Innocent!
After 13 years in prison, John J. Tennison's life sentence is overturned. But will the people who framed him ever pay for it?

By A.C. Thompson

I OFTEN THINK of something I heard John J. Tennison say on a scorching day in mid 2000. Sitting in a tiny room at Mule Creek State Prison, the following words spilled quietly from the solemn, dignified man:

"It just gets harder and harder every day."

At that point, Tennison had spent a decade caged for a murder he claimed he didn't commit.

Living in a six-by-eight-foot cell in a maximum security lockup, surrounded by a sea of lifers, Tennison kept his head down, trying to keep from being shanked or beaten or raped. During the day he worked an 18¢-an-hour job in the prison print shop. At night he called his mom and brother collect, or connected with the outside via FM radio.

Tennison had been banished from the free world for murdering 17-year-old Roderick "Cooley" Shannon in 1989.

Shannon lived in the Sunnydale housing projects in Visitacion Valley. Tennison was from Hunters Point. At the time a brutal tit-for-tat gang war was raging between black teens hailing from the two hoods. According to police, Tennison and accomplice Antoine Goff attacked Shannon and blasted him in the face with a shotgun in the parking lot of a grocery store. The cops figured it was revenge for a massacre carried out by Sunnydale thugs.

With the help of Tennison's then-lawyer, Jeff Adachi, and a private investigator, I revisited the crime – interviewing Tennison and Goff, studying the evidence, poring over the trial transcripts and myriad legal briefs, walking the crime scene, and tracking down witnesses to the slaying. After my journalistic probe, I felt fairly certain that a terrible injustice had been done, that Tennison and Goff had not killed Shannon, that police and prosecutors had engaged in dubious behavior – and that the real executioner was walking the streets (see "The Hardest Time," 1/17/01).

Still, I never really expected the two men to go free. The criminal justice system is stacked against convicts who assert their innocence. Amazingly, in most cases the defendant's "actual innocence" – to use a legal term – isn't even grounds for canceling a guilty verdict. Despite what you've seen on TV, an infinitesimally small number of cons ever have their sentences overturned. And in 2000, legal efforts to spring Tennison had basically shuddered to a standstill. Three state courts and one federal court had rejected his appeals. Goff's bid for freedom faced even more legal roadblocks.

Now, three years later, Tennison is free, adjusting to life on the other side of the wall, and it looks like Goff will be soon.

Tennison is a free man because early last week federal Judge Claudia Wilken issued a 103-page ruling voiding his conviction and ordering prison authorities to release him within 60 days. In her decision, Wilken noted that cops and prosecutors had buried a slew of pertinent clues, keeping key evidence – like the fact that a witness had cleared the defendants and blamed another man for the killing – from defense lawyers who represented Tennison and Goff at trial. Goff's sentence is likely to be reversed as well.

The judge's decision, I think, is spot on. Tennison and Goff should never have been jailed. The wafer-thin evidence arrayed against them was nothing more than the inconsistent, constantly morphing testimony of two young girls, Masina Fauolo and Pauline Maluina. Maluina has since recanted, saying homicide detectives and a prosecutor coached her to lie.

But Wilken's ruling is also terrifying. By my reading, it suggests what many of us close to the case have long suspected: that three high-profile San Francisco law enforcers – police inspector Napoleon Hendrix, Prentice Earl Sanders, who recently retired as police chief, and longtime assistant district attorney George Butterworth – deliberately framed two men.

These people worked hundreds of cases over the span of decades, and put hundreds of people in prison. Did they railroad anyone else?

• • •

Forty years ago the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in a case called Brady v. Maryland. It involved a guy named John Brady, who got popped for shooting somebody during a robbery and was sentenced to death. But he didn't do it – another man pulled the trigger, a fact prosecutors concealed when Brady stood trial.

In the Brady decision, the supremes said, essentially, prosecutors and cops can't hide evidence that exonerates a defendant. Subsequent rulings have refined the concept and solidified Brady as a cornerstone of the American criminal justice system.

The Brady precedent lay at the heart of Tennison's habeas corpus appeal.

Judge Wilken, Adachi said, "identified five separate areas where both the police and prosecution failed to turn over evidence. It was new evidence, it was fresh in their minds at the time of John's trial, and they deliberately chose not to turn it over to the defense."

