A San Francisco judge on Monday overturned the murder conviction of a man who has spent more than three decades in prison for a killing he says he did not commit. The ruling is the first exoneration to come out of District Attorney Chesa Boudin's recently formed Innocence Commission.
Joaquin Ciria, 61, has been behind bars since a jury convicted him in 1991 of fatally shooting his friend Felix Bastarrica in an alley in the South of Market neighborhood. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Brendan Conroy vacated the conviction at the request of the District Attorney's Office. It is not yet clear when Ciria will be released.
Boudin recommended freeing Ciria based on the findings of the commission, an independent panel of experts that includes a retired judge. The Northern California Innocence Project brought the case to the panel. The commission is one of several initiatives Boudin introduced after winning the 2019 election on a promise to reform the city's criminal justice system.
Ciria's attorneys, Paige Kaneb and Ellen Eggers, petitioned the court for his release in January. According to court records, they argued that prosecutors relied on unreliable eyewitness identifications and on false testimony from a "teenage drug addict" whom police coerced into naming Ciria as the shooter. They also presented a new witness who identified a different man as the gunman.
After a four-month investigation that included an interview with that witness, the commission concluded that the new evidence "undermined the entire prosecution case and pointed unerringly to innocence," court records show. Lara Bazelon, who chairs the commission and teaches law at the University of San Francisco, described the original police interrogation of the troubled youth as "extremely coercive" and called the identifications by two strangers "very dubious."
"What happened here was a cascade of errors that started with police focusing on Mr. Ciria as their suspect," Bazelon said at a press conference. She said investigators then forced every piece of evidence to fit that theory. Boudin said there was no sign that police falsified evidence or meant to frame Ciria, but that the conviction rested on questionable evidence that would not hold up in court today.
Assistant District Attorney Arcelia Hurtado said the office dismissed the case after the judge vacated the conviction, and that the judge relied heavily on the commission's work. "The strength of this new investigation by the Innocence Commission made it abundantly clear that there is no way a jury would have convicted Mr. Ciria had they heard this evidence," she said.
Boudin welcomed the ruling but said it cannot erase decades of injustice. "He was torn away from an infant baby at the time of his arrest," he said. Kaneb said in a statement that Ciria can now spend time with his 32-year-old son. Boudin, who faces a recall election in June, called for continued review of other possible wrongful convictions, which he described as a costly and widespread problem across the country.
Retired Judge LaDoris Cordell, a commission member, said the panel looks only at the facts and does not advocate for the wrongfully convicted. "We are, however, advocates for justice," she said. Cordell urged voters to back Assembly Bill 2706, sponsored by Boudin and Assemblymember Marc Levine, which would create pilot programs modeled on the commission in other California counties.
