Opinion ID: 2580915
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: testimony of inmate yacotis

Text: Inmate Richard Yacotis testified at petitioner's capital trial that after the fatal stabbing of inmate Gardner, while housed in a segregation unit, he overheard a conversation between petitioner and codefendant Menefield. Petitioner asked Menefield why he had not picked up the knife. Menefield replied, Because I was running right behind you up the stairs. In 1995, Yacotis recanted that trial testimony, claiming that he had testified for the prosecution because he feared for his safety. At the reference hearing in 2000, Yacotis stood by his recantation. He testified that he was originally going to testify for petitioner at trial, but switched sides when the prosecution told him that he could be put on the [main] line as easily as [he could] be taken off. Fearing retaliation by other inmates were he in the general prison population, Yacotis testified for the prosecution, feigning illiteracy in an effort to explain inconsistencies between his trial testimony and an earlier statement that bore his signature but had been prepared by another inmate. At the reference hearing, Yacotis acknowledged being housed in the segregation unit two cells away from petitioner, but said he had lied about overhearing a conversation between petitioner and Menefield about the stabbing of inmate Gardner. He added that petitioner and Menefield were not housed close to one another in the segregation unit. Seeking to undercut Yacotis's account, the majority points to prison records showing that after the stabbing, petitioner and Menefield had been housed in the segregation unit near one another for three days. Yacotis, however, consistently testified at trial and at the reference hearing that in the segregation unit he and petitioner were housed on one tier, and Menefield on another. Although the referee recognized that recantations should be viewed with suspicion ( In re Weber, supra, 11 Cal.3d at p. 722, 114 Cal.Rptr. 429, 523 P.2d 229), the referee found Yacotis to be sincere and his reference hearing testimony believable, in part because Yacotis, who was out of prison at the time of the reference hearing, believed that were he ever to return his recantation of his trial testimony would cause [him] difficulty with the authorities. The majority acknowledges that the referee's finding is entitled to great deference. It nonetheless concludes that the finding even if believed would not warrant habeas corpus relief. (Maj. opn., ante, 128 Cal.Rptr.2d at p. 774, 60 P.3d at p. 175.) Unlike the majority, I am persuaded not only that Yacotis gave false testimony against petitioner at the latter's capital trial, but that the testimony was damning evidence of petitioner's guilt. The conversation between petitioner and codefendant Menefield that Yacotis claimed to have overheard was, in effect, a confession by petitioner that he had stabbed Gardner and then fled, dropping the knife for Menefield to pick up. Moreover, it was an especially dramatic confession because it conformed exactly to the prosecution's theory of the stabbing of Gardner.