Adachi, now the city's top public defender, represented Tennison at trial as a young deputy in the Public Defender's Office and has crusaded for his release ever since. He views the ruling as an indictment of the San Francisco Police Department and District Attorney's Office. "The only case you can make is that this was an intentional suppression of evidence that led to the conviction of an innocent man," he said.

That buried evidence consists of:

• A memo authorizing the cops to draw $2,500 from a "Secret Witness Fund" to pay one of the witnesses who testified against Tennison and Goff. The police say they don't know what happened to the money. Giving cash to witnesses obviously raises doubts about their credibility and would've become a major legal issue at trial.

• A videotaped interview with a man named Luther Blue. On the tape, then-inspector Sanders lays out an alternative theory of the slaying and says a credible source placed Blue at the crime scene.

• Paperwork indicating the existence of a witness named Chante Smith. Smith told the cops Tennison and Goff weren't involved in the murder and fingered a man named Lovinsky Ricard as the assailant. She met with the police three times and gave them the names of seven people who could verify her story. The defense was never told anything about her.

• The fact that police ran a polygraph test on star witness Maluina. The results were inconsistent. Maluina told the polygrapher that she had lied about seeing the murder, and that she'd been pressured into lying by the other key witness, Fauolo. These damning statements were also hidden from the defense.

• Even after Tennison and Goff were found guilty, police and prosecutors continued to sit on evidence. In 1990, about two weeks after the trial concluded, Ricard was picked up on a minor drug beef. While in custody, he spontaneously told police he'd killed Shannon. It took six months for this bombshell to reach the defense lawyers, who by then were appealing the case with a motion for a new trial.

The prosecution and the police, Wilken asserted in her decision, "misled the court." Summing up, the judge wrote, "any one of the five" pieces of buried evidence "could have caused the result of Tennison's new trial motion and of his trial to have been different.... The Court's confidence in the outcome of this trial is undermined."

Most of the evidence at issue was pried loose 11 years after the trial by a team of lawyers led by Ethan Balogh and Elliot Peters, who took on Tennison's appeal pro bono in 2001. Looking at the overall arc of the case, "you've got to be really angry with the police and assistant district attorney," Peters told me. "They must've understood what they were doing. They had evidence that J.J. and Antoine weren't involved.... They shored up their chances of a conviction by concealing evidence."

Peters and company devoted thousands of hours to the case; had Tennison been paying, the appeal probably would've run him close to $800,000 in legal fees.

The attorneys hired a private detective to track down Maluina, who'd moved to San Diego. In what is probably the most damaging fact to emerge from the legal battle, Maluina gave a sworn statement saying her courtroom testimony was bunk – and that it had been coerced by the prosecution team.

"I told Inspector Hendrix and Mr. Butterworth that I had not witnessed the killing. I told them that Masina had asked me to lie, and that she had provided me with some information to give to the inspectors during interviews," Maluina said in her statement. Her testimony, she continued, "was a lie that I did not want to tell, but I felt pressured to do so by Masina, the police – especially Inspector Hendrix – and the prosecutor, Mr. Butterworth."

After reviewing Maluina's statement and all the facts, Wilken didn't touch on the issue of innocence. The judge simply said the actions of Sanders, Henderson, and Butterworth prevented Tennison from getting the equitable trial guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

However, one law enforcement official familiar with the case has a pretty strong opinion on the matter. "I've never seen a case like this," District Attorney Terence Hallinan told me. "I don't just believe this was an improper conviction; I believe Tennison is an innocent man."

After interviewing two witnesses in the case and reading the judge's decision, Hallinan is instructing the state justice department (which handles criminal appeals) to free both men ASAP and is investigating Ricard, who is believed to be living in the Midwest.

I contacted Sanders, Hendrix, and Butterworth requesting comment for this story. Through a spokesperson, Butterworth declined to go on the record. I left messages for Sanders with his lawyer and called Hendrix at the Hall of Justice; neither got back to me.

However, when I interviewed Sanders in 2001, he claimed the police probe was conducted in good faith. "At no time in my career," Sanders said adamantly, "did I intentionally or unintentionally influence a witness."

• • •

I was with Dolly Tennison when she got the word via cell phone on the morning of Aug. 29. Her son, who entered prison at the age of 18 and is now 31, was about to stride through the gates of the penitentiary. Dolly was frantic, joyous, teary. She rushed to her car and hit the road for Ione, the isolated Central Valley town where the Mule Creek lockup is located. I doubt she drove the speed limit.

