who might have been suspects in a probe of the killing: Garcia and ex-guards David Lewis, who was convicted in 2000 of shooting an inmate he mistakenly thought was a sex offender, and Michael Powers, found guilty in 2002 of conspiring with Garcia to assault prisoners. (Lewis's conviction was nullified on appeal; the feds have refiled charges.)

Yet the lawyers never recused themselves.

Rather, Campbell claims, they advanced a wildly implausible theory that Jim Fallman, the Del Norte County prosecutor who tried Garcia in state court, was responsible for Boyd's death. Noel and Knoller duped Kim Boyd, Campbell says. "She knew nothing," Campbell told us.

In a declaration taken last month Kim Boyd swore, "At no time did either Noel or Knoller tell me there was a potential or actual conflict of interest in representing me while also representing Garcia, Powers, [ex-guard Roy] Alvarado and Lewis or explained how the interests of his clients Garcia, et al, might be adverse to mine. Neither Noel nor Knoller asked me to sign a waiver of conflict of interest at any time."

The widow's lawsuit fizzled. After the duo themselves were jailed for Diane Whipple's death, Kim Boyd kept the suit alive by representing herself in federal court.

When Campbell and partner Bob Navarro picked up the shreds of the suit earlier this year, their first move was to lambaste their predecessors.

"The legal representation given to Kim Boyd by Noel and Knoller was rife with extremely serious and actual conflicts of interest which severely undermined the litigation of this case," Campbell and Navarro wrote in a recent brief. "The evidence supports the inference that Noel deliberately became Kim Boyd's attorney for the very purpose of sabotaging her civil rights in order to protect his other clients, the only ones he ever sought to protect and advance, albeit unsuccessfully and incompetently."

Clifford Gardner, the lawyer handling Noel's appeal in the dog-mauling case, was unaware of the civil suit. "This is the first I've heard about it," Gardner told us.

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Fallman eventually fingered inmate Duke Bolter, a convicted killer, for Boyd's stabbing. Four years later Bolter is still awaiting trial for the crime on capital charges.

But after poring over reams of evidence, Campbell and Navarro say they're convinced Bolter didn't act alone. They claim, in court documents, that Garcia, Powers, and five other current and former prison employees – including two leaders of the guards union – "are directly implicated in the murder of Billy Boyd." The revised suit also includes an allegation that two corrections department detectives "worked closely with Noel and Knoller" to develop "an elaborate strategy designed to derail the investigation" of Boyd's murder and other crimes.

No way, responds Lance Corcoran, executive vice president of the guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. "The allegations and pleadings are completely outlandish," Corcoran said. "We look at this as a desperate attempt to sling mud at Pelican Bay and the CCPOA."

Garcia's current attorney, Matthew Pavone, told us, "My guess is they're trying to say every assault or injury on an inmate is tied to Garcia and Powers."

At this point it's not clear that federal Judge Thelton Henderson will allow the case to move forward, given earlier procedural blunders. If he does let the suit proceed, it could be a replay of the 1999 whistle-blower suit brought by ex-Corcoran guard Richard Caruso – he won $1.7 million from the state – which revealed an apparent pattern of misconduct on the part of correctional officers.

The suit could give Campbell and Navarro a chance to subpoena prison files and make the purported members of the alleged guard-inmate crime ring testify. It might make clear, finally, whether top Pelican Bay administrators were aware of the brutal and illegal behavior of rank-and-file correctional officers in the mid and late 1990s.

Still, even if Henderson dismisses the suit, Fallman has already acknowledged that prison employees were behind Boyd's death. "Staff and inmate conspirators," the prosecutor admitted in a pretrial stipulation entered in the Bolter murder case, "arranged William Boyd's death to assure that he would not expose the conspiracy."

E-mail A.C. Thompson at ac_thompson@sfbg.com.