The night before, I talked to John Tennison's older brother, Bruce. His plans for the reunion were simple. "I want to sit down and have dinner with my brother ... and then I want to wake up and have breakfast with my brother," Bruce Tennison said. He spoke slowly, deliberately.

That is, until he started talking about the cops. "They knew they had the wrong man, and they went along with it anyway," he said. He pointed out that Sanders recently went to court to cleanse his record of any wrongdoing connected to the Fajitagate scandal. "The name Tennison has been tarnished for 13 years. My brother is labeled a murderer! I want my brother's name cleared!" Bruce shouted.

When I called Goff's cousin Jason Hopkins, he hadn't heard the news about Tennison – news that's likely to mean vindication for Goff as well. "Oooohh man! Damn! Ain't that a blessing. I'm trying not to cry right now," said Hopkins, who grew up with Goff and now runs Your Scents, an incense and African craft store in the Western Addition. "It's been 14 years."

Barry Melton represented Goff back in 1990. Melton, now the head public defender for Yolo County, was jazzed about the decision. "I have to believe a reversal in Tennison's case means a reversal in Goff's case," he told me. "It's wonderful news, not just for J.J. and Antoine but for their families as well – they've been going through this too."

Goff's mother, Francis Goff, was a little more cautious. She wanted to talk to her son's current lawyer, Diana Samuelson, before she got too excited. "It's been a nightmare," Francis Goff said softly. "They need to go after the officers who set this whole thing up." After a stint in the notorious Pelican Bay State Prison – a place known for its Aryan Brothers and unusually cruel solitary-confinement wing – Goff is currently doing his time in a massively overcrowded state lockup in Solano.

• • •

Legal experts will tell you most incidents where police and prosecutors fail to turn over evidence are accidental blunders – a misplaced file here, a mislabeled vial of blood there. Perhaps Sanders, Hendrix, and Butterworth simply bungled the Tennison-Goff case, inadvertently holding onto material they should've have given to the defense team.

That, however, seems doubtful.

There are simply too many pieces of evidence that obviously should've made it into the hands of the defense lawyers but didn't. Bear in mind: the rules about disclosing evidence aren't exactly quantum physics – they're simple, and they're known to every rookie cop and first-year law student. And these were not insignificant clues, either – we're talking about a witness who exonerated Tennison and Goff, and the confession of a man who claimed to be the killer. Add to that the allegation that Hendrix and Butterworth pressured Maluina to give bogus testimony and you have what looks to be a major- league frame-up.

Why? The court record indicates Sanders and Hendrix locked onto Tennison within days of the shooting. Both Tennison and Goff were regarded as somewhat rough characters who hung out with a crew of hard-ass young men at a time when the hollow clack-clack-clack of gunfire was a constant sound in the city's African American neighborhoods. Both were known to the police, and Tennison had been picked up a couple of times for selling weed.

Perhaps the cops thought they had the right guys and just didn't have enough evidence to convince a jury.

Even when the detectives unearthed credible evidence implicating another character, it seems they couldn't let go of their hunch about Tennison and Goff.

And what about Butterworth, the prosecutor? Well, the judge suggested he was a player in a team effort to win a conviction at any cost. She noted that when Butterworth put Maluina on the stand, he steered her away from the little matter of the secret polygraph test.

"Butterworth's questioning of Pauline reveals that he may have been aware of the polygraph examination and may have engaged in artful questioning to avoid the disclosure," Wilken wrote, before quoting a whole stream of courtroom dialogue.

Asked about Butterworth's role, Hallinan responded, "He didn't exercise the proper supervision over this investigation and prosecution." (Hallinan wasn't D.A. at the time of the trial.)

For the past 13 years John J. Tennison and Antoine Goff have lived like ghosts, linked to the outside world only by letters, phone calls, and the occasional visit by family members. Those 13 years are gone. No judge's decision is ever going to return that stolen portion of their lives. All that's left now are the scars.

By contrast, the men responsible for this mess have yet to suffer any ill consequences. Today, Butterworth is still a senior deputy D.A. Hendrix is a respected cop. Sanders just retired on a full chief's pension of $188,718 a year.

One last ugly question still hangs in the air:

Napoleon Hendrix and Earl Sanders put in more than 30 years at the Hall of Justice. George Butterworth has been there since 1976. The three men have handled hundreds of cases, many of them homicides.

What other convictions should we be looking at?

Research assistance by George Schulz.
E-mail A.C. Thompson